Reiki | right on or rubbish

Nevyn

http://holisticonline.com/Reiki/hol_Reiki_home.htm

Reiki is a Japanese form of healing that is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. What makes Reiki unique is that it incorporates elements of just about every other alternative healing practices such as spiritual healing, auras, crystals, chakra balancing, meditation, aromatherapy, naturopathy, and homeopathy.

Reiki involves the transfer of energy from practitioner to patient to enhance the body's natural ability to heal itself through the balancing of energy. Reiki utilizes specific techniques for restoring and balancing the natural life force energy within the body. It is a holistic, natural, hands-on energy healing system that touches on all levels: body, mind, and spirit.

Reiki (pronounced ray-key) is a Japanese word representing universal life energy, the energy which is all around us. It is derived from rei, meaning "free passage" or "transcendental spirit" and ki, meaning "vital life force energy" or " universal life energy".

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Right there has been a huge surge in the popularity of such engery workings
and for a lot of people it is a term that is seemingly socail aceptible for a lot
of what was seen as dotty newagism or witchcraft in many forms .
There now seems to be a whole new trend where everyone and thier auntie is now doing reiki were once it was flower arranging classes people are paying to do reiki classes.

Personally I think that it is mad that people are being told that you dotn have to belive in it to do it and the person reciving reiki does not have to believe in it and that a weekend session makes some one qualified to muck about with some onse elses engery.

Yes there are good people who take this seriously and are qualified
but to be honest mostly what I see is a lot of people on a old creaky band wagon painted all new that could cause them and ohters a lot of harm .

So agree/disagree with me I wait to see .

magpie

Anything 'new-agey', especially anything that borrows the 'best bits' from other religions, is an enormous invitation to charlatanism and quackery. It's just amazing how many buffoons put stock in it

Nevyn

well that is one opinion Magpie yours
and your totaly entitled to it and to express it here.

Anyone else ?

stevenmu

Thanks to the infamous placebo effect, the bodies ability to heal, and the mids influence over it, is now well documented and pretty undeniable. As to whether or not Reiki has anything over and above placebo, I'm not to sure. Reiki and other "spitirual" healing techniques could all serve the same function as the little white sugar pills, altough that alone is pretty amazing.
Personally I'd be inclined to think that there is some sort of inate healing ability we all posess, that is related to the bodies energy field, and that reiki and other "spitirual" techniques are ways of triggering it discovered hundreds or thousands of years ago and passed down. Placebos would then just be a modern way of doing the same thing, but I've no idea if they would do it more or less efficiently.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of any studies done comparing Reiki with the placebo effect for effectiveness. I'd be more inclined to think that somebody can heal themselves better than someone else can, but I also feel that Reiki methodology is better at controlling your bodies energies and therefor healing.

Unfortunately as with anything like this there will be an inevitable number of bandwagon jumpers, with seminars by "Madame X, Reiki practitioner to the stars" and books on "Atkins and Reiki: Lose weight while you heal !"

sceptre

magpie wrote:

Anything 'new-agey', especially anything that borrows the 'best bits' from other religions, is an enormous invitation to charlatanism and quackery. It's just amazing how many buffoons put stock in it

As a general comment towards "feel god about yourself" movements I'd raht that as bang on. Even for the people out there who believe in the healing properties of substance X or practice Y, some of them probably realise that either at the fringes or heart of the movement they believe in there are a number of quacks making a few quid off it. The cynic would believe that they're all at it but there are always some regardless. Presumably that's true of Reiki too about which i know almost nothing.

Except that I went to a kind-of Reiki practitioner (at the behest of a parent who was sending a sibling anyway) with some wholesome new age stuff thrown in for good measure about a year or two ago and I don't think I ever laughed so much in my whole life when I got home with girlfriend in tow. Actually I'm still laughing now when I think of it. It's the ancient spirits leaving the body stuff and the big leaving of spirits projected for 2012 I'm laughing at rather than the body healing stuff though I'd be reasonably cynical about that too. Even leaving my cynicism aside (and the fact that this woman has a higher qualification in psychology and could be making more money at that, apart from the fact that she obviously believed in it) there are undoubtedly a number of quacks with their weekend qualification intend on making a few quid from it, as there are in anything else.

stevenmu

A good way to think of it may be that there are people in Nigeria who have millions stashed away in bank accounts as a result of corrupt regimes, but anybody who emails you claiming to be one of them is probably making it up.

Talliesin

Thaed wrote:

Personally I think that it is mad that people are being told that you dotn have to belive in it to do it and the person reciving reiki does not have to believe in it and that a weekend session makes some one qualified to muck about with some onse elses engery.

Yes. I'm getting seriously pissed off at the number of people who are doing some pretty heavy Reiki without warning (or sometimes even being aware themselves) of the healing crisis and even karmic shake-ups that can hit afterwards. I've even heard of people just deciding to do Reiki on someone and doing it without consent which goes against just about every magical or healing (inc. science-based medicine) ethic you will come across.

