Why You Need to Connect to the Earth

29 May

A few years ago, Basic Health Publications released an innovative new work ‘Earthing’ that caused quite a stir. Its basic hypothesis was that many of our health ills today can be traced to being energetically cut off from the Earth.

From an evolutionary point of view, this is a fairly new phenomenon. Indeed, for much of mankind’s history, most of our time was spent out in nature, feet touching the Earth, at one with its energetic flow. Now we spend most of our time walking on rubber soled shoes or other non-conductive materials that effectively cut us off from this energy.

The idea that the Earth is a living — energetic — organism (Gaia hypothesis etc.) isn’t a new one; but most people probably don’t consider the potential implications of this. For instance, if we have evolved as a species inside the Earth’s energetic field, then it is quite conceivable that this energy is just as essential to our overall health and wellbeing as food, air and water are.

If this is the case, if we do have a vital energetic relationship with the Earth, then connecting to it regularly is not just a nice idea, but a health must.

My experience has shown the benefits of connecting to the Earth to include a growing sense of inner balance and calm, a general sense of wellbeing, and a rich flow of energy throughout the body.

Not surprisingly, such energetic benefits soon translate into physical ones as well, since blocked energy and loss of mental and emotional balance are perhaps the main contributors to poor physical health. Once these imbalances are corrected, then vibrant wellbeing usually follows.

If we agree that connecting to the Earth will prove beneficial to our health and wellbeing, then the question that arises is how do we connect? And, given that this is a Reiki forum, how can we use Reiki to help us connect to the Earth in a deep and powerful way?

To connect without using Reiki is easy. Simply place your feet (or other part of your body) on the Earth, grass, sand, gravel or other such conductive materials. After that, energy will naturally rise upwards into your body (somewhat like if you put two large crystals against the soles of your feet).

To help this process, be fully aware of the energetic connection you have established with the Earth and intend the energy up your legs, through your root chakra and then into the rest of your body.

If you wish, you can also imagine energetic roots reaching down into the Earth from your feet, 1st and 2nd chakras. Once these roots are fully formed, use them to draw energy up into your body.

Finally, you can simply shift your awareness to the Earth’s energetic core and let it rest there. That way you can connect to the Earth, even if it is physically impossible to do so at the time.

The result of practising these techniques will generally be a deep sense of inner calm and balance — a feeling that you have plenty of time to fulfil whatever obligations you have, a feeling that you are complete just as you are without needing to do or have anything else.

If you want to connect to the Earth using Reiki, then the technique is a simple one. Just place your hands on — or above — the Earth and send it Reiki. This will soon create a strong energetic connection — one that will be healing to both you and the Earth.

So if you are interested in helping the environment but aren’t sure how to do so, or if you are too busy to tie yourself to a tree that is about to be smashed down by a bulldozer, then this might just be your thing.

Whatever the case, spend a bit of time Earthing — both with and without Reiki — and you will soon feel the benefits.

(Note: ‘Earthing’, by Ober, Sinatra and Zucker, [Basic Health Publications] actually goes a good way to scientifically proving the therapeutic benefits of connecting to the Earth [i.e. Earthing], using — amongst other things — thermal images and photos to demonstrate healing shifts that take place after people Earth. It also demonstrates how Earthing can help protect us from the growing amount of electromagnetic radiation we are exposed to on a daily basis.)
The Remarkable Power of the 3rd Reiki Precept

In my courses, I often translate the Third Reiki Precept as ‘show gratitude’.

Cultivation of gratitude keeps us positive and helps connect us better to those around us.

The more traditional translation (‘Be humble’), however, also has its power.

And here I am not talking about false humility or feeling bad about yourself.

And I’m not talking about lowering your head when you should let yourself shine.

Instead, it’s actually about being open to learn and receive.

When we are humble, we recognize that there is much we can learn — and we recognize that there are many who can teach us.

This keeps us in a state of ‘open-minded freshness’.

We foster an inner state of ‘freshness’ because our openness to external stimuli (teachings, examples to follow etc.) helps us to continually grow and evolve.

We are ‘open-minded’ because we no longer feel we have mastered any area of our life and, as such, are always on the lookout to learn more and develop.

Another attractive feature that learning to ‘be humble’ has to offer is that it protects us from being judgmental.

Being judgmental is a habit that is easy to acquire but poisonous it its ramifications.

It is a foolproof method for creating discord in our environment, for building mental / emotional barriers between us and others.

This is harmful to our Reiki and harmful to our wellbeing.

It is harmful to our Reiki because it prevents us sharing a deep connection with the people we heal.

It is harmful to our wellbeing because the more we judge others the more we will disconnect from them and, as a result, the more isolated and lonely we will become.

So remember to be humble.

Don’t be small. Don’t be insignificant. Don’t devalue your inner beauty.

Rather, let your light shine while staying open to the possibility that there is always much to learn.

If you can do that, you will not only start to feel really good about the world around you, you will also evolve at a rapid rate.

Each day you will connect to others and each day you will learn.
So how about it?

‘For today only, be humble.’

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2015)

Coming Out of the Reiki Closet

Almost twenty years ago, I went on a trip to Amsterdam with two friends. The idea was to hang out there for a few days and then head on down to Germany for one more week of fun.

That was the plan but, the day before we were set to catch a train to Germany, I made up a feeble excuse, backed out of the second part of the trip and returned to Italy (where I was staying).

This wasn’t my greatest moment, for it ruined my friends’ plans – plans that had seen one of them travel all the way from Sweden! But that is what I did. I jumped on a train and abandoned them.

Of course, before leaving I explained my departure by saying I didn’t have the money for the trip, but the real reason – the one I couldn’t bring myself to tell my friends – was that I couldn’t bear the idea of going another week without meditating (something I wasn’t brave enough to do in their company).

Funny how times change, but back then I chose to let down my friends rather than just say, ‘Hey guys, every morning before we get going, I need 90 minutes to meditate’.

Saying that would just have been too embarrassing!

Meditation – it was too weird.

Over the years that has all changed, and these days I’m excited to talk to people about meditation and Reiki and all sorts of other ‘weird’ things (so long as they are interested), but coming from where I have does help me understand students who are embarrassed to ‘come out of the Reiki / spiritual closet’.

And I meet quite a lot of such students. Students who can’t bring themselves to tell their friends about the Reiki course they are attending on the weekend. Students who would die of embarrassment if I ever showed their name at the bottom of a testimonial. Students whose greatest fear would be a Reiki group photo posted on Facebook.

Looking at things from today’s perspective, a lot of these fears seem more than a touch irrational, but I have to admit that in some cases they are at least partially justified.

I mean, some of your friends really might think you’re a bit weird if they discovered you were off to a Reiki course. Some might tease you. Some might question your sanity. Some might tell you that you’re being ripped off. Some might even try to belittle you in both subtle and less subtle ways.

So, for many people, it is simply easier to fly under the radar. To do a course in secret. To practise Reiki and meditation from deep within the closet.

The problem with this, however, is that if you can’t live openly as the person you are, then you are never free. And that will most likely mean that – for at least part of the time – you will be forced to keep much of what is dear to you hidden and unused.

To avoid hiding what you love, you might find that you end up moving away from old friends who are not willing to accept this spiritual part of you.

This can be tough, especially if they are friends you’ve had for much of your life.

It can be tougher still when the people who don’t accept this side of you are your family. In that case, moving away is most likely the last thing you’d want to do, no matter how bad things got.

And it’s not about being overly-demanding. I mean, it’s unlikely you’re expecting your family and loved ones to be as enthused by Reiki (and the like) as you are.

But it would be nice if partners and family could at least be supportive or, if that is too much to ask, non-hostile.

Sadly, this isn’t always the case, and I regularly come across students whose loved ones make them suffer because of their spiritual practice.

Fortunately, extreme friction with partners (and family) typically doesn’t last too long because people do generally, with time, get used to anything.

Most people simply fear change, so if you get involved in something that they don’t understand, they will resist it.

They want to understand the world. They want to understand you. They want to be able to predict what you will do next. They want certainty. Security.

They want to put in a box with a big fat label on it, a label that says ‘understood’!

This sounds suffocating, but the good news is that no one really cares so much what box they toss you in, so long as they can toss you in a box – a box with a big shiny label on it.

You can be the ‘Friday night at the pub girl’. You can be the ‘party girl’. You can be the ‘yoga girl’. You can be the ‘Goth girl’. So long as there is a box and a label, they can relax.

What this means is that for most people, issues – at least with family – only occur at the beginning. After that, they are tossed in the Reiki-weirdo box and everyone is happy.

So if you encounter resistance to your spiritual practice, my first piece of advice is to be true to yourself, but then give friends and family time to adjust, because chances are high that before long they will accept the new you.

My second piece of advice is to consider cultivating the ‘unpredictable-girl / guy image’.

Because if you are unpredictable, no one will ever know what you will do next and, as a result, won’t be upset when you do something new.

In fact, they will even feel happy when you do something unexpected because that will validate the label they’ve given you.

And once the label is validated, they can relax.

Of course, if the new you is just too ‘crazy’ for them, well, maybe itis time to move on. If a friend / partner won’t let you be true to yourself – even after ample time to get used to the new you – then they’ll probably only be holding you back.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2015)

How to Fast-Track Your Goals with Reiki

It is now common knowledge that people with well-defined, writtengoals have a far greater chance of achieving the things they desire – whatever they may be – than those who don’t.

Goals help you focus your intent. They create an ‘energetic whirlpool’ that sucks the things you want into your life.

