Reiki and Jung:  An Introduction

Matthew Fike

            My subject today is probably quite unfamiliar to most of you:  Reiki and its relationship to Jungian psychology, a linkage that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever attempted.  Those familiar with Jung’s (1928) essay “On Psychic Energy” in CW 8 may consider the comparison to be specious because Reiki, or universal life force energy, clearly falls outside the realm of his interests.[1]  He states, “The concept of life-energy has nothing to do with a so-called life-force, for this, qua force, would be nothing more than a specific form of universal energy.” He further distinguishes between “our hypothetical life-energy ‘libido’” and “a concept of universal energy.” Jung does not deny the possibility of universal energy, but he deliberately sidesteps the issue by drawing a line between psychology and bioenergetics.  This is nothing less than an enormous aporia at the heart of Jung’s energy theory.  I intend to address it head on by providing a basic introduction to Reiki.  I will conclude by suggesting some themes that it shares with Jungian psychology in spite of Jung’s stated disinterest.

            The word “Reiki” refers both to the “universal life force energy” itself and to the practice of using it to help others.  First, what is the word’s etymology, and does anything get lost in translation?  “Reiki” is composed of two Japanese words:  rei and ki.  Rei means “universal,” with the connotation of universal intelligence (Miles xiv).  Similarly, it can be defined as “Higher Intelligence” or as an all-pervasive “subtle wisdom” (Rand, Millennium 4).  The word rei also translates as “spirit in English, and [it] has the same ambiguity of referring to ghosts or the most sublime awareness” (Miles 193n).  Ki means nonphysical energy but with a sacred connotation (Miles xiv), and it is the ki that leaves the physical body at the moment of death (Rand, Millennium 4).  So the translation of Reiki as “universal life force energy” fails to capture not only its indwelling nature but also important connotations of sacredness, spirit, and intelligence.  It is incorrect, however, to suggest that Reiki is intelligent.  Reiki is intelligence itself (Miles 187).  It is primordial consciousness or what physicists call the unified field.  That is why one source calls it “undifferentiated” or “‘nonpolarized’ subatomic energy” (Veltheim 44, 29).  Others call it “God-consciousness” (Rand, Touch 31) and “Universal Love” (Stein 1). 

            If this Reiki energy has been around since the origin of the universe, it makes sense that different traditions would have different names for it.  But here we encounter a controversy.  On the one hand, Reiki may be the same as the Indian prana, the Chinese chi, or “light” in the Christian tradition.  Reiki may also equate with the Polynesian word mana, the Iroquois orenda, the Hebrew ruach, the word barraka in Islamic countries, as well as orgone energy, animal magnetism, and archaeus (Stein 16).[2]  Moreover, the similarity between Reiki and other traditions gains strength because Native American healers made Hawayo Takata, who had brought Reiki to the United States, a Medicine Woman based on the conclusion that she used the same energy that they did (Haberly 97). On the other hand, Reiki is not precisely equivalent to words in these other traditions.  For example, if Reiki were really identical to prana, it would be primarily about breath; and if it were identical to chi, I could use it to throw you up against a wall.  Neither is true.  Therefore, the following statement about Reiki by Pamela Miles makes more sense:  “It is primordial consciousness, which is identical to respective source states of chi and prana, called yuan chi and mahaprana.  The chi manipulated in acupuncture and the prana moved by yogic practices are grosser bioenergies” (Miles 10).  That is, Reiki, as primordial consciousness, is the more fundamental source energy of All That Is.

As stated earlier, Reiki is not only universal life force energy but also the practice of using it to help others.  Here is a good definition of the latter with some implications.  Reiki is

a spiritual healing practice that can help return us to balanced functioning on every level—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, even social—regardless of our age or state of health.  . . . [Reiki] brings rapid stress reduction and relief from pain and anxiety.   Recipients commonly report improved sleep and digestion, and a greater sense of well-being.  Other benefits, such as feeling more motivated, less depressed, or experiencing relief from side effects of medication, radiation, or chemotherapy, vary from person to person.  Unlike conventional medicine, Reiki does not attack disease.  Rather Reiki supports our well-being and strengthens our natural ability to heal by encouraging balance.  (Miles 8)

Takata made a statement that amplifies the point about disease:  “‘Remove the cause and there shall be no effect” (Miles 183).  If the imbalance is removed, the disease that arises from it goes away.

