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There has always been some debate about hand positions in Reiki. Some teachers attach no importance to them at all, and advise their students to just put their hands wherever they feel like it. Other teachers demand that they be done exactly and precisely the same way every time. I was taught by the latter method. No variations, no side trips, no intuitive leaps. Hawayo Takata always insisted that a full body treatment be done except in very exceptional circumstances. 'Some Reiki' she would say, 'is better than no Reiki at all.' Dr. Usui, on the other hand, according to recent reports, apparantly placed his hands according to his own diagnosis and did not follow any prescribed pattern. The speculation is that he followed his own internal intuition. In my view it is much more probable that he followed ancient principals of diagnosis and hand placement according to the Chinese Meridian and Acupoint system. Thanks to the work of Frank Petter, William Rand and others it is becoming much clearer that there is actually a scientific basis for placing the hands on specific areas of the body to achieve particular results and not a matter of intuition, angel guides, or anything like that. For all those who have ever wondered if hand positions are important and why we place our hands the way we do, the answer is they are, and we place them according to scientifically proven points on the body that produce specific healing effects. The result of this research leads me to conclude that while Reiki may be seen as an 'intuitive' system, it is one that is based on extensive knowledge and experience. In the absence of extensive knowledge and experience, intuition in my view seems like mere guesswork. Logic and intuition, though, working together in harmony produces miracles. To me this is one of the more important teachings of Reiki. As regular visiters to this site know, I have spent the last several years in the practice of TCM/Acupuncture as well as Reiki. In brief, TCM practice is aimed at the manipulation of Qi (the Ki of Reiki) in the body to treat illness and promote health and well-being. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a 5,000 year old medical practice that encompasses a wide range of theoretical approaches and practical techniques and firmly established in the esoteric healing traditions of Japan. Acupuncture came to Japan in 502 AD. The Chinese government of the day presented the Mikado of Japan with the "Canon of Acupuncture". Zhi Cong (pronounced Gee Tsong) brought charts of Acupuncture and Moxibustion and other medical texts. In the 7th century, the Japanese government sent doctors to China to study and issued an imperial decree to copy the medical educational system of the Chinese Tang dynasty. It set up a specialty of Acupuncture and Moxibustion. The Japanese embraced these practices, as they have embraced many things Chinese over the millenia and developed them along their own lines. From my research, it is apparant that Dr. Usui's system of natural healing is based on ancient principals and his techniques are quite familiar to anyone who has studied TCM. He has apparantly drawn from Qi Gong practice, Tuina Massage practice, and Acupuncture practice and woven various techniques of his own into his unique system. While it is apparant that Reiki is not Acupuncture, it is at the same time based on the same theories of Qi flow, energetic entry points, and manual manipulations to invoke and facilitate the flow of Qi in the body, but with both a Japanese and a personal spin. The idea of fine tuning as a sort of short cut to developing the ability to emit Qi, which came to him in a vision on Mount Kuryama, is one that seems unique to Reiki and one that is very appealing to impatient westerners. In the East, these practices routinely take 20 - 30 years to master. Even in Usui's system, a fine tuning in no way prepares a student to begin a healing practice. A student needed to demonstrate the ability to 'emit Qi', at a specified level before being allowed on to the next level. In virtually all eastern practices, mastery of the physical is a pre-requisite to being allowed to advance to metaphysical and/or spiritual studies. This by the way, is not an argument to diminish all that Reiki has become in the West; a return to the womb, as it were. While I might be something of a 'purist' at heart, with more than 50 different practices having Reiki in their name, clearly, there are forces and principals at work that encourage and reinforce our work in the West with metaphysical energies. There is much more to it, in my view, than simple impatience. Western Reiki, in all its myriad forms clearly has a presence. The question for me is do we continue to ignore Reiki's clear scientific roots and healing potential or do we embrace them? On these pages I am setting out to explore the links between Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medical theories, and Reiki. I must confess this is not so easily done. Both systems actually have numerous streams and methods. It is quite easy to get bogged down in the details. Still both Chinese medicine and Reiki have a rich history of embracing divergent and often contradictory viewpoints into an wholistic system of health, healing, metaphysical and spiritual practice. The mission, if I may call it that, is to figure out how everything fits.
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