Using Reiki for Goals

There are two standard ways to use Reiki to help you manifest the things you desire:

Visualize whatever it is you want, then send Reiki energy into the visualized image. For instance, let’s say you want a new house. To use Reiki to help you get it, simply visualize a new house and then intend for Reiki to flow out of your hands and into that image. The moment you do that, your hands will be ‘activated’ just the same as when you are giving someone Reiki and energy will flow ‘out into the universe’ helping you to manifest the house.?
If, instead, you want a new job, you simply visualize yourself in the new job and intend for Reiki energy to flow out of your hands and into the image you have in your mind.
? (Note: This method works best if you also write down your goal on a piece of paper in addition to simply sending Reiki to your visualization. Here, before you do the visualization, simply read the goal from your piece of paper. This will help you create a stronger intent and, as a result, manifest whatever you want more quickly.)
Write down your goal on a piece of paper and then Reiki the piece of paper, intending that the Reiki energy will help you achieve your goal. You might like to carry this piece of paper around with you in your pocket (you can scrunch it up into a small paper ball for convenience) so that you can Reiki it several times throughout the day. This will accelerate the manifesting process.

To get optimum results with these methods, a few additional manifesting points should be noted:

Always focus on the positive. In other words, if you want to lose weight, don’t focus on ‘losing weight’, focus instead on being slim. Visualize yourself being slim and Reiki that slim image of you, or write down on a piece of paper ‘I am slim, healthy and energetic’ and Reiki these words.
Make sure that your goals are in alignment with your highest good, otherwise you will encounter opposing energetic currents that will make it difficult to achieve your goal. ?
To work out whether something is for your highest good, simply imagine achieving your goal and feel inside for either a sensation of energetic ‘expansion’ or ‘contraction’. If you feel energetic expansion, then the goal is in alignment with your highest good. If you experience contraction, then you’d better choose a new goal or make modifications to the goal you currently have.
Add emotion to your manifesting. When doing Reiki to help accelerate the manifestation of your goals, try to feel the positive emotions associated with your goals as you send them Reiki. Emotions are manifesting fuel. Without them, getting what you want tends to take a lot longer.
Be consistent in your manifesting practice. A seed can spend a long time underground before sprouting. Once it sprouts, growth can often be extremely rapid (the classical example is bamboo). Likewise with manifesting. Often you are drawing what you want closer and closer to you, you just can’t see immediate results.
So have faith in the process and know that every time you use Reiki to help you manifest something that is in alignment with your highest good, you are shooting energy out in the universe that will be doing everything it can to help you get you what you want.
This faith is particularly important, because your manifesting work might be putting the future love of your life on an aeroplane from the UK and sending him straight to your doorstep in Melbourne but – and here is the point – you will only actually see him when he gets to your place, even though he was speeding towards you across half the planet well beforehand.?
Generally speaking, you will want to practise manifesting with Reiki for at least a month. If you stop earlier, what you want might be on the verge of arriving, but you gave up just before it got to you!
Dissolve your fear. Many goals we have are actually to get rid of something. From now on, of course, you will bear point 1 in mind and only focus on the positive, but even so we are sometimes so hurt or emotionally scarred by something that even if we try to focus on the positive (e.g. to be fit and energetic) the fear of, say, our health condition staying with us, energetically overwhelms us each time we start the manifesting process.?
If there is a lot of fear or negative energy attached to a goal you hope to achieve, the best trick is to spend a little bit of time dissolving it before you start your manifesting process. To do so, simply let yourself sit with (meditate on) your negative emotions without trying to either change or wish them away– just like you may have learned to do in some of my meditation / Reiki courses.?
If you haven’t done any of my courses, then just open up to whatever emotions you have and tell yourself these magic words: ‘I am not going to try to change anything.’ Then simply sit and observe the emotions you have inside you. If you can be totally impassive then the negative emotions will soon dissolve.?
Once the negative emotions have been cleared with this exercise, you will be ready to use Reiki to help you manifest your goal.

Good luck with this process. May Reiki help you get everything that is in alignment with your highest good.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

The Four Keys to All Great Reiki Techniques

In my last article (‘Be a Reiki Rebel’), I talked of the need to stay fluid in your Reiki practice, to let intuition be your ultimate guide.

As true as this is, Reiki techniques do still have great value and, in many cases, will make a massive difference to your healing ability and intuition.

So how do you tell the good Reiki techniques from the bad? How do you avoid techniques that will do little more than lock you into a paralyzing prison of fear and dogma?

My answer to this question is that you’ve got to keep an eye out for what I call the ‘four keys to all great Reiki techniques’.

The four keys specify that all great Reiki techniques should:

Have depth
Complement each other
Develop your spirituality / ability to connect to energy
Be taught at the appropriate time

Reiki Techniques Must Have Depth

Some Reiki techniques you learn are great right away, but never get any better. They never have any depth.

Depth means that with practice, you go deeper into a technique.

Depth means that the more you practice a technique, the more you discover about it, the more you tap into its essence.

Depth means that even after you have been practising a technique for a year, it will still seem fresh and exciting because it is continuing to take you to new places, to reveal unexpected facets.

Examples of Reiki techniques that have such depth are the ‘Breathing into the Hara Meditation’ and the level 2 mantra meditations.

These techniques are like the proverbial good wine: with time they simply get better.

Reiki Techniques Should Complement Each Other

A team of champions or a champion team?

A team of champions looks great, but they almost always lose to a champion team.

The same with Reiki techniques.

You can make the mistake I did when I first started teaching and pile in as many good techniques as you can into every course, but you’ll soon learn that this a bad idea.

Why?

Because if there is no real unity to what you teach, if it is all a hodge-podge of disparate and unrelated techniques, then no matter how good the individual elements, they will never be greater than the sum of their parts. In fact, they will typically be less!

When all the parts complement each other, however, it’s like a beautiful dish where sweet complements sour, where salty complements bitter, where crunch complements soft, where all of the textures and flavours blend harmoniously together to create a meal that dances on your palette and sings in your stomach.

When Reiki techniques complement each other, then each new technique will help you go deeper into the others. Each technique will give you the energetic founding to move on to even more advanced techniques.

The traditional Japanese Reiki system is built like this, with the techniques forming what I call the ‘Reiki Pyramid’ (which I will talk about in detail in my next article).

In short, the Reiki pyramid illustrates the way Usui (the founder of Reiki) worked first to energetically ground students, then to connect them to both their higher energy centres and what is known as the ‘Great Bright Light’.

Practising Reiki like this is akin to a tree putting down a deep root system before stretching up high into the sky. If the tree doesn’t do this, then you only need the barest suggestion of a storm for it to come toppling down.

With deep roots, however, it can withstand almost anything nature throws at it.

The same will be true of you emotionally and physically when you practise a Reiki system where each technique supports the other.

Reiki Techniques Should Develop Your Spirituality

We all love to receive Reiki. But truth is, when done in the right manner and spirit, giving Reiki should be almost as good, as good, or even better, than receiving it.

When a Reiki technique has depth, when it helps connect you to your Higher Self, then giving becomes pure pleasure.

It makes you more alive.

It connects you more to your real self.

It energizes and invigorates you.

It helps you soar into ever-deeper states of meditative joy.

And when this happens, Reiki truly becomes a spiritual path – a path that will ultimately enhance every other spiritual practice that you do.

For the more you connect to yourself when practising Reiki, the more you will then be able to connect to yourself when practising your other spiritual paths.

Reiki Techniques Should Be Learned at the Right Time

These days, we tend to want more and more – and we want it now.

The same is often true of our spiritual practice.

We want to learn the best techniques and we want to learn them ASAP.

In fairness, people have pretty well always been like this, even if our high-speed modern lifestyle has exacerbated this tendency.

But timing in spirituality is everything.

The right message at the wrong time invariable falls on deaf ears – something we all know from personal experience!

Think of some of your favourite spiritual books. Chances are they would have bored you stiff if you had been given them at an earlier stage of your life. But at the right time – how they have inspired you!

Or think of cooking. You can have all the right ingredients, but if you put the broccoli in before the chickpeas, you’re going to have a lot of mush.

There are two key problems with learning a technique too soon:

You often won’t have developed the ‘energetic muscles’ needed to do it properly. (Many advanced Reiki techniques, for instance, require a strong connection to your hara.)
You may lack the energetic sensitivity to do the technique properly. As a result, you can follow all of its steps to the letter but still won’t feel much.

Classical spiritual masters knew the importance of timing only too well.

Think how many times the following conversation has played out:

Student: Master, teach me the X technique now. I’m ready for it.

Master: Grasshopper, you still have much to learn. Go sweep the monastery floor!

It can be frustrating for students to have to wait for the ‘inner secrets’ to be revealed, but waiting for the right time means they will get the full benefits of those secrets when the right time finally comes.

Conclusion

This article has been written with Reiki in mind. That said, the ‘four keys to all great Reiki techniques’ will be valid for most spiritual endeavours, whatever the variety.

So next time you are considering another spiritual course, ask yourself whether the techniques you learn in it will have depth, whether they will complement each other, whether they willadvance your spiritual practice and whether they will be taught to you at the right time.

If so, you’ve got a green light.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Be a Reiki Rebel

If you’re like most people reading this newsletter, you’ve read a book or two on Reiki. Some of these books have most likely been great, some less so.

The good ones are probably good in their own unique ways. The bad ones, well, they probably suffer from the same issue: they over-complicate Reiki!

