What is Happening to Reiki?

copyright © 2011 Don Beckett

-//- thanks to Mihai Albu for a Romanian translation of this article -//-

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A LOT of people have been asking this question privately for at least a few years. The answer is not one that most of us are eager to acknowledge. We tend to brush it aside and go on with our own work. But suddenly I feel we need to acknowledge it, for the sake of people who are just beginning to learn about Reiki. We need to let them know what Reiki is and what it isn't — because many of them are being fooled, and led in harmful directions.

In many places and with many people, Reiki is getting a bad reputation. I know some Reiki teachers who have stopped teaching Reiki, precisely because they don't want to be associated with the pseudo-Reiki that is becoming more and more prevalent. One of my friends — who for years taught Reiki to Buddhist lamas in Nepal — stopped having anything to do with Reiki because she had heard stories of several "Reiki Masters" becoming demonically possessed and going crazy!

I assured her that, if those stories were true, it was not because the people were doing Reiki, it was because they were doing something that was definitely not Reiki. I offered her a Reiki session ... and, afterward, she said: "I had forgotten how good and clean this energy is!" The energy itself had shown her immediately that there could be nothing demonic or crazy-making about it!

And yet, there are indeed crazy and "demonic" (for lack of a better word) things going on in the world of pseudo-Reiki. Many people who believe they are doing Reiki are really doing much more of some kind of ritual magic. Somehow the simplicity and purity of Mikao Usui's "method for achieving personal perfection" — his method for "connecting with the ancestral Self" (and surrendering the personal will to the will of Self or Source) — have been cluttered with all sorts of unnecessary junk, at best, and warped into something completely unrecognizable, at worst.

One thing I've always loved about Reiki is the freedom to understand and teach it in my own way. And I've been willing to allow everyone else the same freedom, of course. I realize that Life is a perfectly self-balancing, self-regulating phenomenon; that we all get what we need, when we need it. (As the Beatles put it, so eloquently, 40+ years ago: There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be / It's easy!) For instance, teachers who charge a lot of money — they attract precisely the people who need to be charged a lot of money in order to believe something is valuable. Teachers who teach 49 different systems of Reiki (and each system having perhaps 49 different symbols) — they attract precisely the people who yearn for such complexity and such boatloads of information. And the rest of us, who like to keep things as simple as we can — we attract the students who like simplicity!

I feel tremendously fortunate to have started learning Reiki 20 years ago, when there were only a couple flavors of it available. If I were just now encountering Reiki for the first time, I would be overwhelmed by the number of Reiki systems and the oceans of Reiki information (and misinformation) swirling around. Therefore, with all due respect for the countless entities that are presented as Reiki nowadays, this article is intended to give aspiring Reiki students the simple basics of what Reiki is and what Reiki is not.

Reiki is:
a method of Self-realization (spiritual awakening), founded by Mikao Usui in the early 1900s. The secondary effect of it is healing, on all levels: spiritual, emotional, mental, physical. The key ingredient, which gives this method its unique identity, is the awareness and use of a discernible, definable energy called Reiki — which is the subtlest, highest-vibrational energy in the physical dimension. In other words, the first physical manifestation of pure Source (and Reiki connects us to pure Source-energy, called Shinki).

Reiki is:
a method of not-doing. We "do" Reiki by giving our attention to the energy, making no personal effort, and surrendering our personal will to the Source of All That Is. We do not try to manipulate or control the outcome; we trust that the Source of All That Is (which created us and everything else) is better informed and wiser than our personal self.

Reiki is NOT:
a method for imposing our personal will on anything or anyone. It's not a magic potion for acquiring a new job, a new house, a new spouse, or an "A" in school. We can apply Reiki to any of those things — but only by surrendering our personal will and accepting the natural outcome. This goes for using Reiki as a "healing treatment" also; we don't diagnose conditions, and we don't try to "fix" anything. Removing a symptom is not always the best thing, and we must admit that we don't always know what's best. Therefore, we don't try to control the result of the Reiki application.

THIS IS EXACTLY where the distinction between Reiki and pseudo-Reiki comes in. Mikao Usui created a very simple system, which relied on alignment with the divine order of Life — not on developing or imposing one's personal will. But, since then, many people have taken "Reiki" farther and farther into the territory of personal will and manipulation. Truly hundreds of "Reiki" systems have now been invented. About all that's missing is Baba-Ghanouj Reiki ... or French-Fries-And-A-Coke Reiki. And, what differentiates any of these from the others?

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