Reiki Cairns Teaching Usui Shiki Ryoho, the gentle folk healing art of Reiki

For the most part, life is full of busily doing things. Our minds are busy naming things, sorting through the inputs from an increasing variety of sources, thinking about the next thing that might be catching our attention.

 The end result is that we can be left thinking our lives rather than living them, reacting to the next thing, making up stories about what just happened, making judgements on what each and every thing means to us.

Even when we take time out, it can be more of the same. We can go into nature, and still be looking at it, and thinking it …trees, flowers, birds, clouds, hot, wet, and imposing our own meanings about those things. However, every once in a while something changes in our perception. 

In a moment of stillness, maybe in awe at the beauty in front of our eyes, we stop the naming and the thinking. We are just being there, and a space opens up that allows nature to give its meaning to us; that we are not separate from it, that we are an integral part of its vastness, its richness and its beauty.

That experience is there in every moment of life, but its necessary to let go of everyday mind to let it in.

“Practise, practise, practise.” was an encouragement often given by Mrs Takata to her students.

For many whose focus is the physical aspects of the healing practice, this has been an encouragement to do lots of treatments, to develop skills and sensitivities in the treatment practice. There are those who seem to have a great aptitude for this, who are great ambassadors for the practice in a therapy sense, who are focused on bringing the practice into recognition in mainstream medical settings.

But that was not my way. Instead I found more questions. “What did she really mean”? “What are we really practicing”?

What if this was something “very Japanese” that we weren’t understanding? Something very Japanese that she did not explain, expecting the student to discover this for themselves.

An aspect of Japanese art forms is that there was both an outer practice, the physical expression, and also an inner expression, a dimension of awareness, of mind. The Japanese Samurai arts of swordplay, archery, and the like, all had a very deadly real outer expression, and at the same time drew on an inner dimension of mind, the experience and knowing of “life in every breath”.

Over time, that was what I have discovered, how I have come to experience the practice, as both the physical practice and a practice of stillness of mind, of being present in the now moment, “doing without doing”. Just as with the martial arts, the physical expression opens a doorway to inner experience that can become a lived expression of who we really are, so that it may be experienced by others, so that it may even awaken that very sense in themselves.

Healing doesn’t get more real than that. It is the very essence of healing.

No doubt you will know the story of the Trojan Horse, how the Greek soldiers entered Troy in the belly of a huge wooden Horse, a “gift” left to the city when the invaders supposedly withdrew. 

These days the Trojan you hear of most often is a rogue computer programme. On the surface it appears to be a useful utility, something that gets you to instal it, but behind the scenes a companion programme is running, doing something entirely in secret.

In a way, Reiki is like that. The Reiki trojan is the healing practice. “Healing” as a physical phenomena is the attraction, gets you to run the programme, and it works quite nicely in that role, and it keeps the trojan programme active. But behind that process is another stealth process, running in the background, unseen and for the most part undetectable.

What is this stealth program doing? Its attempting to overwrite a very real rogue process on your hard drive. Thats the process called “ego mind”, the programme that trips you up with its belief systems, creates separation, suffering, and all that ails you.

This rogue process is a utility programme that has taken control, rewriting and mutating itself to survive. That’s just what it does. Its tricky to get it back to doing what it was designed to do, but it can be done.  

If the Reiki trojan crashes the rogue programme, you will be in no doubt you have been “hacked”. This is a very good thing to happen. It is the real healing that many seek, the “getting real”, the “end of our stories”, the end of suffering. Its also called awakening and enlightenment.

Mikao Usui wasn’t joking when he called it the “secret method”.

*Source unknown.

If love didn’t involve fear, it couldn’t teach courage. If love didn’t address fear, it couldn’t answer fear. Love is one of the most general of notions which becomes one of the most specific when applied.

Awareness of the existence of love doesn’t mean we can love, any more than awareness of electricity means that we can throw a switch and have a light come on. First we have to invent a switch. We have to invent a wire, a generator and a light bulb.

Before we can have an electric light we must invent appropriate technology, and  the same is true of love.

Love is invented. You have to be an inventor.

Love is discovered. You have to be an explorer.

Love is created. You have to be an artist.

Love is the technology of the heart… the strategy of creation…the creation of the heart that unites the heart with creation itself.

It has something to do with creating something “there” that wasn’t “there” before, only to discover that it was all that was there, all along!

How would you respond if you were told that you were in this life to learn to love, and that when you did you would change the world?

Even if you were not told this, both of those things are true.

The Buddha’s question “How well did you love?” is the key to the answers to the other questions.

In my experience, nothing else determined so fully how much life was in my living, or how real was the letting go, as did Love.

I don’t mean, pink fluffy love, or “need you” love, or “you complete me” love. I mean love that fills your being to overflowing, that feels like it’s opening your heart wide because it’s so big you can’t even begin to hold it in.

I mean love that is full of joy and delight at existence itself, as much for your own self as for everything else, and ultimately there is no difference.

Every thing, and every one, that I have loved, I have had to be willing to let go. The depth and clarity of that love has been the measure of how deeply I needed to let go, for love of my own self.

It didn’t mean that there was never pain or uncertainty over the possible outcomes. Lives end, lives go on. The paradox is that the more clearly and lovingly I let go, the more love flowed in: the more real relationships became, even when I was not physically in them any more.

That’s not an impossible dream. You can know that experience, because it is yours to have, the essence of your being.

The Buddha was asking the questions to plant a seed, to lead those willing to hear the question behind the question, into the possibility of going for it.

Believe, be willing to take a risk, and keep on being willing no matter what. You can do it.