The following piece appeared on a previous blog a couple of years ago. I am reposting it here now as a prelude to a whole chapter of my new book Mindfulness Meditation and the Art of Reiki, covering the same topic. It's a topic that there genuinely needs to be some debate around in the energy healing community.
In the following video, Indian mystic, Sadhguru warns against the practice of energy healing. As a Reiki Master of 25 years, who has taught hundreds of students in different countries, I fully endorse what Sadhguru is saying. “Why would someone involved in energy healing, agree that energy healing is bad?” First, here is what Sadhguru had to say: (note: the video has been disabled by the owner for playing on sites other than YouTube. Click the link below to take you to YouTube):
If you are a Reiki practitioner or a Reiki Master, no doubt your hackles are up. They shouldn’t be. Sadhguru doesn’t say anything that contradicts the philosophy and tenets of the Reiki system.
When I teach a Reiki class, I always make it clear to my students, that what I’m NOT doing is teaching them to be healers. They may well end up facilitating many healings, but they themselves won’t be healing anybody.
I’ve facilitated many healings in the 25 years since I learned Reiki; physical healings, mental and emotional healings, and even environmental healings. But I’m not a healer and have no desire to be one.
In the video, Sadhguru said: “All chronic illnesses are an indicator of a deeper problem that exists. If you erase the indicator it will find expression in some other way.”
As an energy healer, you have no way of knowing what that deeper problem may be, or where it is located within the energetic matrix or physical body of the human being. Some believe that they can access this information and target the original cause. Mostly this is an expression of the ego because they can’t.
The information pinpointing the original cause is certainly out there in the universal energy field (UEF) and within the energetic matrix of the human being. This information, however, when accessed by the energy healer, is filtered through the human mind and is subject to various influences: the perceptions of the ego, obscurations caused by our own imperfections, sensory data filtering as well as cultural, religious and time-specific influences. This all renders the originally pure information as potentially inaccurate or entirely wrong. Most people, most energy healers, do not have the spiritual connectivity, or spiritual awareness to read this information accurately, to know that it is being corrupted by themselves.
Consequently, energy is manipulated, eradicated, replaced, basically fucked about with, by people who simply do not know what they are doing.
In Reiki Jin Kei Do, there is an acknowledgment that the energy of Reiki is essentially an intelligent energetic life force. It knows, better than we do, what is required in a healing context. As a practitioner, therefore, it is important to allow this energy to do what is required without our limited conscious mind having any input because we simply do not know what is required to effect successful healing.
So we ‘step the mind back’ out of the healing process. By engaging in meditation practice, called The Six Point Meditation we relinquish any conscious engagement in the healing process, and allow the energy to do whatever is required. The more we can remove our conscious intention to do this or do that in terms of healing, the more we allow the energy to do what is necessary.
One of the problems we have as human beings is that we think we understand the nature of healing: There is a problem, let's remove the problem, and healing is achieved. This is not always the case. We need to broaden our conception of what we mean by healing. Sometimes healing is not about removing the problem but allowing the problem to unfold. To allow it to teach us whatever is to be learned from the experience. Sometimes healing is about learning to lead a meaningful and happy, productive existence within the context of the problem. If we can do this, then the problem ceases to be a problem, and becomes a trigger for positive growth, for beneficial outcomes to manifest.
So in Reiki, we don’t rip out the negative energy and replace it with positive energy. We encourage the transformation of this so-called negative energy, this health issue, to transform and take on a more positive aspect, by stepping our conscious minds out of the way and allowing to be, what is meant to be.
To assume we understand what healing means; to assume we know how to fix a problem at its deepest pre-manifestation state is naive and childish. This is why Reiki is so dominant in the energy healing field. It has a much more sophisticated understanding of health and healing than other energy healing practices.
If you want to heal the world, you start by being. You limit your amount of doing. Just being is very powerful.
At its highest level, there is no contradiction between the words of Sadhguru, and the practice of Reiki when it is carried out correctly and in accordance with the foundations of the practice.
Postscript: The original videos from which I quoted Sadhguru have been deleted from YouTube (unfortunately they are also referenced in my upcoming book). The video here presents some of the opinions that Sadhguru voiced in relation to the practice of energy healing, but not all.