Reiki Day 25 - Hidden Messages in Water

At my Reiki teacher's recommendation, I checked out of the library "The Hidden Messages in Water" by Masaru Emoto. Dr Emoto has studied the crystals formed in water from all over the world and under all sorts of circumstances. He has particularly focused on the effects of resonances - chemical, emotion, energy, prayer, sound, anything he could think of and test.

Three key things: (my wording in all cases)
- the most perfect and complete crystals are formed by the combination of love and gratitude;
- frequency resonance and disruptions are ubiquitous (e.g. changes in atmosphere by a person entering the room);
- large scale resonance transcends distance (e.g. the initial invasion of the first Gulf War appearing in his research results before he read the headlines).

Dr Emoto's conclusion: "I only ask that you listen to and absorb what water has to say--to all of humankind, and to you."

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I wish I'd completed this little book a day or two ago so I could have pondered to the accompaniment of the torrential downpours we've had recently. : )

Some random thoughts and early reflections:
- Bringing a group of people into consensus is like a crystal forming. The first structure appears and then the whole body finds itself in formation. (Warning! The same must hold true for groupthink.)
- I have been debating with my father what drives human motivations. I'm going to have to think about resonance effects to see how that impacts the basic arguments.
- "Resonance" clearly resonated with me throughout the whole book - far out of proportion to how Dr Emoto used it. Yeah, the pictures were pretty, but the words and descriptions of vibration effects practically shouted at me from the page. : )
- "Love and gratitude" is probably what most people would key into, but that was my major insight the first use of Reiki after attunement and in combining Reiki with prayer. This book didn't add into any of that for me.


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Into the Present Moment - Track 15, "Make Me A Blessing":

Lord, make me a blessing to those that I meet
And make me a blessing as I walk down the street.
Oh make me a blessing this day e'en this hour.
Lord, make me a blessing; it lies in Your pow'r.

Lord, make me a blessing at work and at home
And make me a blessing wherever I roam.
Oh make me a blessing, that people may see
That I am a blessing for You are with me.

Reiki Day 20 - Settling into stability

As the 21-day cleansing period comes to a close, I feel that things have stabilized:

- I no longer feel like I'm slopping Reiki everywhere; it is reined in with intent. : )

- Though I have not yet fully adjusted my biofeedback tools, Reiki no longer triggers the overall dilation loop.

- Reiki is fully integrated in my prayer and meditation habits. I have even adjusted hand positions for using while meditating on the bus to keep from jostling my hands around.

- I successfully managed a 2am on-call without crippling my ability to work for the next two days so I believe my health baseline is starting to improve.

- I think my long time spirit guide has actually identified himself to me, but the implications are beyond belief and I am still adjusting. I sense that these changes in the relationship are necessary before I will be ready to work with symbols for Level II.

- I have made no progress whatsoever on the issue of healees. Time to go back to my teacher, I think, on this issue.

Reiki Day 17 - My Cat's Input

Lately, whatever adjustment has been in progress with Reiki has seemed to largely go into the non-verbal sub-conscious giving me little to write about. As long as it has been, 10 days, it still feels too early to discern what the impacts have been. But something has come up I thought worth noting.

I was coughing some and have been using Reiki to help me calm my coughs, but my cat was half on my lap and half wrapped around my forearm and he determinedly was not moving. I didn't want my coughing to dislodge him, so I tried just putting one hand on my chest and resting into Reiki. The other hand was across the cat's side.

To my surprise, it worked! I could feel the Reiki flowing and my cough was able to still. Even more surprising, the cat, who usually only tolerates Reiki and that only sometimes, relaxed more and started purring. It felt like he and I were cradled together in God's hands, tucked in a blanket of love and affection and healing.

So it is apparently possible, and preferred by my cat, to do parallel channels. Or perhaps the relationship was the recipient?

Reiki Day 7 - Healees?

The recommendation is to do self-healing daily and at least three whole-body sessions on others per week for this 21ish day transition period. I'm one week in now and am clearly having no trouble with opportunities for self-healing. I have yet to do any whole-body sessions on others, though. My husband let me help a headache (more to humor me than anything else), but I realize I have no idea how to indicate services available to people I interact with. This must be a common problem, but if that were true wouldn't it be a common element in the training? I did a quick browse through the "Training Reiki" chapter of "Essential Reiki", but don't see anything about this there.

And it is always possible that this is one of those common relationship knowledge things I never learned.

Reiki Day 6 - Unintended consequences

I am fascinated by the changes in everyday things. For example, I find myself saying grace far more regularly as I pick up food and feel my hands tingle. I don't believe the prayers are any more effective, but having a tangible association sure makes it easier to really allow myself a moment to be grateful for the bounty in my life.