They give the impression that it’s almost never enough to just put your hands on somebody, intend for the Reiki to flow and let go.

Oh no!

You’ve got to first pray to this ascended master or that.

You’ve got to do symbols over your hands.

You’ve got to do symbols over the person you’re healing.

You’ve got to do symbols on the walls and floors and ceilings around you.

You’ve got to invoke Reiki through long and elaborate incantations.

You’ve got to….

You get the picture.

The problem with this approach is that it generally makes Reiki healers rigid.

Indeed, talk to the type of healer who has devoured too many of these dogmatic books and they will almost always insist you’ve got to do Reiki in this way and that, insist that anything else is acorruption of the ‘pure Reiki’, something which, they imply, will send you straight to Reiki hell.

Unfortunately, juggling a vast array of rules and regulations typically leads to an excess of mental clutter, and this muffles intuition. You’re so busy trying to work out the right way to do things, trying to make sure you aren’t making a mistake that you can’t hear your Inner Voice.

That said, you might still be wondering whether there isn’t in fact anideal way to do Reiki, a way that will give you the best results. Because don’t some techniques simply work better than others?

I don’t deny that some techniques really do seem to work better than others and I very much discriminate between the thousands of Reiki techniques I have learned over the years. But, even so, the key to Reiki is to remember that it is more about feeling than process, more about essence than form.

Take the Reiki attunements, for instance.

You might think that they are a precise art, that the proper attunement must be like a combination lock with only one solution. But in truth there are many different forms of Reiki and, as a result, many different attunements.

Since all of these attunements processes work, however, the only logical conclusion is that it is no so much their external form that matters (i.e. the precise steps involved), rather the energy they generate.

And the same, actually, can be said for all the Reiki techniques we learn.

They are designed simply to connect us more fully to Reiki energy. They are a means to an end. But it is the end that matters, not the means.

If this is true, however, why have so many ‘Reiki rules’ been created?

And why do so many people love to point their finger at you and tell you that you have to practise in a certain way?

One obvious reason is that for all of their potential pitfalls, rules do often work well. That’s is why they became ‘rules’!

The mistake people make is simply to make these rules binding, instead of seeing them as fabulous tools which, at times, either need to be outgrown or discarded to get the optimal result.

Another reason people can get militant about doing things in the ‘correct way’ is that rules comfort people by helping them avoid a feeling of ‘responsibility’ for their healing.

I mean, if their healing didn’t go well it wasn’t their fault. They simply followed Reiki protocol – the rules!

(Note: In actual fact, a healee is at least as responsible as the healer for results, but that typically doesn’t stop healers from assuming the burden of 100% responsibility!)

A further reason for the proliferation of rules is that rules empower teachers. The more rules you have, the more complicated the procedure, the more students need to check in with teachers to make sure they are doing everything just right. This makes teachers indispensable and, as a result, helps them earn a living!

So if rules do often work well but, at the same time, can lead us into difficulties, how should we deal with them?

My advice is to keep things simple.

Stick to a small set of techniques.

Stick to a small set of rules.

Remember that Reiki is not an ‘instrument’ you use to heal, ratheryou are an instrument it uses to heal.

You are just the channel and, in the majority of circumstances, the more you can simplify things and get out of the way, the better.

Indeed, the more you let go, the more your intuition will open up, and the more your intuition opens up, the more you can tailor your healing to the individual you are working on.

This is critical to a great session, because everyone is different and, as a result, will need a unique healing session.

So as much as I love the Reiki hand positions and the many techniques I teach, we should never be bound slavishly to them (or any other techniques out there). In fact, what I teach is ultimately designed to help us go beyond everything we have learned, to go beyond form.

For when this happens, we will be free to let Reiki use us as it pleases, and this will not only take our healing to an entirely new level, it will also keep things fresh and exciting.

For when we are not the ones in the ‘driver’s seat’, we will have no idea where we are going until our intuition sends us our orders. Indeed, we will be waiting – just like the person we are healing – to see what we will do next.

So learn the rules. Be flexible with them. Then break them as your intuition deems fit.

Be a rebel.

A Reiki rebel.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2015)

Reiki, My Novel and Your Life Purpose

Readers often insist that my novel Full Speed is autobiographical.

I usually insist it isn’t.

The truth is most likely somewhere in between.

The protagonist, Seb, has some of my skills and habits (like a love and aptitude for playing chess). He has spent time in cities I have lived in (like Perugia, Italy, where the novel is set) and, like me, he is fairly academic.

But Seb is also very different from me in the majority of ways. He is shy. He has a photographic memory. He comes from a family that puts a lot of pressure on him (etc.), so he is clearly no simple literary alter ego.

The autobiographical truth of the novel actually lies in its themes, rather than my likeness to any of the characters. For the themes the novel explores are ones that truly fascinate me:

What is love? Is it something more than a chemical reaction in the body — pheromones? Can we have romantic love that stands the test of time?
What is true creativity? Does knowledge get in the way or aid creativity? Can we be creative in a world filled with imitation and unconscious influences?
And freedom? What is it? How can we be free from the pressures of our family, our friends and society at large? How can we find the strength to stay true to our inner guidance, to live a life of passion, to live our life purpose?

I meet a lot of people in my Reiki courses who are looking for change just like the characters in my book. They are looking for something more in life, a life that better reflects who they really are. But to achieve this is a challenge, and many feel trapped – trapped by financial restraints, trapped by pressure from everyone around them, trapped by expectations, both from within and without. They would love to embrace a new life, but fear what would happen if they did.

Perhaps this is the main reason why I write and the main reason I teach Reiki: I’m driven to help people live a life that resonates with who they are on the deepest level.

That, at least for the moment, is my life purpose.

I’m lucky because writing helps me understand the world better, it spurs me to live up to the ideas in my work – and Reiki gives me the inner balance and energy I need to write, to finish works that can take years to complete.

That, of course, is the brilliant thing about Reiki. Whatever you aspire to do, it can help.

Why?

Because its primary purpose is to connect you to who you really are, to your essence, and this is the key step to manifesting your truest desires.

This is sometimes overlooked by people who primarily associate Reiki as a hands-on healing method; but the truth is that the practice of Reiki is a spiritual path – an inner journey.

It is a meditation and energy system designed to help us connect to our core: the man or woman behind our physical body, thoughts and feelings.

For when we touch this part of ourselves then everything starts to flow. Then the divide between our inner and outer world disappears until we no longer need to separate our spiritual dimension from the other parts of ourselves – we no longer need to separate work from play, meditation from everyday life.

Spiritual Practice for the Everyday World

The beautiful thing about Reiki is that it is highly pragmatic. It is a system designed to get results in the real world.

Take the precepts, for instance.

The first two (‘For today only, do not anger’ and ‘For today only, do not worry’) focus on two key areas where we waste a lot of energy.

We get irritated by things. We worry about things.

This dissipates energy that we could better use elsewhere.

The third precept (‘For today only, show gratitude’) helps put us in an energetic state of being where our powers of attraction are greatly magnified. By getting us to focus on the positive aspect of things, we start to vibrate more and more on a positive energetic level. This, naturally, helps us to attract more and more positive things.

The fourth precept (‘For today only, be honest in your work’), helps us to understand the necessity of not just being honest in our work when dealing with others but also, just as importantly, finding a job that is ‘honest’ with ourselves, i.e. one that is in alignment with our inner being, with the person we truly are. This, more so than simply not cheating people is, I believe, the essence of the precept.

It is about learning to merge passion and livelihood together. About finding deep meaning in the way we earn a living.

The final precept (‘For today only, show compassion to yourself and others’) teaches us to accept things (ourselves and others!) as they are. This creates a sense of deep peace and, as a result, helps us to vibrate at a very high energy level.

When you combine precept work with the other meditations in the Reiki system, with the hands-on healing and use of symbols and mantras, you have a powerful system for restoring inner balance and harmony.

And it is this very inner balance and harmony that is required if we wish to discover our life purpose.

Finding Your Life Purpose

People often want to know how to discover their life purpose. While there may not be one simple method for doing so, there are some basic questions you can ask yourself that often illuminate things:

What is something you have always loved doing to help other people?
What things do you do that truly energize you?
What things do you do (or dream about doing) that give you a tingle of excitement – even just at the thought of doing them?
What would you love to do with your time if you never had to worry again about either money or being good at what you chose to do?

Choosing to let the answers to these questions guide your daily actions will help you to enter a state of ‘flow’, to live a life at what my novel calls ‘full speed’. This is a life where the Universe does everything it can to support you because you are living in alignment with who you truly are.

You are moving with the current, rather than trying to swim against it.

It is a state where everything within you rejoices because you are no longer fighting against your deepest nature.

As such, your life picks up speed and momentum as all of your available energy resources start working together, rather than against each other.

Your Life Purpose Is Not Static

People grow and change. They learn from past experiences – and seek fresh ones to continue their inner growth.

As a result, it is only natural that situations that are so valuable to your evolution today, cease to promote growth in the future.

So we need to stay flexible and open to change.

No matter how much we have loved something in the past, there might well come a time where it has taught us all it has to teach. As a result, we will soon grow restless and seek fresh lands to explore.

This is a natural and healthy thing – and something we need to embrace.

As such, we should stay open to the possibility that our life purpose may change many times throughout our life.

Our mission today, may not be our mission tomorrow.

So you should never feel guilty about letting go of something that no longer fulfils you.

Rather, let it go with a smiling heart, knowing that you have now created the necessary space to bring in something that can better fulfil your present day ‘evolutionary needs’.

