Reiki and Worry ~ The Second Principle

Just For Today, I Will Not Worry

“Worry is not preparation."  ~ Mark Twain

Fear, like anger, has a purpose.  When we are in danger, fear focuses our attention and energizes the parts of us necessary to defend ourselves.  Fear helps us to run faster, fight harder, see more clearly and survive.  In a healthy system, when the danger has passed, the fear is discharged from the body and we return to a neutral state. 

Unresolved trauma, however, particularly trauma where we’re unable to act in our own behalf, results in a lingering state of hyperarousal.  The system is always on high alert, energized to defend itself against a danger that is not happening in the present moment.  It creates a free-floating globule of anxiety waiting to attach itself to any host, and is a futile misuse of our resources.

To worry is an expression of powerlessness. It is a byproduct of dissociation and the attendant feeling of helpless inability to directly affect our environment.  It is the charged remains of past overwhelm, a backlog of unspent energy in the nervous system trying to find a way out. 

It is important to be aware that this particular expression of fear never resolves into relief, but instead transfers endlessly from host to host.  When one supposed cause of worry is taken care of, we simply drop down to the next item on the menu and proceed to gnaw on that, the way a dog worries a bone. 

Try noticing your inner dialogue for a while and see how much of it relates to what is actually happening in the present moment.  Research suggests that of the 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts we have per day, over 95 percent of those thoughts are repetitive, recycled, and completely unoriginal.  Equally striking is that 70 to 80 percent of those thoughts are negative. 

What this means is that we worry, almost all the time, and we worry about the same things over and over.  Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, when a student said they had no time to meditate, responded, “You have time to worry.”  And we do.  We are experts.  We can worry while driving a car, making love, balancing our checkbook, or eating lunch.  It is a skill so finely honed, it feels like our nature.  But it’s not. 

If we had the technology to take a picture of what happens to our energy when we worry, it would look like we were hemorrhaging.  You’ve probably heard the expression that worrying is like praying for what you don’t want.  Energy follows attention, so by persistently energizing imagined disaster and peril, we effectively create a world where we prove ourselves right. “You see, I knew that was going to happen!”  What little life force we have left then needs to be directed at dealing with the crisis that we ourselves have created.  What would it be like to take even half of that power back? 

When we worry, our attention leaves the body and the present moment.  This is very anxiety producing because it means there is no one driving the bus; we’re on auto pilot and that’s not safe for any extended period of time.  Because of our unresolved trauma, our nervous systems are trained to look outside of ourselves for solutions. The anxiety then gets translated into something to worry about, and the cycle persists. 

The surest way to calm yourself down is to pay attention to how your body feels. This sends the signal that your awareness is where it should be, and the system comes off high alert.  Unresolved trauma will try to convince you that in order to feel better you need to do something about what you’re worrying about, but most of the time nothing is happening in the present moment, so you have absolutely no agency to effectively make change. 

The antidote to worry is presence.  As you explore this principal, it’s important to notice where your attention is.  Trying to control your thoughts is pointless and exhausting, and you usually end up worried about the fact that you’re failing at not worrying.  Instead, if you realize you’re worrying – which isn’t hard because it’s happening most of the time – try paying attention to how that makes your body feel.  Is your stomach in knots?  Does your vision change?  What happens to your appetite for food or sex? 

Once your awareness is located in your body, don’t consciously try to change anything, just bring reiki and your breath into the places you feel are impacted by your thoughts and notice what happens. Out of habit, your awareness will keep moving outside to worry, but if you keep gently bringing it back to the body sensation, keep breathing into it, and keep introducing reiki, in time this habit will change. The breath, awareness and body sensation working together under the auspices of the reiki will gradually dispel the anxiety.

Every minute you spend doing this instead of letting your worry waltz you out the door, you are redesigning your energy anatomy to hold you and keep you safe.  The less you worry, the less you have to worry about.  Making conscious choices about where you place your attention is one of the most commanding tools available to you.  You’re the one giving your power away.  If you want it back, all you have to do is name that it’s yours.    

Reiki and Anger ~ The First Principle

With the full moon in Aries approaching this evening, there have been several cautions that anger is not our best resource to work with the explosive energies and revelations that surround us.  I thought I'd share some thoughts on the first reiki principle:

Just For Today, I Will Not be Angry

In approaching this principle, it is important to begin with the understanding that we are equipped with emotions for a reason.  Emotion = E-motion, the movement of energy in the body.  The expression of grief creates continuity and flow where there had been compartmentalization.  Joy opens our heart and expands our awareness beyond the boundaries of self interest.  Depression can indicate a need for the stillness of the element of earth.

