My Personal Journey into Reiki

Reiki

 

I wanted to write a little bit about some of my experiences with Reiki. There are many different forms of Reiki, mine being “Tera-Mai™ Reiki,” which can incorporate Seichem. I won’t go into an in-depth description about what Reiki is, or does, because this information is already on many websites and I would just be repeating what is already out there, instead, I would like to discuss other aspects of hands on healing that I have discovered over the many years of using these techniques. These findings are personal to me and are in no way part of the Reiki teachings.

In brief, what is Reiki/Seichem?

Tera-Mai Reiki (pronounced ray-key) is Japanese for ‘universal life energy’ Reiki works in such a way as to bring us into balance, which in turn reinforces the body’s natural ability to heal itself at all levels, whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Reiki is not bound to any religious belief system instead it works for anyone

Tera Mai Seichem (pronounced say-keem) works in the same way as Reiki, ie hands placed on the body or in the Auric field surrounding the body. Seichem utilises the four elemental rays, Earth (Reiki) Fire, Water and Air.

Seichem connects with our higher selves to establish healing in the emotional, physical, mental and spiritual bodies. The energy of Seichem is used to heal and stimulate personal development and growth.

 

My Personal Journey

A lot of purists would argue that you should keep the many facets of hands on healing separate, by that I mean, Reiki is Reiki, crystal therapy is crystal therapy and so on, but I have found that healing with the help of the spirit world is not nearly so rigid. Instead it’s more like a pebble in a pool with rippling effects. Spirit, quite simply, uses whatever is the most appropriate method at the time regardless of the types of healing you are using. Guides are not governed by using Reiki simply because you do, but more on that later.

When I first started in Reiki I wasn’t expecting nor was I prepared for what happened next, from being young I was always reading about other cultures, mainly Japanese and Egyptian. Who knew that many years later I would learn healing systems called Reiki and Seichem. A Japanese healing system and an Egyptian healing system.

Coincidence or synchronicity?

Well, I have since learned that there are no coincidences, even when things do not appear to be going your way and you rail at the gods for doing you some disservice, synchronicity is usually at play. I have learnt that ‘When things are going wrong, they are sometimes going right,’ trust me, I could write a compendium of situations that appeared to be going wrong instead of right, and yes, I did shake my fist at the sky and rail at the gods. Since then however, I have learned to trust that it is often better to bend like the Willow instead of standing rigid like an Oak. Sometimes we have to ‘go with the flow’ trust that our guides are looking out for us even, if, at the time it does not feel like it. This takes great courage and an unfaltering faith in those who have chosen to walk our path with us.

I asked my guide one day what to call him. Was he a ‘master guide’ or a ‘gatekeeper’ as I had so often read about. He didn’t deny that he was a master guide nor a gatekeeper, he merely impressed upon me that he was my ‘life guide.’ Which actually made more sense to me. I then discovered that I did not have one guide by many guides, Now, I’m getting ahead of myself so let me go back to how I first discovered these guides.

One particular guide, an Egyptian lady used to visit me in my dreams when I was young. She always came with a Panther or black Jaguar walking by her side. I always remember the jaguar’s eyes were very piercing as if it could see right into your very soul. It had a very powerful unnerving look about it; Not towards me, it was as if it was guarding me. It often used to turn up in my dreams and It would follow me around but stay just out of reach. The Egyptian lady was the first guide that I remembered meeting, not that back then I even knew what a guide was. Little did I know that, much later on, we would be working together in hands-on healing.

So, through some nifty guide intervention and synchronicity, I ended up learning Reiki. I had no intention of learning Reiki but my guides had other ideas and created a situation where I found myself suddenly booked on a course to learn it.

I was hooked from the first day of learning Reiki. I found it fascinating that with a simple initiation and some self-belief that I could in fact do this; that, I was, in effect a facilitator of healing. Now that all sounds rather simple but in truth it was to become a big learning curve that took many years to develop and understand, you see there is no better teacher than experience. If you do not use it then you cannot develop it.

