Reiki to facilitate spiritual emergence: a personal journey.

0. Abstract:
Reiki is a healing energy technique of uncertain origin. It may not be applicable to occupational therapy, but the process of learning reiki may be of use to occupational therapists for facilitating spiritual emergence and personal development. This blog entry describes my personal journey as a physiotherapist learning reiki, and how the experience led me to re-train as an occupational therapist. The benefits I experienced included increased empathy and interpersonal skills, more ethical living, a deeper respect for occupational therapy, improved physical and mental health, a feeling of connection to the universe and restored faith in God.

1. What is reiki?
Reiki is a technique for channelling energy from the universe into a person, object or event through placement of the hands. Some believe it was developed in the early 1900s[1]. Others believe that it was revealed from meditation on ancient Sanskrit sutras[2]. A woman named Hawayo Takata is credited with introducing reiki to the West[2]. According to her, reiki was invented by a Christian boys’ school headmaster named Usui Mikao[3], but according to cynics this story may have been contrived to facilitate the marketing of reiki to Christian people in the West[2]. Others believe that Usui was a Tendai Mikkyo Buddhist, influenced by Shintoism and Shugendo[4]. Unfortunately until recent times reiki teachings were conveyed only by word of mouth. It is therefore likely that the techniques and story have been modified several times by people to suit their own needs and religious or political interests. It may therefore not be possible to determine where reiki actually came from.

2. Before I experienced reiki:
As a junior physiotherapist I was scientifically minded to the point of being sceptical about many physiotherapy modalities. I had seen enough inequity and injustice to turn me to atheism. I worked weekends for Britain’s nuclear, biological, chemical regiment, to prove my British identity and express aggression in a socially acceptable way. I consumed tubs of ice cream or family-sized cheesecakes on a daily basis and accompanied colleagues to the pub across the road every day after work to relax myself with stout. A couple of male colleagues and myself used to have regular letching competitions during which we would each try to find the most attractive woman to look at. Unbeknown to me, a chance meeting was about to start a chain of events that would change all of this.

3. My initial experience of reiki:
A woman I met socially told me about reiki and offered me a demonstration. She moved her hands over me without touching me, and as she did so I felt waves of energy pulsating through my body. To my amazement, she told me things she intuitively knew about my military injuries. I thought this would be a great skill to have as a physiotherapist, so I asked for her teacher’s contact details and booked myself onto the first available lesson.

4. The first attunement:
The first lesson took just one day. The reiki teacher spoke of angels and how reiki would change our lives. I thought she was away with the fairies. She told the students that reiki was taught through a series of attunements, each of which would be followed by a detoxification period during which we could feel ill as our bodies became accustomed to a higher energy flow. After a brief ritual she blew into my hands. From that moment my palms were tingling and warm for no apparent rational reason. We spent the rest of the day practising reiki on each other and most of the students were able to find each other’s illnesses and injuries by feeling the energy alone.

On returning to work, I wondered whether I had imagined the whole thing, but as soon as I walked onto a ward my palms started tingling. Practising on patients was out of the question, but one of the senior physiotherapists had a migraine and allowed me to try reiki on her. She said it worked, but I found it very difficult to believe. Similar incidents would soon occur with several other clinicians, but I remained unconvinced. Events did not fit with my understanding of science and I wondered if my colleagues were teasing me when they said the reiki worked. At the pub after work my hands felt repelled by an unseen force around a pint of stout and a strong sense of intuition told me not to put chocolate cake in my mouth.

5. The detoxification:
Over the next month I re-experienced childhood knee pains, digestive problems, asthma and had a terrible cold. According to the reiki teacher these things were significant messages about problems with my life. This theory was just another aspect of reiki that I was not prepared to believe. With time however I came to accept that my childhood abdominal problems were due to a lack of power and social status. My asthma and heartburn were due to inhibition of my love, and my perpetual colds were due to poor awareness of my own intuition[5]. I would come to understand this theory as somatic metaphor. It brought me awareness of the huge untapped potential for occupational therapy. I just needed scientific evidence to triangulate the belief. I was still unsure whether reiki was real or just a figment of my imagination.

6. Learning to use reiki:
I learned to use reiki through experience. The results did not cease to amaze me. Feeling people’s energy provided me with indications of what their psychosocial problems were according to the theory of somatic metaphor. Lifestyle change proved to be far more effective for resolving chronic energy problems than the reiki treatment itself.