I suspect it's down to the currently popular fluffy* idea that anything "alternative" is safe and easy. I no more want a weekend Reiki master antwhere near me than I do a weekend heart-surgeon.

*I don't really like the term "fluffy". These days its mainly used by fluffies in order to suggest that they aren't, often in refering to deeply unfluffy concepts.

akari no ryu

I, at this point, would like to state that Reiki is not nearly as fluffy it can be portrayed.
Crystals, angels, all that malarky, they are not a part of Reiki. Reiki is merely about using the energy that flows through all living things, chi/ki/sekhmet/whatver, to allow the body to fix itself. It teaches that when the body's energy paths are out of whack you get ill and when you get ill the body's energy paths go out of whack. Reiki is simply the proccess of reversing it. It is a non-theist system, adaptable to things like cristals, angels and all that malarky but inherently it doesn't use them.

Talliesin

akari no ryu wrote:

I, at this point, would like to state that Reiki is not nearly as fluffy it can be portrayed.

That's the problem. If it was fluffy then we could just let the fluffies play and not worry about it (and hey, we all need to reach our inner fluffy from time to time ). It's the baby-with-a-nailgun aspect of how its often practiced that concerns me.

akari no ryu wrote:

Crystals, angels, all that malarky

Crystals can be very powerful. I've used them in workings where I had to take them away again because stuff was just getting too strong.
According to the scriptures of the religious system they come from, Angels have six wings, visages that cannot be looked upon, like to accessorise with flaming swords and their hobbies include killing the firstborn child in every house in a kingdom, raining down burning sulphur, and raping women to produce monstrous offspring. Doesn't sound too fluffy to me.
It's not the tools that are fluffy, it's some of the practitioners.

akari no ryu

Talliesin wrote:

That's the problem. If it was fluffy then we could just let the fluffies play and not worry about it (and hey, we all need to reach our inner fluffy from time to time ). It's the baby-with-a-nailgun aspect of how its often practiced that concerns me.

I couldn't agree more.

Talliesin wrote:

Crystals can be very powerful. I've used them in workings where I had to take them away again because stuff was just getting too strong.

I realise that, I use them myself all the time. I was just stating that they don't have an intrinsic place in Reiki. It's extended.

Talliesin wrote:

According to the scriptures of the religious system they come from, Angels have six wings, visages that cannot be looked upon, like to accessorise with flaming swords and their hobbies include killing the firstborn child in every house in a kingdom, raining down burning sulphur, and raping women to produce monstrous offspring. Doesn't sound too fluffy to me.
It's not the tools that are fluffy, it's some of the practitioners.

Talliesin, I think you have misinterpreted my post. I wasn't calling Reiki, Crystals, Angels or even Malarky fluffy. I have the greatest respect for Malarky.

Talliesin

akari no ryu wrote:

Talliesin, I think you have misinterpreted my post. I wasn't calling Reiki, Crystals, Angels or even Malarky fluffy. I have the greatest respect for Malarky.

I was just emphasising that just as you were saying that Reiki isn't fluffy in itself, this also applies to most of the other things that are current fads.

Hey, even the bloody Qabalah is fashionable now!

akari no ryu

That's not what I was trying to imply. I'm sorry, I do have troubles articulating myself properly.

Hasn't the QBL been popular for yonks now, though?

Talliesin

akari no ryu wrote:

Hasn't the QBL been popular for yonks now, though?

It's only in the last couple of years that you'd have Hollywood celebrities endorsing it (well kind of, there's no qabalic source of those thread bracelets, and the only scriptural mention of them condemns them).

As a source of material that has entered into the Western Mystery Tradition and from there influenced quite a lot of different religious and magical groups, then yes it has been popular in those circles.

Nevyn

if reiki didnt work it would be easier/safer.

and the fluffies and ill informed/prepared reiki users
who do so with out thinking through what may happen
and could cause a lot of harm from them and the person they
work reiki for.

Oryx

I agree that Reiki can work, but I do have a problem with its popularity now, because it means every housing estate has a few practitioners, that learned it over a weekend, for pots of money. I have seen someone trained (in a few hours) to Reiki 1, attempting to use distance healing, (I know they shouldnt have...) and yes the recipient was healed, but that person ended up with the illness themselves. So baby-with-a-nailgun, yes.

I also believe that everyone has an intrinsic ability to heal, and some people call this Reiki, and reiki does provide a discipline required to use the energy involved. But I dont agree that you need a Reiki master to 'attune' you or switch on the ability by tapping you on the head (which I am aware one person does). This is quackery to me and cheapens the whole thing.

Talliesin

KatieK wrote:

...cheapens the whole thing.

And yet ironically often increases the price