Welcome to the latest Reiki Blog Hop
THEME: Reiki, Spirituality, and Religion
How does Reiki mesh with, augment, replace, or fulfil your spiritual or religious philosophy and practice (or lack thereof)?
This is a subject that over the years, I’ve given a great deal of thought to… I was raised under the notion that there are three things that you should never discuss in polite company – sex, religion and politics… luckily I seldom keep polite company 😉 and you’re here now in my space so I’m going to shoot the breeze…
I remember being at school around age 12? 13? and I was never a fan of writing down notes and frequently I would ask questions in an attempt to sway the teacher off course and keep them talking for as long as possible… Using this ploy, I discovered that my History teacher was colour blind.. My English teacher knew how to set a trap to catch alligators… My Science teacher was building a boat… and many other things that slip my mind, but one thing that has always firmly stayed was the words of my Religious Education teacher when I asked her what her beliefs were. She told me in a very matter of fact way that her role was to impart a Religious Education and that if she was a teacher worth her salt then I would never have any detailed knowledge of what her personal beliefs were…
It was something that struck a deep chord and certainly years on and working as a holistic therapist and reading tarot, it still resonates with me as I feel that I am there to help people explore their own thoughts rather than impress mine upon them… And living in the town that I live, where we boast of having Britain’s most multi-cultural high street, I speak to people with all manner of beliefs and backgrounds… People often assume I hold certain beliefs due to the type of work I do, other people are less assuming and will ask… My typical response it that I am of No Fixed Abide…
Or sometimes I will say that I am a lapsed Scientist…
I don’t consider myself to be Spiritual, mainly because I want to know what your definition of that is before I will either confirm or deny… I don’t consider myself to be religious as I don’t actively practise a faith… yet I feel that some kind of vestigial religious thought is in my DNA…
Am I a skeptic? Well again… that all depends on the mood I’m in! I have a degree of skepticism in that I don’t openly embrace any and all woo that gets thrown at me, yet I dislike the kind of Science mind that dismisses out of hand the existence of anything beyond the known, the measured and the tangible…
I’m all for Science when it dispells dangerous quakery…But Science for the sake of Science that becomes mean spirited and soul sucking and destroying of magic… no! stop it!
I watched a program the other day as Professor Brian Cox was on there plugging his new series… I can’t help but watch him, for a couple of reasons… ok firstly, yes I’m shallow and he’s easy on the eye! (Ooops!! TMI thoughts… there’s two out of the three… 😀 should I go for the hat trick and toss out some Brexit commentary… ) But also because he is very vocal and renowned for being anti-woo… yet often when he talks, I hear things that would fill a fluffy bunny’s heart with rainbow arcs of glee and glitter! But he talks science, science… and more science… Yet… somehow he retains a childlike sense of awe and wonder…And then he only went and did it(SQUEEE!!)… he said something along the lines of:
Seeing something in nature and looking at it everyday and describing the beauty of it… that’s Science… doing the same thing every day and recording beauty… that’s what Science is!
I laughed so hard! I thought… Brian! Is it really?! Oh! bless you, you sweet man with your PhD! Science?? Get out of the closet man!!
So… again I found myself wondering about what my beliefs are and a single gnosis seems somewhat arrogant to me, yet an absolute agnosis seems to kill my soul and I pondered and perpended on some more until a word started to form in my mind…
Polygnosis…
I wasn’t sure if the word existed so I asked the Google oracle and it gave me
Polygnosticism is a pluralistic outlook which espouses that all individuals’ unique ideas about the divine, about what is sacred, and about how to approach these matters in practice are valid and significant for them. It is also a non-absolutist view which holds that no characterization of the divine or the sacred is universal (valid for everyone), and that no known divinities or sacred qualities can be called objective (existing independently of subjective perceptions).
Read the full article HERE. Polygnosis sits well with all parts of me…
So… how does this all tie in with my Reiki?
