Reiki Energy- the power within.........

Reiki is an oriental method of working with energy that you can use for your own benefit and for the benefit of other people. In its original Japanese form in the 1900s Reiki was very much about working on yourself: it was a system that you could use for self-healing, self-development and spiritual development. But when Reiki was first taught in the West in the 1970s, and since that time, Reiki teaching has focused much more on Reiki as a treatment technique - something that you do to other people – and the system appears to many people to be a sort of oriental spiritual healing, a hands-on treatment method that involves channeling energy. Reiki is now being classed as a sort of complementary therapy, so people might practice Reflexology, or Aromatherapy, or they might practice Reiki.

There are very many different ways of practicing Reiki, with lots of different Reiki ‘variations’ having seen developed in the West over the years, but, whatever the variety, Reiki is something that you can use for yourself, for your own personal benefit, and it is something that you can also share with other people.

What is Reiki energy?

Reiki is something to do with this energy, this ‘chi’, but Reiki is different from Tai Chi and Yoga, and Reiki treatments are different from Shiatsu and Acupuncture treatments.

When you practice acupuncture or shiatsu you are using your skills as a practitioner to detect subtle imbalances in energy flow and you are using your considerable knowledge of the meridian system to direct you in making specific and precise ‘invasive’ manipulations of the client’s energy system.

But when you practice Reiki as a treatment method you are not detecting and diagnosing and intervening. When you treat someone with Reiki you are allowing an unlimited external source of ‘energy’ to flow through you into the client. The energy is drawn through you according to the client’s need on that occasion: you are not directing the energy, you are a conduit through which the energy flows, you are creating a ‘healing space’ that the client can use to bring their own energy system into balance, without conscious and deliberate intervention on your part.

That is not to say that there is not a ‘skills’ component to Reiki practice, but when you develop your art as a Reiki practitioner you are not applying book knowledge: you are learning to open to your intuition and you are learning to ‘listen’ to what your hands are telling you in terms of energy flow. Your treatments become more effective as you develop your intuitive abilities and allow the energy to guide you in terms of where to rest your hands and for how long you place your hands in a particular position; you learn to ‘work in partnership with the energy’. That is how a Reiki practitioner develops their ability, through developing intuition rather than through applying knowledge.

When you treat someone with Reiki, you are not using and giving up your own personal energy reserves. You are not depleting yourself. In fact treating someone benefits and invigorates the practitioner, as they benefit from the energy that they are channeling!

For more details on Reiki and becoming a Reiki practitioner please contact Tara on massagecourses@hotmail.co.uk