7. Progressive attunements:
I went to my second attunement with an occupational therapy manager I knew. The attunement was to an energy called seichem. We were taught a psychic surgery technique that involved liaison with celestial beings. I did not believe in such things, but went through the motions and was shocked to feel an unseen being placing unseen objects in my hand. Several experiences during the surgery did not fit with my understanding of science and I thought I was imagining them until the occupational therapy manager described the exact same events in a way that she could not have known that I had experienced them. My rational mind searched for explanations. Had we been drugged or hypnotised? Was this some form of mass hysteria? As I progressed through four other attunements over the next nine months my paranormal experiences became progressively more vivid. After my final attunement I went on to teach several doctors and a student nurse. Conducting attunements myself was an overwhelming experience. I perceived brilliant light radiating out from inside my body and saw angelic beings for the first time.

8. Progressive breakdown of my reality:
I became aware of sensations that other beings were around me at various times during the day. At first I could not see them but could feel their presence. I became sensitive to other people’s feelings to the extent that my emotional state varied to match that of people in my proximity. Over time I would learn to distinguish between other people’s emotions and my own. I remember going to my pigeonhole at work one morning and wondering whether I had developed schizophrenia. I was experiencing what Collins[6] recently described as spiritual emergency. As my training progressed, my psychosocial problems manifested metaphorically as visible and tangible demons. My intuition told me the meaning of each demon, and what I had to change about my life to leave it behind. The natures and significance of each demon were personal and will therefore not be described in this blog. For my masters’ attunements I was taught how to teach reiki and attune other people. During this lesson I discovered that reiki teachers (from the Tera-Mai lineage) do not actually attune their students, but call on celestial beings that do it. I was unable to believe in such beings until I started teaching reiki myself, and experienced direct contact with them. At this point, the logic I had based my atheism on no longer seemed valid.

9. Ethical problems:
A senior occupational therapist once told me that Jesus is the only source of spiritual healing and therefore reiki must be a trick of Satan. During a lunchtime discussion one day, fellow physiotherapists ridiculed the concept of healing energy and expressed that the idea of occupational choices profoundly influencing health was ludicrous. I was not aware of any published data to support evidence-based practice. The Royal College of Nursing once approved a reiki course for the continuing professional development of nurses, but subsequently withdrew their approval due to their interpretation of a House of Lords report on complimentary therapies[7]. For these reasons, I have never been able to use reiki with National Health Service patients. Some time later, I was presented with two subjects that seemed to have serious energy problems. One had an energy imbalance down one entire side of his body and the other seemed completely deplete of energy. Neither had any awareness of having health problems. I therefore said that there was no evidence that what I was feeling meant anything and it should not be a cause for alarm. After this event I stopped practising reiki because I thought it could worry people unnecessarily. Within a year I was shocked to find that the first subject had a hemiplegic stroke and the second had died of cancer. Diagnosis had been made too late for life-saving treatment. I had a few sleepless nights after receiving this news, before deciding not to start practising reiki again, except for with spiritual aspirants that requested it specifically to facilitate spiritual emergence. I believe that great care should be taken when selecting reiki students, to ensure that they have the emotional resilience to endure spiritual emergencies without developing mental health problems.

10. How reiki changed me:
Reiki inspired several changes in my life. Much to the bemusement of my friends, I gave up alcohol and letching at women. Specific decision-making is often informed by reiki. A memorable example of this was an attractive woman flirting with me and kissing me after a formal army dinner. I felt a very strong force pushing me away from her as though an invisible person had put his palm on the side of my head and was extending his arm. At the time I thought her guardian angel was protecting her from my amorous intentions. I therefore concluded my behaviour was immoral and I left her alone. Later that night I noticed her tendency for attention-seeking and somebody that knew her well told me she was pregnant. Perhaps I was the one that was being protected. On a wider scale, I was unsure of the ethics of the invasion of Afghanistan, but previously ignored this because I enjoyed soldiering so much. As a manifest demon, this dilemma was impossible to ignore, so I transferred to the Medical Corps to ensure that I would never be ordered to kill. My new sensitivity also convinced me to leave unethical jobs in Council Housing and National Health Service management. My experiential knowledge of somatic metaphor convinced me of the importance of occupational therapy[8]. If demons could be real I reasoned that God could too. This inspired me to read the Bible, Koran and various other religious texts that have restored my faith in God and helped me built rapports with patients of each book’s respective faith. The fact that lifestyle change is more effective for restoring energy balance than reiki itself is an indication to me that occupational therapy has the potential to make reiki obsolete. Reiki inspired me to analyse evidence of occupational influences on health[9, 10] and ultimately re-train to be an occupational therapist.

