• • A friend of mine shared with me a teaching he received from his mentor – his mentor said to him, I cannot teach you about being awakened or enlightened, but I can teach you about being honest. This deeply resonated with me. Being honest is my path to freedom, happiness, inner peace and health. Live honestly. Work honestly. Speak honestly. Relate honestly. I don’t always get it perfect, but I do know that truth and honesty are grounding for me. If I’m feeling ungrounded, the first thing I check is if I’m being emotionally honest with myself.
  • Recently, I read a remarkable teaching by the late Richard Wagamese from his book, EMBERS: One Ojibway’s Meditation, which best describes my own experience of Reiki practice. It reads: “What defines me is not what I do, but what I receive. Out of a deep spiritual yearning, I have received sobriety, recovery, and a working relationship with the god of my understanding—so that I have received grace. Out of that same yearning, I have received community, belonging, home and the opportunity to be productive—so that I have received prosperity. Spiritual yearning has brought me friends, fellowship, brotherhood, family and a life partner who expands me—so that I have received love. That same yearning has brought me calm, peace, prayer, compassion and forgiveness—so that I have received joy and freedom. What defines me is not what I do but what I receive, and I have received in great measure.” (p.155)
  • Above all, be kind. These are words that came to a member in our Reiki community during our two-year in-depth study of the Reiki precepts. Whether one understands it as loving-kindness, compassion, love, or ‘unconditional positive regard of all sentient beings’, choosing kindness in any situation requires a great level of discipline, courage and humility. Respecting our common humanity and treating one another with the golden rule with regularity, takes the strength of 10,000 suns (an ancient way of speaking about infinity).

These teachings are simple spiritual practices: honesty, kindness and being open to receive from the god/dess of your understanding/the Universe. Living these practices as a daily habit is incredibly challenging and brave. To live a spiritual life is to surrender and say ‘yes’ to receiving from the god/dess of your understanding, from the Essence of All Life, from the Universe/Cosmos.

Surrender, open and receive.

That’s as simple as it gets. That’s all I do in my Reiki meditation. You might think that is easy enough to do. What it requires, however, is releasing all and every need for control of outcome. And that is a most difficult thing to do each and every day. As I practise ‘surrender, open and receive,’ I become more honest. The layers of defenses, hurts, karma and fears all begin to fall away. I encounter my true nature, my authentic being, my diamond soul … naked, revealed.

We yearn to know and be our true nature, yet we fight against the honesty it requires. We yearn for compassion and kindness, toward ourselves, in our families, communities and in our world. Yet, in a flash of a moment, our emotional triggers and memories become activated and we have fed our anger, our resentments and our judgements, shaming and guilting ourselves or projecting this shame wherever it lands.

The simplicity of my Reiki practice as a spiritual practice often takes my breath away. There is nothing I need to do. A colleague shared with me a teaching from our Reiki Master/Teacher, Huyakuten Inamoto: “Not thinking is good. Not doing is best.” Open and receive. Become your honest self. Be compassionate.
The incredible irony is that I cannot open and receive except in love and gratitude. To open and receive is to be gifted in grace. The only appropriate response to this gift is gratitude, right here, right now. And in this experience of grace and gratitude, a gift unimaginable on some days, I find myself doing what I must do. Living purposefully. Living with focus and clarity of heart, doing what is needed. Humble discipline.

And with this gift, this receiving of Reiki, we find ourselves doing what we never imagined. We start following our inner guidance, living in the spirit of the moment, listening to the awakened heart and learning to love it all. And somehow, in the journey of all of this, I receive my health, my happiness and my prosperity.

I wish this for you as well. If you are yearning for a deepening of your spiritual life, a betterment of your health, join me for the next Reiki Level One class starting on January 25th, 2019.

Namaste,
Shirley Lynn