Submitted by Claire de Lune on
http://therapeuticreiki.com/blog/reiki-10-myths-debunked/
Reiki energy healing may not be fully understood. Here are 10 common misconceptions about Reiki. This article is to clarify the issues and to align you with your highest path of healing growth.
REIKI MYTHS
1. Reiki is a Religion.
No. Reiki is spiritual, not a religion. There is no Reiki church, no Reiki liturgy, no priests, no sermons. There are Reiki principles for practitioners. These are not religious, and come from the Japanese Emperor. The Code of Ethics goes hand in hand with the ability to heal. Reiki principles might be (but usually are not) communicated with Reiki recipients. Communication usually completely centers around the recipient’s well-being.
2. A Reiki Practitioner Can Heal a Reiki Recipient.
Well, no. I like to phrase it humbly: a Reiki practitioner is kind of like a ‘garden hose’ pouring Reiki (Universal Life Force) energy onto recipients so they can heal themselves. The Reiki energy comes through the practitioner, but is not the practitioner, and is given to you, the Reiki recipient. The Reiki practitioner is the facilitator of your healing. None but you can heal yourself. This task can not be ‘delegated’.
3. A Reiki Treatment Should Be Free. Reiki is Divine, Thus Free.
It’s true that Reiki is Universal Life Force energy, and therefore is Divine. However, unless the practitioner offers Reiki as a charity or gift, it can not be provided free. The Reiki practitioner must take time to prepare and give the treatment, have previously acquired and paid for the ability and skill to be able to channel Reiki for your healing, and must make an effort to be a professional health service provider. This is why recipients should pay for Reiki, just as they pay for dental surgery.
4. If I Get Reiki Once, I’m Healed Forever.
I wish this was true. Well, sometimes it is true that with a single, short Reiki session, clients heal and cure of something forever. However, that’s working with a too narrow definition. Healing is holistic and as such, healing is a path, a process.
To make significant shifts on this path on significant issues, clients are recommended to take 3-4 sessions at a time. Typically, clients do this. Then they take a break. A few months later they come again. If they come in for another specific issue, we do another few sessions in a row. Alternatively, if we commence a preventative health maintenance program, we do a session about once a month. No matter whether you work on your health preventative or reactive: healing is a process.
5. Reiki is The Same as Therapeutic Touch.
They look similar, but are different. They are similar in that in both a Reiki and a Therapeutic Touch treatment, a practitioner gently places hands in specific positions on or over a person’s body for healing; They are both non-invasive techniques for clearing, energizing and balancing energy of the client’s body and aura. In both cases, a client’s first response is relaxation — the required condition for healing.
But Reiki and Therapeutic Touch are not the same. A Reiki practitioner helps people heal by channeling Universal Life Force Energy (Reiki) into their body. A Reiki practitioner receives the ability to heal and instruction on how to use it from a specially attuned Reiki Master. Reiki was developed in early 1900s by Mr. Usui in Japan. Reiki is also a life philosophy; practitioners are required to work on themselves through self-Reiki.
A Therapeutic Touch practitioner works with people’s individual energy field. With his hands, a practitioner assesses and balances the bio-energetic field around a person’s body. The practitioner manipulates this field to encourage the person’s natural healing. Therapeutic Touch was developed by Dolores Krieger, R.N. in the ’70s, as a tool for patient care by nurses. Later it was shared it with the public for anyone’s healing.
6. All Reiki Practitioners Give The Same Treatment.
Well, yes, Reiki is Reiki, but not all Reiki practitioners are the same. Some combine Reiki with other therapy, other specialize in Reiki. There are also Reiki variants, traditional or non-traditional.
It is desirable to choose someone who does Reiki all the time such as a Reiki Master or very active Reiki II practitioners. Masters & active practitioners’ ability to channel energy is likely to be much greater than someone who is just dabbling in it, or someone who has just done the beginning Reiki level I course.
Most importantly, it is important to choose someone who, energetically, ‘feels right’. I recommend prospective clients to ‘follow your heart and intuition when selecting your Reiki practitioner’. Furthermore, geographic proximity is not a good determinant , but synchronicity is.
7. If You’re Healed, You’re Cured.
Healing may include curing. However, healing is not curing. Healing and curing come from the opposite end of a spectrum of wellness. While curing works on the symptoms and their immediate physical causes, healing works on the root-cause of a problem or physical condition. Reiki healing entails emotional, spiritual and mental unblocking and rebalancing. Dissolving the root-cause of the problem usually also releases the physical problem and its symptoms.
8. You Need to Believe in Reiki for It to Work. Based on Placebo Principles, It Is A Self-fulfilling Prophesy.
Well, I have good news for non-believers: you don’t actually need to believe in Reiki for it to work for you. All you need is to be open to healing, and to the possibility that it might work. In addition, I ask particularly my clients with racy minds during treatment to give themselves the mantra: “I’m open and receptive to good” or similar.
9. Healing is Lineair: You’re Unwell — You’re 1/2 Fixed — You’re Done.
It does not work like this. I would say that healing is a spiral process taking huge re-iterative loops up. Every loop we heal from something, making us lighter and our light shine brighter. Therefore, every loop we go a bit (or a lot) higher on the spiral. Then, we take our next loop, where we will work on something else. As we are now higher up in the spiral, we have and operate from a different and more spiritually more evolved viewpoint.
10. People in the healing profession never get sick.
Oh, I wish… and then again, I don’t. I don’t want to rob anyone of their process of healing and of the insights they obtain along the way.
Clear and square: Reiki practitioners and masters are mere mortals. We are not above the human condition of spiritual evolution. I hope that many have landed at an advanced spiritual developmental level, but that’s not even so. It is however my observation that people in the healing professions do tend to use their healing tools for self health maintenance. Furthermore, it is a group of people that regularly exchanges alternative health therapy with each other.