Conclusion

The only way to live a truly fulfilled life is to live in alignment with our ‘life purpose’. This ‘life purpose’ is not necessarily a fixed thing. It may change according to our ‘evolutionary’ needs.

Reiki is a magnificent tool in helping us live our life purpose. It not only helps us gain the inner balance and energy needed to find clarity on it, it also gives us the necessary courage to live in alignment with it.

A life lived ‘on purpose’ is not necessarily an easy life; but it is an exciting one. It is also one where the energy of the Universe will ‘conspire’ in your favour.

Ultimately, when you have the Universe on your side, and when the various parts within you are working together in harmony, you will have both the inner and outer energy needed to live your life purpose or, as I put it in my novel, to live a life at full speed.

Postscript: If you feel that you don’t yet have the courage or strength needed to live your ‘life purpose’, then I suggest you work on your 1st and 3rd chakras (the 1st chakra will give you the security and confidence you need, while the 3rd chakra will give you the drive).

You might also like to take a peek at — ahem! — my novel. You can pick up a Kindle version on Amazon or collect a hard copy version at any of my courses or practice nights.

If you wish to find out more about Full Speed, you can also visit the novel’s website.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Give the Gift of Reiki and Change a Life

Most people presume I started my spiritual journey with Reiki.

Not so.

Rather, I began with meditation.

It happened some twenty years ago during my early years at uni and from the beginning I was hooked.

Meditation gave me a glimpse of something special, a part of me I never knew existed.

It helped me connect to a quiet, calm, vibrant, expansive state of wholeness which, on a good day, made me feel as though I had everything I needed to be happy.

Not that meditation was easy.

Far from it!

Most days it took me between 1 to 1.5 hours to calm my mind, and on some days my mind simply stayed busy.

But the good days were worth the failures, and since I got going there has barely been a day that I haven’t meditated in some form or another.

That said, meditation did have a frustrating side to it: it was hard to share.

Sure, I could go into my ‘meditation bubble’ and bliss out for a while, but when I tried to talk to my friends about it, they thought I was crazy.

Sit down and do nothing for an hour? Watch your thoughts? Try not to think? And that’s meant to be fun?

Possibly I wasn’t great at articulating the wonders of meditation, but even so, conveying the beauty of meditation to logical friends is no easy task. Because meditation – as anyone who has practised it knows – needs to be experienced personally.

You can talk about the beauty of ‘inner stillness’, but if you haven’t experienced it, it just sounds dull.

Of course, there may be some teachers (or spiritual masters) whose energy field is so great that their mere presence is enough to send you into a state of deep calm, but that wasn’t me. As a result, I often got frustrated a) that my friends couldn’t’ get what I was saying and b) that I couldn’t share my experiences.

That all changed some years later when I first came into contact with Reiki.

Suddenly, with barely any practice, I could give people a taste of what I was talking about.

I could lay my hands on someone, channel Reiki energy their way and, in many cases, send them into a deep state of meditation.

I could help them access an undiscovered part of their being.

I’m not saying this happened – or happens today – every time I work on someone, and those really deep healing sessions, the ones where a client experiences something truly amazing, are still more the exception than the norm.

But they do happen, and they do happen regularly enough.

And when they happen, Reiki healers like you and I might just change someone’s life.

This sounds hyperbolic, I admit. But it’s true.

Until the Reiki, our clients were most likely simply trundling along with their 9-5 existence, going to the pub after work on Friday evenings, going to the footy on Saturday afternoons, saving for their end-of-year holiday – doing the same old same old.

Because that was it.

That was their life.

That was more or less the extent of everything they had to look forward to, year after year after year.

But a good Reiki session – it can change everything.

It gives someone a glimpse of something grander. A dimension of their being that contains the most unexpected and magical of wonders.

A dimension of their being where, for the first time, they feel whole.

Granted, this glimpse into what we might call their True Self might not change them immediately, and they may continue on doing the same old things day after day for some time yet; but, even so, the Reiki seed will have been planted and they will have discovered things that they can’t ‘undiscover’.

After that, try as they might, their everyday world will no longer fully satisfy them and, having seen beyond it, they will experience an ever-growing dissatisfaction with the superficial life most people lead.

This stage of dissatisfaction may be uncomfortable. It might test old friendships and relationships. But ultimately, it will lead to The Search. To that moment when they decide to look deeper into their Reiki experience, deeper into who they really are.

And that – let’s be direct! – will change their life.

That will, most likely, be the moment when, looking back over their life many years later, they will say that everything changed.

That will be the pivotal moment of their entire existence.

So never underestimate the good you can do with Reiki.

Work with it and you can change not just the lives of the people you heal, but even the lives of those around them.

Because the effects of Reiki ripple on from person to person to person, from generation to generation to generation.

They go on, long after your healing work is over.

So this Christmas and New Year, give the gift of Reiki.

Give a gift that can truly change lives.

Your clients, friends, partners – the world! – will love you for it.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Feature Article: Reiki, Relationships and the 7 Chakras

For those of you who are in (or out of) a relationship, here are a few ideas on how giving Reiki to the chakras can benefit you. If any of the issue discussed below is relevant to you, simply give Reiki to the associated chakra.

(Note: the chakras have a lot of depth, so these are simply some ideas to get you going.)

1st Chakra: If you feel overly needy, if you feel as though your emotions are too greatly influenced by your partner’s actions and moods, then working on this chakra can help. It will ground you – give a feeling of inner stability that will support you when your partner threatens to knock you out of inner balance.

2nd chakra: This chakra governs the emotions. It is also intimately connected to the feelings / ideas connected to sex and sexuality. So if you find yourself being overly moody with your partner, working on the 2nd chakra will help calm you down. If you suffer from infertility or psychological issues with sex then this chakra is also the critical one to work on.

3rd chakra: If you find your life to be overly influenced by your partner, if you aren’t living your dreams but rather those of your partner, then working on this chakra will give you the inner strength and drive to act in a way that is in harmony with your true inner nature. It will help stop you getting pushed around so that you can live your dream?

If you are suffering the hurt of a recent separation, if you feel that hollow, empty feeling that often accompanies a separation, then working on this chakra will give you a great boost. It will give you the strength to get back on your bike and meet the future with confidence. It will also help you feel as though your life has direction again – something that can be lost in the aftermath of separation.

4th chakra: To have a great relationship you need to have an open connection with your partner on an energetic level. If you hold anything back, if your emotions are blocked by hurt, then your relationship will dry up. Working on this chakra opens you up fully to your partner, enabling you to love them despite their imperfections – despite those little things they do to irritate you.

5th chakra: One of the big reasons relationships fail is because communication between partners is not great. Often one or both partners can’t bring themselves to say things that need to be said. Often they can’t find the words to explain their emotions. Working on the 5th chakra is a big help to clear communication. It will release communication blocks and help you better express yourself?

6th chakra: Relationships work best when each partner can intuit the needs of the other, when things are understood without being said. The 6th chakra is home to intuition, so working on it will grant you a better grasp of what your partner thinks and wants. It will help you avoid all sorts of potential conflicts, especially those due to a lack of clear communication.

7th chakra: Relationships are about more than relationships. They are one of the soul’s most wonderful vehicles for evolution. A clear, strong connection to the 7th chakra helps give you a feel for the bigger picture. It helps you know when a relationship is serving you and when it would be best to move on, no matter how hard that is for you. Like working with the first chakra, it also helps give you a degree of inner strength and stability, in this case because you recognise deep down that relationships, while beautiful, are not the most important thing in your life. Rather it is your connection to Spirit (God, the Universe etc.) that ultimately counts.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Feature Article: Riding the Reiki Rollercoaster
In many disciplines there is a neat correlation between the amount you practise and the improvements gained.

Practise the violin for 100 hundred hours and you are clearly better – at least if you are a beginner – than you were beforehand.

With Reiki, however, things are not so simple.

Take the initial learning period, for example.

You turn up at a course, get attuned to Reiki, practise several meditation exercises, do a series of activities that typically lead you into a state of great inner peace and calm – and yet, every now and again, rather than continue to grower calmer still, you encounter moments of agitation.

This isn’t the norm, and for the most part, the more Reiki you practise, the better you feel; but it can happen that at some point during a Level 1 course, students might get a headache, feel pains in various parts of the body and, at times, even grow queasy.

So what happened to all that beatific calm they were meant to be feeling?

Well, before we go into further detail, I want to say that by the end of a course most people feel the best they have felt in ages. But for those who do suffer what is commonly called a ‘healing crisis’, it really is nothing more than a physical/mental/emotional detox. A cleansing of the system. A rebalancing. And in the process, muck that is buried deep in our being sometimes needs to rise to the surface.

The same when you are a more experienced practitioner.

This comes as a surprise to many people, because they generally presume that once they have reached a certain level of inner calm and self-mastery, the ups and downs of everyday life will never touch them again.

Sorry to disappoint.

The truth, frustratingly, is that the levels of our psyche (or being) run very deep and that some layers are calm and others not.

And it isn’t the case that the top ones are necessarily more turbulent than the ones beneath.

Sometimes as you dig deeper and deeper down you strike a worm. Sometimes you strike a sunny field. Other times it feels like one of those monsters in the film ‘Tremors’.

You see, we repress a lot of things. And sometimes these things are pushed very deep.

So you might be practising, feeling pretty good about yourself, admiring your sheer meditative brilliance when plop! you slip down into the sewers of your mind. Into a nice old pool of sh*#@!

