The question I’m most asked as a Reiki teacher is “What’s the deal with the attunement and the magical symbols?”

A Reiki attunement is offered after levels of formal study with a qualified teacher. It’s a marker of the degree of learning, of study and time put toward the healing and meditative technologies of Reiki.

An attunement is an energetic transmission from teacher to student. Attunements channel vision, value, and coloring to the healing process, to our understanding of the unity of experience. An attunement is a ritual of passage, a recognition that something has been learned.

And as with most spiritual concepts, after the study and practice there is non-cognitive assignment through ritual. We can get to communion in many ways. Reiki attunment is a way, a technology, and it is a technology of healing.

It is in these states that most higher learning comes, when we are open to the non-linear and the non-substantial, to the energetic flow that pours through us, and without us.

A Reiki Master in this process is not sharing anything personal, anything from ego, but simply opening the moment to a greater gift, the student allowing power to be given back.

For a gift to be real, it has to be given. It’s no different with the gift of healing.

Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, merged Buddhist, Christian, and Tantric rituals and healing practices, following a self-proclaimed vision of “Universal Life Energy.” From his vision he extracted three symbols, said to represent cycles of physical, mental, and spiritual healing.

Symbols connect us to our unconscious drives and reaches, and from these subtle states we flower to divine power and wisdom. The bridge is the symbol, and then there is no longer a bridge or symbol, there is no need any longer.

The Reiki symbols are a ritual metaphor, a magic languaging like The Lord’s Prayer, or the Kabbalist’s Ladder. Shared language, shared symbols, and shared clues lead to shared vision. They’re pictures that get you there. Like a green light. Like a key.

The attunement and the symbols represent a moment of higher unity with teacher and student, a moment with a shared energetic and metaphorical language, a doorway, a liminal break, and as Chogyam Trungpa so aptly puts it, “ It is merely a meeting of two minds. Two minds become one”

As with abhisheka (the ritual “sprinkling” in Vedic rites) or Christian baptism this shared ritual represents passage in time and connection to the divine outside us, and the divine within. Healing and bliss are there. And there is everywhere.

Peace

Robert Allen
www.reikiteaching.com
www.roguetantra.com


copyright Robert Allen 2008