Suggestions
Goutte de miel
Dans l'infini.
Suspendue dans son ambre,
Glisse, glisse...
Une vague de conscience.
Jean-Pierre Chupin
In the following « Suggestions » you will find reflections, exercises, advice. These aim to help you form a clearer idea of what reiki is, of what it can bring to you and of how it can be practiced with respect to others.
If you don’t find the answers to your own questions here, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Unless your question is of a personal nature (in which case my answer will be addressed to you personally), your question and my answer could well give rise to a new “suggestion.”
The following pages may be consulted in any order. Please remember that the most important thing is not the answer or advice written here but the response it may stimulate in your own mind.
Jean-Pierre Chupin
To begin, the reiki practitioner needs to assess the energy of the person receiving treatment. This means trying to discover the trouble zones in the body. If we imagine energy as a fluid circulating through the body, it will be using channels – motorways, roads, tracks, crossroads. An energy block, to keep to the same metaphor, will be like a road block or like a traffic jam at a junction, etc.
Obviously, this is an image, not reality. But this helps by giving us a picture of the type of feelings we may experience. A well-balanced person will project a uniform, fluid perception during assessment. On the other hand, a person with an energy imbalance will cause the practioner to get different perceptions from different parts of the body. Practitioners will not register those diffeences in the same way. For some it’s a question of hot and cold, others feel more or less tingling in their fingers, or else a feeling of density or emptiness; some perceive different colours.
In practical terms, the energy assessment involves passing one’s hands over the person’s body without touching it for just one or two minutes. Each practitioner develops his or her own routine ; there is no single fixed procedure.
During the assessment, the practitioner must be mindful and receptive. One needs to make one’s mind a blank, free of voluntary or intrusive thoughts in order to facilitate contact with the person’s energy, to be able to “listen” to what the person’s body is “saying” about their suffering.
If one zone seems to be « speaking » then that is usually the part of the body that has led the person to seek treatment.But this is not always the case and it is rare to find just one area expressing itself. To return to the image of roads, a traffic jam in one place can often be explained by a problem further ahead or further back. In the same way, a reiki practitioner will be able to identify other problem areas, of which the person may be unaware, but which will need to be harmonised if the person’s problem is to be treated successfully.
This assessment will enable the reiki practitioner to direct treatment more particularly towards certain areas, before finishing with an overall treatment which always covers the emunctroy or excretory organs, necessary for toxins to be eliminated successfully from the body.
Laying one’s hand or hands on someone to relieve pain is a reflex action as old as the hills. It is a gesture showing that attention is being given to the person who is suffering, that the part of the body affected is being protected, that warmth is being communicated. In terms of energy, the hand is the tool most spontaneously used to approach the area of the body which needs to be treated. From the open palm of the hand, the calming energy passes from the giver to the receiver.
During a reiki treatment, is it better to touch the person or not? This is sensitive issue.Some reiki practitioners prefer to be in physical contact with the person they are treating. It must also be said that since a complete treatment session lasts about an hour, muscular fatigue sets in after a while when one is holding one’s hands above the body.
personally, I would advise you to have as little physical contact as possible with the person you are treating, for several reasons.
- There is no need of physical contact. The latter makes people think of other practices such as massage and unless one has specifically offerred treatment including reiki and massage, physical contact does not make reiki treatment more efficient.
- Energy perception makes use of captors which are difficult to identify but which do not involve the sense of touch. Subtle feelings due to energy transfer may well be disturbed by touching the person.
- The skin reacts to contact, however gentle this may be, even through clothes. Professional therapists who rely on touch, such as physiotherapists and osteopaths, know this very well. This reaction hinders relaxtion and may produce resistance to treatment.
- For the person receiving reiki treatment it is important they feel they are respected. Being touched may be experienced as intrusive and keeping one’s hands at a distance may reassure the receiver. In the case of a long, complete treatment session, if the practitioner feels the need to lay his or her hands on the person, it is very important to request their permission. In any case, he or she should only touch the body through clothes and should never touch the person’s private parts. As a general rule, touching the head, the face and the abdomen should always be avoided.
- Finally, don’t forget that reiki energy does not pass exclusively through the hands. Certain techniques use the breath and the eyes.To conclude, I’ll just remind you of the the existence of remote treatment, but more of this in another « suggestion ».