Are you eating a really healthy diet, or snatching fast food on the run to your next meeting? Are your major relationships—with partners, children, siblings, parents and close friends—healthy and loving or stressful and tense? Are you happy with whatever work you do, whether that’s in external employment or in the home, or do you really long to do something else? Do you have time to indulge in hobbies and interests that add to your life, or are you always working? Have you achieved some of your dreams and goals and expect to achieve even more, or have you given up the unequal struggle and settled for whatever you can get? Do you think life is wonderful, fun and a joy, or do you find it all too much of an effort?
Of course, in today’s busy lives, finding time for yourself can be a challenge, but unless you are living exactly the way you want to live, as healthily as possible, you need to be willing to make some changes in your life—and giving yourself some time and space for the things you need could be the first of these changes. It makes sense to take a good look at your life to see if it is helping or hindering you in achieving optimum holistic health.
Using Reiki for self-healing involves taking responsibility for your own health and well-being. The word responsibility really means “being able to respond.” In this case it means responding to your body’s messages, learning from them and moving forward with a better understanding of what your body needs—and what you, as a whole, need in your life. It also means treating your body and your whole self with love and respect. Giving yourself a Reiki self-treatment can be a very important part of being loving to yourself.
Essentially, all healing is self-healing because whatever interventions take place, whether conventional medical methods or complementary therapies, it is the body’s own repair and replication capabilities that carry out the healing. Reiki can be tremendously valuable in helping you to achieve optimum health, but it is not a cure-all. It will help to alleviate symptoms and relieve pain and discomfort, but it still needs a change of consciousness, a willingness on the part of the person receiving the Reiki to allow changes in lifestyle, in attitude and in ways of being, so that the healing can be completed and fully integrated into that person’s life. Even if you use Reiki on yourself every day but continue with any harmful habits or behaviours that are taking a toll on your physical, mental or emotional well-being, whatever you are doing that is causing you harm will continue to harm you.
Initially you may well see a considerable improvement in your health, because Reiki is wonderful, and it can potentially do the most miraculous and amazing things. But Reiki is not an impenetrable shield and it does not make you invincible! It involves you in your own healing, encouraging you to take responsibility for your own wholeness and health. Being able to use Reiki on yourself for self-healing is one of the major advantages—and the main emphasis—of Reiki First Level.
As you start bringing Reiki into yourself regularly it begins the process of dislodging blockages and obstacles within your energetic system, slowly and systematically affecting deeper and deeper layers of blocked and stagnant energy caused by suppressed or buried negative and damaging thoughts, emotions, attitudes and beliefs. When these blocks are dislodged and removed they come to the surface for attention. This often means that memories of past events suddenly come into your mind, or you start to have very vivid dreams.
Occasionally you may even find that previous situations recur, so you might begin to feel that all those old problems you thought you had sorted out long ago have come back to plague you. But if they do, it is only to make you face up to them, and when you do they will soon disappear. This is a necessary part of the process of letting go, and the memories, dreams or situations have surfaced to give you an opportunity to heal them and learn from them.
Naturally this is an on-going process, as you cannot rid yourself of years of blocked or stagnant energy overnight. But as the process continues, over weeks, months and even years, you will gradually find that you feel better than you have ever felt before—lighter, more vital and energetic, less concerned about other people’s opinions, more in touch with your own feelings and happier with yourself and your life.
Reiki does not need any complicated rituals before it will start to flow. All it takes is your intention to use it, which can be accompanied by a simple invocation such as “Let Reiki flow now for the highest and greatest good.” Thoughts are an energy form and can be very powerful, especially with the force of intention behind them.
Actually, Reiki will begin to flow from the moment you first think of using it, so as you place your hands on whatever needs healing, it is already flowing. However, where and how Reiki flows is not up to you—you are merely a channel for this healing energy—because it is Divinely guided, so it goes where it is needed, not necessarily where the person using it, or the person receiving it, wants it. Having the intention that it should flow for the highest and greatest good therefore helps to get rid of the ego that might otherwise be involved.
You therefore need to rid yourself of expectations as to outcome—which can be very hard, I know, because most of us in the Reiki community have a deep desire to help people. But please realize that by channelling Reiki you are helping people, even if that help does not turn out exactly the way you hoped it would.
A Reiki initiation is a fresh start in life, and your first priority really needs to be self-healing, before you begin to use Reiki on other people, because when your own energies have been cleared you will be in a better position to help others. Remember the adage “physician, heal thyself?” Well, this is the major focus of Reiki at the First level, and that means putting yourself first. It is about giving yourself the time to focus on your life, your thoughts, your emotions and your body; giving yourself time to listen to your body’s messages and that inner voice that tells you when something feels “right”.
For example, you might truly wish, with the best of intentions, to heal a friend’s illness, but if it is for your friend’s highest and greatest good for the physical symptoms to remain while they face up to the causative issues, then the Reiki will go to the causative levels—mental, emotional or spiritual. It may also bring some temporary relief of symptoms, but you can never guarantee what Reiki will do, because it is never under your control.
Basically, the only person who has the power to change your life is you.