A defining moment; there have been many along my path, was when I Reikied a friend of mine. She’d just finished university and was confused about where her career was taking her. She was leaning towards teaching and had applied for a few jobs. Feeling a little stressed she asked me to do some Reiki on her, which I did. I had only been doing Reiki a few months but I had worked on quite a lot of people. I did not promote that I did it, they just sort of found me.

Well, I was doing my thing, just focusing my intent. I had my eyes shut as I worked, simply because it helped me get into my ‘Reiki space’ as I called it, when all of a sudden there was this very tall, very muscular Native American with full headdress down to the floor standing at the foot of the Reiki couch. In his hand he had a shallow bowl with what looked like white powder in it. In his other hand he held a large fan feather. The fan feather to me looked more oriental, logically I told myself that Native American’s didn’t carry oriental feathers thus rendering this vision a complete figment of my imagination. The figment of my imagination then started to throw this white powder all over my friend. He was placing it on her feet and legs and then up over her body and head. I remember telling myself that I was losing the plot at this point.

Now the vision just didn’t make any sense to me. And I knew nothing about the Native American culture. For a second I remember thinking, shouldn’t I be seeing someone who is Japanese. But there he stood just doing his thing. When he didn’t fade away, I noticed that he had a tattoo on his arm along with bands. He tapped two fingers over the tattoo to draw my attention to it. When I looked closer, I saw a diamond in a diamond with a dot. I then saw what looked like chevrons.

 

After the Reiki session, I decided to do some research. I had just bought my sister a book called, Quest: A Guide For Creating Your Own Vision Quest and in it she mentioned the use of corn meal in ceremonies. It brought protection and abundance. A few days later Linda phoned me up to tell me that she had received three phone calls all offering her supply work as a teacher. Obviously the corn meal worked.

The diamonds I saw were a Native American symbol meaning, ‘eye of a medicine man’. Now I make no great claim to have an in-depth knowledge of these symbols so again I had to do some research. There are many variants on the answer but generally, the Eye of the Shaman or Eye of a Medicine Man symbol is a very powerful symbol.

A Medicine Man or Shaman was believed to have magical powers of spiritual healing and of seeing into the future. The outer lines of the symbol represents the four corners of the Universe, North, South, East and West of the physical world. The inner lines represent the Spirit world, which the Medicine Man had knowledge of. The centre circle represents the eye of the Medicine Man and his spiritual vision.

So, quite simply he was telling me that he was a Medicine Man. I found out that the Chevrons were, in fact, a symbol of the thunderbird tracks, which generally means, Power, Transformation, Indomitable Spirit, Unquestioned Authority and Messages from the Otherworld’s.

I thought it strange that this figment of my imagination was still communicating with me so I began to wonder if it wasn’t a figment of my imagination but an actual spirit. I was later to find out that we would be working together quite a lot.

I had also noticed, before I had my first encounter with my Native American guide, that animals would show themselves to me in visions. Again, I did not initially see the significance of this but they were to prove invaluable to me later on. My poor guides must have been standing there thinking, any minute now she might just get the connection. Unfortunately for them I was so focused on the Reiki that I forgot that spirit was trying to help me out with information. So for a time, I simply saw a lion, or a bear and thought, oh how cute. No, they weren’t cute, they were trying to tell me something that related to the clients situation. Once I had that Eureka moment about three months into Reiki there was no stopping me; much to my guides relief no doubt, bless them for their patience.

Now you see what I meant about the pebble in the pool. I created Reiki ripples going out and my guides sent them back. I quickly learnt that to utilise the messages that I was getting, was to gain an insight into the client’s issues. It was simple; spirit chose to communicate with me through totem/power animals.

Another healer may see crystals or hear voices, or see a multitude of things. It doesn’t matter how you receive information it just has to be interpreted in a way that people understand.

It has been said to me that there is more to Reiki than my visions and I do not argue with that but I also know that when spirit chooses to communicate it is never for frivolous reasons and it’s certainly not a parlour trick or game. The messages received have a deep meaning for the people they are given to and I do not lessen their importance by simply saying whatever comes into my head or using my visions to ‘look good’. I take the responsibility of my visions really seriously. Trust me, if you misuse this power your guides will back off so fast you will wonder what’s happened.

