Everyone has his or her own path to self-awareness. Don’t look to another person’s journey, but go within and find your own.
If you are new to Reiki, and even if you are not, you will have many questions as to ‘how’ to do things. ‘How’ to best use Reiki, ‘how’ to avoid mistakes, ‘how’ to feel more sensation (or less!), etc etc. The list can be endless to the point that you feel best to do nothing rather than do it wrong.
It can be frustrating to be told that there is nothing you can do wrong. To be told to discover your own Reiki path, and have your own Reiki experience. It can be annoying when your Teacher just smiles and tells you to keep going, keep discovering, and drink lots of water. It can be confusing when you feel so much sensation and not have explanations as to what is happening. But if you have a Teacher worth his or her salt, they will encourage you to keep going, and they will not dis-empower you with endless explanations that are ultimately dependent on their own experience, not yours.
There are infinite pathways to self-awareness, and infinite expressions of consciousness traveling them. Don’t be distracted with someone else’s experience, and don’t be fooled into trying to follow them. What works for one person will at best provide pointers for you. When you read over and over again to meditate, to be still, to go within – there might be something in that. But when you are told to follow one particular mantra, in a particular posture, in a specific time frame, and no deviation is allowed…your eyebrows should spring into your hairline and you should beat a hasty retreat. YES recipes are useful when you are first learning, but they are only recipes. Any cook who has had any experience knows that to deviate from a recipe usually results in a much better dish that is more aligned to your family tastes.
Even in Reiki, we give you recipes for the hand positions, recipes for the amount of time to spend doing your Reiki, and we can be fairly adamant that a daily self-practice is best. And that is, frankly, because that is what worked for us. But what works for you – truly works, not just delusional laziness, is for you to discover. Be honest with yourself – when are you complete? When do you feel yourself dropping into your inner awareness, what hand positions allow you to reach a deep level of commune with your inner peace? These are for you to discover, and no recipe can take you there.
Take back your own inner counsel, the one that was stripped from you as a child, when all the adults told you to do things differently. Its OK, its not their fault – they were also under the delusion that their way was the best way. They were doing their best, just like you are doing yours. So now you know, the truth is within you; you’ve heard it a million times, so act on it. Go in; find your own path, its not nearly as scary or difficult as you think.
photo credit: hawkflight1066 “Rayleigh High Street and Rayleigh Mount, December 2013, Essex England UK” via photopin (license)
