Reiju ("giving Spirit") is a Reiki "empowerment" procedure that was taught by Mikao Usui to some of his students. It is also given to students at each meeting of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai (Society) in Tokyo. Reiju evolved (or devolved!) into the modern Reiki "Attunement" -- via Dr. Hayashi (who used a procedure called Jikiden) and Hawayo Takata. For more about this, please see http://reiju.johreiki.net/reiju.php.
Though the energy goes where it is most needed, we don't know how much will be needed for any particular condition. For instance, someone's liver may take 100 hours of Reiki to heal itself. So, unless they get the whole amount in a fairly short time -- and, if they get only an hour or 2 of Reiki once in a while, it may take a lot more than 100 hours, because the liver will be taking in more toxins all the while -- if the hands are placed only in one position, then the Reiki will go from there to the liver, and the rest of the body will be neglected.... By giving a full-body treatment, even if all the Reiki ends up at the liver, it has to pass through the rest of the entire body to get there!! : ^ ) So, the whole body gets the benefit of it (and, presumably, a certain amount of the Reiki gets absorbed in other places, never reaching the liver, which means, again, that the liver will take longer to heal -- but it seems better, to me, to treat the whole body instead of just one part; that neglecting all the rest might create even bigger problems)....
Many times, when giving Reiki to myself, I get lazy and focus only on one or 2 areas -- but I almost always feel more benefit when I do a full-body treatment. My favorite, full-body self-treatment (because it's so simple!) is what I call You Are The Universe! It's included in my book Reiki, The True Story (also, you can email me via the link at the bottom of this page and ask me to send You Are The Universe! as a separate document)....
My understanding is that any condition of disease is created by our faulty human thoughts. In God's world, there is no disease! In the Source, in the Real Self -- no disease! No concept, even, of such a thing! And, what Reiki does is to suspend our world of faulty human thinking, and to bring in the God-energy, the Source-energy, the Shinki ... in other words, to re-establish Reality, which brings about what we call "healing."
It doesn't matter, therefore, what kind of disease anyone has. In reality, there is only ONE disease, ever: losing our alignment with Source! We do this by becoming careless, tired, not paying close enough attention. Not remembering who we really are. We get away from the wavelength of Reality ... and then we need something (Reiki is just one such thing) to bring us back to it.
So, I don't believe that Reiki will ever "feed" any sort of disease. It dissolves disease, with the light of Reality....
On the subject of viruses and bacteria generally: It's worth emphasizing that they do NOT cause disease. We all know the story of Louis Pasteur and his Germ Theory — which has been endlessly trumpeted by mainstream Science and Medicine. It's the very bedrock of the mega-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, and every schoolchild is religiously indoctrinated with it. But, parts of the story always seem to be missing from the mainstream version:
Two of Pasteur's peers — Antoine Béchamp and Claude Bernard — repudiated his assertion that germs were the cause of disease. Bernard made the famous statement "The terrain is everything; the germ is nothing" — in other words, germs do not harm a healthy body — and, to demonstrate, he drank a glass of water teeming with cholera and suffered no harm. Béchamp (whose scientific credentials dwarfed Pasteur's) agreed with Bernard. And Pasteur himself, on his deathbed, admitted that Bernard had been right ... though this part of the story is what gets scrubbed from the history books and medical schools. Pasteur had instructed his family never to release his laboratory notes; however, they were released, almost a century after his death, and they showed that some of his experiments did not even demonstrate what he had claimed at the time.
[ » For more on this topic, you might like this article about Pasteur, and/or this one, The Lost History of Medicine, and/or this one, Béchamp & Pasteur – Clash & Consequence. ]
Besides Bernard and Pasteur, at least one other historical personage arrived, independently, at the same realization. Decades later, in Japan, Mokichi Okada (founder of Johrei) reached the same understanding by direct intuition. Okada said that germs do not cause disease, they are the result of disease, and also part of the healing process; they eat the toxins that have in fact brought about the disease. This kills the germs, and both germs and toxins are then excreted from the body. These excretions are what we recognize as symptoms of illness -- though we can say, more accurately, they are symptoms of healing!
A great, thought-provoking question! And, I think we have to start with an even more fundamental question: What is Reiki in the first place? According to Tatsumi (one of Dave King's
teachers, who learned from Dr. Hayashi), what Usui meant by "Usui Reiki Ryoho" was "Usui system for connecting with your ancestral self." And, by the traditional Japanese understanding of the word "reiki" itself, reiki is the highest of 7 energies in the body, the one that connects the physical body to Shinki, God-energy.... It seems to me, both of these definitions are getting at the same thing ... and the simplest, most literal examination of the word "reiki" confirms
this. It is, most simply, the bringing together (unification) of Rei (Universal Spirit) and ki (the individual expression of that Spirit, as one's personal energy)!
Another question: Is everyone's Reiki the same? I don't think so. I think Reiki is each person's "highest energy," the energy that acts as a bridge to Shinki -- but it seems reasonable that each person's Reiki is a little different, just like
fingerprints, for example. The important thing is that it connects us to Shinki! And, of course, we are eternally connected to Shinki. The result of the bringing together of Rei and ki is, in a word, Self-realization. It's the process of becoming aware of our Oneness with Universal Spirit. We have always had the connection, the Oneness, with Universal Spirit -- all Reiki is giving us is the AWARENESS of that!
So, a Reiki initiation (IMO) does not give us an "energy" we didn't have before, it just activates our awareness of what we already had....
Some people seem to believe that what is given in a Reiki initiation is a particular frequency of energy, and that only a very precise series of movements and/or thoughts will convey the single, correct, vibratory frequency to the initiate. They talk about the importance of giving an initiation exactly as Takata did, for example. What about the fact that her way of doing it was a modification of Hayashi's way; and that Hayashi's way was quite different than Usui's way (Reiju)? And, as many of us have discovered, there comes a time when Reiki initiation can be given with no procedure at all, just by intent.
Takata herself is said to have given some initiations only by intent -- and we know that her students ended up using various initiation procedures, with various mutations of the Reiki symbols (merely because she did not permit them to keep written copies of the symbols, and so their memories of them changed over time)!
I totally agree that some initiations are much more effective than others! In fact, I've encountered some "Reiki Masters" who said straight-out that they didn't know what they were doing; and when they gave me "Reiki" I didn't feel anything. These happened to be people who had become "Reiki Masters" in a very short period of time -- and I feel that was a crucial element in the weakness of their Reiki.
I think, our ability to empower others with Reiki depends on just how well we have achieved the unification/resonance of Universal and personal energy in ourselves (in other words, Usui's "method to achieve personal perfection"). Giving a Reiki initiation is a matter of bringing about that state of Oneness in ourselves ... and realizing that Oneness with the initiate. I think the analogy of Reiki initiation as a chemical or mathematical formula -- or as a magical formula, as many people see it -- is not a fitting one, and that it sends us in a wrong direction.
I think the confusion comes from people putting too much importance on techniques. Many Reiki people act as if Reiki techniques are magic spells, in fact! To me, it all comes down to "achieving the personal perfection" of uniting our personal ki with the Universal Rei ... achieving that Oneness, Self-realization. That is what heals people and empowers people ... and the techniques are mostly just "training wheels" or even "stage props," to give us confidence.
So, just remember, the Oneness with Source is what you're really learning and practicing. Use any technique only if it feels "right" and helpful to you! The goal is to embody the Oneness, and your intuition will probably give you the very best techniques for you; and they will almost surely change over time.
