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

I have a friend who is a master at drawing circles. In this she has a been a great teacher, I know few who do it so well or so consistently. I am talking about circles of inclusion and exclusion, which I see as spirituality in action.

There are those who draw small circles to exclude others. What is beautiful to experience is the ability of my friend to be seemingly always able to draw a bigger circle again, to include the very ones who seek to exclude.

Ultimately this is what healing is about. At one end of the healing continuum is ego mindedness, the small, closed circles of “I”, “me” and “mine”. Expanded awareness, being willing to hold an ever expanding circle, to know the oneness in all things, is at the other end. “Healing” is everything in the space in between.

Small circles are driven by fear, which always involves suffering. Small circles are commonplace. The feeling that goes with expanded consciousness and willingness to hold the bigger circle is love. While this may also involve pain, ultimately it leads to peace.

“How big am I drawing my circles?” has become one of my “self check in” questions.

In the first several years after I began the Reiki practice 20 years ago, I knew a lot of stuff about Reiki, what I was doing, what Reiki is, how it worked, and more. The truth was that I didn’t know much at all. The meanings I imposed on the practice were the beliefs  and ideas I had accepted from those whom I thought knew more than I did, who had more experience than I did.

However, as happens in a self healing practice, life events happened, I had my own experiences, and questions began to mount. The number of times I asked myself the question “what am I really doing”, and “what am I really practicing”, I couldn’t even begin to guess, until in the end my mind had no ready answer, and there was just an empty space of not knowing.

And one day in the midst of life and its doings, of doing my daily practice, of not knowing or even seeking an answer, I experienced a new and different mind space, was simply being “there”. All the “stuff” had fallen away and in that space it was as if Life itself was at last able to express its own meaning; the exquisite joy, the delight in the boundless possibilities and richness of all that is life; that the reality had always been this, of being whole, of all things being perfect just as they are in the now moment, of being held in what I can only call Love.

The older meanings and beliefs were not wrong. They are simply a perspective from a different point on the healing continuum. I still don’t know definitive answers to my questions, although it seems that I have been practising stillness and being present. Even so, as I allow myself to be in my not knowing, continue to heal the places of separation in my life, my new meaning seems to be being expressed in my everyday reality, a reality that I believe is there for everyone. As Mikao Usui put it, a capability we are “endowed with since birth.”

Mrs Takata had a simple and direct style of teaching that was very “Japanese”. She was the teacher and the student was the student. As a student you were expected to do as she taught and the learning arose from your practice. She would say “Let Reiki teach you”.

One of many anecdotes is her response to questions and descriptions related to the personal experiences of the Reiki practice, that could be described as esoteric or metaphysical.  She would simply say “Fantasy!” and go on to whatever was of practical concern in that moment. She was seemingly uninterested in what these experiences meant or what they were about.

I was not one of those students, nor did I ever meet Takata. Even so, her response has exercised my mind over the years when the same sorts of questions and stories were received from students taking my own classes. It was, and is, in fact a brilliant and practical response. She wasn’t saying that the experience wasn’t real, just that the mind’s meaning was without a basis in reality.

Imposing meanings and making explanations about our experiences is something the mind does automatically. It makes up a story of what happened, or why something just happened, which doesn’t need to be based on fact, can be fanciful and even magical. With so many facets of our experience that are genuinely in the realm of the unknown, the mind’s “meaning” is easily just a fantasy.

Ending the stories that lie at the heart of our human suffering is the way to the healing of our lives and hearts. The mind’s fantasies about what could be, are only another distraction from what is real, the “here now”, and “what is”.

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”.