In the Beginning

I guess that in writing this weblog, I wanted to get down some of my thoughts and experiences on life as it transpires around me and within me from the perspective of being a teacher of Reiki. Importantly, at least from the way I view it, is the fact that I teach Reiki from the tradition of Reiki Jin Kei Do - which is very different from teaching Reiki from pretty much any other tradition as far as I can tell. There are many reasons for this, and I guess as time goes by, these differences will become more apparent. To detail them all here would not be very meaningful. Best to let them appear and contextualize themselves as we go.

This is my first attempt at a 'blog' and so those of you more knowledgeable than me will, I hope allow me to make all the mistakes that I need to on my learning curve, before bombarding me with suggestions for improvements! Thanks in advance! I will get there in the end!

I first got into Reiki back in 1996, at a time in my life when things couldn't have gotten much worse. Life was bad and spiralling out of control in a big way. I am not going to trawl over the details here. There is no point. Suffice to say that at the time when I needed someone, anyone, just a friend of any description in my life, Reiki came along. A part of the traumatic situation that I was in at the time was the need to find a direction for my life. I needed a new career, a new purpose. I had always had a vague interest in complementary therapies (though I only knew snippets of information about a handful of them) and so decided that this would be a good direction to go in - get trained up in one or two and then make bucket loads of cash as a private practitioner. But where to start?

I recall reading an article about this thing called 'Reiki' that up to that point in my life I had never heard of in some magazine - maybe Kindred Spirit. The article was brief, but grabbed me. I don't know why, maybe it was the fact that the training was relatively short or maybe it was that it was relatively cheap - perhaps both. It was a good place to start though, and so I sent off for details from everyone that was advertising a Reiki course in that particular issue of the magazine. One of the advertisers was Healing Touch, based in Newcastle in the North East of England. I don't know why the material that I recieved from my soon-to-be Reiki Masters grabbed me so much, but something inside of me just told me that this was where I had to go. In April of that year I took my 1st Degree training with Gordon and Dorothy Bell in Newcastle, and my life was never to be the same again.

I guess that there were two things that got me really hooked on Reiki. The first, though not necessarily the most important, was the unmistakable sensation of heat and tingling that was manifesting in my hands pretty much all of the time. The second, and the one that actually sticks in my memory the most clearly, was the incredible warmth, love, friendship and support that Gordon and Dorothy both gave me. It felt like a homecoming. I knew that I had arrived at exactly the place that I needed to be and more than this, I felt honoured to have been given the chance to learn this profound system of healing and spiritual development from whom I still consider to be two of the best Reiki teachers teaching anywhere.

Three months later I went back to take my 2nd Degree and was then invited by Dorothy to begin my Master training, which began in January 1997. While my Master training was going on I began to work enthusiastically as a practitioner of Reiki Therapeutics. I felt that I had found my niche in life, but actually as time went on, it began to dawn on me that this was not so.

In my previous life I had been a school teacher and a good one at that. As much as I no longer wanted to work in this profession - for many reasons to do with stress, discipline, Government interference with preposterous new 'initiatives', and the battle against so many ego's making life difficult in their attempts to climb the career ladder, I could not get away from the fact that the one thing that I was missing, was teaching, and more and more I was becoming disenchanted with the prospect of being a therapist. I liked helping people for sure, but the role of therapist was not something I wanted anymore.

I stuck at it however, and by the summer of 1998 I had completed the first part of my Master training and Gordon and Dorothy unleashed me on an unsuspecting world as a teacher of Reiki in my own right. This was more like it! Teaching a subject that I loved, but no-one to answer to!

To cut a long story short, after teaching Reiki in the UK for a couple of years in the summer of 2000 I moved to Egypt and began to teach Reiki there also - with the occasional trip back to the UK to teach a class. I am now back in the UK pretty much full time (after 3 wonderful years in a truly astonishing country) and still teaching Reiki. Reiki is and probably always will be a critical part of my life. It is now fundamental to every aspect of my day to day existence and manifests for me in so many extraordinary ways. It is a real delight to see this method change the lives of so many people as they come to take classes and then go on their own journeys of discovery with it.

Something Still Missing?

Last year (2005) I decided that I needed a new direction again. Not because I wanted to get out of the Reiki teaching business, but because there were still parts of me that I had not fully explored or developed. There was still something missing. It was not hard to find what it was.

Ever since the age of 14 I have wanted to be a writer. I had never done it for a whole variety of reasons - perhaps mainly due to fear of failure, but the consequence has always been a deep sense of not being truly fulfilled. This had to change and so I made up my mind to just do it. Write something, on anything, and get it published. Sounds easy doesn't it? It was.

Reiki Jin Kei Do: The Way of Compassion and Wisdom

I had to find a subject. Reiki was the obvious one. The trouble was that there were hundreds of books on the subject already. Most of them frankly; rubbish as they just regurgitated the same old material over and over again. Yet another basic guide to Reiki's most basic attributes. If I was going to write a Reiki book it had to be different. A book unlike anything else out there on the subject.

Now, as I have said, Reiki Jin Kei Do is very different to other systems of Reiki, and more than this there had never been a book on this particluar method of Reiki practice - so here was my focus: the world's first book on the tradition, teachings and philosophy of Reiki Jin Kei Do. I was going to be in big trouble with this if I got it wrong!! I was going to do it anyway...and not tell a soul until it was too late to stop it...

By the time that I got around to telling anyone about the book - my Reiki Masters and the lineage Head, Dr Ranga Premaratna - there were already I think 4 finished chapters and I was all set to go to a publisher with it. O Books, relatively new to the Reiki-book publishing scene seemed to be a good bet, so I went to them first - with the 1st draft of those 4 chapters. Within a week they had bought the book. Gritting my teeth, I plowed on and had the book finished 3 months ahead of schedule in October 2005.

At the time of writing this the book is not yet out, but it is already garnering a great deal of interest. Not only from those within the tradition of Reiki Jin Kei Do and particularly with my own Reiki students, but also within the wider world of Reiki.