A Day of Reflection and Why Reiki Doesn’t Cure Everything
Yesterday I spent the day at Salisbury’s Personal Best Health Event. During the day I talked to many people about different aspects of the work that I do. It was great to see so many familiar faces: clients, Reiki students and people from my meditation classes as well as fellow practitioners. I was also very grateful to be joined by two of my Level Two Reiki students, Jen and Carol, for a while.
For those people I chatted to that I had never met before there was a wonderful curiosity in finding out more about Reiki, energy healing and meditation. It is a delight to share information with people on so many different levels and even better to give a few a little taste of how Reiki feels.
Many people who use Reiki still struggle to explain it well and one of the reasons why I am about to head back to California to do some more training is because the person I will be working with has done such an amazing job of defining exactly what Reiki is and what it does and doesn’t do.
I began my Reiki training in 2003 with my Level One Attunement. This was a great experience and it set me on a path to learning more about how to take good care of myself as well as planting a seed for a change of career direction. Over the next couple of years I worked my way through the more advanced levels of Reiki training, set up my practice and then began teaching. I have always enjoyed the teaching aspect of my work and it has been a joy and privilege to be able to attune my students to the wonderful energy of Reiki. Attuning someone to Reiki gives them a life-long skill to take better care of themselves and to look after parts of them which cannot be looked after by other means. For many, learning Reiki is that missing piece of their existing self-care practices.
In 2014 I was lucky to be one of the first people to get a copy of the newly published book Understanding Reiki: From Self-Care to Energy Medicine by Chyna Honey. The short synopsis is that it blew me away. It made me realise how many aspects of the Reiki system (the practice of Reiki not the energy itself) hadn’t ever sat that comfortably. For example, I had always talked about Reiki as a non-spiritual practice yet there are many things that have been added to Reiki class curriculums that belie this. I, like many practitioners and teachers, had also struggled to feel like I could present a really clear and succinct description of Reiki that was accessible to those seeking to learn about it. I always knew that Reiki couldn’t ‘cure’ everything, as is sometimes, (potentially dangerously), claimed but I didn’t feel like I could offer much explanation or clarity to this sense of knowing. Given the illumination that this relatively short 99-page book had already offered m y own understanding, my practice and my teaching I jumped at the chance to start re-doing my Reiki training with Chyna and it has transformed my classes in such a wonderful way.
Gaining such clear and precise knowledge, both for me personally and to share with my students, helped me to fall in love with Reiki and with teaching all over again. My classes are an absolute joy as I am now able to share knowledge based on a curriculum that has none of the, albeit well-intentioned, woolliness or unnecessary additions that used to be the case. It also means that in being able to provide a much better understanding of Reiki and why it is useful to us I maximise the chance of my students continuing to use it. If we believe something should cure everything and it doesn’t then we may well just stop bothering to keep trying to use it at all and therefore miss the benefits it can bring.
I have written articles previously that are aimed at sharing some of the clarity that I have gained with a wider audience and this article is the start of further writing on this topic. For now, though, I will leave you with the following anecdote that I think demonstrates well why I am so excited to be going to complete the last part of my re-training with Chyna.
Some time ago I was interviewed as part of an online international Reiki Summit. One of the things I mentioned during my interview was that Reiki can’t cure everything because it works on only two specific parts of the human system and deals with imbalances caused by the everyday wear and tear of life. For this reason it cannot heal imbalances in our body or energy systems that are caused by things like trauma, many illnesses or injury. However, because of the specific way that it works to help us deeply relax and be more balanced it does support our body’s inner capacity to heal itself and so sometimes indirect benefits are experienced. It may well be for this reason that what Reiki can and can’t do may have appeared confusing and hard to define at times.
Shortly after my interview aired I received an email from a lady in America. She had completed her Master Level (Level Three) Reiki training and met regularly with a group of other Reiki Masters. She thanked me for the information I had shared in my interview and said it had come as such a wonderful relief. This was because she had criticised herself, as well as having been directly criticised by others, for somehow ‘blocking’ or preventing Reiki from healing some particular problems she had been experiencing. She had been told, and come to think it true, that she didn’t ‘believe’ in Reiki enough and wasn’t open to being healed. It is for this reason that promoting something as having the ability to ‘cure’ or heal anything that might ail us can be so dangerous. This lady may well have been putting off seeking the appropriate treatment that she needed because she had been told it was her fault the Reiki wasn’t fixing it.
It is for these kinds of reasons, for my students, my potential students and hopefully a wider audience that I will continue to share information as best I can and gladly take these opportunities. Reiki is such a wonderful energy and over the years I have known many people, including myself, for whom it has changed their lives. Thank you for reading this, I hope it has offered something useful to you too.
Dr Karen Janes ©
19th January 2020.