This fall from grace can be distressing but, if you keep practising, it usually doesn’t take long for you slip through the ‘Excrement Layer’ and fall into far more beautiful waterways, to find yourself in a crystalline pool of shining, warm water – a pool where you can once again go back to admiring you own startling

equanimity…until whoosh! down you tumble back into an even deeper level of poo.
The moral from all this is that you can’t expect the ‘Enlightenment Graph’ to run in a straight line.

When you ‘walk the path’, it’s more like following the tide on its way into shore. Sometimes you’re moving forwards, sometimes backwards – all you know is that over time you are definitely making progress.

So don’t despair if you seem to be slipping backwards. That might actually be a very good sign. It might indicate that you are going deeper and deeper into your Being.

Deeper into the fertile sewers of spiritual growth.

So yes, those sewers might not be first on your list of ‘dream destinations’, but if you can flush them clear, then you might start to feel really good. So good, in fact, that you will soon be ready to diver deeper yet again, deeper into the next layer of….

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Feature Article: Why 90% of Reiki Students Get Average Results

Anyone can get great results with Reiki.

It’s not difficult.

You just have to do two simple things:

Practise daily – even if only for a short time.
Make sure your practice is structured.

Forgive me if I’ve talked about some of the issues in this article before, but having taught a lot of people over a long period of time, I know that some things need elaborating.

So let’s examine why 90% of Reiki students around the world fail to get anything close to their full potential and how you can be sure to extract the maximum from the time and effort you put into your practice.

Daily Practice

Have you ever gone to meditate or practise Reiki and found that everything inside you resists settling down?

You know that feeling you get when you sit down on your mat or chair or whatever and suddenly have a volcanic urge to clean the windows, empty the trashcan, check the Internet, change your bed sheets, write your essay, drink some water, go for a stroll — do anything but sit still!

Well, resistance happens to practically everyone at first. But it’s a little like swimming out past the breakers. Until you’re past them it can be pretty rough; but once you’re through, everything generally calms down.

So the key is just to push on when everything inside you is screaming out to stop, to do something else — anything! — but go on.

Because if you make it past those whitecaps then distant lands beckon.

Beautiful.

Lustrous.

Super-charged lands.

Lands that will be yours to navigate especially if you make your practice consistent. Because consistency is the key tomomentum, and momentum is the key to high-level results.

Momentum means you won’t need to start each day with the engines cold. It means you can build directly on your efforts from the day before.

And that means you won’t need to keep battling inertia.

Rather, you’ll be flying faster and faster with each passing day.

Preloading

There is one final reason why consistent, daily practice gets such great results: it helps you to ‘preload’.

‘Preloading’ means preparing yourself properly for the day ahead of time.

It means getting yourself in the right state of body and mind to be ready to effectively confront whatever challenges the day throws up — loading an effective ‘response program’ deep into your being.

If, for example, you have meditated, given yourself Reiki and said the precepts in the morning (I recommend my revised, ‘positive’ version), then you’ll be prepared (both mind and body) to meet the day’s tests in a way that maintains your energy levels.

If you haven’t given your day the right foundation, however, then when these challenges occur it is all too easy to lose your balance, react negatively and, as a consequence, start haemorrhaging energy.

The Need for Structured Practice

This point is !!MEGA!!

It’s the chief reason why so many people reading this article only achieve mediocre results.
I

t’s the reason why people who get good results don’t get amazing results.

Think of it like this:

Imagine you have 10,000 bricks to do whatever you want with.
If you lay 100 here and 100 there and keep dumping them down here, there and everywhere, do you think you’ll end up with anything of value?

But let’s suppose you use those bricks in a structured manner.

Let’s suppose you used them to build a single-storey house.

Get the difference?

Using the materials you have in a coherent, structured manner means creating a house that can withstand the storms.

Using what you have haphazardly means getting soaked each time it rains.

So don’t dabble in this and that.

Stick to a few things and go deep.

Then stay with those things longer still and go even deeper.

If you do that then you’ll not just see steady improvement in your Reiki practice, you’ll also begin to more fully experience its benefits in your daily life.

If you’re all higgledy-piggledy, however, you’ll probably only get about 10% to 20% of the benefits you could.

What You Should be Practising

There is a long answer to this and a short answer.

I’m going to give you the short answer.

I’m going to give you a couple of things to practise that will make a difference — so long as you keep working away at them.

Level 1 Practice

Breathing into the Hara Meditation.
Reiki precepts.

Note that I’m keeping things simple. Nothing fancy here, but do these two things every day and your practice will definitely take off.

Then, whenever you get the chance (even if it is while watching TV!), give yourself some hands-on Reiki, trying to consistently rotate and cover the main energy centres of your body (in particular your chakras).

And working on other people, you ask?

That is secondary.

Work on yourself first, others later.

But once you have done your own daily practice, by all means, work on as many people as you can.

That will be good for them and…good for you!

Level 2 Practice

Breathing into the Hara Meditation (yes, it’s still important!)
First mantra (chanted), focusing on the hara.

And that’s it. That’s the foundation of your practice.

If you have more time, give yourself hands-on Reiki, use the symbols and work on others.

All of those things have great value — but they are secondary.

Practise the two things above and you’ll notice a great improvement in the way you feel, connect to and use energy.

Level 3 Practice

Contact me and I’ll help you devise an ideal practice plan

Final Point

If you want more information on what you should be practising and have studied with me, then try a visit to the Om Reiki Video Portal.

I have videos there on what — specifically — you should be working on post course.

And they go into detail.

So be consistent, be structured and have a plan.

That way your Reiki will improve in a way that will genuinely surprise you.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Feature Article: Can Reiki Harm You?

If you practise Reiki long enough, you are bound to bump into a bunch of big don’ts.

Don’t Reiki people who are wearing jewellery.

Don’t Reiki the crown of the head.

Don’t Reiki pregnant women.

Don’t Reiki the spine…

The list goes on!

Sometimes things get even sillier, like ‘Don’t Reiki anyone if you are wearing red’.

As ridiculous as some of these don’ts sounds, they are usually backed up with just enough rational explanation to make you wonder.

For instance, you may have heard people talk about Kundalini energy (a powerful energy that resides at the base of the spine). To someone who is energetically prepared, getting this energy to rise up into the body can lead to wonderful mystical experiences. To someone who isn’t prepared, however, a rising Kundalini (and the resultant ‘power surge’) can be dangerous, not to mention painful.

With this in mind, Reiki fear-mongers explain first that red is the color of the root chakra, then that giving Reiki to someone while wearing red will amplify the amount of energy sent to this chakra. This, actually, isn’t true, but if you believe it, then it suddenly does seem plausible that wearing red while giving Reiki might inadvertently get the Kundalini energy to rise up when a person isn’t ready for it!

Fortunately, almost every don’t in Reiki is short-circuited by a very simple point: it is the recipient who determines how much energy flows — not the giver.

Think of the recipient as someone who sucks on an ‘energy straw’. If they suck hard, a lot of Reiki energy will flow. If they suck gently, only a little Reiki will flow.

As a result, what they receive is up to them and the only thing a Reiki healer does is provide the opportunity for energy to flow.

What this means is that there is a safety valve built into the system, because an individual will only ever take in as much energy as is healthy for him or her. Taking in more would be like pushing a dagger into your flesh — not something you are likely to do.

If you are talking to someone who can’t accept this line of logic, you might like to get them to define ‘Reiki’. If they know anything about the origin of the word they will tell you that the most literal translation (that makes sense) is ‘spiritual’ (Rei) ‘energy’ (ki). But if this is how Reiki translates, would it ever make sense for this ‘spiritual energy’ to be a negative force?

I think not!

So next time you are anxious about giving someone Reiki, remember that it can never hurt them.

A person never receives Reiki unless an unconscious part of them asks for it and, even if they could receive Reiki without their consent, it could never harm them anyway.

Reiki is ’spiritually guided energy’, and this energy knows what is best for a recipient.

Note: While Reiki can’t harm anyone, it can trigger ‘healing crises’. These may, from time to time, bring on emotional upheaval, physical discomfort and the like but, even so, are ultimately a good thing. Think of it as something similar to the cleansing process that takes place when someone goes on a fast. A person might get headaches, pimples, rashes and all sorts of other unpleasant things; but once the cleansing is done, he or she will feel better than ever before.
Fortunately, Reiki typically works in a very gentle way and, in the vast majority of cases, will simply make you feel fantastic. But if you do ever experience a ‘healing crisis’, know that it is a good sign because it indicates not only that old ‘wounds’ are being healed, but also that you will soon be feeling better than you have in ages.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Feature Article: The Wonderful World of ‘Infinite Reiki’

One of the biggest challenges many healers have is protecting themselves from negative energy.

Healers tend to be more energetically sensitive than your average person, something that is great for healing, but less good in energetically draining circumstances.

There are a lot of ways people commonly get energetically drained. Bad company. Bad environments. Needy friends and acquaintances. It’s so easy for energy to be sucked from the unprepared.

So how do you defend yourself again energy vampires? Against places that leave you feeling tainted?

