Reiki Helped Me Understand Christianity Better

by Murielle Marchand

I often refer to your website when I have to explain Reiki to friends or people around me (I still find it very difficult to explain what it is myself…). And after consulting your website many times, I thought I’d like to share my own experience with you.

People usually say, “You do not go to Reiki, Reiki comes to you” and this is something I find particularly true. I heard about Reiki three times at various periods of my life before eventually deciding to join the Reiki I initiation in October 2003. I then became Reiki II in October 2004.

To me Reiki is gift I received in a particularly difficult period of my life. I don’t know where I might have ended without it but ever since I’ve been attuned many things have changed. I can honestly say that the last two years have been a period of growth and evolution for me, sometimes at a very slow pace but a constant one.

I never considered Reiki to be incompatible with my Christian faith; on the contrary, the practice of Reiki has given to me a much more meaningful understanding of Christianity & spirituality and as a result I have returned to Christianity with greater faith and conviction than ever before. Praying, going to church or making the sign of the cross is nowadays a very different experience and a much more meaningful one. Now I constantly use both Reiki and the Christian faith hand in hand in what I believe is a meaningful whole.

As a child I was of course taught about Jesus’ miracles or the descending of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, but nothing made sense to me as I could not understand how all this was possible. I just learn t to accept this as a part of my own culture and faith but I was enormously disappointed to feel so distant from it. I have always been very spiritual but at some point I became very distant from Christianity which just seemed to me a series of “legends” and rituals that were not making me feel closer to God. I never stopped believing in God but I kept saying that I was spiritual and not religious. Something I have also always despised in so many Christians around me is what I call the “praise of suffering”. As a child I heard too often that this or that person was a Saint because (s)he was suffering so much in this life, no doubt (s)he would certainly end up in paradise (there was an instance when I heard that about a woman who was beaten by her husband and nonetheless stayed with him her whole life). I have always rebelled very hard against such conceptions. To me it was not positive. It’s not because Jesus suffered on the cross that it meant we all had to suffer and let things go in our life. My own conception of life was more in terms of a battle to fight or an evolution to make to reach serenity, happiness and wisdom, and of course help others. In those terms, I felt much closer to Buddhism.

Now, I have come back to Christianity with very different eyes and great respect. At first, I felt that practicing Reiki on others (or on me) was very rewarding because I could concretely act when somebody (or I) was in need. Laying hands to channel Reiki energy on my grand-mother when she was ill at least gave me the impression I could concretely act to help, something praying could not do because it was too abstract to me. Reiki was also much more concrete because not only could I feel the energy flow in my hands, but I could also sense the flow change in intensity depending on the situation. It is when I turned Reiki II and learnt about the symbols that my understanding of the Christian faith drastically began to change. It started with the sign of the cross. I had always kept using it, e.g. when I got in a car or a plane, or when saying goodbye to a family member, we used to make the sign on each other’s forehead for protection. I did it more out of superstition that anything else. But when I started using the Reiki protection sign almost everyday it suddenly occurred to me that the cross was the Christians’ protection sign (in one of its use of course) and that each faith had just simply developed its own symbols. The power of symbols in Reiki is so obvious (and it works so well) that I started understanding that the cross must be much more than just a sign. It then suddenly appeared meaningful that my family had been using it as a protection symbol for generations! With this first breach in my vis ion of Christianity, it is the whole veil that eventually went away. Of course once you start Reiki, Jesus’ ability to heal through the placing of hands starts making sense as well – even tough it remains a miracle. But at least you know that all human being have the capacity to heal and use energy; some have just greater capacities than others, but it’s all a question of spiritual evolution and faith. One day, as we were discussing distance Reiki in a Reiki exchange, some people (including myself) expressed skepticism as whether Reiki could really work in space and time (meaning you could send it to dead people or to someone who was far away from you). Someone then said that it was like thoughts. Thoughts are energy as well. And when you think about someone, even if that person is far away from you or dead, you send energy to that person. I then realized that prayers must have been energy as well. Something that was not lost in emptiness but some form of energy addressed to God or someone you were praying for. And with that, I realized why it made sense that Christians were holding mass for their dead or praying for them. Similarly, just like you can work on a situation in the present and the future using Reiki, Christians light candles or pray for someone to recover from an illness or pass an exam in the future. Or I also came to understand that blessed water is water energized by the highest form of energy you can find: God’s (the same way you can energize food or drink or anything using Reiki).

I must say that it has been wonderful to discover little by little that all those things I felt so distant from when I was a child just make sense! Today, I pray a lot and practice Reiki a lot. But I would not use one or the other, I think both marvelously complete each other. Praying and going to Church has become very important to me. It gives me daily guidance & serenity and helps me in difficult times. For the moment, I use Reiki for more practical things, like when I have a headache or feel tired or stressed, when I want to work to improve a particular situation or help relieve others of physical pain. It’s like a gift you grant your body and mind. And Reiki contains that idea of evolution that I like: that you have to go on working on yourself, that you have to evolve because if you want to improve the world you have to start by improving and loving yourself. And it just works!