by Frans Stiene
Within the system of Reiki we talk a lot about healing, but what is healing?
Think about it; can we heal from birth, sickness, old age and death?
Birth
We are all born and therefore we must die. We cannot escape being born so that we do not have to get sick, become old, and die.
Sickness
Have we ever healed ourselves completely from being free of sickness? No more colds, pain in our aging body, headaches etc… all the time, for the rest of our living life? Let’s be honest… We heal from one disease, pain or headache and a year later we have another disease, pain, or headache. We are never 100% free of pain or illness, as long as we live in our bodies.
Old age
Can we heal ourselves from growing old? No we can’t; we will all grow old, no matter what happens and no matter how much we try to heal ourselves.
Death
We all will die one day; again we can not escape this, we can not heal ourselves from dying one day.
So then what is healing?
The original 1828 Webster’s dictionary starts its definition in this way: “Heal, verb transitive [Latin celo; Heb. to be whole or entire, all]” and the current Merriam-Webster dictionary, “to make free from injury or disease: to make sound or whole, heal a wound”
So across the ages, we therefore can say that healing is to be whole. This wholeness is really pointing to our essence, our true nature.
Within the system of Reiki, Mikao Usui called this our Great Bright Light or Reiki. We don’t have to make it more whole; it is already whole. Or in other words, we don’t have to make it more bright as it is by nature bright. In the Shinpiden Reiki III symbol/mantra we find the kanji of the sun and moon. We can not add more light to the sun and neither can we take light away, it is whole already. The moon is also whole. It never diminishes; even though sometimes we just see a sliver it is still whole all the time. Thus all the practices within the system of Reiki are there to help us to realize that we are already whole all the time. No matter if we have a sickness, are growing old, or we are dying, we are already whole.
This deep understanding of wholeness also releases us from the tension of the need to do something. And the more we relax in this wholeness the more our energy starts to flow.
Mikao Usui also pointed this out within the Reiki Precepts:
Today
Do not anger
Do not worry
Be grateful
Be true to your way and your being
Show compassion to yourself and others
Within the precepts we do not see anything about physical healing, rather we see a wholeness. A state of mind of wholeness.
Seeing this through the embodiment, not just intellectually, of the Reiki precepts, we can have a disease, we can grow old and we will die. But now we can have/do/live all of this without anger and worry, by being grateful, being true to our way and our being and by being compassionate to ourselves and others. This is the ultimate healing. This is what Mikao Usui pointed out again and again within his teachings, wholeness. Being whole right here, right today.
