What is Reiki?
When you begin studying different forms of Eastern healing you are going to run into Reiki. What is Reiki? It is one of the youngest healing Eastern disciplines. It was founded in the early 1900′s by Mikao Usui. He had just finished a long period of fasting and meditation which brought to him enlightened ideas of treating the human condition using the energy flow through the hands.
Mikao Usui made one major departure from almost every other form of healing when he started teaching people about Reiki. He did not teach people to go out and heal others, he first stressed the importance of healing oneself, and putting your own life in order, before starting on the journey to treat others. For this purpose he setup a series of 5 ideas which his students needed to follow to allow themselves to be clear, and to have free flowing positive energy in order to be able to heal others.
Reiki has not stayed only within the boundaries of the ideas of Mikao Usui. One of his early students later trained Hawayo Takata, who took Reiki in a completely new direction. Ms. Takata moved out of Japan and relocated to Hawaii, taking along her training and practice of Reiki. She westernized Reiki removing much of the spiritual elements and formalizing the methods of treatment.
Where Mikao and his students believed in the important of intuition, and “knowing” where to treat the hands for assisting various body parts in healing, Hawayo developed deliberate charts and procedures of treating patients. She changed the spiritual energy thinking into a more scientific process, and started training it to her students.
This divide still separates the two large schools of Reiki practitioners. Hawayo’s followers are considered to be practicing Wester Reiki, and Usui’s followers are practicing Traditional Reiki. Depending on your own beliefs you will need to choose which form is more beneficial.
How has science looked upon Reiki? They view it as a form of alternative therapy or medicine, with no proven benefits in producing healing. This comes back to one of the most important components of Reiki. You must go into the treatment with a mind full of belief, and expecting relief. This is part of the teachings of Mikao Usui, and something science will never be able to test. You need to work on your own inner thoughts, your own healing, along with the efforts of the Reiki healer. Belief plays a major role in any method of healing.
What is Reiki’s role in solving your medical problems? It would probably never be wise to ignore medical science in favor of only using any form of alternative medicine. A far wiser choice is to use both forms of treatment to enhance and extend the healing capability of both. Allow medical science to treat the physical symptoms, while you use Reiki to treat the energetic, and spiritual aspects of the illness. When you take care of all aspects in harmony, you can improve your success.
