Chapter 15: Healing Prayers
As someone who has been into Reiki, the technique of healing prayers was something I was really curious about. I wasn’t particularly interested on it, however, because Reiki had always been effective for me to heal other people and, in extreme cases, my own body. Nonetheless, always mindful of my petition at the beginning of the week, Divine Mother considered it’d be good to introduce me to this technique anyway!
I will do a little parenthesis now and explain briefly how I got into Reiki, to help understand my reflections on the Healing Prayers technique.
Shortly after my parents divorced, my father found out about Reiki and took an initiation. When I was 14 years old, a year before reading Autobiography of a Yogi, he brought my siblings and I to Angelo, his Reiki teacher (conventionally called “Reiki Master”) to take initiation too (with our previous consent, of course!) At the same time, he took initiation into level two, which supposedly allowed him to do healing at a distance with the help of special symbols.
Even though I believed on the reality of the healing energy of Reiki, I was skeptical on the teaching that you needed level two to heal at a distance. I remember thinking: “I will do Reiki by distance anyway, with or without symbols and with or without level two!” My father probably thought somewhere along the same lines, though he never told me if he did (either that or I don’t remember!). He is not someone who will believe blindly on what he is told, and when he started to find discrepancies in the teachings within that very same school, he became suspicious.
He then started to research on Reiki through books and the internet, and it wasn’t long before he found out how much diluted the teachings of Reiki had been in only eighty years. My father then investigated all he could about the original teachings of Reiki, which is not, as it’s usually seen, primarily a tool for healing the body, but rather a tool to achieve enlightenment! Upon further research he found out that, effectively, the restrictions on healing at a distance (“must be level two or more”) were false, as were the claims made by most Reiki “Masters” that the symbols are absolutely necessary for it: actually, the symbols were born as an aid to help the beginners direct the energy, nothing else!
Moving on, my father, recalling that on his initiation to level two he hadn’t felt any difference on his ability to channel the Reiki energy, realized that his own teacher was a poor channel for it, for the thought “I did it” is very normal on people who serve as channels for the energy to heal others: they were never taught otherwise! With this realization, moreover, he came to find out that a normal “Reiki Master”, on a Reiki initiation, would only give you the ability to channel that which he himself is channeling, which may not always be the pure energy of Reiki!
Armed with this knowledge, my father was initiated to the level of “Reiki Master” (he later changed this denomination to “Reiki teacher”) first by an English woman, and later by the Reiki energy itself, and founded his own school on “Dorje Reiki”. He then initiated my siblings and I into level 1, then 2 and finally 3 (which, in his school, represent only an increase of one’s ability to channel), teaching us to let the enlightened energy of Reiki flow through us and not try to interfere with it with our own desires and attachments: Reiki is intelligent energy, he taught us, it works only to bring harmony, even if the results are not always what the channel expects. Just like yoga, Reiki teaches to let God flow through us: in essence, it’s the same teaching!
As years passed, I used Reiki a lot, but I conveniently forgot about the part of “don’t try to interfere with it with your own wishes”. Eventually, when I was 18 or so, I felt my channeling had become “dirty” for some reason, and then stopped using it almost completely. It wasn’t until I was 20 and had my two feet set on the spiritual path and the teachings of Yogananda that I realized what had been wrong: I had been constantly telling myself “I am the doer”, which disturbed the flow of Reiki energy. I asked then to God that He gave me a new initiation, to “wash away” the old impurities; in meditation, I got my wish.
Ever since, I’ve practiced Reiki only with the purpose of healing other people, and never for my own body. As I learned more and more to be in tune with Reiki and to let it flow through me, I gradually realized, out of my own experience, the true essence of Reiki as it was originally taught, before all the self-styled “masters” introduced their “insight” into it.
And now I can start to recount how I experienced the technique of Healing Prayers…
It was on Tuesday evening: I had wanted to finish dinner as fast as possible to go to the Crystal Hermitage chapel and meditate, but I was kept because someone sat at the table with me and we talked as we ate. When I was finally about to excuse myself and start my walk up to the Hermitage, a woman (I don’t remember her name now) came up to my table and offered me to take a class on Healing Prayers that was going to be offered in the Lahiri Shrine at 7:30: that was in fifteen minutes! Uncompromisingly, I told her I would think about it.
Within ten minutes, I had decided it’d be best to go to the class instead of going to up to the chapel, so I headed to Lahiri Shrine, where a small group of people was gathered and already talking about the basics (I arrived a little late).
Our teacher taught us how to perform the technique, and then we sent healing energy to a number of people. I wasn’t surprised to find out what I already suspected: original Reiki and Yoganandaji’s Healing Prayers are, in essence, one and the same! The only clear difference between them is that Reiki uses an initiation, and the prayers use tension to draw the energy. Since Usui wasn’t a self-realized Master, I am inclined to think that Yogananda’s technique is the “higher” version; but a real difference? Of those, I found none.
During the period in which I learned to really channel Reiki to flow through me, the “technique” I developed as the one that, I saw, gave the best results, is almost exactly the one we were taught in Lahiri Shrine that evening. Moreover, the so familiar feeling of being a channel for the energy is exactly the same, and I should have noticed if the energy channeled was different, because of the very important truth: “The instrument is blessed by whatever passes through it.”
Maybe the most convincing point (to me) that both methods are essentially the same are the effect they have on my consciousness: whenever the healing energy reaches the patient, I feel blessed, I feel an expansion much like the feeling I experienced the first time I entered Crystal Hermitage, except this feeling is one of light instead of one of joy, just another different aspect of God (and yet the same, because underlying them both is the bliss of Satchitananda). Such is the bliss of this channeling, that I sometimes wonder who’s getting more benefit from it: the patient or myself! This effect, as you probably have guessed, is exactly the same whether I use Reiki or Yogananda’s Healing Prayers.
As for the effectiveness of these prayers, I can say without hesitation they are amazing! I have not yet directly seen their effect on someone when I am the channel, but I have seen the effects of Reiki many, many times, and I have no doubt the results of the prayers will be the same, or better.
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Next: Chapter 16: Discipleship