Well, I guess it wafts and weaves in and out, in much the same way that my Science brain still likes to roll theories around…
Recently I went for an MRI scan and it was not something that I was looking forward to as every now and then I can get a flutter of claustrophobia. So, I find myself in a huge machine having to lie perfectly still for a good half an hour and then this is when my mind starts to play with me… Now knocking on for 20 years ago, I found myself sat in a lecture being given by someone who practised Magnet Therapy, now I know there are people who swear by this and my attitude is still pretty much along the polygnostic highway in that, if it works for you and you’re not harming anybody else, then you use it… However… I did take exception to the way the person described how it worked… the information given was that blood contains iron and so placing a magnet next to it causes the capillaries to spin… Well… I’m sorry but no way could I let that one go as FFS!!! NO! NO! NO! Blood contains haemoglobin which is a compound containing iron but no, it’s not magnetic and even if it was why for the love of all things (un)holy would anyone want their capillaries to spin?! That kind of nonsense calls for a scientific foot stomp! So… back to the scanner… I’m corpse like in there and they made a big deal about the noise levels but they failed to tell me that the bottom plate that I was laying on would get warm… I felt this heat slowly starting to build and I thought to myself… OH… what if… what if… that magnet therapy person was right… maybe my capillaries are spinning… maybe all my blood is going to get ripped out of my body… maybe… oh… no… maybe they set it to microwave by mistake and I’m slowly cooking and I’m going to burst and then I’m going to have chunks of me dripping down and landing on me and it’s going to take forever to get it out of my hair… what am I going to do? At which point I thought… what you’re going to do Karen, is get an ‘effing grip!! You’re going to give yourself some Reiki and reel this nonsense in… and when I use Reiki, I tend to see colours but in an MRI scanner, this is how it came through…
That kind of surpised me… as I am so used to receiving colours but it did the trick and calmed the mind…
I tend to often use Reiki in situations that I ‘d sooner not be in…
Here’s another painting…
That one is from a trip to the dentist to have a rather problematic toothed pulled… these are the colours that poured over me as the work was being done…
And going from MRI scanners to Reiki scanning, here are a couple of snapshots of the pain I’ve been getting with an ongoing back problem… The first one is at its worse and the second was how it felt after I’d received Reiki from one of my students…
I’m still not entirely sure whether or not I’ve addressed the theme and answered the question…but I’ll continue into another digression and drift into Astrology… See… I told you I spent a lot of time mulling on this topic… this is my notebook from a few months back… Is it my spirituality? Is it my nature? Is it all hoo hah and I’m merely a product of nurture?
I’m just going to drop this here…
Pretty much all of my chart falls in 9th house (beliefs) and 10th house (public image/recognition) and all of my planets link back to Venus which sits on my MH… so I’ve ran around my dispositions and as a summary sentence of my whole chart, I get…
My sense of aesthetic brings all my thoughts together harmoniously in a way that I can communicate to serve others seeking deeper meanings.
Yeah… I think I’m still paddling in the polygnostic pool…
Has there been a neo-renaissance yet…
I think the world would be a sweeter place if sometimes people just said:
I describe
and left it at that…
I think the world would be a sweeter place if sometimes people just said:
I describe
and left it at that…
Click on a link to visit my neighbours…
The pure and blessed way 
Reblogged this on Lost Dudeist Astrology.
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woohoo love your thoughts what a fantastic word ‘polygnosis’ like it. x yes Brian Cox is a wee bit strange xx
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Thanks 🙂 yes the prof is a wee bit strange but it’s a strange that I like 😉
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Brilliant post! I liked one of his series and yeah Cox has this child like wonder about the universe and all the science that he speaks about. Thanks for sharing, its given me food for through because of what you’ve said actually fits in with the way I look at all things from time to time.
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Thanks Jay 🙂 yes… at my table, I never serve answers but there’s always plenty of food for thought 😉
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Wow, that’s some Virgo stellium you have there. But as to Reiki…yes, I like that, “I describe” instead of “I believe.” I actually do that sometimes, so I guess that’s part of why I like it. Polygnosticism is a great term to add to the vocabulary! Thanks for introducing us to it.
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Yeah… with all the Virgo, you’d think I’d have neater handwriting! 😀 YW on the polygnosticism, it would have been rude not to have shared it… I wonder why it took so long to find it… 😉
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