At this point, it may help to underscore what Reiki is not.  First, it is not a transfer of the practitioner’s bio-energy to the client (Usui and Petter 19); instead Reiki flows from an inexhaustible source through the practitioner and into the client’s body, where it seeks to repair imbalance that arises from injury or negative thinking and to strengthen the body’s own healing capacity.  As Diane Stein puts it, “A healer . . . does not do healing to [other persons], but only with them” (22).  Second, Reiki is not a religion; in fact, neither practitioner nor client has to believe in it for it to work.  When I do Reiki, I do not even have to concentrate, though the energy often produces a meditative state.  Third, Reiki cannot be forced:  if a practitioner does so, he tends to pick up symptoms from the client.  Instead, one simply allows the client’s body to draw whatever amount of energy it needs. The energy then goes wherever it is needed.

            For our purposes, John and Esther Veltheim’s book, Reiki:  The Science, Metaphysics and Philosophy, provides a helpful way to cap off this section on what Reiki is.  I want to return to their idea that Reiki is “‘nonpolarized’ subatomic energy” because it will help you understand how Reiki reacts to imbalances.  The Veltheims point out that when Reiki moves from the nonphysical into time-space during a Reiki treatment, it becomes polarized and forms “a mirror image of the disharmony (disease) . . . in the energy field” (44; cf. 29-30).  If you were to imagine a hole and then were to imagine water flowing into it in order to create a smooth surface, you would have a metaphor for how Reiki works. 

That is how it affects the client, but what about the practitioner, and what about Reiki more generally?  Reiki manifests as heat and as tingling in the hands, is the same in both hands, switches on automatically, flows according to demand, never runs out, is not affected by the health of the practitioner, works on animals and plants, can be used to treat oneself, can be practiced by anyone who is initiated, is not a belief system, has no harmful side effects, is complementary to all other systems, always treats at the root cause level (that is, “always tend[s] to go to the area of greatest disharmony”), needs no diagnosis, and reduces stress (all from Veltheim 31-42; emphasis in the original).

We might fruitfully end this section on Reiki energy and Reiki practice by invoking Miles’s statement that Reiki “sits at the intersection of science and spirit” (12).  This privileged position may be why Dr. Mikao Usui gave Reiki the following titles:  “The Miracle Medicine for all Diseases” (medicine and miracle—there’s science and spirit) and “The Secret Method of Inviting Happiness” (there’s spirit again) (Rowland, Reiki for the Heart 209).  I now want to double back and give you some information about Dr. Usui and the history of Reiki.  It is a tale of two controversies.

The standard story goes like this:  Mikao Usui was the dean of a small Christian school in Japan named Doshisha University; his honor was violated when he was unable to respond to a student’s question about how Jesus healed people and why such healing was impossible in the present day.  So he quit his job and went to the University of Chicago, studied for seven years, received a doctorate in theology, then returned to Japan to study the Buddhist sutras (Lambert 8).  He received the Reiki symbols in a vision on his twenty-first and final day of fasting on Mt. Kuriyama.  Usui passed Reiki on to Chujiro Hayashi, who was a medical doctor and a Navy captain. Hayashi in turn passed it on to his patient Hawayo Takata, who then brought it to the United States.  To give you an idea of the time frame, Usui’s quest for Reiki took place in the late 1800s; Takata was born in 1900; Hayashi became a Reiki master in 1925; and Takata went to Japan in 1935, became a Reiki master in 1938, and died in 1980 (Stein 11).  These dates are accurate, but Usui never worked at Doshisha University or studied at the University of Chicago.  William Lee Rand, the editor of Reiki News Magazine, discovered that neither place has any record of Usui whatsoever (Touch 2), which suggests that Takata made up parts of the history of Reiki’s discovery to make it more palatable to the Christian West. 

