Reiki

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Feb 5, 2002

On Sunday, Neal Sideman ( http://www.paniccure.com ) and I had our first telephone "meeting" through which he has generously offered to teach me about cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt). We are scheduled to talk again on Friday and then I will either write about cbt myself or, since he is more well-versed in the subject, ask Neal to write a guest column explaining it. What he has taught me so far is a brilliant concept for changing how we think about and therefore how we respond to panic. Very intriguing ideas and techniques.

In the meantime, it has been quite a while since I've written about any approaches to healing and I think maybe it's time to stop meandering on about myself for a while and talk about some of the more active approaches that can be taken to healing. I'm a teacher/practitioner of something called Reiki (pronounced RAY-key) and that's what I would like to talk about this week.

Before I continue, though, let me issue a warning/apology to all you nice left brain folks out there who live by logic alone. This is going to be very "airy-fairy" stuff, nebulous and mystical. Things like reiki require some logical gymnastics for those who are very down to earth; they require you to exercise that OTHER side of your brain a bit. Before you run screaming from the page in disgust, though, I would ask that before you dismiss reiki, you do the scientific thing and experiment with it. Reiki may defy logic, but I have run into very few people who don't actually experience the energy. A long time ago when I was still pretty new to the art, my nephew, a realist if every there was/is one, generously agreed to humor me and got on my reiki table fully expecting, I'm pretty sure, that absolutely nothing was going to happen. He was studying akido at the time and had sore wrists (I think it was his wrists). Much to his astonishment, he felt heat and then no more pain. He was determined at the time to find a logical explanation for what happened. I don't think he ever did, though. Reiki isn't logical.

So what is Reiki? It is an ancient and mystical healing practice with roots in ancient Tibet. It was rediscovered as a practice in the early 1900's by a Japanese teacher named Mikao Usui. There are a number of conflicting and somewhat mythological stories about how he reclaimed this lost art and I think they are basically beside the point, so I won't go into them. If you are interested in the most recent (and probably most accurate) information on Reiki history, you can check out a really fine website on the subject: http://reikihistory.topcities.com/index....

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The copyright of the article Reiki in Agoraphobia is owned by Katherine E. Rabenau. Permission to republish Reiki in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.