So, I can say that my guides slowly over a period of time showed me more. It was never an instant awakening, it often felt like, well now you’ve earned the right to see this or know that. It was never just given to me. I had to do a lot a research because back then there was no books on totem animals or Reiki come to that. I used to teach in my metaphysical gift shop that you have to earn the right to this information through hard work. Do not forget that your guides know if you are being lazy or simply not making the effort. If that is the case, you will not get much communication from them. You have to earn your stripes as it were.

I would often watch colours swirling around and I could sometimes see people’s pets who had passed over into spirit, cats, dogs, even horses. I had a knack of knowing which animal walked with a person. Now when I say walked with, I don’t always mean a power animal, they are different to totems. The phrase ‘walk with’ for me means, at that particular time the person has an animal spirit trying to guide them through a situation of some kind. The situation surrounding them would have an effect on their well-being or state of health. It all began to make perfect sense to me.

Once I had embraced the animal kingdom, I began to see more people. Sometimes relatives of the clients, guides; although guides are a contrary bunch and do not always want to show themselves. I started to get cryptic messages in the form of symbols. I had to learn to decode these symbols, this became easier the more I worked with my healing guides. I could almost hear them saying, she’s got it, when I eventually figured it out.

I’ve seen crazy images, images that you think, hell no I’m not telling them that, they are going to think I’m some kind of nutcase. But I learned to trust the information given and although sometimes I questioned whether or not to tell them, I nearly always did and to my surprise it meant something to the person receiving it.

One example was a friend of my sisters. She came for a Reiki and I kept seeing a small white horse but this horse was wearing a pointed party hat, you know the kind you get at children’s parties. Oh no I thought, here we go again, another daft vision. I was beginning to think that the spirit world had a sense of humour and were using it at my expense. In the end, I told my sister’s friend what I had seen. To my surprise, she said she knew the white horse and that he was in spirit, and that last night she was at a fundraising party for horses. I suddenly realised what the horse was trying to tell me, and that was that he had been there at the fundraising with my sister’s friend. It was like he had just popped in to thank her for raising money for horses.

I was lucky enough to have the forethought to start a Reiki journal a few weeks prior to learning Reiki. It is a record of my ‘light bulb on’ moments.’

I learned also that sometimes the client dictated which guides came in. One session I could see Aztec guides, the next it would be Tibetan monks, then Native American’s, then African’s. There is never a limit, it changes with the people you work on. At the core of my healing work I had a group of guides that I saw on a regular basis, they were a Japanese lady, Noriko. My Egyptian guide, called Etoba, who often sits at the head of a client and massages them. Then there is my Native American chief who I affectionately call ‘Many Feathers’ or I often refer to him as my ‘Big Guns’ because he often goes directly into the person’s physical body. There is also a smaller Native American called ‘Two Feathers.’ He would often mix poultices and place them on the client.

In recent years, I have started working with Nuns. The nuns came to work with me as I reikied my sister who had been diagnosed with cancer. I noticed that my sister also had nun guides but unlike mine, they were dressed differently. Through a bit of research I found out that they were 15th century nuns. I would often see ten or more of these nuns surrounding us as I reikied her. I used to ask my sister what you would call so many nuns. I used to joke and say, we have our cloister of nuns with us today.

I have watched these nuns using crystals. They would press the crystals into acupressure points. It was mesmerising to watch them at work. I have seen guides doing massage, reflexology, chiropractic movements, I have even seen them go inside people and pull things out. Even more interesting is that the client would often confirm what was happening and how they had felt someone other than me working on them. So I never set boundaries; I accept that whoever comes in is the right person for that client.

So you see it does not pay to be too fixed in your approach to healing because you may be blocking out a wealth of information brought to you by a myriad of guides with a wealth of knowledge from all different cultures. If you allow it, it becomes a symbiotic relationship.

I hope that in sharing just a small part of what I have learned, it will inspire those of you who wish to expand on your healing work and delve a little deeper into the possibility that no man or woman is an island. You just have to ask for guidance and then be gracious enough not to dictate how or in what form that guidance will come. Just close your eyes, have an open heart and a lot of patience and eventually you will get an answer.

The book referenced in this article is below

Quest: A Guide For Creating Your Own Vision Quest

Quest Denise Linn