So the first controversy is whether Usui was a Christian and studied in the United States—apparently not.  More likely, he was some combination of Buddhist, spiritualist, and psychic (Usui and Petter 10; Rand, Millennium 116).  The second controversy is whether he discovered or rediscovered Reiki.  It is possible that Reiki practice is 2,500 years old.  Rand speculates that Jesus traveled to India, Tibet, and China; and noting biblical passages about the laying on of hands, Rand speculates that Jesus may have been a Reiki master (Millennium 88).  Stein takes it further, claiming that Reiki’s background includes the Buddha and Jesus and that Jesus was “a reincarnated Bodhisattva,” survived the crucifixion, and went to live in India afterwards (10).  This theory further holds that Reiki teachings made their way to Japan and eventually to Usui.

Anything further regarding these dual controversies is beyond the scope of my talk.  The important thing is what happened after Takata brought Reiki to the United States.  Thousands of people in the West now practice Reiki, but Reiki practice has undergone some changes.  As Miles points out, whereas the emphasis was originally “on spiritual development with healing as a by-product,” today Reiki “tends to focus on healing with spiritual development as a by-product” (41).  In addition, the price has come down.  Takata used to charge $175 for introductory Reiki, $500 for level two, and $10,000 for Reiki master training (Miles 123).  In contrast, I paid $50, $100, and $500.  And whereas the three levels used to be spaced out over years, some irresponsible Reiki Masters now initiate students to all three levels in a weekend. 

All right, what are the three levels or “degrees” of Reiki?  Reiki I includes the history of Reiki (often the mythological version promulgated by Takata), the hand positions for oneself and others, and a first-level attunement.  The hand positions correspond to the chakra points, which, from lowest to highest, are as follows:  root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown.  The first three are considered masculine, the last three feminine, and the heart is the hinge between the two categories (Veltheim 50).  In the same way, Reiki is thought to combine masculine and feminine elements and to be moving humanity from a masculine, power-centered emphasis to a more loving, heart- and spirit-centered way of being.  In any case, the Reiki hand positions are as follows:  various positions on the head (front, temples, back of head, crown, throat and jaw); then shoulders, heart, upper abdomen, middle abdomen, and groin; then the shoulder blades, middle of the back, small of the back, and lower back.

Next, what is an attunement?  I must first explain Reiki II.  The main emphasis in the second course is on three of the four Reiki symbols.  In keeping with Reiki tradition, I will not give the symbols’ Japanese names or show you what they look like, but here is what they are all about.  They are a combination of Sanskrit and Japanese (Rand, Touch 30-31).  The first is commonly called the power symbol; its purpose is to start the flow of Reiki, to amp up its power, and to effect physical healing.  The second is usually called the mental/emotional symbol, though some call it the “harmony symbol” (Ellyard 161); its purpose is to bring about healing of the mind and emotions.  The third is the distance or connection symbol, and this is where Reiki gets really interesting.  The distance symbol, which relates most directly to the energetic body, enables one to send energy to someone (including oneself) across space and time.  It provides a connection to the Akashic Record and thus to one’s past and future lifetimes, and Stein claims that a practitioner receives a karmic boost as a reward for becoming a healer (105).  One can also use the distance symbol to send energy to avatars like Jesus and the Buddha or to angels, the dead, extra-terrestrials, or to whomever or whatever one wishes no matter where or when, including temporary pain, chronic illness, first aid issues, situations of global conflict, plants, animals, and mechanical or electrical devices.  The only caveat I found was that Reiki should not be given to those who are anaesthetized because it increases awareness, to those on anti-coagulants or cardiac stimulants, or to those who have epileptic seizures (Parkes 61).  One of the coolest applications involves sending energy to one’s future self:  the energy can be stored as if in a battery at a future place and time (like this presentation or a job interview):  it is there when one needs it (Rand, Touch 35-36).  A practitioner can also beam Reiki across a room or use the hands to scan a body for imbalances.