Anger clears space of unwanted intrusions.  If you are on a crowded subway and someone stabs your foot with their umbrella, you have a flash of appropriate anger and do what you need to do to protect yourself.  It is a momentary fire that flares up in response to danger.  If we are fully present in the moment, we respond skillfully and our anger dissipates when the danger has passed.

Unfortunately, most of us carry trauma that has not fully resolved.  A perceived threat in the moment wakes the experience of old dangers that we unconsciously relive and project onto our current experience.  So that umbrella on your big toe triggers a memory of all the ways you have ever had your boundaries impinged upon, causing you to respond to this innocent intrusion on your space as though your life were being threatened.  Disproportionate rage and/or overwhelm might result, leaving you furious at something that hasn’t actually happened, or dissociated and resentful at a feeling of powerlessness.

Reiki helps us to release old trauma and come back to the grounded experience of ourselves in the present.  Exercising the principle, “Just for today, I will not be angry,” disciplines the mind to harmonize with that process rather than hinder it, training it to respond to what is happening right now and not joust with the phantoms of our past hurts. 

There is a difference between the emotion of anger and the state of being angry, which is a reflexive and habituated response to unresolved fear.  By embracing this first principle of reiki, we take a breath and ask ourselves:

¨     Am I in immediate danger?

 

¨     Am I making assumptions that may not be true about someone else’s motivations?

¨     Am I behaving in a way that exacerbates or perpetuates the situation?

¨     Am I unable to accept an apology?

¨     Is there another way I could respond that might be more productive of good?

¨     Is there something I can let go of that could make this situation better?

Being angry is an expression of powerlessness, a failure of imagination that limits our perception of the choices available to us.  It is a delusional state that keeps us fighting battles in a war that exists only in our minds, funneling resources, that could be better spent, into our own military industrial complex. Because the battles are not real, they can never be won. 

Being angry creates a state of constant inflammation in the body, a system always on high alert that degrades our wellness and makes it impossible for our awareness to rest comfortably in our felt sense.  The attention is always directed outward, and we hold external forces responsible for our well being. 

If we are not feeling compassion, we are not connected to the truth of what we are.  We might feel as though we are right, but if we aren’t feeling love, we have come unplugged. 

So just for today, just for this moment, what would it be like to choose a different response?  What would it take to decide to ignore the initial kneejerk reaction to life and wait for another possibility to present itself?  If the way you’ve always done things were not available to you, what other tool could you use to resolve conflict? 

Not being at war with anything means you accept things as they are.  That doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion about anything or protect yourself.  It just means that by accepting things as they are, you are not wasting time and energy wishing they were something they are not.  This places you firmly in the arena of life rather than in the land of disempowered resentment; you are in real-time negotiation with the thing itself and not your unfulfilled fantasy of what you want it to be. 

Think of something infuriating.  You won’t have to look far.  Imagine that being angry is not an option.  Watch what happens when your body steps down from the initial impulse to go to war.  The narrowed vision of fear and rage expands to take in more information, and you might observe something you’ve never noticed before, see it from a different angle. 

While being angry perpetuates conflict and limits our efficacy, being present gives us access to resources to create something beneficial and new.  We begin with this principle, the practice of choosing presence over fear, because it retrieves our awareness from the past and plugs it back into the ground of the moment where we have true power to effect change.

Reiki and Wildness

Offering reiki to wild things is a way of cooperating with the organic intelligence of the material world.  What beats your heart is wild.  The love in your dog’s eyes is wild.  Your soul’s code is wild, unresponsive to the dictates of the conscious mind. 

There are things that don’t obey us.  This is good.  Just as you wouldn’t let your demanding two-year-old into the operating system of your computer, there are enormous swaths of life that run independent of our tinkering.  To try to impose our limited agenda on the elegance of our wildness is arrogant and grandiose at best, inevitably leading to catastrophic results.  

In our wildness is our ability to heal.  To surrender to it is to deliver ourselves to the unmade and chaotic realms where matter and spirit, form and emptiness, come together.  It is the intersection where what we are made of meets what we come from and we understand that there is no difference between the two. 

So working with wild things is about listening, noticing, allowing, and learning from beings and parts of self far wiser than us.  Pay attention and be willing to adapt and follow.  Be receptive to the deeper impulses as they pull you out of your habituated response to life and into the places where you have no control.  Let yourself be held; let something else steer the ship. 

Whether you are working with a fallen sparrow or your own deepest wounds, soften the edges of your container and impose no agenda or tether.  Let what you are working with move freely into and out of the field of the energy you are offering, trusting that they know what intensity and duration works for them.  Hands on or long distance, just make the reiki available and trust that the wisdom of the wild thing will use it well.