In previous articles, I’ve talked about the chief methods of ‘protecting’ yourself in the Reiki system:

Strengthen your hara(an energy centre a few centimetres below the navel) and become like a mountain. The mountain is so solid inside, it doesn’t mind what you throw at it: rain, hail, lightning, the storm of the century – it’s all the same to it. It is too solid to be hurt. And that is how you feel when you strengthen your energy core (your hara!).
Focus on the positive. Since what you focus on grows, it is easy to make a bad situation worse by focusing on all of its ‘bad’ aspects. And that is why it doesn’t typically help to try to ‘defend’ yourself against negative energy, because the moment you do that you are focusing on – surprise, surprise – the negative energy. As a result, the negative energy grows along with your ‘shields’ and continues to ‘slime’ you. But if you find and then focus on the positives in any situation, you will ensure that these too grow.
Raise your energy vibration. The idea here is that since like attracts like, you can only get ‘slimed’ if a part of you is vibrating on the ‘slime’ level. So even the most negative of environments won’t be able to harm you unless a part of you shares in the negativity. So to make sure that negative energy can’t stick to you, simply do everything you can to raise your energy vibration and, as a result, remove yourself from the negative energy orbit.

These techniques all work wonderfully well, but I would now like to introduce an even more daring – and somewhat experimental – technique that I call Infinite Reiki.

Infinite Reiki has the advantage over all of the other techniques in that it won’t just ‘protect’ you from negative energy but also, potentially, use the negative energy to increase your energy!

The success of ‘Infinite Reiki’ is based on the following assumptions:

There is an infinite supply of Reikienergy out in the universe.
Anyone who gives Reiki, immediately receives some Reiki.
The key to channeling Reiki is intent.
You don’t have to consciously focus on Reiki energyfor Reiki energy to flow.
Reiki energy can flow from your entire being, rather than just your hands.

Infinite Reiki works when you set your intent to let Reiki flow through your body to anyone who needs or desires it.

For example, imagine you are in the company of a needy friend who always leaves you feeling drained. Ever happened?

Well now, thanks to Infinite Reiki, the moment you meet such a friend you will simply intend for Reiki energy – and only Reiki energy! – to flow through you to them in as great a quantity as they require.

After that, you simply sit back and let it happen. If all goes well, they can feast on Reiki energy instead of your energy, and in the process of drawing Reiki energy through you, you will also receive some Reiki.

If you are in a crowd full of energy vampires, you simply intend for anyone who wants energy to take as much Reiki energy – and only Reiki energy! – from you as they want. Then you simply stand back and enjoy Reiki’s energy gift to you as it flows through you to the ‘vampires’.

Finally, you can offer Reiki energy to any place that needs it. Do this and, instead of the place energetically draining you, it can fill up on Reiki energy instead (and, in the process, facilitate a nice flow of energy to you).

So the beauty of Infinite Reiki is that not only do you avoid either being energetically drained or ‘slimed’, you actually heal the energy ‘vampires’ and boost your own energy reserves at the same time.

So give it a try. Intend that negative people or places draw as much Reiki energy – and only Reiki energy – through you as they either need or desire and then sit back and enjoy the results. Reiki energy is infinite, so you can afford to be generous

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2014)

Feature Article: What To Do When Things Go Bad

It happens to all Reiki practitioners at some point: you’re doing your practice, everything is flowing, you’re marveling at your own brilliance, when all of a sudden – whack! You hit a road bump and your touch is gone.

Perhaps your Reiki healing isn’t as intense as it used to be. Maybe you can’t feel as much heat or tingling as before. Maybe it just doesn’t relax you like it always used to.

When this happens, we tend to get anxious and worry that we’ve lost our connection – often even fearing that it might never return. After this, the situation typically deteriorates further, sometimes leading to us stopping our practice altogether.

This article looks at three simple steps you can take to get your Reiki back on track when things get rocky. Three steps that will even allow you to feel good about the entire process.

Step 1: Remember that No Storm Last Forever

In my early days of meditating, I reached a point where I could sometimes go ‘very deep’ and experience a wonderful sensation of inner stillness. This felt so good, I naturally wanted to recapture the same state the next time I meditated.

Unfortunately, this seldom occurred. Typically, my next session was mediocre – something that frustrated me no end.

Worse still, when the following sessions were also ‘bad’, I often ‘panicked’. I worried that my ‘good’ meditation session was a one-off and that I would never again recapture the same state of inner stillness.

This anxiety then made it more difficult for me to go deep, so I would often need to wait another month or more of daily practice before I reconnected in the same way again – and this only happened when I gave up trying to have a great session and just meditated without expectations.

Having gone through this same brilliance-despair-brilliance cycle many times, I eventually learned to relax more and trust the process. I stopped fearing that I would never again go deep and, as a result, the gap between good meditation sessions grew shorter.

Today, I just do my meditation and don’t worry about fluctuations in ‘performance’. If everything in life is ‘impermanent’ (as the Buddhists like to say), then it stands to reason that my meditation will not remain constant. The best solution, therefore, is simply to roll with whatever shows up and enjoy the process.

Step 2: Focus on where You Want to Go

A big mistake almost every spiritual practitioner makes – either always, or at least from time to time – is to focus on the problem he (or she!) is trying to get rid of.

For example, you come home from work feeling stressed, don’t like this state and want to get rid of it. Being a spiritual practitioner who has had a lot of good meditation or Reiki sessions, you know what it is like to really feel well and determine to fix things right away. So you immediately set about giving yourself Reiki, meditation or the like, in the hope of bit by bit getting rid of your unpleasant stress.

This seems like a good idea, but as you work on yourself, you find that you are continually checking to see how much stress you still have in your system – and can’t help but grow frustrated by how slowly it seems to be dissolving.

There is a simple reason for your slow progress, however: trying to actively do something to get rid of a negative state almost inevitably sees you spending a lot of time focusing on the negative state.

Since what you focus on grows, this means that you keep reinforcing and strengthening your negative state – even as you are doing something (like Reiki) to dissolve it.

The end result is that for your Reiki to take effect, you typically need to spend a lot more time healing yourself than you should.

The solution to this issue is therefore to focus on where you want to be, rather than what you don’t want to experience.

If you want to feel relaxed, you should try to conjure up a feeling of relaxation in your body while meditating or giving yourself Reiki. Put all your focus on this relaxed state and, soon enough, you will start to feel it without any effort.

If in your current stressed state you find it impossible to focus on a state of relaxation, then all you need to do is recall a previous time when you were relaxed.

Remember this state, recall the physical and energetic sensations you had when you were in it, and focus exclusively on these things while meditating / giving yourself Reiki.

This old memory will then act as a kind of ‘tuning-fork’ that will pull your energy / emotional state back into balance by recalibrating it with your old, pleasurable experience.

Doing this, you’ll almost certainly regain balance in record time and avoid all the stress and frustration that comes when you try to pull yourself out of a negative state.

If you focus on a positive state, the negative ones simply cease to exist because you let go of the energetic connection you have with them. You simply unhook and reattach yourself to a more pleasurable state.

Step 3 – Stay Open

It is important to remember that if we feel disconnected from Source, we are doing something to disconnect.

In other words, our natural state is one of connection, so to not feel this we actually have to work at it!

The trick then, is simply to stop doing whatever we are doing that is disconnecting us from Source.

Of course, we often don’t consciously know what it is that we are doing to cut ourselves off from Source, so the way around this is simply to focus on staying open.

Imagine you are a sunflower basking in the sun. Imagine you are fully open so that the sun’s rays can wash over every last part of you. If you can do this, then you have just discovered the kind of ‘openness’ we’re talking about.

After you have opened up, the trick is simply to stay open and let the natural energy of the Universe (Source) flow through you. This won’t necessarily be easy, for when we feel stressed or angry or hurt or whatever, we tend to energetically close up. This kind of defence mechanism always backfires, however, for it cuts us off from Source and guarantees that we will stay stuck in the very state of being we hope to get out of.

So next time you feel yourself energetically contracting, take a few deep breaths and open yourself up energetically to the world around you – just like the sunflower opens up to the sun.

If you do this, you will immediately feel a good deal of relief and, if you can stay open, will soon reestablish your connection to Source.

Feature Article: Why Words Don’t Matter

You’ve heard it said that the ‘unconscious mind can’t process a negative’.

So if you affirm: ‘I’m not going to get angry’, then the unconscious mind only hears ‘angry’ and, as a result, you will most likely get angrier.

But have you ever wondered why the reverse isn’t true?

If you affirm: ‘I don’t want to not be rich anymore’ (admittedly a clumsy sentence, but bear with me), why is it that the unconscious mind doesn’t simply hear ‘rich’ and help you to become rich?

I mean, if what everyone says about the unconscious mind not being able to process a negative is true, this should follow.

You could say: ‘I am rich’ or ‘I don’t want to not be rich anymore’ and they should amount to the same thing when you take away the negatives.

But they don’t! So why not?

Before I answer that question, have you ever thought about water crystals? I’m thinking, in particular, about the work done by Japanese ‘scientist’ Masaru Emoto.

In his experiments, he writes a word on a piece of paper – say ‘love’ or ‘hate’ – and then sticks this piece of paper to a glass of water. He then freezes the water in the glass and creates a water crystal that is seemingly affected by the word on the piece of paper.

Place the word ‘love’ on the piece of paper, for instance, and the water crystal turns out all beautiful. Use the word ‘hate’ and it is ugly and distorted.

Why so?

Do words really have innate power, power that affects even inanimate things like water? Or is something else going on?

And if the word itself does have power, how come you get similar water crystal for both ‘love’ and ‘amore’ (love in Italian)?

The fairly obvious answer, of course, is that it isn’t the word that matters, rather its meaning or, to be more precise, the energy behind it.

And the same, of course, is true for our first example of being ‘rich’ or ‘not being rich’.