11. Possible implications:
The paranormal experiences resulting from reiki led me to wonder about the functions of hallucinations and whether or not these are always pathological. Perhaps people should only be considered ill if their hallucinations adversely affect their happiness or social functioning. Shamanism is common to several cultures, and though Western science currently tells us to disregard it, there may be a hidden science underlying it. Some occupational therapists have argued that “there is still a need to understand better the impact that spirituality has on health and wellbeing”[11]. Perhaps reiki training is a suitable method for occupational therapists to gain experiential knowledge of this. In some cases, responding to or interacting with hallucinations might change an individual’s life for the better, while ignoring them or medically suppressing them could prove detrimental. An example of this has been documented in the British Medical Journal. A woman was alerted to her brain tumour by a voice telling her a) that she had one, and b) which hospital in her locality had a suitable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit. Responding to the voice she managed to convince her general practitioner that she needed a MRI scan, and was therefore successfully diagnosed and treated[12]. If medical treatment had been focused on suppressing this lady’s auditory hallucinations, the brain tumour would not have been diagnosed as early.

12. Summary:
Modern reiki is a healing energy technique of uncertain origin. I do not believe it is a suitable modality for occupational therapy. It has however been offered by non-occupational therapy staff in National Health Service Hospitals[13] and could be a great personal development tool for occupational therapists that wish to accelerate their own spiritual emergence, or would like to experience a different perspective on how occupation can influence health. The evidence for this is intra-personal. This blog entry only briefly touches on my experiences of reiki, and I only trained with one of many reiki lineages. Further reading is therefore recommended. As scientists I expect graduate occupational therapists to have a healthy cynicism about reiki. I suggest that anybody that doubts reiki or the existence of a spiritual plane should take the six reiki and seichem attunements up to masters’ level to inform their judgment before making up their minds.

13. Recommended reading:
Brown F. (1992) Living Reiki: Takata’s teachings. Mendocino: Liferhythm
Paul N.L. (2005) Reiki for Dummies. Hoboken: Wiley
Stiene B., Stiene F. (2005) The Japanese Art of Reiki. Ropley: O Books

14. References:
1. Stevenson M. (2003) Brief introduction to Reiki. British Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation 10(1):34
2. Shealy C.N. (1999) The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of Alternative Healing Therapies. Shaftesbury: Element Books
3. Brown F. (1992) Living Reiki: Takata’s teachings. Mendocino: Liferhythm
4. Stiene B., Stiene F. (2005) The Japanese Art of Reiki. Ropley: O Books
5. Mailoo V., Wickham J., Bannigan K. (2006) OT and the tantric frame of reference. Therapy Weekly 33(3): 8-10
6. Collins M. (2007) Spiritual emergency and occupational identity: a transpersonal perspective. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 70(12):504-512
7. Manson C. (2003) A brief introduction to Reiki. British Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation 9(9):368
8. Venth (2007) Occupational Therapy First - It is time for our profession to lead; not follow. Available at: http://www.metaot.com/blogs/%5Buser%5D-6 Accessed on 24.3.2008
9. Mailoo V.J., Williams C.J. (2004) Psychoneuroimmunology: a theoretical basis for occupational therapy in oncology? International Journal of Therapy & Rehabilitation 11(1):7-12.
10. Mailoo V.J. (2006) Psychoneuroimmunology and occupational therapy for inflammatory disorders. International Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation 13(11):503-510
11. College of Occupational Therapists Ethics Committee (2001) Addressing spiritual needs. British Journal of Occupational Therapy 64(2):107
12. Azuonye I.O. (1997) A difficult case: diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices. British Medical Journal, 315:1685-86
13. Mehrfar M. (2006) Patient Healing comments. Available at: http://www.cancertherapies.org.uk/patient.php?PHPSESSID=ca4dc83f058d6a7f... Accessed on 28.6.2008