by Mari Hall
I recently took a few days to reflect on the events of 2007 as well as how my life was before and has been after Reiki. Have you also had thoughts like that or found yourself saying, “Before Reiki I was…, and after Reiki I am…?”
Before Reiki I thought the world was harsh and hard to live in. I had decided it was not safe to show emotions, certainly that love would hurt, and the people in your life would never be there for you. I lived life closed, depressed and isolated. I was an outsider looking in at life and watching other people. I knew it was not safe to participate in life because you could not trust anyone…after all with my track record my mind was firmly made up.
I had few close friends in school and spent much of my time in my room painting or writing in my journal. By the time I was 37 I had two failed marriages and had spent enough time spent in the hospital with various illnesses to know things just did not come easy and that I did not deserve any better. I was told by my doctors that by the time I was forty, I would be totally paralyzed and in a wheelchair.
In 1980, I participated in a Reiki course and started to give myself Reiki. The paralysis in my body disappeared, but most importantly, I felt that I had touched my soul and awakened from a long sleep. I experienced a return to harmony on all levels and a deep peace.
Continuing to use Reiki as a means for inner harmony, I began taking self-development courses to heal my past. This helped me to forgive and move on. Reiki was my constant companion through that period. It still is. Since that first day with Reiki so many opportunities have been given to me, chances to say yes instead of no to life. Life has not always been rosy and all my problems did not cease to exist after Reiki. In fact it seems at some level that the heat was turned up. Reiki continues to help bring things up to heal physically and emotionally. I have been challenged to live my life in the present moment, to be true to myself, honest, and fearless. Fear-less meaning that I have come to realize that what I fear most I bring to myself. Reiki helped me change my belief structure. Feeling the way I did before Reiki became uncomfortable. Fearing shut down my energy; Faith, which is the opposite, opens me up, frees the soul and fans the flame of love in my heart.
Reiki was the beginning of my spiritual journey. There was a time when I thought I had taken that first class only to learn some Reiki techniques that might help heal me, but what actually happened was that Reiki supported me on my return to wholeness of body, mind and spirit. Every step I take with Reiki confirms the truth of this. It is a never-ending process of discovering myself, and indeed, a spiritual journey unlike anything I could ever have imagined. I have heard Grace defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul. At times I did not even realize that parts of me were not balanced until they were harmonized and I felt different… certainly more alive and filled with grace.
I know without a doubt that if I had not taken that first step with Reiki my life would be very different today. I see parallel lives: on one side “without Reiki” there is a lonely woman in a wheelchair all dried up with no life in her; on the other, “with Reiki”…me as I am. And the two are vastly different. Before Reiki, I would never have quit my job and flown to Europe, much less found myself teaching with the passion of an awakened heart in the UK and throughout Europe. I had been lit from the inside. I now cared not only for myself, I but could see how connected I was to others and how interconnected we all are. I saw and experienced a bigger picture that was beautiful.
This is an excerpt from the complete article that appears in the Spring 2008 edition of the Reiki News Magazine.
