Reiki Training This July

What is Reiki: Energy work is the simple explanation.

I am American Indian, from the White Earth Nation. Anishinaabe is the Ojibwe name for the people. AKA: Chippewa, Ojibway. Both my parents were from Naytahwaush, Minnesota. We are all enrolled members of the White Earth reservation, and my enrollment is removal Fond du Lac.

I knew four (4) other Native American Reiki practitioners when I started in 1994. Two women and two men. There are many more Reiki practitioners today. Some use Reiki to make a living, and some for personal reasons only. All appreciative of the gift.

My first experience with Reiki was with an American Indian therapist. He was demonstrating Reiki at a mental health conference. He invited me to schedule an appointment with him to experience a Reiki session.

Marcus talked about using Reiki as an addition to therapy, and that some of his clients would come in for a 50-minute Reiki session, and talk therapy would be a very small part of the session. I scheduled an appointment with Marcus, and the day came when my daughter dropped me off for an hour.

After that first session, when Joanna came to pick me up, she asked me to drive the car. We went to Superior, and Joanna had fallen asleep. When she woke up, I was driving around lost and not at all concerned.

Joanna didn’t recognize the situation and became upset, and had me stop to ask for directions. I told her that we wouldn’t be lost for long, as we would soon recognize something. I was just totally relaxed and calm. I loved Reiki then and continue to now.

After about a year from my first Reiki experience, I was living in Bemidji and invited Marcus to provide an attunement for level I to me, my sister, brother, and a friend.

We paid for his hotel room, gave him gas money, and we each gave him 4 gifts. After he taught us the hand positions, told us about level I Reiki, and gave us each attunements, he told us to spend some time by ourselves and then to give each other Reiki.

I was talking to a traditional healer, and I mentioned some of my experiences in using Reiki, and she explained to me that if I were going to ceremonies, I would have received what I am receiving with Reiki.

What I was getting from Reiki was coming to me because the attunement was a ceremony. Not of our culture, but it was exactly what I would have received from our traditional ways, she explained.

Kathy spoke to me about how our Native spiritual beliefs, traditions, and rituals had gone underground, were lost, or changed. I knew that only since 1978, the year I found my way into recovery, had our American Indian religious freedom been given back to the people.

Speaking with Kathy gave me the willingness and open-mindedness to continue with Reiki and to trust that it would only give me goodness and light.

Reiki I is known as hands-on, physical healing. It was important for me to learn the hand positions. Because Marcus was a therapist, he did not teach hands-on healing but rather taught that we could use the same positions, one to two inches above the body.

Reiki has been extremely helpful for treating burns, cuts, strains, and bumps for myself and others. My eyesight has benefited from Reiki also. When I wrote this, I was 54 and did not need glasses. Today at 71 I need reading glasses, and I am borderline for longer distances.

While on vacation in Corpus Christi, I was flipping channels on the television and ran into a study of Reiki. The experiment involved two people who looked like they had identical wounds on their upper arms.

The study included a door with a whole cut out with a shelf where they could each put their arm. At one of the doors, there was a Reiki practitioner, and at the other door, there was no one.

The person with the Reiki had a significantly better healed wound in the same time passing as the person without Reiki. I was new at using Reiki, and this made a huge difference to me.

I also saw the movie, “Philadelphia,” where the man dying visits a Reiki practitioner who helps him prepare to die. This movie helped me to help others pass over (uncle Ejjick and auntie Shirley, and several others now).

Then, sometime after, I was watching Oprah getting acupuncture for the first time on her show. Dr. Oz was there along with his friend who was doing the acupuncture.

Dr. Oz explained how we are made up of energy. Alternative medicines, Dr. Oz said, deal with the body's energy – something that traditional Western medicine does not.

"We’re beginning to understand things that we know in our hearts are true, but we could never measure," he said. “As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier… in medicine is energy medicine.”

“It is more than acupuncture… it is Reiki, and therapeutic touch”. Opera then said she couldn’t have gotten a doctor to say that in the last 10 years, what he was saying now. That was said many years ago now.