Let reiki unblock your energy

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      For Vancouver-based reiki master Sharon Allen, the phone is ringing more often these days. “I don’t know if it is spring cleaning—mentally, emotionally, and everything else—but right now it seems to be the season for reiki,” Allen said in a phone interview. “I am getting so many calls.”

      According to the definition offered by the Canadian Reiki Association on its Web site (www.reiki.ca/), reiki is a Japanese “light-touch, energy-based modality”. Its primary function is the unblocking of the chakras, a Sanskrit term meaning circles, through the movement of life-force energy. It was brought to the fore by Mikao Usui in late 19th-century Japan, and many local practitioners and masters, including Allen, adhere to the Usui approach.

      When the flow of energy is disrupted, weakened, or blocked, emotional or health problems tend to occur, according to reiki proponents. Imbalances can result from emotional or physical trauma, injury, negative thoughts and feelings, negative self-esteem, and toxicity. Reiki is excellent for healing any of these issues, Allen said, and it can give wonderful results.

      She described reiki as energy work, with practitioners becoming kind of like antennae, holding positions around the body to let the energy do its work. “That is basically what it is in a nutshell,” Allen said. “But other people add to that. For example, I do intuitive healing, so I also pay attention to what comes through during the healing, so it ends up becoming something of a reading as well. I believe that everything that manifests in the physical body starts off in the mental and emotional, and that the body is just talking to us.”

      Reiki is taught on three levels, she added. At level one, practitioners can perform self-healing and healing on anything with a “life force”. Level two involves distance healing and sending reiki energy over a wider area. Level three includes “attuning” other trainees and showing them how to teach reiki.

      According to CRA membership relations director Judy Cain, there are 120 members in B.C. in good standing and 600 across Canada. Master reiki practitioner Astrid Lee described it this way: “Reiki, in a practical sense, is the universal life force that is channelled through a practitioner or a reiki master—and is channelled through a receiving person, who is usually lying on a massage table fully clothed. The reiki is sent throughout the body. Usually we work from chakra to chakra, from head to toe, and from front to back.”

      Unlike traditional therapeutic treatment, Lee said a reiki master does not get tired from giving a treatment, but is reinvigorated after working with the life energy for an hour. And the benefits to the recipient can be measured by how reiki “goes to where it is most needed”, Lee said.

      “Reiki is an industry where I start to feel that, around the world, we are starting to connect with each other,” Lee said. “People like to be part of a greater team, and I think that is why the healing group has grown so much. People find it, they love it, and they like the idea of connecting with other reiki practitioners, or other laypeople, for healing the planet and all humanity.”

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