Can the practice of Reiki help to change your mindset? When your life’s not going the way you’d planned, changing your mindset about pretty much everything you ever believed in and anchored your existence to, is a good place to start, if you want to forge ahead and make happen, whatever it is you want to make happen. Reiki can help you in that process.
How you make sense of the world and your place in it is shaped by your mindset. This is the set of beliefs that influence the way you think, feel, and behave. According to Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, your mindset is the overriding factor in determining whether you’re going to succeed or fail in life.
Changing your mindset, therefore, can have a huge impact on the trajectory of your life; amplifying your chances of success by resolving the conscious and subconscious blocks you’ve placed in your own way. But it’s not an easy, or for that matter, necessarily comfortable process. This is why so many people employ a mindset coach to help them navigate the territory and unravel the stories, through which they live their lives.
We simply don’t know, what we don’t know. We don’t realise that we generally view the world through a bunch of stories that we make up that have only a passing relationship to the world as it actually exists. All these stories, built on the beliefs that we hold, are the ways in which we block ourselves from the life we aspire to.
On a survival level, these stories work pretty well, and that’s what they’re for. They help us navigate the world and keep us safe in our comfort zone. The comfort zone is never about taking chances or forging ahead into unknown territory. The comfort zone, even when it’s not that comfortable (let’s say due to a physical health problem) is where most of us choose to spend most of our lives. It’s familiar territory and we know how to deal with it.
But what if you want more from life than that? What if you have ambitions, dreams, aspirations that simply can’t be realised from the comfort of your comfort zone? Do they require you to step out, step up, challenge yourself and radically re-orientate your mindset in a new direction? Do they require the untangling of the unconscious beliefs, opinions and stories that are blocking your path?
Of course, you can employ a mindset coach, as many people do, but another, and a method that possibly has a deeper impact, is to take up the practice of Reiki.
How can a Japanese energy-healing discipline help to transform your mindset?
Let’s put aside the notion that Reiki is a complimentary therapy for a moment. The real focus of this system has always been on using its various methods and techniques as a system of personal spiritual development. Its core practice is meditation. The energy healing part of the system is just a happy accident.
Meditation, amongst its many documented benefits is a practice for raising self-awareness. Insight meditation (the practice of focusing on your inner being in a non-judgemental way) is central to the practice of Reiki. What stands Reiki apart from simply engaging with an insight meditation practice is the esoteric initiation at the heart of the whole system.
This initiation has one function: to connect you, or reintroduce you to, the Absolute ground of being. According to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, this is a state of absolute knowing in which the experience and the person having the experience are one and the same: ‘the object known, is the subject who knows’.
The process opens a transcendental state of awareness to the Absolute state of unconditioned reality. This is a state where the concept of ‘things’ dematerialises into an understanding of emptiness and the unborn nature of the mind. The concept of ‘mind’ ultimately becomes problematic. It’s both there and not there at the same time.
When working with an insight practice, the initiation procedure has the potential to open the mind of the practitioner to a state of blissful union with, or realisation of their True Nature.
This is as an emanation of awareness of the whole of the manifest and unmanifest state of existence and non-existence.
Let’s bring this all back down to earth a little. One of the central practices of Reiki as an energy healing method, is to resolve mental and emotional issues. These mental and emotional issues are always the direct outcome of the way that we think. Our thinking is conditioned by our mindset. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that thoughts arise unbidden from the conditioned nature of the mind. Thoughts are not us; they are things that happen to us, and we have no more control over the arising of thoughts than we have over the sounds of the world all around us. What we do have control over, however, is the nature or content of those thoughts.
In focusing on the mental and emotional healing aspects of the system of Reiki from the perspective of personal spiritual development, we find that we can encounter deeper and deeper levels of awareness. This deepening quality of our awareness leads us to an understanding of the whole of manifest and unmanifest reality. This is a deep process of unfolding: a realisation of Hegel’s ‘Absolute ground of being’. It's a revelatory process of understanding the nature of our own mind and thus our own mindset. It exposes the stories that we invented that the mindset is predicated upon.
Once we can get past the artificial nature of our mindset and start to ‘tap into’ the true nature of who we really are, we are on the road to freedom. Self-awareness becomes a permanent and ever-happening state that constantly opens us up to our true potential. We realise moment by moment how we are constantly getting in our own way, by staying out of flow: confined within the strangling limits of our comfort zone.
When the system of Reiki is used in the way that it was originally designed, it can become a powerful adjunct to the transformation of your mind, your life, and your perception of the nature of reality. It will transform everything.