Family gatherings are fascinating, like little microcosms of intense behavioural analysis over short periods of time – all your childhood trauma and patterns on display for a few days. I always learn so much! The theme for this holiday was people pleasing. I have always been a chronic people pleaser. I have gotten much better, able to draw boundaries with clients, students, some friends. But family and loved ones? Much harder. I was pondering the roots of this, why can’t I just say ‘no’? To requests, to behaviours, to assumptions, to roles? Then, as often happens, I was on a call with a lady ..read more

An update of the Ideal Scene concept – For years at the Reiki centre a calendar highlight was the end of year “Ideal Scene” Reiki gathering. We would gather, share Reiki, create a really potent energy for manifesting, and then write our Ideal Scene for the following year. It was dated a year ahead, so if it was 20th December 2023, you would write the date one year ahead, 20th December 2024 and then write a letter to yourself, or to a loved one, describing all the amazing things that had happened in the year. It’s a fun way to manifest as it creates an energy of “already happening” or an energ ..read more

I recently completed a course called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I took it to see what secular mindfulness was all about, especially as it is now offered on the NHS, keeping up with the Joneses and all that. The course was nice enough, the teachers where lovely and the participants sincere and open-minded. But I have to say I struggled with the pointlessness of it all, if I was coming at it fresh without any spiritual background, it would have gone straight in the bin. To get some perspective, mindfulness is actually mind training, a bit like relaxation is body training. It com ..read more

After a few months off it was lovely to meet once again in our monthly online community. We discussed a more expansive way to bring Reiki as a more permanent support system rather than 'doing' Reiki as a technique. Activate and expand Reiki to be a constant companion in your daily life. After all it is universal life force and is as available and accessible as air. What happens when we start to become more mindful of this? The second theme was to experiment with the 'self-attunement', imagine the potential for yourself, and others, if we could booster ourselves and continue to attune ourselves ..read more

When I have questions or problems that I’m dealing with and I take time out to meditate and clear my mind, I sometimes get answers during the meditation. How do I tell whether these answers are my intuition or my mind? They feel like a hunch but then after the meditation I end up rationalising that hunch and can’t tell if the original answer was intuitive or my mind. Do you have any advice on how I can tell the difference between an idea generated by my mind and pre-existing beliefs and an intuition that actually is a better way forward? This is a very common question as we progress with our ..read more

I caught covid a few weeks ago and during my 3 days in bed I was reading a series called The Enlightenment Trilogy by Jed McKenna. (He's a fictional character but the books are beautifully written.) Somehow the mixture of being too weak to fight/resist and the power of the books themselves, woke me up (to the next stage, whatever that is). I have long known that all our egoic structure is based on belief – that underneath or behind it all is a presence or consciousness. We must believe ourselves into existence. I have had direct and indirect experience of this over the years. (If you want to ..read more

There has been an interesting percolation of ideas bubbling up that I am playing with. I'm expressing it here as a way of intention, but also as a way of getting some feedback and ideas from you all – what do you think? What are some barriers you foresee? Does it resonate? Would it be wonderful if Reiki was accessible and available for all? I am imagining a network of Reiki teachers, from any lineage, who are passionate about this and want to do their part in making this a reality. By creating individual community projects we can add a small amount of our own time and effort to a larger group ..read more

When moving through spiritual growth, it is often handy to have a road map that helps you to put tools into perspective – where they belong on the map and what usefulness they have. People often start with something like positive thinking or law of attraction as their first step on the personal growth ladder and then become confused when they see other tools that tell them to let go and stop trying to control. So should we control or not? It’s not a simple yes/no answer – it depends where you are on the map, and what stage you are at, also what pathway you are travelling. In this article, I a ..read more

According to Wikipedia from 1580 to 1630 an estimated 50,000 “witches” were executed in Europe. 80% were women and most of them over the age of 40. Witch hunts went on over an extended period from 1400 right up until the mid-1700’s when laws were passed making it illegal. Historical consensus is that these “witches” were for the most part innocent. The result of mass hysteria, fear, weak central governments and individuals abusing their local positions of power. Horrendous torture techniques were used to extract confessions and usually resulted in accusations levelled at other members of the ..read more

Open Source is a term used for software program development that is freely available for anyone to update and change. Open Source pretty much built the internet. More than this it is a philosophy of community, collaboration, transparency and sharing. Systems and programs improve quickly, gaps are filled, there is a combined vision and many people working towards this shared vision. The input of thousands of programmers also pushes creative development in a million different directions creating even more energy, vision, and creation. How does this relate to Reiki? Traditional wisdom is that Re ..read more