The Reiki Principles
Your feelings are little children.
(Excerpt from The Reiki Way)
Your feelings are little children, begging for your love. They want to be held, acknowledged. Not locked away and shunned. ‘If you ignore me,’ says the root of your worry, ‘I will wake you up at night.’ They want to be heard and held and healed of their wounds. Stressful thoughts have gravity. Emotions and more thoughts come to orbit them, and a whole universe of confusion is born. The principles allow us to sit with the first stressful belief and look at it, before the galaxy of suffering matures. Once thoughts are witnessed for what they are, they release us on their own.
Just for today…
Do not be angry
Do not worry
Be grateful
Be true to your way and your being
Be kind (to yourself and others)
The depth and breadth of the Reiki system is illustrated by the deceptively simple Reiki principles. The six little lines are a profoundly affective invocation to healing. They uproot our long-buried pain so it can once and for all be seen, understood, healed and released. The principles guide us to a deep awareness so that when a stressful thought arises, we can meet it with compassionate consciousness. We can stand firm in the light of our awareness. Instead of hopelessly fighting the strong undercurrent in our emotional river, we sit on the bank watching the choppy water rush past.
Using them as an active meditation unearths the seed of our pain; this process will dig up anything that has taken root within you that is untrue. It might seem uncomfortable at first but watch as these simple little words burn away all that no longer serves you. Many people struggle with the first two pieces of instruction: do not be angry and do not worry. As soon as these words are said, the anger and the worry rise to greet the sentiment. As Frans Stiene (one of my dear teachers) so beautifully illustrates: if you are walking around with a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you, what’s going to spill out of your cup? Not hot chocolate. That is the whole point. We are going to let the truth spill out.
Going Inward To practise, sit with your hands in Gassho (palms together in front of your heart), which helps us to go within. In this gesture we can no longer ‘do’, we are just resting within our being. As you go through each principle, pause when one sparks a reaction. Say that one over and over to yourself, noticing what is rising.
For example, if I say ‘do not worry’ to myself, and I’m holding anxiety, I will most definitely begin feeling anxious as all of my suppressed thoughts come up to greet my awareness. As I see them, I keep going with ‘do not worry’ until I have let them all out of their hiding places. Now the thoughts are with me in my conscious mind, I can address them. I’m going to see them each as a small, innocent child who is asking for love and affection. I will invite each one to enter my heart and see if there is anything this little part of me needs as I do so. I will love all over my worry until it is seen and eased. I will tell it that I’ll take care of whatever it is asking. Sometimes it asks me to listen to my intuition because there is a genuine cause for concern that I might have ignored the day before. I’ll hear it out. Then I will go to the next precept, ‘be grateful’, and I’ll let the sweetness of gratitude soothe any residual energy the worry children left behind. This plants us so firmly in reality, it brings us to our truth and it activates our healing. Try this for yourself and see what happens. I’d encourage you to get your journal out too – it helps to take it out of the head and onto paper.
I often receive emails from students after a course, who have started to use the principles and now question the negatives. Usually they advise a rewording to make them more positive and suggest using ‘be free from anger and worry’ instead. This feels much nicer. And I totally agree that is much better feeling that way. Yet, if we make these into better feeling statements that don’t provoke our reactivity, we are missing the alchemical response within Usui’s golden path to uprooting buried pain. Reiki is a tool for emotional mindfulness, which means we become so incredibly aware of all the places we need healing and holding as soon as we begin to pay attention. The point is not to affirm that we are not angry. We are not trying to kid ourselves here. We’re getting real.
We are not manifesting, we are liberating ourselves.
The point is to recognise all the places we hold anger so we can heal the destructive energy rather than keeping it politely stuffed down in the pockets of our body. The Buddha famously said, ‘holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die’. We want to get the venom out of our system and address the deeper place it’s asking us to go. Anger is always pointing us to grow but it often requires going much deeper than the surface.
As we notice the anger rising, we are setting it free. Do not be angry isn’t the same as do not feel angry. Anger is a natural human emotion. Feel it, but don’t become unconscious to it, don’t be consumed with rage and blinded by it. Use it as a call for compassion. Listen to it before acting on it. So instead of feeling that ‘I am angry’ we give ourselves a chance to notice ‘there is anger in me and I am not it.’ Here it is, and I am here witnessing it. Notice the actual sensation of anger. For me, it comes up from a primal space in my deep belly. It feels like a wave of heat, a rising fire. I call it the dragon. My son and I describe the dragon rising when one of us is about to tip over that edge into the unconscious. He is aware of some people having very big dragons. He already knows that the anger isn’t really the person - just an energy that lives inside the personality. If I’m aware of the energy, I can be present for it and stay in the power it’s risen out of. I can give the anger a clear voice of truth in a conscious way that helps me reestablish a boundary. I’m riding the dragon rather than being the dragon. I know the dragon is here to serve me, so I approach it gently. We can meet our emotions with kindness, treating them the way we’d treat a crying child. We investigate, we comfort, we embrace and hold space. We choose to see ourselves with eyes wide open. Once we’ve looked deeply into all our shadowy places, we understand what it is to be human. Our suffering isn’t personal, it’s universal. This gives us a new level of understanding for those around us. This opens the door for compassion.
Why are you here, anger? What do you want? Often this energy is rocket fuel, trying to get us to make some changes, and only when we listen to it will it stop creeping up on us while we’re trying to live our lives. If you are not holding any anger, then the statement ‘do not be angry’ will not provoke anger. It is only provocative if healing is underway.
Our journeys to work things out for ourselves have an incredible ripple effect, through timelines, past lives, family patterns, conditioning – this is how we heal the world. We make peace in our own mind first. We learn so much about being human in the process. These statements provide a way to see clearly and be true to ourselves. Only in acknowledging our feelings can we let the feeling pass. We don’t shun, we don’t bypass. We soften, allow, integrate. Heal.
