Reiki Shamanism

Reiki (ray-kee) translates to mean universal life force energy. It is the subtle spiritual energy permeating all aspects of creation. It is the elixir of life bringing all things into unity, harmony, and wholeness. Reiki healing is as ancient as humanity and as universal as the quest for understanding. It is the original shaman’s fire. It is also as simple and natural as a mother coddling her child and as a sprout-ling being coaxed toward the Sun. Reiki predates religion but can be found in the workings of all the great healers and teachers. In fact Reiki supplants the need and exposes the weakness of organized religion by awakening the divine connection within the individual and accentuating the unity and interdependence of all life.

Reiki is shamanic in origin. Shamanism, which means “seeing that which was unseen”, is the most ancient science of healing and understanding. The shaman employs whatever techniques she knows, trance, sacred plants, fasting, drumming, and chanting, rattling. etc., in order to connect with sublime energy in creation for the healing of the community. The shaman seeks knowledge and healing by moving energy, through herself and the afflicted. She first is drawn to the energy, the energy teaches and transforms her, and then she works with the energy to transform and heal others. The path of the modern Reiki practitioner is the same.

The traditional system of Usui Reiki is named after its founder Mikao Usui of Japan (8/15/1862 – 3/9/1926). Like the shamans of all ages have done, Mikao Usui developed a system of passing on his connection with energy to his students. He developed his own connection to Reiki in the shamanic way of the vision quest. He went to a high and sacred place where he fasted for 21 days, having brought along 21 stones to count the days. He returned from his quest attuned to the healing power of Reiki. From that time on he continued to heal and work with the energy establishing his Reiki system. With the process of attunement Reiki then began to be passed on. The Reiki system spread to Hawaii from Japan and then on to the continental United States in the late 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century Reiki is now a world wide phenomenon.

Reiki is a relationship and initiation into higher consciousness that can begin long before our first attunement. I became aware of higher energies that were working with me and healing me on a personal level at least fifteen years before I received my first Reiki attunement. This healing occurred at different times and in different ways on several levels of my being: dense material/physical, emotional, mental and spiritual/soul levels. My relationship with healing energy prior to my attunement and subsequent Reiki practice included visions and experiences that transferred light and energy, healing dreams, the tangible movement of energy through my body (especially my hands), intense feeling of well being and “oneness”, and the healing of gastritis, stress, anxiety, and depression.

Having a previous connection to healing energy and other energetic modalities in no way devalues the system of Reiki as it has come to be taught or the process of attunement. I only wish to share that Reiki is not the sole domain of Reiki practitioners; by definition Reiki means universal life force energy. My purpose is to not only teach and pass on the system of Reiki. I also seek to explain my understanding of Reiki in the broader perspective of human evolution at this critical time in history. I understand this as the path of the Reiki Shaman.

I have found that Reiki Shamanism is the beginning of a extremely rewarding journey at this crucial period in our collective experience. What does this mean? For some, just a broadening of their own enlightening journey, for others an opportunity of transformation to begin a new relationship with themselves, humanity, and the Earth, as well as with subtler energies, higher dimensions and the guides that inhabit them.

post attunement journeying synopsis

The latest advances in physics are dissolving the materialist intellectually boundaries of our perceptions of reality and our cultural cocoon. Life it turns out is a pulsation, a rhythm, starlight, fields of potentiality. We no longer have to be bound. Its not only that the scientist is seeing what the shaman saw 10,000 years ago. The prehistoric Shaman and the modern scientist have folded time/space, dissolved the illusion and are peering through the same eye simultaneously. Pulsing and free they send out ripples of healing revelation through the collective human endeavor.

Electrify this spaceship you inhabit and ascend up into the finer layers of your own being and know that we are ONE. Here I am, smiling right back at you. We, in our most natural state of unity and uncreated potential, created this game, strung these lights and descended into matter. What's the matter anyway? Its just illusion, unless you sense the pulsation, unless you see me in the mirror. Every moment is a new creation from the pulsation. Do you feel the Shaman looking out through your eyes?

I sat in the dark with my eyes closed and watched rainbows flow through me. I stood beside my mother as she prepared to give birth to me. I put my hands on her stomach and loved me. I watched my twin children float across an evening sky as they waited to enter our illusion. Their souls adorned in spheres of golden light, they came to awaken me. I traveled backwards through this sleepy illusion gathering the weak, broken, and hurt pieces of myself. I held them in a tender embrace and gave thanks for all that has been. I transformed into a clear channel of healing energy, then I walked into the future and gentle dissolved the chrysalis of a million butterflies. What did you do tonight? These things and more, because you went with me.

the Papyrus of Ani

from Awakening Osiris; A New Translation of

the Egyptian Book of the Dead by Normandi Ellis

Becoming the Lotus

As if I'd slept a thousand years underwater I wake into a new season. I am the blue lotus rising. I am the cup of dreams and memory opening--I, the thousand-petaled flower. At dawn the sun rises naked and new as a babe; I open myself and am entered by light. This is the joy, the slow awakening into fire as one by one the petals open, as the fingers that held tight the secret unfurl. I let go of the past and release the fragrance of flowers.

I open and light descends, fills me and passes through, each thin blue petal reflected perfectly in clear water. I am that lotus filled with light reflected in the world. I float content within myself, one flower with a thousand petals, one life lived a thousand years without haste, one universe sparking a thousand stars, one god alive in a thousand people.

If you stood on a summer's morning on the bank under a brilliant sky, you would see the thousand petals and say that together they make the lotus. But if you lived in its heart, invisible from without, you might see how the ecstasy at its fragrant core gives rise to its thousand petals. What is beautiful is always that which is itself in essence, a certainty of being. I marvel at myself and the things of earth.

I float among the days in peace, content. Not part of the world, the world is all the parts of me. I open toward the light and lift myself to the gods on the perfume of prayer. I ask for nothing beyond myself. I own everything I need. I am content in the company of god, a prayer that contains its own answer. I am the lotus. As if from a dream, I wake up laughing.