I'm hitting an odd challenge, though. My body has a problem with temperature regulation. When overly warm, my blood vessels over-dilate and press against nerves - resulting in a migraine. When chilly, my blood vessels over-constrict, straining the muscles that control them - another type of migraine.

When I feel a migraine coming on, I check my hands. If they are cold, I'm over-constricted and I soak them in warm water which has a biofeedback effect of relaxing all of my blood vessels. If my hands are warm, I soak them in cold water to constrict the vessels. Alternatively, I can use Coca-Cola (a constrictor) and Aspirin (a regulator).

Today I dressed warmly for the cool day ahead, but the office was warmer than usual. And then I had Reiki flowing all over, warming my hands and triggering the biofeedback response to dilate all my blood vessels further. I went through 2-1/2 cans of Coke with ice and washed my hands in cold water whenever I could take a break, just barely staying ahead of the migraine. That much caffeine had me wired most of the afternoon. And that had coughing consequences when I got home and tried to wind down. Though Reiki did help with the wind down, it only exacerbated the problem during the day.

I have to figure out completely new habits to re-balance my migraine management. And I have a pretty compelling driver for learning to control the Reiki flow.

Reiki Day 5 - Feeling like an apprentice

Being middle aged, it feels funny to be an apprentice again, slopping Reiki everywhere in a very messy fashion.

I notice my hands getting warm and tingly at the oddest times without any regard to conscious intent. Is that uncontrolled talent needing more skill discipline? A new sensation of energies that have always been there? Reiki coaching me to pay attention to an application? My hands just feeling funny like my mouth did when I learned to play the french horn in junior high?

Unlike the frustration I felt in adolescence, I mostly find it funny now. I've drawn attention a couple of times laughing out for no [to viewers] apparent reason.

My favorite is the image of a cartoon character working with something sticky, getting more and more tangled up in it, and ending up all cocooned. I'm not sure why I feel a strong association to this. I can't imagine Reiki being either sticky or tangle-able, but there it is.

Reiki Day 4

My first two posts highlighted spiritual growth. This growth is not the result of Reiki attunement. Continual growth on many fronts is a core part of being a Jeanne-Anne. The Reiki attunement has clearly influenced the direction and intensity of the growth already in progress and this brings to mind something I think needs to be made explicit.

It is easy to talk about attunement changing us because we see influences where something seems different, but I think this is a misnomer. We do not become different, merely more completely ourselves. We lose nothing in the process.

My experiences are not all on a spiritual level. I have had trouble to varying degrees over this past year with itching from hives. I haven't been able to identify an allergy causing them, though they are mostly controllable with antihistamines.

I have had increasing trouble with it again the past few days, to the point that I was up in the middle of last night taking an oatmeal bath trying to calm it enough to go back to sleep (and today am paying the consequences for broken sleep).

I didn't notice whether this bout started before or after Reiki attunement, but I have been interested to note that Reiki seems to do nothing for it. I have also noted that there is one stressor in my life with intensity seeming to correlate to the hives, and I think this is the cause. It may have always been the cause, but I've had so many stressors the past 4-5 years that this one has been difficult to isolate.

Reiki has seemed to have no effect on the hives. It is tempting to be discouraged by that, but I'm not. This stressor has been an issue for me for about 25 years, with numerous significant negative impacts in several areas of my life. 4 days of Reiki is not going to make all that go away, even with the Reiki I've received in the past.

Maybe Reiki over time will influence a final resolution to the stressor. Maybe it will help me more comfortably accept something I can't change. Maybe my brain will find some seemingly beneficial pattern to attribute to Reiki whether or not the pattern is a true correlation. Maybe Reiki really is nothing more than conditioned responses releasing endorphins to make us feel better. I haven't seen a compelling argument on whether or not it even matters which, if any, is true.

The fact that Reiki is probably not a silver bullet to fix all the ills in my life does not make it useless junk to be discarded. I use baking soda for an amazing number of things, from a leaven in cooking to a cleanser to a skin soother to a deodorizer to a tooth powder to an additive for the sewer or septic tank. That I can't use it to pay my bills, become better able to sit for an hour in church pews, or even ease the itch from these hives doesn't prompt me to toss it all away.

So it doesn't bother me that Reiki won't do everything. I never expected it would. I am grateful and joyous in what it has done and is doing in this present moment.

