INNER LIGHT – A REIKI NEWSLETTER FOR REIKI PEOPLE
VOLUME FIVE ISSUE 2 FEBRUARY 2023
REIJU FOR YOU
It’s not always possible to attend a Reiki Share where Reiju is often part of the Share, so Carole provides Reiju remotely. Any Reiki person can ‘tune in’.
In Traditional Japanese Reiki, students receive Reiju empowerments every time they are with their Reiki Practitioner/Teacher. This tradition is echoed when Reiju is available at Reiki Shares. And in the same way that Reiki can be applied remotely – or ‘by ‘Distance’ – remote Reiju works really well.
Carole ‘broadcasts’ a remote Reiju empowerment every Sunday for the whole week with the intention that it can be experienced by any Reiki person.
The simplest way to experience Reiju is to sit and quietly bring yourself present, breathing down into the Hara with your hands in Gasshô, then think to yourself “I will experience Reiju Empowerment from Carole now”.
It is as simple as that.
SIMPLY REIKI WITH HEART
Carole is now recording meditations under the above banner and these can be found on her website.
The latest recording is responding to a request for the Cave of the Heart meditation. You can find it via this link:
https://reikiwithheart.com/2023/02/28/february-2023-podcast/
TIME TO THINK
In the Northern Hemisphere we are now moving from winter towards Spring. For those of us affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) this is letting go the darkness that was instigated by the ‘fall back’ resetting of clocks, and now we are almost at the ‘spring forward’ stage so we have longer hours of daylight. When the weather is dreich, it almost seems like we spend most of our lives in darkness.
With the lighter mornings in particular, maybe we wake up earlier and maybe we can use that extra time to think. As someone who has never lost the art of daydreaming, it is certainly much easier to let my brain wander in those moments before I really HAVE to get up.
I am beginning to look forward to those other times when I have time to think – my lunchtime walk, being in the garden just tidying up, hanging out the washing… and many other things that do not necessarily need me to have 100% concentration.
In my times to think I can ponder on what theme I might next write about in this newsletter, garner ideas for other pieces of writing, or just think about what I want to reflect upon in my occasional training times with Frans Stiene. At the moment this is how I make best use of my Hara, how can it deepen my practice? To spend just five minutes thinking about my practice and then 5 minutes putting my thinking into my practice makes a difference. Baby steps, kaizen it may be… but progress is made, and I look forward to having more quiet reflection moments as the days lengthen to think and daydream and think about what is really important for me and my life and work.
EFFICIENCY VERSUS EFFECTIVENESS
Listening to a podcast on this topic recently made me stop and think about how I would define these words. If you work in the business world, efficiency often means doing things right and low input for high output. However, I prefer to see it in a different way – effectiveness for me is doing the RIGHT things right.
One of the things that often fascinated me in my role as a consultant doing organisational audits or an evaluation of an organisation around how they use the grant made by funders is how much time is spent doing WRONG work RIGHT. Many people in an organisation take on tasks that are other people’s and do it to the best of their ability – meanwhile their work that contributes to why they are employed in the organisation takes a back seat.
In training programmes I ran for ‘effective teams’, I developed an exercise where I gave each member of the team two balloons, in a colour unique to them, and asked them to keep their balloons in the air. There was often much muttering about childish games, what’s this got to do about anything etc, but I would just let them mutter for a bit longer before stopping the exercise.
The debrief was always illuminating and led to much discussion about roles and efficiency and effectiveness. You see, people often only had one balloon at the end of the exercise, sometimes that was not even the colour of balloons given to them at the start, and there was always a bunch of balloons left blowing around the floor – indicating wrong work done well and how it means loads of things that could be done remain blowing in the wind and procrastination around Right Work.
I think this comes into Reiki and our practice. What does your practice compromise? Do you worry about doing things wrongly, whether your hand positions are right, whether your meditation is ‘progressing’?
What happens if you start thinking about efficiency and effectiveness in Reiki? What changes might you make? Is Reiki fulfilling for you? Then let’s get back to basics. I think it was Bruce Lee who said he did not fear the opponent who had 10,000 moves, most of which he didn’t know, but the opponent who had one move that had been practised 10,000 times.
Remember that the RIGHT thing even when it is done imperfectly, where you do your best, can beat a flawless performance of the WRONG thing. When in doubt, just breathe into the Hara, engage your Great Bright Light and go from there. Or take one of the Gokai (Precepts) and consider how you bring it into your life every day for a year. Or practise Sanmitsu Hô once a week for a year. You can journal how impactful that has been on your Reiki.
RIPPLES IN A POND
Do you ever think about the effect your Reiki practice or your meditation has on others? Often we have no idea what we say or do has a profound influence on others and how they see themselves and their Path in life.
The HeartMath Institute has ways of monitoring what happens when we are in a state known as ‘coherence’. This means they can monitor what happens with their Global Coherence Meditations that millions of us participate in on Full Moon night – but now because of the fragile state of the world we’re asked to do as often as we can.
The feedback is that with people joining others in meditation the vibrational quality of the world is changing. It may not seem like it, but it is. It is becoming more positive.
I like the story of the National Trust who were given a property and all the land that goes with the property. There were priorities obviously, but one of the things they worked on was what was the land like when the house was built – what form did the garden take, what was left for cattle or deer etc.? One of the things was that in one field there had originally been a large pond, but this had been filled in and the land used for grazing more recently. So they took a digger to the field, carved out the area that was once a pond – and left it because other things needed doing. Two years later when they went back the rain water had filled in the hole, they recorded a whole host of insects and wildlife using the pond, there were threatened species of toads and newts in the pond and there were irises, poppies and bullrushes growing at the water’s edge. The whole thing was thriving. And they had not needed to ‘do’ anything to make that happen.
This is what is happening with the Global Meditation – we do not need to ‘do’ anything. Just be with anyone else in the world who is meditating at that particular time, and know that your 15 minutes of meditation is making more of your energetic input to the world. We CAN change the world. Just let’s metaphorically join hands with just one other person who is doing their Reiki practice at that particular moment in time – and we have already doubled the vibrational quality of our meditation. You’ll never know the specifics of the effect you can have – but does that matter?
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