What is Reiki?

In this unit we’re going to look at Reiki from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, start­ing from the very prac­ti­cal, and mov­ing on to a more spir­i­tual under­stand­ing. But before we jump in with that, it’s impor­tant to realise that prac­tis­ing Reiki is not an intel­lec­tual activ­ity. It’s all about your heart, and very lit­tle about your head. So if your heart is open to Reiki, you’ll learn it quickly, regard­less of how well you can under­stand or explain it, and regard­less of your beliefs about it. There is no require­ment that we all think the same way about Reiki; what mat­ters is only whether our heart is open to it. All of this means that if at any point these words stop mak­ing sense, or if you dis­agree, you can freely skip on to the next unit with­out wor­ry­ing that you’ve missed some­thing impor­tant.

Reiki is a spiritual healing practice.

Reiki is a spir­i­tual heal­ing prac­tice. In other words, it’s a method that pro­motes heal­ing and it uses spir­i­tual rather than phys­i­cal tech­niques. The tech­niques them­selves are very sim­ple: the recip­i­ent usu­ally lies down, always fully clothed, while the prac­ti­tioner gen­tly lays their hands on var­i­ous points on the body. The hands are usu­ally held in each posi­tion for about 3 or 4 min­utes. Many peo­ple on encoun­ter­ing Reiki for the first time feel a sense of peace, and enter a deep state of relax­ation. And this is an ideal state for heal­ing to hap­pen, when the ten­sions and wor­ries of life are lifted, and the mind and body are allowed to enter real rest.

Reiki is used to treat both psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal prob­lems, and is often used as a com­ple­ment to the treat­ments of West­ern med­i­cine, espe­cially if the con­di­tion is seri­ous. There is no sci­en­tific con­sen­sus on the effec­tive­ness of Reiki, let alone how it works, as there is extremely lit­tle research on it, espe­cially when com­pared to research on prac­tices like acupunc­ture. That said, we should attempt some expla­na­tion for how it works, and the expla­na­tion needs to be appro­pri­ate to the con­text where Reiki is being used.

Reiki is often used in clin­ics and hos­pi­tals, where it’s used to treat chronic pain, for exam­ple. In this set­ting the expla­na­tion for how Reiki works would be that it encour­ages the body to enter a state where it can heal itself. West­ern med­i­cine is well aware of the body’s innate heal­ing capa­bil­i­ties, and is usu­ally open to any way to pro­mote this, pro­vid­ing no harm is done. And Reiki, hav­ing no adverse side effects, fits this bill well.

Reiki is a spiritual path

For a great many Reiki prac­ti­tion­ers, Reiki is so much more than a tech­nique to pro­mote relax­ation and the body’s innate heal­ing mech­a­nisms. To us, it’s a spir­i­tual path: a set of prac­tices with an accom­pa­ny­ing set of sim­ple pre­cepts. When prac­tised with per­sis­tence Reiki will lead to psy­cho­log­i­cal and spir­i­tual growth, and a greater expe­ri­ence of con­nec­tion with the source of all life. Like all spir­i­tual paths, you can tell it’s authen­tic where you see the fruits in lives of its fol­low­ers. These fruits include greater com­pas­sion, love and accep­tance of self and oth­ers. And just to clar­ify: it’s a spir­i­tual path, but it’s not a reli­gion, because the prac­tice of Reiki doesn’t show any of the mark­ers of reli­gion: no creed, no required beliefs, no insti­tu­tion, and no clergy. This allows Reiki to be prac­tised by peo­ple with any reli­gion, or none.

At the core of this spir­i­tual path is some­thing we alluded to ear­lier: the source of all life . This source is not a ‘thing’ that exists in the uni­verse, and so there’s no direct way for us to study, under­stand, or even talk about it. Reli­gions have named it Allah, HaShem, God, Brah­man, Dhar­makāya, and Tao. Philoso­phers talk about it as the Ground of Being, which implies that all things that exist are them­selves grounded in this thing-which-is-not-a-thing.

Whether you fol­low a spir­i­tual path or not, you might have had moments in your life where you became con­scious of this Ground of Being. Some of the most com­monly reported con­texts for this include:

• A deep sense of awe whilst in nature. This awe seems to sat­u­rate our whole being with a sense of con­nect­ed­ness and peace.
• Moments of deep­est love or inti­macy, such as hold­ing a new­born for the first time. In this moment, this love seems to go beyond our ordi­nary capac­ity for love.
• Break­through visions whilst doing spir­i­tual prac­tice or whilst on a psy­che­delic trip.
• Moments of grief or despair, touch­ing a raw place where words fall away — yet feel­ing held by some­thing deeper.

