The Reiki Blog

On death and Reiki. May 19, 2012

Posted by ourfriendben in Reiki, Reiki wisdom.
Tags: Frans Stiene, Gerard Manley Hopkins, International House of Reiki, Reiki, Reiki and dying, Shunryu Suzuki
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Frans Stiene of the International House of Reiki (www.IHReiki.com) is hosting a 1 1/2-hour webclass called “Reiki and Dying” on June 20 (in the U.S. and U.K.) and June 21 (in Australia). “In this teleclass Frans Stiene will be looking at how death relates to the system of Reiki,” the e-mail noted, as well as “how the idea of death affects your spiritual practice.” (There are plenty of other topics addressed as well; go to their website to read all about it and/or sign up. The webinar is $75, and you can participate live and ask questions; everyone who registers will also receive a recording of the class, so if it’s not convenient to actually listen in, you’ll still receive the entire teaching.) I’m dying (sorry, couldn’t resist) to know what Frans plans to share with participants!

As everyone who has come close to death and been recalled knows, death itself is nothing to fear. Many people describe it as being similar to falling asleep; thus the beautiful expression “falling asleep in the Lord.” (Actually, it’s more interesting than that. It’s like someone walking through a house turning off all the light switches, as the organs start to shut down. You can feel it happening, but it doesn’t hurt, so it’s not alarming.) It’s not the actuality of death that’s so terrifying, it’s the idea of death, the thought that we will lose not just our form but ourselves, that we will cease to be. And coupled with that is the sorrow of parting with our experience and enjoyment of this beautiful world in which we’re privileged to live.

The priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captured this sense of loss perfectly in his poem “Spring and Fall: to a young child.” He writes:

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! As the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for. 

(Please forgive the eccentricity of the WordPress format, which won’t let me close up the lines in a poem, making reading so awkward and wrecking continuity. Maybe there’s a way to get around this, but if so, I don’t know it.)

Reiki can rescue us from this sadness at perceived separation from beauty, from loved ones, from life, because it is a path of connection to the All. When we follow the Reiki Way, we come to see the connection of All there is.

It is inevitable that our form will drop away, that our individuality will dissipate. As Shunryu Suzuki-roshi succinctly put it, “Everything changes.” But what will not change is our essence, already a part of everything in the most literal and atomic sense, and the animating energy, which we call Reiki, that is the cause and support of all life. Hopkins also recognized this, when he said in his poem “God’s Grandeur”:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

Forms arise, change, disperse, regenerate. But underneath the changes lies the unchanging, the eternal, of which life and death are passing phases, meteors in the night sky, sparklers lit and tossed into a pond. Should heaven and earth pass away, our essence, and the energy that animates it, will still exist, out among the stars. Death, be not proud.

Just for today, be grateful.

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