Happy Thursday, Sault Ste. Marie - I'm glad you here. Before we get into today's blog entry, let's go through some announcements. First, it's Thursday! That means we're open from 12pm to 8pm for walk-in psychic readings or to browse our shop. Remember: if the door is locked, that just means we're upstairs, so Ring the doorbell and we'll be right there!
Also, please remember that tomorrow's Lightworking class from 7pm to 8pm and Saturday's community Lightworking clinic from 2pm to 3pm are cancelled because the fellow who runs them - yours truly - will be out of country. Everything else at the studio is running as scheduled, and I'll be back on Tuesday, so I'll see you then.
Reiki vs Lightworking (part 2): What are Attunements, and Do they matter?
Reiki is a Japanese word which means "universal life energy." The practice of Reiki, mostly commonly known in the west as Usui Reiki, is a healing practice which uses the laying on of hands with a meditative state to channel pure life energy for the benefit of the recipient. In the Reiki community, one of the most contentious issues (if not the most contentious issue) is attunement, or the lack there of. In traditional schools of Reiki, practitioners are taught that they are unable to channel universal life energy without being attuned, or initiated by a teacher who him- or herself has already been attuned.
The question of initiation is not unprecedented. In fact, it is quite a common theme in many religious traditions. For example, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam are divided over whom should be leading the Muslim nation: Sunni Muslims believe that a qualified person may perform the job, but Shia Muslims believe that only a blood-descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is qualified for that position. Christianity can be likewise examined in this dichotomy: the Protestant denominations of Christianity believe that their triune deity as God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is available to any who seek Him and that personal revelation is possible through prayer and other forms of devotion, but Catholics (and Mormons of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for that matter) believe that only the elect can speak for Jesus Christ. Those elected to speak must either be specially anointed to perform this duty, or in the case of the split between the mainstream LDS Church and the Fundamentalist LDS Church, this role is prescribed by blood relation to the prophet Joseph Smith.
In Wicca and other western occult traditions power and authority are not typically drawn from one's direct line of descent from blood relatives but instead from one's line of teachers and the means by which your occult knowledge has come to you (there are folks out there who like to brag that their grandmothers were witches, but that's an entirely different can of worms.)
But returning to the topic of tradition and attunement or initiation, in a way this is very similar to the origins of Reiki in the Japan: in order to teach Reiki, the practitioner must have an unbroken line of transmission back to the originator of the tradition. In a perfect world, this means that every Reiki practitioner would be able to trace his or her lineage in an unbroken line back to the founder of Usui Reiki, Dr. Mikao Usui.
Dr. Mikao Usui was a lay Tendai Buddhist monk who already practiced a variety of other healing techniques. We know from his own notes that he believed there existed a method to heal without depleting one's own energy which is what led him to conduct a spiritual retreat for three weeks at Shinto temple on Mount Kurama. After three weeks in retreat, Dr. Usui believed he had discovered a new method of healing and he named it after himself. The important thing to remember about Dr. Usui is that as a Buddhist monk he would have known about the Zen Buddhist custom of the transmission of dharma, which can be loosely interpreted as "way" or "knowledge." The reason this is important to us is because the transmission of dharma is a sort of spiritual bloodline used to legitimize a teacher and show that he or she has completed a tradition's requirements to teach and lead students.
However, in Reiki, this "transmission" of teaching is not just a way of validating a student's experiences and a teacher's qualifications, but also the literal method by which a student is capable of communing with the life of the universe. This requirement that students be attuned or initiated by hand in the presence of a legitimized teacher is contentious because it necessarily invalidates the founder of Reiki, Dr. Usui, who himself was never attuned.
Can you wrap your mind around that?
"You are literally incapable of communing with the spirit of the universe unless you've been spiritually attuned by a teacher descended from a line of teachers taught by a man who himself was never spiritually attuned."
If you think this requirement to be attuned by a person who was attuned by a person who was never attuned sounds fundamentally broken, then you'd be right. Most schools of Reiki deliberately overlook this fallacy or else explain it by inventing a deity or other spiritual entity - in other words, Dr. Usui was attuned by a divine being who to this day refuses to attune anybody else. This progressive attitude is becoming more prevalent in the Reiki community and many Reiki practitioners agree that such initiations are not necessary for expressing universal life energy; however, the distinction has to be made that such initiations are necessary for establishing authority among different traditions of Reiki. For example, a person who has never been attuned to William Rand's tradition of Karuna Reiki by an accepted teacher can never call him or herself a teacher of, or leader in, Karuna Reiki.
I think it's inappropriate to say that attunements and initiations are wrong; clearly, these traditions serve important purposes in defining and "crystallizing" the organizational body of a tradition, but I do think it's wrong to use attunements and initiations as tools to invalidate and delegitimize other practitioners. Beyond Reiki, this is an important lesson to remember in an interfaith setting, especially among faiths descended from a common source. No matter what we believe the spiritual nature of the universe to be, what deities have spoken to us, what spiritual teachers have revealed to us, or what occult rituals we perform, we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously that our own particular "-isms" become the only "-ism." Attunements are what we make of them, so make something good.
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