In Defence of Reiki

When my article on Reiki ('Reiki Healing' 21/9/98) appeared in Psychic News last year, I was somewhat bewildered by the response that it received. On the one hand there were those that thought it hit exactly the right note - one long time reader even suggested to me that it was the best thing that Psychic News had ever printed - and then there were the detractors.

It's not that I mind at all when someone voices an opinion contrary to my own, but I do tend to take umbrage when confronted with smugness and outright hostility. There seems to be an awful lot of it targeted at Reiki these days. Let's be clear about one thing, like it or not, Reiki is here to stay.

Roy Stemman in his excellent book 'Healers and Healing' touched very briefly on Reiki, but was more or less dismissive of it and claimed that "I have as yet seen no evidence that a person who becomes a Reiki Master displays special healing powers he or she did not have before parting with their money for the Reiki training...".

This is a very common misconception amongst people from other spiritual healing backgrounds and sadly, is often used as an arrogant defence of their own tradition which they feel is threatened by the explosive growth of Reiki.

The truth of the matter is that the majority of people now involved in Reiki and as a consequence of their introduction to Reiki, other forms of healing, would never have gotten into this field had it not been for Reiki. To say that they already had this ability is errant nonsense. Yes we all have an innate healing ability to some degree or another but in most of the population this is fairly latent and predominantly unexplored. What Reiki does in every case I have ever come across, is to magnify this potential ability enormously. This can only be a good thing.

So why all the hostility towards Reiki? One Psychic News letter writer, in a display of cultural prejudice found it inexplicable that Reiki uses sacred symbols, and promptly dismissed this practice as irrelevant.

Clearly there was little respect here for the fact that Reiki is derived in part from Tibetan Buddhist healing practices, in which the use of sacred symbols, yantras and mantras is very dominant. It is just a part of the 'baggage' if you will, that Reiki has carried over from its origins.

Other people have seen little value in what is seen as a practice of creating 'instant healers'. Admittedly, in comparison with other healing forms the training in Reiki is quite short, but where does it state that length of training equates with quality of training? This is another example of the prejudice that is becoming rife amongst some healing groups and individuals and reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of the teaching/learning process.

Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of criticism that can justifiably be levelled at Reiki - or rather some so called practitioners of Reiki. Because of Reiki's meteoric success and thus potential commercial exploitation, some Reiki Masters really have left the door wide open to criticism.

I know of one lady who was suffering from an ankle injury who did all three levels of Reiki training in the space of one day (and paid a good sum for it too). She then expressed annoyance and bewilderment that at the end of the day she still had a problem with her ankle. We may smile at this type of blindingly unrealistic expectation but this is sadly a reflection of some of the incredibly poor training that is now going on in the world of Reiki.

Reiki has, sadly, become Big Business. It's now very common to see some Reiki Masters, not only offering training at exotic locations such as at Stonehenge, on Glastonbury Tor, in the Himalayas, in the Great Pyramids of Egypt ad infinitum as if the location was somehow significant to the process of training rather than just a bolt-on holiday, but also to be advertising courses in 'Energy Mastery'.

These 'Energy Mastery' courses are made up of training sessions that cover a plethora of deviant, variant and plain invented Reiki systems that as far as I can work out have no historical origins at all, and appeal largely to those who have more money than they do powers of discernment.

how one of these advertisements to a true 'Energy Master', such as an advanced T'ai Chi or Qi Gong practitioner in China and they will more than likely simply laugh at the arrogance and egoism of it all (they most likely wouldn't have the unbridled audacity to describe themselves in this way at all).

So there is much to be concerned about in the world of Reiki and I'm sure that I share this concern with many others. There are however many Reiki Masters that believe that their role is not only as disseminators of a long and valuable tradition of healing, but also as protectors. Working with integrity, these Masters have much to offer the world of spiritual healing: enriching it, and shedding new light on a culturally different approach to an ancient and universal discipline.