Reiki Day 3

I am finding that Reiki and prayer seem stronger when used together. This seems especially true when using the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.), the prayer of Julian of Norwich (God of your goodness, give me yourself, for You are enough for me. And I can ask nothing less that is to Your glory. And if I ask anything less, I shall still be in want. For only in You have I all.), or God's message to Julian (All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.).

This is not to say that these are magical incantations for healing or even that the Reiki is stronger with prayer. It is to say that I seem to be more sensitive to Reiki when I turn my will over to God and trust that God is great enough to be able to use me as a tool no matter how broken or sinful I may be. And I more easily submit to the focus of prayer while channeling Reiki.

I have been listening repeatedly over the past month or so to "Into the Present Moment", a 2007 collaboration between the UK singing group CAIM and Fr Gregory, OJN, with alternating devotional music and meditative reflections on the Order of Julian’s motto: await, allow, accept, attend. This cd is probably the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. Fr Gregory is very much like a Christian Thich Nhat Hanh with the ponderous phrasing and emphasis on the present moment.

Anyway, today the section on "allow" particularly grabbed my attention as very much describing the relationship between healer and Reiki. Here is a transcript of the first 3:47:

Allowing the Present Moment

When we allow the present moment, we give it time and space to unfold its full meaning and reality before us. We are poised to allow what God and reality want to happen.

When an artist comes to her easel, she does not come with a complete plan of what she wants to accomplish. She does not sit down and transfer what is in her head to the canvas. Rather she provides the open space of her imagination and the disciplined skill in her hands to allow the painting itself to emerge, unfold, and blossom through her. She provides an intensely aware presence through which the painting can offer its own life.

So too, when we walk the contempletive way of allowing, while we have intentions and hopes, we do not come to each moment with a plan to impose on that moment. Our ego is not out in front, seizing control and battling with everything to get its will done. We are rather curious to see what the moment itself will unfold for us, what it has to bring, to share, to unveil. We allow reality to emerge into its own truth before us.

This does not mean that we have no plans or intentions. We still walk to the shower in order to bathe. We still slice apples in order to eat. Living in contempletive allowing does not mean drifting in a haze from indulgence to indulgence. This is not contempletive living or spiritual allowing. It is immaturity.

What allowing means is that as we walk to the shower in order to shower and as we slice the apple in order to eat, there remains a part of ourselves that transcends that intention to shower or eat and sees our intention as only one influence in that moment, a moment that includes the steaming water gushing in the shower or the green and gleaming skin of the apple. We are not identified with our ego, posessed by anxiety and driving blindly against the present moment.

Thus when the shower refuses to give water or the apple reveals it is worm-eaten, we do not take it as though we were being attacked because our intention is frustrated. It is not personal. It's not about us. And it's not even bad not to get what we want.

We thus don't rise up to condemn the shower, the plumber, the apple, or the grocery store. Without fighting or condemnation, what we do is to chart a new course in joy based on what this present moment has offered. Our path through life can thus be free and spontaneous, always shifting, always responsive, and always centered in Christ.

[The cd can be purchased at The Julian Shop.]

Reiki Day 2

I am slowly reading and pondering "Essential Reiki" by Diane Stein, listening for different resonances in material "known" pre-attunement.

Reiki Day 1

[Transcribed from paper journal dated 3 Oct 2009]

During my Reiki I class, my teacher had us set a psychic shield before we were attuned. Included in the imagery was a drain for disposal of negative or harmful energies. At first I thought of this like a ventilation hood in chemistry labs to vent away toxic fumes, but that seemed too aggressive to me in multiple ways. Then it came to me that the drain is like a piscina, a basin in a church with a drain that goes directly to the earth, used for washing or disposing of consecrated (blessed) items.

The idea behind a piscina is that sacred wastes need to be treated with respect and go to nourish the earth rather than be junked with the other contents of a sewer. The revelation to me was my negative and harmful energies need to be treated with respect. Firstly, it is wise to respect anything powerful enough to cause serious harm, and secondly these energies are part of me, therefor deriving from something sacred, therefor sacred in and of themselves.

Later, after attunement, we were doing our first healings. I finished the first healing awestruck. Doing Reiki is like stepping into the stream of God's love for this precious child. How you see the recipient afterward is forever changed once you have had this glimpse through the lenses of God's eyes. The first time I was a chalice bearer at communion was like this, too. I had never realized how precious the elements truly are until I was the one sharing the cup with other beloved souls. I had received communion innumerable times before - even shared elements passed around. Likewise I have received Reiki numerous times over numerous years.

Ideally, the recipient would understand s/he was the next pipe in the channel to take the blessing to the rest of the world, but somehow we never really recognize that in our gut until we've dipped a toe in the waters further upstream.