A Unified Model of Teaching - West meets East as a Beginning

Today, I completed teaching a class in Usui Reiki I. The Usui part of the class refers to Mikao Usui, the founder of the Usui System of Natural Healing, the actual name of what is termed Reiki in the West. The Western style of Reiki comes to us by way of Usui to his student Chujiro Hayashi and from him to a Hawaiian named Hawayo Takata, also called simply Mrs. Takata in Reiki circles.

In the 1990's, the Western Reiki community began to hear about the Eastern Reiki community which everyone had assumed had disappeared after WWII. The Eastern community calls itself the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, or the Usui Reiki Natural Healing Society. I first read about this in a book by Frank Arjava Petter called Reiki Fire (a great book to read, if you have the chance). I later studied it with Reiki Master Amy Rowland, author of Traditional Reiki for Our Times, and Intuitive Reiki for Our Times and a new book about living the Reiki principles.

Over the almost four years since I first studied this style with Amy, I have been exploring ways of teaching it. Last month, I taught the style as a separate modality for the first time. This weekend, I exclusively used the Reiju (attunement) style from the Usui Reiki Ryoho in my Western Usui Reiki I class in addition to the techniques from that system I have used since 2007. It really felt good and I felt the Reiki Masters with me as I worked through the Reijus. First, as they told me to stay longer in certain locations, next as they told me to add grounding at the feet, finally as they helped me to visualize the elements of each of the students in the attunement.

I had been concerned previously about not doing the attunement the way Mrs. Takata had in a class teaching her techniques, but I am coming to the realization that my style is more in accord with the Eastern side of things, more gentle, more intuitive, simpler. This experiment was planned because I was supposed to be teaching a very large class and I didn't think I would have time to do the Western attunement four times for all the students. The class ended up being my usual size of five students, but I kept to my original plan of using the Reiju. It went beautifully.

I would also like to congratulate my students who have received their first degree this weekend: Shushan Aleaqui, Andrew Johnson, MIchael Mastronikolas, Summer Stevenson, and Michael Yun.