The Reiki Blog

Reiki is nonsense. June 13, 2013

Every few months, I check where my blog comes up on a Google search. I’ll check “The Reiki Blog” (the actual name of my blog), “Reiki blogs,” and “Reiki.” I’m always humbled and stunned by how high my blog ranks in the first two categories (always in the top two). But by just Googling “Reiki,” I’ve come up with some real shockers.

Today, I saw that Quackwatch (http://www.quackwatch.com/) featured an article called “Reiki Is Nonsense,” by Stephen Barrett, M.D. It begins, “Reiki is one of several nonsensical methods commonly referred to as ‘energy healing’.”

After mockingly quoting a British website that claims that Reiki can heal every ill known to man, Dr. Barrett chooses to cement his claims against Reiki by quoting at length from the American Conference of Catholic Bishops’ denunciation of Reiki and insistence that Catholic priests, monks, nuns and laypeople—who’d found the practice effective and enthusiastically embraced it in the spirit of the first Apostles and the Holy Ghost—abandon this gentle healing practice or else. God forbid that anyone other than ordained Catholic (male) clergy should practice the laying on of hands in the name of the Holy Spirit.

And Dr. Barrett chooses to end his argument with a citation worthy of The Crucible, of the Salem Witch Trials, where teenage girls exacted revenge on everyone they decided to dislike, sending them not to the stake, as is still commonly believed, but to the gallows. Sending innocent women and men to their deaths to get attention. In the case Dr. Barrett cites, a 9-year-old girl, called Emily Rosa, “debunked” Reiki practitioners in the mid-1990s, continuing her debunking through age 10. Oops, wait—she didn’t interact with Reiki practitioners at all, instead performing her experiments on practitioners of therapeutic touch (TT).

Yet Dr. Barrett, while admitting this, claims that the results would have been the same if she’d pitted herself against Reiki people as well. (And here I thought science demanded proof. Perhaps I could claim that Dr. Barrett isn’t actually an M.D. because I didn’t see his diploma on the Quackwatch website.) Perhaps I’m being ignorant here myself, but I thought “Emily Rose” was the name of the girl in “The Exorcist.” Or if not, in the name of some other satanic movie. Sheesh.

The good doctor makes a final point, crowing that Reiki practitioners don’t have to have any special training, apart, of course, from Reiki classes and practice. Excuse me if I’m missing the point here, but as I understand it, doctors don’t have to have any “special” training apart from med school and interning. Of course pre-med, med school, and interning is damned hard work. So is training for Reiki mastership, attending classes, studying, practicing, assisting at Reiki classes for 6 months to a year or more after rising through the first two levels of Reiki training.

That doesn’t even touch on the training that Reiki practitioners like me choose to go through, studying for years and years in as many schools of Reiki as we can, such as Gendai and Komyo and Jikiden as well as Traditional Reiki, Japanese Reiki as taught by the International House of Reiki, and Reiki Ryoho. Reiki is indeed a lifetime study, as conventional medicine should be. Yet I’ve never heard a single Reiki practitioner denounce conventional medicine as this doctor and this website casually, frivolously, arrogantly denounce Reiki.

Reiki, should they bother to look into it or experience it for themselves, isn’t about specific diseases and their cure. Instead, it’s about loving touch, disinterested loving touch that doesn’t judge a person on appearance, weight, or age, but rather on the simple laying on of hands, the healing touch that Jesus Christ and His apostles, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, instituted to heal our hurts. So many people have only experienced hurtful touch, abusive touch, manipulative touch, or sexual touch. They have never felt the gentle, healing laying on of hands in complete acceptance of themselves, whoever and whatever they are, in complete, nonjudgmental love that asks nothing in return—nothing at all—but simply shows the body, mind and heart that they are loved.

Even Dr. Barrett in his article admitted that Reiki practitioners put their hands down on fully clothed recipients. He said specifically that they used gentle, noninvasive touch. He understood that there was no abuse of the client, either physically or mentally. And yet he failed to understand the point, the whole point of Reiki.

I’m not even talking about the point of Reiki practice, the ultimate goal of enlightenment, satori, for those of us who set our feet on the Reiki Way. That would clearly be beyond the ability of someone like Dr. Barrett, with his glib snap judgments, to understand. But that he would dismiss the healing power of Reiki, of loving touch, out of hand, in our touch-averse world, makes me sick.

Humans, like all creatures, were made for touch, born for touch. Without touch, we sicken and die. Scientists have proved, to my horror, that babies raised without touch will inevitably die. Yet despite this, we as a society dismiss the centrality of touch to our well-being. Most people use touch to get their own ends—sex, dominance—and never put their hands down in simple, disinterested love. That sites like Quackwatch and people like Stephen Barrett could offhandedly condemn those of us who choose to try to heal through loving touch is truly shameful. Shame, shame on them!!!

Reiki people, don’t be put off by such ignorant, pathetic, dogmatic pronouncements. Put your hands down in love, and let Reiki do what it will. Put your hands down, and ignore those who believe that healing only comes at a price. Maybe we can’t heal cancer or Parkinson’s or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis or whatever. What we can do is give rest and relief to those who suffer, from those and endless other conditions.

Just for today, be kind.

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