It’s not whether we use a negative or a positive statement that matters. It’s the emotion we feel when we say the statement.

If we say ‘I am rich’ and repeat that a thousand times but feel the stress of poverty each time we say it, we are actually only going to attract more poverty.

That is why excessive focus on words – and even images! – can lead to problems.

I can create an affirmation doing all the write things (present tense, positive language etc.) or I can visualize a scene I want, but if the emotional feeling I get when I affirm or visualize such things is negative, then that is the result I will get.

So if I say: ‘I have a beautiful partner’ but then feel the lack of a partner, I’m only going to push the partner I really want further away.

And the same goes for visualizing this perfect partner. Unless the emotional undercurrent of the images I create is positive, I will never create a positive outcome.

Hence the saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true!’.

You tell yourself you want a beautiful, intelligent partner, get one, and then realize that their beauty is a stress and their intelligence a curse!

What went wrong?

The answer is that we need to focus on the ‘content’, not the ‘container’ – and words, images and thoughts are containers, not content.

The real content, as I’ve hinted at, is actually the emotions the words (images etc.) generate.

So words and images are not important in themselves, but rather for the emotions / energy they contain (or generate).

That is precisely why they say that communication is 90%(ish) non-verbal (the number given always varies, but it’s high!).

And it isn’t even the body language that does the rest of the communicating as they say, rather it the energy behind the words(admittedly, often communicated in part through body language).

Once we understand this, we can then set about manifesting goals in a much smarter way than by robotically writing affirmations or visualizing the fulfillment of our goals.

Because now we will understand that what matters is the emotion we wish to experience, not the specific external result we intend.

In other words, I don’t really want the beautiful, intelligent partner per se, I want the feeling I believe such a partner will give me.

And I don’t really want the millions of dollars per se, I want the feeling I believe they will give me.

So next time you focus on a goal, tune in to the emotion you want to experience once you achieve the goal. Then meditate on this emotional vibration.

By ‘meditating on the vibration’, I simply mean hold the feeling of that emotion in your body for as long as you can.

Since like attracts like, the emotion you hold in your body will go out into the universe and attract more things like it.

They mightn’t be what you imagined they would be, but they will give you the feeling you wanted to have.

Do this and you won’t wish for one thing, get it, and realize it wasn’t what you wanted. Rather, you will get the exact emotion you were looking for.

So focus on emotions, not words.

Emotions are what really matter.

Feature Article: Reiki and the Power of Sound

We are all vibrational creatures.

We are energy vibrating at different frequencies – and the higher our vibration, the greater our evolution.

The Usui system of Reiki that we practise today is an amazing tool for raising our energy vibration. Put your hands on (or above) your body, intend for the Reiki to flow – and voila! you are super-charged with high-vibrational Reiki energy.

What most Reiki practitioners don’t know, however, is that the original Japanese Reiki system also used sound to raise a practitioner’s energy vibration.

Sound (in the form of chanted mantras) is introduced in Level 2 and forms the foundation of a bold plan to dramatically change the way you experience energy.

Indeed, the Reiki mantras not only help you to become more aware of your energy body / energy field, they also help connect you to the key energy centres in your body, for instance the chakras and the hara (a key energy centre below the navel that will help ground

and energize your life).

Understanding Sound

Every part of your body vibrates at a certain energy frequency. Each part can vibrate within either a healthy vibrational range or an unhealthy one.

If a part of your body vibrates for too long outside a healthy vibrational range, then illness will typically result.

Most Reiki systems use hands-on healing to either help keep the different parts of your body vibrating within a healthy vibrational range, or to draw them back into one.

Yet there are other ways to bring your body’s energy vibrations back into balance, and a very powerful one is the intelligent use of sound.

For this to work, you simply use sound like a tuning fork.

You do this by creating a sound with the precise energy vibration of the part of the body you are working on. This sound then works to draw the imbalanced energy of the area into alignment with it and, as a result, back into balance.

This kind of work is often done to balance chakras. Each chakra actually has a note that vibrates at its exact energy frequency. As a result, you can use this note as a kind of energy ‘whirlpool’ that draws the energy of the chakra back into alignment.

In a similar way, you can also use sound (i.e. a precise note) toamplify a body part’s connection to energy, thus strengthening it.

Apparently the Mayans understood the power of using sound like this, for they are said to have had ‘sound chambers’ that resonated at major energy frequencies. Stepping inside one would have been like taking a sound bath – something that helped you connect more fully to these key energy frequencies.

Along these lines, I foretell ‘sound-healing-machines’ in the not too distant future that will first take a scan of your body to check which parts are out of alignment and then do one of either two things:

Play the appropriate sound(s) to draw these body parts back into balance or,
Play ‘inverse’ sound vibrations to neutralize negative energy – in much the same way that ‘noise cancellation’ technology works. By shooting out a sound wave with an inverse energy frequency, the negative energy will be cancelled out, in much the same way 2 – 2 = 0.

The Power of Mantras and Chanting

I have to confess that the first time I came across chanting in traditional Japanese Reiki system I felt uncomfortable.

To me, chanting conjured up images of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I saw mind-dead humans having their hearts ripped out, evil priests enslaving the masses!

I gave chanting a shot, however, and soon came to recognise its incredible potency. Indeed, for over a year, chanting became my number one Reiki practice!

Reiki Mantras

Chanting Reiki mantras has several specific benefits over and above those already mentioned. To start with, they can be used tocalm the mind at times when traditional meditation would be almost impossible.

For instance, imagine you’ve come home from work stressed after a hectic day. If you sat down to meditate in such conditions you would most likely find that your mind was out-of-control and there was little you could do to calm it quickly.

Since mantras and sound work on both a physical level (their sound vibrations penetrate deep into your body) and a mental level (they give your mind something sturdy to focus on), they are typically able to still the mind, even on ‘manic’ days. By working simultaneously on two levels, they can almost always bring about calm.

Specific healing benefits of the mantras include:

Strengthening the hara(they are probably the best tool I know for this)
Improved grounding
Protection from the negative energyof people and places
Increased self-confidence
Increased connection to all of the chakras

Given all of the benefits, it is sad that these mantras were lost to Reiki when it was introduced to the West in the late 1930s – all the more so because they lay the foundation for many of the more advanced Reiki techniques.

Fortunately, the mantras were not lost for good and they eventually re-emerged to the general public around the mid 1990s. Admittedly – even today – only a tiny percentage of level 2 courses teach or even know of their existence but, if you study the right course and work with them, you will soon find that your connection to energy improves.

What’s more, the mantras will also help you to become moreemotionally balanced and give you the energy foundation to start accessing ever-increasing amounts of Reiki energy.

I’ve seen it time and time again: anyone who works consistently with the Reiki mantras always ends up amazed by the power of sound.

The energy of the mantras goes deep into your body, deep into your soul and, ultimately, deep into the heart of your everyday life.

You’re not allowed to make any medical claims when talking about Reiki.

You can’t say Reiki will do this and Reiki will do that.

This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because it stops unscrupulous people making ridiculous claims. It’s bad because it often creates the impression that Reiki isn’t great for healing physical conditions.

Perhaps this is why most people who see Reiki therapists actually do so for emotional reasons.

They get dumped by their boyfriend – they see the Reiki therapist. They are stressed at work – they see the Reiki therapist.

What they don’t do is see the Reiki therapist when they get the flu, have a cold, do a hamstring etc.

And yet this is a real pity because in my experience (not saying Reiki will always do X, Y and Z, just talking about my experience!), Reiki is stunningly effective for acute conditions.

It can be effective for chronic conditions too, but they are more challenging and I’ve written about them elsewhere.

For now, I’d just like to talk about acute conditions and how (in my experience) Reiki can very often dramatically accelerate healing recovery.

To give you an example: some months back my daughter had a terrible earache. Hoping I could help, her mum dropped her at my place and I decided – as I do in such situations – to give her some Reiki.

Since Reiki isn’t a magic pill, it didn’t solve the problem right away. In fact, for some time, my daughter was in considerable discomfort. She cried. She wailed. She writhed. She screamed that Reiki WASN’T HELPING!

This is normal enough, but the housekeeper I had in that day didn’t understand the process and started to – in no uncertain terms! – tell me I should take my daughter to the doctor right away.

But while I’m not against doctors, they are typically not my first choice. Unless it is a serious medical issue (I’m losing blood, I’ve just broken my arm etc.), I’m going to try natural healing first and doctors second.

My rationale in this case was the following: If I book my daughter in to see a GP, she is unlikely to be seen within, say, the next forty minutes. (And to be seen in that timeframe would be considerably good luck!)

The GP would then ever-so-generously spend ten minutes looking over my daughter, tell me she has an infected ear and write up a prescription.

After that, we’d probably spend another 15 minutes going to the chemist and collecting the medicine / painkillers and then have to wait another 20 minutes for the painkillers to take effect.

In total then, my daughter is crying and wailing and writhing for 1.5 hours before the pain goes away.

After that, she then needs to take medicine for 3-7 days – medicine that costs money and is bad for her long-term health. It also tastes terrible, so I’m going to have to put up with her complaining about taking it, each and every time she has it.

So all in all, the medicine might work, but it is slow-going and ultimately bad for my daughter’s health.

Contrast that to what actually happened.

I enlisted my daughter’s mum’s help, we administered Reiki and, within 15-20 minutes, my daughter’s ear was fixed.

Yes, until then my daughter was still crying, but after that she didn’t have any more issues with her ear.