Before you con­tinue read­ing, pause for a moment to see if you can recall a moment in your life when you felt that you had touched — or been touched by — the Ground of Being. Take some slow breaths while that mem­ory comes alive in you again now.

This kind of expe­ri­ence is so bright that it can blind us. Just as look­ing directly at the sun will over­whelm our visual sys­tem, encoun­ters with the Ground of Being will over­whelm our cog­ni­tive sys­tem. In the after­glow, the mind will grasp for words to make sense of what has hap­pened, but like with Moses and the burn­ing bush, these encoun­ters elude ratio­nal expla­na­tion, and the words will always fall short. When Moses won­dered how he was going to explain the mys­tery to his peo­ple, he asked at least for a name, and was told ‘I AM WHO I AM’. These are words that point us away from ratio­nal under­stand­ing and instead towards mys­tery.

As a spir­i­tual path, Reiki brings us into con­tact with the Ground of Being every time we lay our hands on for treat­ment. We don’t always feel this: some­times we don’t feel any­thing when we do Reiki. But to fol­low the spir­i­tual path of Reiki is not about chas­ing pro­found feel­ings. It’s about lay­ing our hands on in patient expec­ta­tion, regard­less of whether we can feel Reiki and regard­less even of whether we believe in Reiki.

At the start of our jour­ney, Reiki seems like some­thing mys­te­ri­ous, some­thing exter­nal to our­selves which graces us with its pres­ence. But over time, we find our­selves trans­formed by it. This trans­for­ma­tion brings with it the real­i­sa­tion that just as Reiki is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the Ground of Being, so we also are man­i­fes­ta­tions of the same Ground of Being. Ulti­mately we find our­selves part of a uni­ver­sal unity, that we are one with Reiki. This process is mostly slow and grad­ual, like water flow­ing through a rocky gul­ley. At first the water takes the shape of the gul­ley, but over time, the jagged stones are worn smooth, and increas­ingly the gul­ley takes the shape of the water, wide and smooth. As with spir­i­tual tra­di­tions across all times and cul­tures, this path of trans­for­ma­tion is a process of emp­ty­ing away the things in us that are false, and allow­ing the true self that emerges to rest in the Ground of Being itself.

This then is the deep­est mean­ing of the word ‘Reiki’: that it is a lens through which we see and expe­ri­ence the Ground of Being at work in our lives.

Reiki is divine love.

We’ve now spo­ken about Reiki as a hand-on heal­ing prac­tice and as a spir­i­tual path. We’ve also spo­ken philo­soph­i­cally, say­ing that Reiki is not strictly speak­ing a thing, rather it is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the Ground of Being, the source from which all things arise. But gen­er­a­tions of Reiki prac­ti­tion­ers have found other ways of talk­ing about this, and to close we will look at two of the most com­mon.

The first is that Reiki is divine love. This love is gen­tle and patient, softly encour­ag­ing us to give up the pain we hold deep inside. It is self­less, never demand­ing, but always invit­ing us to go deeper into the love. Instead of describ­ing this love as infi­nite, let’s call it hyper-abun­dant, by which we mean the more you receive this love, the more that you are able to receive. This is actu­ally our expe­ri­ence of true love with another human: the more you love, the more you become capa­ble of lov­ing, as the act of lov­ing opens your heart and allows more love to flow through. And with Reiki, rather than run­ning out as you share it, giv­ing Reiki increases your sense of con­nec­tion to Reiki, and so it seems that even more is avail­able than before.

Reiki is divine energy.

The sec­ond expla­na­tion sees Reiki as a kind of energy. This is unlike the phys­i­cal energy we get from food which pow­ers our bod­ies. Instead, it is a divine spir­i­tual energy, which inter­acts with the human holis­ti­cally: the spir­i­tual, emo­tional, psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal bod­ies. How this works is again not some­thing we under­stand sci­en­tif­i­cally, but on this course we will attempt some expla­na­tion via the chakra sys­tem. And once again, this divine energy is hyper-abun­dant, get­ting more abun­dant as we share in it.

The idea of Reiki as divine energy fits neatly with the orig­i­nal Japan­ese char­ac­ters for the word Reiki:

The first char­ac­ter, rei, means spir­i­tual, divine, or mirac­u­lous. The sec­ond char­ac­ter, ki, is most often trans­lated into Eng­lish as energy or spirit. Together, these two char­ac­ters can be trans­lated into Eng­lish as divine energy, Holy Spirit, or uni­ver­sal energy. And this brings us back to the idea that Reiki is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the Ground of Being—a man­i­fes­ta­tion that we expe­ri­ence as a lov­ing divine energy.