Now a Reiki attunement impresses these symbols on a student’s hands and in her biofield.  As Reiki energy is channeled from a practitioner to a client, so an attunement is passed from the master to the student.  That is, the ability to channel Reiki is not so much taught as it is transferred (Rand, Millennium 3; Miles 86).  Before the attunement, one cannot channel the energy, at least not to any significant degree; after the attunement, bam, one can do it because the attunement has aligned the student’s biofield so that she becomes a conduit for life force energy (Miles 64).  Here are a couple of analogies.  An attunement is like upgrading from a wireless set to a radio that can pick up international stations (Veltheim 66).  Or this:  In an attunement, a Reiki master adjusts a student’s radio antenna (Ellyard 5) or adjusts the dials so that she he can pick up Reiki Radio. 

What follows the initial attunement is a twenty-one day cleansing period:  three days per chakra, or so I am told.  It may be that someone arbitrarily selected the number twenty-one because of Usui’s twenty-one days on Mt. Kuriyama.  The attunement for Reiki II enables a student to use the symbols like keys or activation buttons (Rand, Touch 31) because the attunement anchors the symbols in the student’s mind, and each activates a particular type of Reiki energy.  Moreover, the symbols are energetic in themselves, have power of their own (Ellyard 167), and even have consciousness (Rand, Touch 32).  We are a long way from Jung, who believed that symbols have significance when humans imbue them with it but no inherent power of their own.

The final symbol, the Reiki master symbol, is taught in Reiki III, which is a course for those who want to teach Reiki to others and give attunements.  If the initial attunement is done properly, one then has Reiki for life.  It may grow stronger, but one cannot lose it unless the attunement was not done properly, in which case the energy fades out over two to three months. 

In any case, when one has been attuned to Reiki, the energy enters at the crown chakra, is channeled into the client’s body or one’s own through the hands, finds its own way to the place of imbalance, and stimulates the body’s own healing ability by rebalancing the chakra or energy system.  Sometimes, a healing crisis will result from the release of toxins—the client will seem to get worse before she gets better.  But that too is a sign that the energy is doing its job.[3]

Well, this presentation would not seem to have much, if anything, to do with Jungian psychology; so let me turn now to some similarities.  First, if Reiki can be sent at a distance, it clearly transcends “our Newtonian time-space models” (Miles xv), much like the collective unconscious, as Jung’s writings on synchronicity point out.  For Jung as for his friend Albert Einstein, space-time is relative.  Second, Reiki boosts intuition.  As Miles writes, “your hands have a direct relationship with Reiki that doesn’t go through your mind, as if your hands have become Reiki” (135).  Reiki, you will remember, is consciousness; and hands that are alight with energy know where they need to go, which sounds very similar to Jung’s sense that intuition comes from the unconscious or from the archetypes.  In other words, the rational faculty is bypassed, which is what Jung may mean when he calls intuition “irrational” (CW 18, 502/219; 6, 770/453).  Third, some of Reiki’s effects—especially relaxation, focus, and calmness—and its effect on the mental/emotional body can assist traditional psychotherapy, though the touch taboo probably means that it would be best not to receive psychotherapy and Reiki from the same person (LaTorre; Miles 35; Durana; and Nield-Anderson and Ameling 43-44).  Fourth, Reiki works on the emotional/mental body; and this includes the unconscious, which means that it promotes individuation, especially the integration masculine and feminine.  As others have said, “Identification with a deeply healed self is the goal of your journey” (Rand, Millennium 95); and “Reiki is all about . . . learning to become whole from within” (Veltheim 99).  Here is Takata’s biographer and friend, Helen Haberly:  “Mrs. Takata often spoke of becoming a ‘complete whole,’ for we must have not only physical well-being but mental and spiritual balance, as well.  Only then can we say we are whole—this is what we receive from Reiki . . . ” (57).[4]  So to the extent that Reiki is the life force that Jung relegates to the field of bioenergetics, he must stand corrected because there is a complementary relationship between Reiki and psychology.[5]

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