After years of both practicing and teaching Reiki classes, my current belief about this beautiful and powerful Japanese healing practice is this:
Serve my Reiki with a healthy dose of skepticism, please.
“Now, why would you say that?” you might ask. “You always talk about the magic of Reiki and the power of believing, why would you encourage people to look at Reiki with a skeptic’s eye?”
The reason is simple: I believe that Reiki is an experiential healing art, which means that you will only believe it and know it to be true through your own experiences working with Reiki.
Reiki is magical, no doubt about that, but I think there’s nothing wrong with a “Show me what you can do, Reiki” attitude about the whole thing.
I remember when I had my very first Reiki session ever and was so relaxed, slipping in and out of consciousness as many people on the table are prone to do. I felt so wonderful, there had to be something to this, that’s all I knew.
When I took my first Reiki Level One class a few years later, I jumped in headfirst, and only waited a few months before taking Reiki Two and eventually the Reiki Master Course. But even though I myself had felt the benefits and effects of Reiki firsthand, even though all the electricity went out in my house when I came home from my Reiki 1 attunement, even though I could literally feel myself vibrating for the first week or two after my Reiki Master Attunement, I have definitely gone through periods of doubt and speculation on my Reiki journey.
Feeling yourself vibrate is such an amazing feeling!
“Is this really working or am I just making this up?” “Maybe everything that’s happening is just coincidence?” (Even though I know in my heart there are no coincidences, only synchronicities.)
“Is it really the Reiki, or did my Reiki Master Teacher just pick up everything she knew about me through observation and other ways?” (Even though, there was no way she could have known what she did.)
You see, that’s how the subconscious mind works. Even if all the hard evidence points otherwise, we view situations and our lives by the beliefs we already hold to be true. So even I am having all these experiences with Reiki that cannot be explained by the logical mind, my subconscious mind will always revert back to my longstanding beliefs and shape the situation according to them.
In short, the subconscious mind always runs the show.
Even after I was officially a Reiki Master Teacher but before I had started teaching, doubts would crop up from time to time. I would even take breaks periodically from Reiki, where I wouldn’t practice at all for a couple weeks.
Have you ever read the book Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives by Brian Weiss?
I referred to it in the post Heal Your Past Lives with Reiki Energy, and I love this book for so many reasons. Brian Weiss was a psychiatrist who had a patient under hypnosis for her anxiety when she suddenly started talking about a past life.
In the book, Brian Weiss talks about his struggle with believing what was happening as he did past life regression on this girl again and again. There was no way this young college student could have known some of the things she did, but she still did. “Could what was happening really be happening?” He asks himself again and again.
Sometimes you just know.
It’s not always easy to be a Reiki practitioner, as we have to live both in this physical world of bills, obligations and responsibilities and the energetic world of pure Source energy that Reiki allows us to connect to. Sometimes, moving back and forth between worlds can leave us feeling a little crazy!
Nowadays, Brian Weiss is the authority on past life regression, and he explains how the more he hypnotized his patient and she would regress, the more his doubts and skepticism simply went away.
“Seeing is believing,” as the common saying goes. “Believing is seeing” as well, since we create our reality through our beliefs, but that’s another article for another day.
Any and every doubt I’ve had about Reiki left as well when I started to teach. The more experiences that I had, and seeing the countless experiences my students had time and time again, helped chip away at those doubts until they disappeared altogether.
I’m not quite sure when they left, but they left in their place a deep trust about the truth and power of Reiki and the unlimited possibilities of all this healing energy is capable of. It is spiritually-directed energy after all, and has the power to move mountains and make miracles.
The universal life force energy that is Reiki is everywhere.
But if I hadn’t allowed myself the chance to question Reiki, I never would have had such strong inner beliefs about Reiki’s power. I had to see it for myself.
Think about it. Would you want to blindly follow the crowd and go along with what someone else said without checking it out for yourself, or would you want to test something out and see if it resonates as truth to you?
I am glad that I am an independent thinker and that I had to prove to myself the truth behind Reiki, because without fail it has proven to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but for me.
We ARE Reiki, after all.
Reiki has never let me down, even if it hasn’t always worked in the way I thought it should : ) it is always, always working.
So, if you find yourself doubting Reiki, good! Make Reiki prove itself to you, and it will, time and time again.
