What is Reiki ?

In simple terms, Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. Reiki is a simple, natural and safe method of healing and self-improvement that everyone can use. It has been effective in helping virtually every known illness and malady and always creates a beneficial effect. It also works in conjunction with all other medical or therapeutic techniques to relieve side effects and promote recovery.


Brief history of Reiki

Ask some practitioners and they will tell you that reiki healing has come to us from Atlantis, that it is as old as time itself. Certainly it seems perfectly plausible that a healing energy that's out there in the atmosphere, and is a power for universal good, is not rooted in time as we know it.

However, our interest here is in reiki as we practise it today, and that has a much shorter and more speculative provenance. For a tradition that is barely forty years old, the history of western style reiki is a surprisingly complex one. To understand it, we need to consider the timespan during which it has grown (around 1970 to the present day) and the political and cultural influences at play during this time.

The word reiki comes from the Japanese symbols Rei (Unseen) and Ki (life force). It was discovered and developed by Dr Mikao Usui who was, among other things, a Buddhist monk. He was born in Japan on August 15, 1865, and spent his early life as a businessman and later Mayor of Tokyo .

You may read elsewhere that he was a Christian, that he was president of Dishisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and that he studied in America. Unfortunately, no evidence has been found to substantiate these claims and we are left to speculate on why they were made.

It could be that HawayoTakata, who brought reiki to the west from Japan, felt it necessary to make the story more palatable for the American people she was attuning, so soon after the second World War. Certainly there are now distinct differences between eastern and western style reiki. However, we should be grateful to Takata san for her efforts, for she attuned 22 Reiki masters and from those people all of us practising Usui reiki can trace our lineage.

So what can actually be verified about the founder of our tradition? Certainly Usui sensai travelled all over Japan , and to China and Europe in pursuit of knowledge. He studied a wide range of subjects including medicine, psychology and religion. Because of his enhanced psychic abilities he was able to join a metaphysical group called the Rei Jyutu Ka.

This combination of experience and knowledge gave him an excellent base from which to fully appreciate and develop the spiritual gift which was to come to him later. For it was a spiritual experience, a flash of bright white light that came to him during deep meditation, that was the gift of reiki healing.

When Dr Usui started to practise he did not claim that reiki was new. Usui Reiki Ryoho (his version) - however, was new, and totally unique. But it was never his plan that this wonderful gift should be restricted or in any way elitist. Quite the opposite, his intention was that reiki healing should be passed on and shared amongst all nations as a tool for world peace.

Years later, during the time of the second World War, such radical thinking would have been enough to get a practitioner put to death in Japan, and this goes a long way to explain why Reiki went "underground" there for a long while in the 20th century, and why, to this day, no Westerner has - to my knowledge - achieved the level of Reiki Shinpiden (as we would say Master) in Japan.

For further reading, I would recommend chapters one to five of "The Spirit of Reiki" by Lubeck , Petter & Rand to fully appreciate the history of our tradition.


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