60-second inter-being meditation

Posted May 18, 2012 By reikiday

Oneness

Healing as conceptualized as a joining

Good morning.

Here’s a mindfulness meditation for you to try for 60 seconds. You may be surprised at how powerful it is.

1. Set an alarm or timer for 60 seconds.

2. Close your eyes and sit up straight, in any way that is comfortable.

3. Breathe in and think something like “I breathe in my interconnection to everything else.”

4. Breathe out and think something like “I breathe out what I have borrowed.”

5. If you get distracted, think “OK” and focus on your breathing.

6. When the alarm sounds, take a few seconds to be grateful to yourself for giving yourself a minute.

7. Repeat whenever you think of it.

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Lessons of illness

Posted May 15, 2012 By reikiday

When the Reiki practitioner's target passes

Lessons of illness

To welcome illness as a teacher is counterintuitive, but important. What message may your body be sending you about your life, when you are feeling unwell?

My practice lately has been to appreciate moments, instead of setting up future things. Mindfulness practice, as taught by so many others, has something important to say about the moments we have.

The moment you are living in right now is the only one you really have. Those from the past are gone, and those of the future are only in your imagination.

Think of how often our mind is trailing off to some future event? The next social occasion. The next meeting. The next argument. The next vacation. The next ride all the way home.

Now think of how often we are reminiscing about the past. What we should have said. What happened at work. That wonderful time which is so long ago. That vacation we should repeat. That missed opportunity.

Now stop.

Come to your senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Even better, come to your sense of proprioception, and notice your breath. It is always in the present moment. And let your breath anchor you to your other senses, in the present moment. Literally come to your senses. Sensation. Breath. All that is.

That is mindfulness. Only aware of what is here, now.

***

Illness is a state of chronic worry about the next disease sign, or what it means for the future.

But illness can be an ally if it teaches us to reach into the current moment as, to be honest, not so bad. It could be worse.

“There is more right with you that wrong with you,” Jon Kabat-Zinn says to his chronically ill workshop participants. It is an absolute truth.

There is always more right with us, than wrong with us. Illness can teach us how to appreciate what we do, in fact, have in the moment.

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Meditation: I’m not me

Posted May 10, 2012 By reikiday

We have an opportunity to discover something remarkable in meditation

I want to share with you a life-changing awareness.

The “story of me” might be making me sick.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot on meditation. Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon-Kabat Zinn (again, I keep going back to him), the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, and even a new fellow named Martin Boroson, who makes meditation very simple, who offers a wonderful video called “One Moment Meditation” which I urge you to check out, at his website, at onemomentmeditation.com.

But the most powerful phrase that has occurred to me out of my reading and viewing is in a video of Jon Kabat-Zinn at Google, giving a 75-minute lecture on mindfulness, linked here.

The most important and helpful thought during meditation, which Deepak Chopra also teaches, is “Who is talking (in my head)? Who is doing the noticing that I am talking?”

And when meditative awareness is occurring, I am reminded of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s insight that “We are all so caught up in the Story of Me.” He goes on to explain that we are focused on MY life, what it is that “I” am doing, what makes ME happy, what makes ME miserable. And in getting so caught up, actually miss life. Or, as he says in the video linked here, ‎”Our opinions of ourselves actually get in the way of being ourselves.”

This ego thing is responsible for missing my life and not enjoying it. Why do “I” need to have a story of “my life” in the first place?

Reiki teaches, at its highest understanding, that interconnection is the only truth and that separation in time or space does not exist. If that is really true, what does the Story of Me matter?

All ponderings for my own meditation practice. And maybe yours too, if you wish.

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How to Be Nice

Posted April 16, 2012 By reikiday

Reading this post has the potential to make your life better.

I am going to teach you how to win friends and influence people. It is really easy. And it is related to Reiki in a big way.

The first positive injunction of Reiki is “be filled with gratitude.” That follows two negative injunctions in the Reiki Ideals: “Just for today, do not anger. Do not worry, and be filled with gratitude” is the statement.

Why is gratitude important? Glad you asked. I wrote a dissertation about it to finish my doctorate, so I should know a little about it, don’t you think? I think so too.

Gratitude is, according to researcher Barbara Fredrickson, one of the emotions and behaviors that allows us, as people, to “broaden and build” our social networks. And since human beings are wired, at the most basic level, to be social, this is pretty important. Gratitude lets us make more social connections, and builds upon our existing ones.

Now think of the opposite: ingratitude. What do we think of people who are not grateful? Generally, we find a way to leave them alone. They bring us down. They are a drag. Not fun. Boring. Dark cloud over them, etc. Sometimes we even find a way to get rid of them from our circles of friends, or places of business.

So if you want to be nice, be grateful. Not only will this help YOU, because it is impossible to have a bad feeling when you are truly grateful (try it — try to be angry or anxious in a moment of gratitude!), but that “vibe” travels to other people around you via your posture, tone of voice, facial expression, color of your skin, movements, not to mention your ENERGY which more and more Western research is showing to be a “real thing” (see The Intention Experiment by McTaggart).

So, you want to have a FANTASTIC life? Be grateful, *even* to the people you might have a hard time finding a reason to like. Sociopaths? Be grateful to them that they teach us lessons about what is important. Inconsiderate people? Be grateful that teachers of justice and peace have someone to teach. Mean boss? Be grateful to the person who teaches you the importance of other things in life besides work.

And if you do this, if you are “filled with gratitude” as the Reiki Ideals say, you will not only be a nice person, but a healer.

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Lighten up! It’s all fiction!

Posted April 6, 2012 By reikiday

Is Reiki fictional? Yes.

And so is absolutely everything else. Science, love, heat, light, darkness, cold, happiness, sadness. Everything is fictional.

