INNER LIGHT – A REIKI NEWSLETTER FOR REIKI PEOPLE
Volume 5 Issue 6 – August 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.
HOSPITALITY
A poem I am using more and more with the people I am working with is Rumi’s The Guest House. It has always spoken to me about ‘allowing’ and in that allowing each unwelcome emotion is welcome and in that welcoming comes a softening and a better ability to deal with what turns up each day.
Since the pandemic and lockdown, we have all been trying to cope with the disruption of life as we knew it. The uncertainty of each day. It brings Mikao Usui’s thoughts on ‘impermanence’ to front of brain. Things ARE in constant change and we are all trying to find our way through the upheaval of life not returning to how it was before Covid-19.
Much to my surprise, those new phrases in our language – working from home or Teams/Zoom meetings – have become surprisingly normal now. And they work much better than expected. By trusting in the vibrational qualities of Reiki I have been able to trust my own teaching and mentoring abilities are undiminished, and possibly enhanced because we can experience the Energy at work differently.
In the chaos of the early days of lockdown I began to see that all the teachings and meditations of Usui-Sensei were helping me and those I was working with to deal with the numbness of the ‘freeze’ of the fight or flight reaction. I feel the teachings have allowed us to adapt to the circumstances of ‘working in the dark’ because this was new, and we hadn’t been here before. The teachings held us and helped us to deal with things and move away from being overwhelmed.
In my other work of helping people to recover from trauma, there is a process labelled “titrate” – it helps bring alive that phrase in the Gokai shin shin Kaizen – to make tiny adjustments that help ‘reform Mind and Body’. It is an instruction to do things gently so as not to be overwhelmed by the suffering.
The Buddha taught about the Mind as being shining and when visiting the ‘forces’ (such as jealousy, greed, fear, hatred etc) then like The Guest House they may “violently sweep your house empty of its furniture” but they are still only visiting – even if they visit a lot. When there is a knock at the door of life, and I get up and open it, then I meet with these forces. I can either shut the door in their faces – but pretending I didn’t hear the knock just means these forces shin up the drainpipe or find an open window – they are very persistent.
Like the Tiger Who Came To Tea they just come in, eat up everything in the fridge and drink daddy’s beer whether I like it or not, before departing.
Reiki meditations help us to deal with all the new arrivals if we treat each ‘guest’ honourably, and just reconnect with our awareness, our compassion for ourselves and others. This is how it is right now and balance is restored. We may be, or feel, all alone, but through these meditations we create a real connection with others who are sitting and contemplating right now, anywhere in the world. We do not have to impose the idea on ourselves, it IS what is happening.
The Mind is shining in the stillness of our guest house, and by welcoming whoever comes, we can be grateful. We can respond and begin to see each emotion as a guide, a teacher, who has been sent to help us make the changes, take actions, that will develop the resilience and inner strength needed to ‘wake up’ to a new world.
SOMETHING TO READ
In previous newsletters I have written about Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter books who shades her lamps by covering them with scarves and how we have also covered our own Great Bright Light with veils. Reiki helps us to remove these veils.
Tara Brach in her book Trusting the Gold – Learning to nurture your Inner Light, has a similar story to tell. She begins with the story of the huge clay statue of the Buddha in Thailand in the 1950s, which began to deteriorate in the heat and crack. When monks shone a torch into the biggest crack, they were amazed to discover the Buddha beneath the clay was pure gold..
600 years earlier, the monks in the monastery covered the statue with clay to preserve it from invading armies, and whilst the monks had all been killed, the Buddha had survived, its beauty untouched.
Tara goes on to share how we, too, cover our innate beauty and goodness as we encounter the challenges in our lives. We identify with our coverings, feeling threatened and deficient. Yet our True Nature calls to us daily through our deepest intuition that there is something that is vast, mysterious and sacred.
In this book, Tara shares her own challenges and discoveries to help us find our meaningful Path.
ARCHITECT
Three masons on a construction site all doing the same thing – a curious architect asks the first man “what are you doing?” With a sigh, the mason says “I am laying bricks”. The architect goes to the second mason. Same questions. After wiping the sweat from his brow, the man says “I am laying bricks to build a wall”. Then the architect moves on to the third mason, same question. The mason stands tall, looks up with a smile and says “I am laying bricks to lay a wall for the most beautiful cathedral in the world.”
The architect was Christopher Wren. The masons were constructing St. Paul’s Cathedral.
AWE
The Japanese are an indigenous people, though people forget this and see modern Japan as full of exciting buildings and technology. Yet step back and you see that many of the ceremonial aspects of indigenous life are still practised and are still honouring the original Japanese way of life.
Although I am shamanically trained in the Lakota tribal ways of the Seven Great Nations of Sioux Indians, I am curious about all indigenous practices throughout the world – many of which are similar to the indigenous practices everywhere.
One of the aspects that is relevant to Reiki is the Japanese practice of Yuggen. Like many foreign words there is no exact translation but approximately it means awareness of the Universe that triggers emotional responses that are too mysterious and deep for words (Don’t you love the depth and feeling and sense of vastness that is held in that one word? Me, too!)
Reiki, I think, teaches us to appreciate just how awesome things are. From the tiny way a bird’s eye speedwell flower bud opens into such a pretty flower and its here today and gone tomorrow aspect, to watching the cosmos in the night sky and the profundity of the way it organises itself. This year watching three planets line up, then move apart, or how we have experienced the nearest approach to the earth the moon makes on the 1 August to the rarity of the Blue Moon on 31 August.
Whilst Professor Brian Cox is the new man on the Cosmos block, I am still in awe of Carl Sagan’s voice. “The Cosmos is all that is, was or will ever be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice. A faint sensation of a distant memory of falling from a height … we know we are approaching the greatest of all mysteries.”
When we honour the aspect of the Gokai’s Kay Dake Wa (Just for today), we remember we are not separate, or is it self-healing, or Shirushi or Jumon, or even the Gokai itself – it does mean we immerse ourselves in Reiki, so every action we take is Reiki, every word we speak is Reiki, every thought we have is Reiki and every breath we breathe is Reiki, because Kyo means ‘your life’ and we make it all we do.
Then we truly open ourselves to Yuggen and appreciate just how wonderful life is.
Hawkmoon
Recent Comments