C Place your hands on your thighs, palms up.
C Concentrate on the sensations in your palms and become aware of the flow of Reiki through your body. (You can also turn your hands round and rest your palms on your thighs if this makes the sensations stronger.)
C Now trace the energy back. Up your arms, then further back. Further still. Wherever your awareness takes you.
You can go deeper and deeper every time you do this. Remember, Reiki works on different levels of the universe and you may be taken to different places at different times. There may even be moments when you feel you’re getting close to what Mikao Usui experienced in his moment of enlightenment…
more reiki meditation techniques
The previous exercise is one I came up with myself. But there are meditation techniques in traditional Reiki too.
And they are pleasantly simple…
Seiza
This isn’t really a technique – it’s the classic Japanese meditation pose. Seiza means ‘proper sitting’. To sit in seiza, you kneel on the floor, resting your bottom on your heels, then turn your ankles outwards so the tops of your feet are on the floor and lower your bottom right down to the floor while keeping your back straight. In Japanese tradition, women keep their knees together and men separate them slightly. Your hands can be folded in your lap, rest palm-down on your thighs or be placed in a half-curl by your hips with your knuckles touching the floor.
This may sound simple, but I have never sat in seiza myself.
My knees would kill me. Some people use a seiza bench in order not to sit directly on their ankles, but even that doesn’t work for me. Fortunately, seiza isn’t necessary. We are allowed to be comfortable in Reiki!
And yet there’s often a fine line between comfortable and casual, and a sloppy posture isn’t helpful either. The more alert we are and the straighter our spine, the more easily the ki can flow. So, by all means sit in seiza, or the lotus position, or simply cross-legged, if your physical disposition allows it. In all these cases, your two knees and your buttocks will form a ‘tripod’, and this is what is important.
If you are more comfortable sitting on a chair, make sure that your feet are placed on the floor (or, if you are too high up, on a cushion or stool), your sitting bones are firmly on the chair and your spine is straight. If you can, I would suggest sitting at the front of the chair and not leaning on the backrest, but this is up to you. You now have the tripod again: a stable base for meditation.
Gassho
Now to meditation techniques. In Reiki, as usual, we start with the hands. Forming Gassho is very simple: holding our hands flat, we bring them together, palms and fingers touching, in what is universally known as the prayer position.
But there is much more to it than initial observation suggests: it is a traditional way to greet someone, express gratitude and concentrate.
Literally, Gassho means ‘bringing the hands together’, and that is what we do: the left and right meet in the horizontal middle. We find it most comfortable holding them in front of our heart chakra, the vertical middle of our chakras. So we literally centre ourselves.
That is the physical act. Now comes the awareness.
Normally, we use our hands physically. We type or write or draw (or play with our mobile phones). We carry, we lift, we hold. Then we feel or sense something. We encounter a physical sensation. Often we use our hands independently of each other. Now we can’t – we have brought them together. We have moved away from work. We have moved away from everyday life. We are holding them still.
Looking at the hands in Gassho, we first thing we may realize is that we tend to hold them with the fingers pointing upwards. They are pointing away from the Earth.
Away from our physical selves. They are pointing towards heaven.
Next we may realize that we have brought the two hands together. But what did we bring together? First, left and right. Our two halves.
Looking at our brain and imagining our hands being guided by it, being an extension of it, we may realize that we’ve brought the two sides of our being together: the left brain, our intellect, controlling how we function in the world, and the right brain, the centre of our intuition, emotions and spiritual awareness, where we find guidance and peace.
There is a common saying that when people appear slightly confused, ‘the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing’. In Gassho the hands do know. They are held together. They are in the same place.
Having brought our attention to the position of our hands in the centre between left and right (or, rather, transcending left and right), we can now look vertically. The heart chakra doesn’t just represent the centre of the chakra system but also the centre of the Three Diamonds system. Below is the Hara, the seat of Earth energy, connecting us with the level of form. Above is the third eye, the seat of the heaven energy, connecting us to the world of spirit.
So, by holding our hands in the Gassho position, we bring all aspects of our person into harmony. From this point, we can reach out. The Centre Diamond, the heart, is the
place of connection, the place where we feel love, harmony and peace. We can now fully focus on being at one – with everybody and everything, and with our own true self.