Is this depressing? No, absolutely not. In fact, it is liberating. Of course, the very statement presents a dilemma: If everything is fictional, is the statement itself fictional? “Everything is false” inherently represents a logical problem; if everything is false, the statement must be false too. To accept that it is false, is to say it is true.

Everything is false.

Now, let’s assume that is true (!). The only thing that matters is whether a fiction is “useful” or “non-useful.” Is Reiki (which is fictional because it is a word representing a SOMETHING that human beings claim to exist, like everything else) a useful fiction?

I say yes. Reiki has helped many people around the world. The fiction of it has been responsible for the healing (meaning the relief of suffering) of many, including myself.

So are fictions useless? No. The medical establishment is fictional too. All of our structures are. All of our structures wither away as soon as there is no human mind to hold them together.

But they are useful to us, right now.

Check your premises. Examine everything you hold as true under the light of the possibility, and I say certainty, that it is false. And then figure out whether it is a useful belief to hold or not. If it is useless, as a wiser man than me once said, cut it off.

Birth, renewal, hope. Wash away the illusion of certainty, and be born into possibility. Happy Spring.

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The gift of endless compassion

Posted March 27, 2012 By reikiday

Try this exercise the next time you feel aggravated or upset with the behavior of another person.

First, recognize your own position in the universe. Even if you are 100 years old, that is a very short time in the fullness of eternity. There are trees and turtles four times your age. You have only been here for the mere blinking of an eye. You are still a child; in fact, we all are.

So we must stop pretending that the awful things we are doing to one another have any legitimacy whatsoever. We need to reign in our adult behaviors, because our adultness is an illusion and always has been.

The next step is to use the fullness of this new insight to regard the person with the offending behavior. Have you heard the dissonance that occurs when someone describes a child with an “adult-sounding” pejorative name? For instance, “jerk” or “creep” perhaps? It never sounds right.

It doesn’t sound right for “adults” either. In fact, I challenge you to call someone a creep and feel, in the next millisecond, how the injury reflects back to you.

Label the behavior if you must (“inconsiderate”), but not the person. A child did it.

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Thanks for being human this time

Posted March 19, 2012 By reikiday

The Fool, the first card in the Major Arcana

Tripping through life, wondering why you are here?

We deeply appreciate that you answered our invitation to this incarnation as a human being.

For a long time, we have been hoping that the human species would evolve into a race that has the capacity to save the Earth planet (which itself is a living entity with a bio-heritage we value) from the threat of collision with other space objects.

Since its dawn into self-awareness, this human species has wondered about its purpose. It only has one. It is to develop ways to save the Earth from its destruction.

All the wars and tragedies have served a purpose. As humans learned how to divide among themselves and practice destroying one another, they have developed the technological capability to defend the planet itself. We are curious to know whether the humans will cease warring now that they are at the point where planetary defense is a possibility. Only time will tell.

In any case, this message is to thank you for choosing, in this incarnation, to become one of the planetary defenders. It is our hope that you will spread the word to other humans about the solitary purpose for the existence of the human race, so that the human guardians can begin to live peaceably among one another, and among all the other creatures and forms of life that humans are ultimately tasked with protecting.

We will send further communications as necessary.

Have a pleasant day.

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Inner joining outer reality

Posted March 4, 2012 By reikiday

Buddha
The invitation of the eastern philosophies and religions is to look inward, and not outward, for the reality in which we choose to participate.

There are many things, good and bad, occurring in the universe we physically perceive. Those can pull us up the great heights of expectation, anticipation, and joy. They can also pull us down into disappointment, despair, anger, and illness.

Like everyone else, I struggle — with great difficulty often — to maintain an inner focus and an inner peace. It is not easy because I, like so many others, have become fascinated with the idea of an “I-ness.”

The East teaches us there really is no individual. There is no separation between one thing and the next. There is only continuity. My thought touches your thought, and my actions reach you. Independence is a lie. A total wholeness is the only reality.

It is hard to perceive that total wholeness when we see a world in which our highly evolved (perhaps) brains tell us everything is separate. So in order to see it as it truly is — all connected — we must half-close our eyes to remember that what we see is not the whole story. It is only a very small part of the total reality.

We dim our vision in order to see things as they are.

We go within ourselves to find the peaceful connectedness we so desperately need, that which tells us there is no such thing as a future or a past. There is no such thing as death or life. There is no such thing as here or there. There is only one moment, right here, right now. That is always the only reality.

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Reiki Psychology readership up

Posted February 28, 2012 By reikiday

Oneness

Healing as conceptualized as a joining


I would like to offer my thanks to those with whom the words of Reiki Psychology have joined.

The journey into serenity, oneness, and better overall health is a constant path, with rests along the way. Sometimes journeys have their setbacks — a loss, a missing companion, a problem — and then we find the gains, the new companions, and the rewards.

So it is with Reiki, and so it is in everything else (because it is all connected).

Thank you once again for joining with me on the journey through the book Reiki Psychology. I am so grateful it reached you.

Sincerely,
R. Shipon

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New practice dedicated to wellness

Posted February 4, 2012 By reikiday

Hello everyone,

Hope all is going well. I am sorry I have been away from the ReikiDay blog for so long. I have opened a new private practice in Mountain Lakes NJ and it is just getting to the level of expanding. It you are interested in checking it out, please take a look at Inner Wellth and if you don’t mind, “Like” the Facebook page to join the conversation about total wellness and success.

In the mean time, I would like to report that the distribution of Reiki Psychology has increased dramatically with the wide adoption of e-readers. For everyone who purchased the book or viewed and rated the YouTube video, to the right.

Best wishes to everyone. I plan to post more soon.

R. Shipon

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