When I finished Reiki II, my mentor suggested that I read ‘Hands of Light’ to prepare for the next stage: Reiki III attunement. The book took me a long time to finish. It was almost like a textbook about energy work with some theory and some practical, but a lot of it was… well. A lot. There was psychology, quantum physics (some of which has been disproven since the book was written, as happens in science fields), spiritual theories, all kinds of wild things smooshed together in one book.
I also studied the background of Reiki; the history of my lineage from Mikao Usui to Monica Perry. Somewhere between the two, Reiki got whitewashed and Christianized in order to be palatable to western students and clients. I understand why this happened; when Madame Takata was teaching Reiki, it was war time. She was a Japanese woman living and teaching in Hawai’i. That’s a scary time to be teaching Japanese spiritual healing techniques in the United States. It worked; American people did keep taking her classes. Monica has done a great job of decolonizing Reiki, but… I wanted to know more about the original traditions.
At the same time, I was reading about a note-taking system called ‘zettlekasten‘, which is german for ‘slip-box’ because the original zettelkästen were usually notecards stored in little drawer cabinets. I learned how to make a digital version to help me assimilate all the information I was trying to learn. I had to develop my own way of keeping the digital zettlekasten, because all the ways currently in use were nothing like the physical slip-boxes. Zettelkästen are supposed to be like a second, external brain. I wrote a whole article about zettelkästen, and maybe I should put that in a blog someday… Anyway, the point is, it helped me take useful notes while I read all of the other books I had on the go.
I read. I took notes. I sat and thought. I practiced my second level of Reiki in my studio with clients. I had tea chats with my mentor. I felt like a cocoon; the caterpillar turns to goo with intact memories inside a bio-produced ziploc bag and waits to develop into a new creature. Fall and winter even felt like the right time of year for this sort of work.
When I was done reading all the things and I felt I could finish my Reiki training, I told my mentor I was ready. I was delighted to find that several other people were ready to join the class at the same time! These are people I’d been doing Mitsuki-do classes and myofascial unwinding retreats with alongside my mentor, so I was pretty excited for the companionship.
We chose a day that worked for all the in-person students and the one distance practitioner who joined via video call. Honestly, it was a perfect mix of situations; one of the students is pregnant, so we got to play with distance and with a baby consciousness who had already started ‘helping’ her mum with myofascial work. Of course I had to make a joke about Dune…
We picked ‘Life Angel’ cards to get us started and to think about our own themes for the day. Mine was ‘clarity’, which… is what I’ve been looking for from this journey. After we’d read the workbook and discussed the symbols and theory, we each got attuned. This is where things started to get wild; Ana Wagner, who I discussed in my Reiki I blog post, showed up to help attune me. Like. I got attuned by my mentor and a GHOST. I mean, I know Hector showed up to my last attunement, but it’s different when you KNOW THE PERSON.
As I was being attuned, it felt like a waxy seal was torn off of my throat chakra and I could finally take in the energy that chakra is supposed to ingest. It was like I had been suffocating, and suddenly I could breathe. I felt as though I was inflating like a Macy’s Day parade balloon float. I kept getting bigger and bigger. I worried that I’d get too big and pop. Instead, what happened was an integration of my kundalini as it punched out the top my crown chakra like a tornado. And now I am a Reiki Master, or–as Monica prefers–Reiki Adept.
Nothing that came after the attunement was less bananas. We learned how to extrude our auras out of our fingers like… well, like Salad Fingers. And how to use the aura fingers to find problems in the body, both physical and auric. How to pull out the problems and fill the now-empty areas with helpful energy so the harm can’t come back and re-occupy the space. We learned how to add our energy to someone else to support them while they were working on someone.
It’s been a week since my attunement, and it’s taken me this long to write about it. There’s a lot to think about. I already felt like a crazy person before this class, so welcome to my existential crisis, I guess. I love me some science, but sometimes stuff just works and we don’t know why. Between attunements I learned that there is plenty of ‘science’ that remains unexplained. Acetaminophen, for example. It works, but no one really knows what the mechanism is. The same applies to a lot of depression medication. Medical professionals still prescribe these things every day, without having the slightest idea why they work.
Or, the universe could be self-aware and that’s why this stuff works. Nothing is truly solid, we are all clouds of atoms held together by something, so why should I feel odd about the idea that we can be healed by the same mysterious something?
Addendum
I wrote this as a skeptic, trying to sound ‘less crazy’ rather than just documenting my experiences. Later, I realized it’s like when I was figuring out my queerness; I kept thinking I wasn’t queer ‘enough’ and so I stayed in the closet. Well, this blog post reads like I’m trying to keep one foot in the ‘broom closet’, when most people who know me already know I’m a witch. I do Reiki, I feel energy, and I also do evidence-based massage therapy. Right now I separate them… as much as I can since energy is everywhere and I’m working within the personal bubble of everyone I treat. I do specific Reiki treatments, and I do massage therapy. If you want extra witchy, then you’ll choose Reiki, and if you don’t, you’ll get the well-documented science. So from now on, I’ll write without watering myself down. Reiki is cool, and I loved my education.