Giving Reiki to Kids, Family and Everyone Else

As a parent, I’ve found Reiki to be invaluable. Kids often come back from school with colds. From time to time they get growing pains, the flu, headaches, skin issues – all sorts of things that Reiki can typically sort out with minimum fuss.

The only real challenge with kids is getting them to stay still long enough for you to give them Reiki. If this is an issue for you, try giving it to them while they watch TV, while you tell them a storyor read them a book (yes, you can read a book and give Reiki at the same time!) or – the method that always works – when they areasleep!

Naturally, you can also give Reiki to adults and, although they might be more skeptical, at least they will typically lie still.

With adults and kids alike, however, I really encourage you to try Reiki as your first response to acute conditions.

So if your partner has the flu, for example, see if Reiki can help before you pop a pill or drink some disgusting, sickly-sweet medicine. You’ll often find that just one or two Reiki sessions make a dramatic difference. One to two sessions and within 24 hours your partner can be up and about when, without the Reiki, it might take them a week or more to get better. (And yes, we’re still talking about my personal experience here, not medical promises!).

Working on yourself is challenging, because we so often focus on the problem, not the solution. We try to get rid of our illnessand so give strength to it. As a result, we can be undoing with our mind the good work we are doing with our hands.

I’ve written about this issue elsewhere. For now, if you are working on yourself, just try to either, a) enjoy the Reiki without focusing on the result you’re looking for or, b) imagine the perfect, healed state you want, and hold this feeling / image in your body while you give yourself Reiki.

Do this and you will cease giving energy (through focus) to the problem.

Reiki for Prevention

I used to do a lot of running. I enjoyed this, but my legs didn’t. In particular, I had bad knees and constant shin splints.

This was a real pain (literally!), and I used to spend lots of money on physios.

They helped a tiny bit, but not much and the problem persisted until I learned and started practising Reiki. Since then, it’s been goodbye shin splints and goodbye bad knees.

I still run most days. And I run up and down the hills in Daylesford, so conditions are probably worse for my body than ever. But the Reiki keeps me in good shape. It heals my body before issues arise.

That’s why I recommend that you give yourself daily Reiki. Why wait until you’ve got a problem? By then it’s a lot harder to get rid of it.

What’s more, through daily practice, you grain greater energetic sensitivity and can very often feel (in your body) when the first sign of an imbalance arises. After that, you simply Reiki that area (often, for me, it is a chakra), restore balance and all is well.

Do nothing, however, and you may soon suffer the growing consequences!

Conclusion

Reiki is great for physical issues. It doesn’t come with a guarantee. You can’t make any medical claims. But if you already do Reiki, why not give it a try? If it doesn’t work, you can always try something else.

(Note: For chronic conditions, I’ve found Pellowah to be really effective. Among other things, it helps change unconscious negative psychological patterns, thus clearing the path for your body to heal itself. ).

Feature Article: The Why and How of Lucid Dreaming

A lucid dream is a dream where you know you are dreaming.

It is a dream where you ‘wake up’ inside your dream.

Learning to lucid dream will improve your meditation, enhance your ability to connect to energy (ki) and grant you greater access to your Higher Self.

Lucid dreaming is also great fun, because you can act consciously in a world without limitations.

Want to fly? Great. You can do it.

Want to stuff yourself with chocolate without putting on weight? Can do that too.

In lucid dreaming, you can indulge fantasies, live other lives and learn from all sorts of experiences that would normally be unavailable to you.

What’s more — and this is a point people normally don’t talk about — lucid dreaming may well give you a glimpse of something close to enlightenment.

Admittedly, I’m not enlightened, so I can only go on my personal experience of lucid dreaming and the words of people I believe are enlightened (e.g. Adyashanti), but whatever the case, when you lucid dream you are not just incredibly present to the world around you, but also wonderfully connected to your energy field. You feel complete. Whole. Energized.

In short, you bliss out!

So, given that you are going to spend roughly a third of your life asleep, why not ‘open the gates’ to lucid dreaming?

How to Lucid Dream

Lucid dreaming can be challenging and I suspect most people go their entire lives without ever having one.

Fortunately, being an energy worker / meditator, you have a big advantage over most people in that you will:

1.   Be better at focusing on the present moment
2.   Be more detached from everyday life
3.   Have greater amounts of ki (chi) energy

These three things will make lucid dreaming far easier for you than the average person, so while it will still be a challenge to lucid dream, it will be doable.

The key factor for having lucid dreams is simply to set a strong intent to do so. In other words, each time before you go to sleep, you need to give yourself an ‘order’ to have a lucid dream.

Another good idea is to create an affirmation to repeat before going to sleep (e.g. ‘Every night I have lots of lucid dreams’). When you say your affirmation, try to feel its ‘truth’ as you say it. Don’t just repeat the words without focus. Imagine yourself ‘waking up’ inside a dream as you say them. Imagine yourself becoming lucid.

A great way to do this is to recollect an old dream, replay it in your mind and then, at a certain point in it, imagine yourself becoming lucid. Spending time ‘daydreaming’ this new ‘lucid’ dream will greatly enhance your chances of having an actual lucid dream.
The next key to lucid dreaming is to practise detachment in your everyday life. My experience is that is very difficult to lucid dream when you are overly caught up in everything that is going on around you.
Why?
Because you won’t have the ‘energy’ left to set a strong enough intent to lucid dream. If all you really want is to get that new job, then it will be hard to pull your energy away from that preoccupation and focus on lucid dreaming.

That said, I don’t want you to become passionless. Rather, you need to be willing to get excited about one thing one moment and then let go of it the next. If you can do this, then your energy will be freed up for lucid dreaming.
Another important way to enhance your chances of lucid dreaming is to increase your ki (chi) energy levels. Among other things, this will help you to become more aware of the present moment, a critical skill for lucid dreaming.
Practising Reiki daily is magnificent for your ki, as is learning and practising Pellowah. Meditation, yoga, Qigong and the like are also great.
If you don’t practice any of these ‘spiritual’ disciplines, then it will be far tougher to have lucid dreams unless you have a natural gift for them.

Concrete Tips for Lucid Dreaming

I first came across the idea of lucid dreaming in the works of Carlos Castaneda (whom Deepak Chopra called the ‘Godfather of the New Age movement’!).
Castaneda’s teacher instructed him to visualise his hands before falling asleep and then, using his intent, to ‘find them’ during his dreams.
In other words, Castaneda had to remember to look for his handsduring his dreams and, if he could manage this then, with luck, he would awaken to the fact he was dreaming.
This is a great technique, for when you find yourself looking at your hands in a dream, a mental ‘buzzer’ goes off and you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m dreaming!’. After that, you can do and go wherever you want in your dream because you are lucid.
Another key for enhancing the chances of having a lucid dream is to think about lucid dreaming both during the day and before you go to bed (ideally reading something on the topic right before sleep).
By cramming your mind with lucid dreaming ideas, your unconscious dreaming mind will be much more likely to become lucid.
Finally, here are my big three ways to have more lucid dreams:

1. Wake up some time during the night and spend 15-20 minutes meditating on your lucid dreaming affirmation(s). Then go back to bed, intend to lucid dream, study the back of your hands, give yourself the order to find your hands in your dream and voila’! you may just find yourself in a lucid dream.
2. Sleep more. Yes, this isn’t always practical, but I’ve found that the longer I sleep, the better the chances of lucid dreaming. 8-9 hours of sleep tends to really help your cause and you will often find that your lucid dream comes in the final hour before you wake up.
3. ‘Retrace’ your dreams when you wake up during the night and imagine becoming lucid in them before falling asleep again. In other words, if you wake up in the night, try to remember your last dream. Visualize it in your mind and then imagine becoming lucid in it. ‘Daydream’ this ‘lucid dream’ until you fall asleep. With luck, you’ll fall right into a real lucid dream.

How to Maintain a Lucid Dream

Having a lucid dream is only part of the challenge. Maintaining a lucid dream, an ever bigger one.
In practice, after becoming lucid, one of two things tends to happen rather quickly:

1. Your dream images go all black (or some such similar thing) and you wake up.
2. You get sucked back into your regular dreams.
To maintain your lucid dream, you need to stay vigilant. You need to keep your awareness focused 100% on the present moment of the dream.
One way to ‘maintain’ your lucid dream is to only glance at thingsin the dream. That is, never focus too long on any one thing. Spend a second or two looking at one thing and then move onto the next.
If you feel your lucid dream fading on you, try glancing from object to object in the hope of helping to strengthen the lucid dream.
Another fabulous tip that I got from Castaneda’s books is to remember to place the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth when I am lucid dreaming. This tip is always a big help in extending the life of my lucid dreams.
Finally, your dream world is a ‘mirror’ of your daily life, so to be conscious at night, practise staying ‘conscious’ during the day. One way to do this is to practise the ‘dream technique’ of glancing from object to object during the day. At some point as you do this, you will most likely feel your awareness being sucked back into the ‘daily dream’. Whenever this happens, focus on a new object. This will help anchor you in the present moment and help prevent you getting sucked into unconscious daydreaming — a great skill both for daily life and lucid dreaming.

Conclusion

Lucid dreaming is a fun way to expand your consciousness, connect to your Higher Self, live the ‘impossible’ and make the most of your sleeping hours.
For many people, it takes commitment and practice to develop the art of lucid dreaming. So be patient and persist. The rewards will definitely be worth any wait.

Sri Sri-nanthakumar

Why You Need to Connect to the Earth

The Five Reiki Precepts