Yesterday in our Reiki Circle we discussed how constant scrolling through social media, or email, or Amazon is another manifestation of our sickness and unrest as a society and as individual souls.
So many of us are craving relief. (from what?) We are grabbing for answers to life. We grab at the internet. We grab at life hacks and quick tips. We grab at our phones, constantly scrolling, scrolling for the answer: how to feel good, how to lose weight, how to succeed, how to be better, to be pain-free, to be pretty…and rich (and calling it abundance doesn’t change anything if you’re still chasing after it.)
Here’s a meme I recently grabbed from inspirational speaker Steven Miraboli:
OR MORE SIMPLY, AS THE KIDS SAY:
(image via amazon.com)
Craving relief. Relief from feeling pain or stress, from feeling less than.
Last Sunday we realized that during our Reiki group was one of the only times during the waking week when we turn our devices off completely. (Of course we, too, have that problem with constant searching.)
Through Reiki we have found the great relief of turning it off, even if only for a few hours.
One thing we read all over the internet is that meditation is good for us. We hear that turning inward is the antidote to the epidemic of insane scrolling that is hurting our culture. (Granted, the craving has always been there. Ancient practices like yoga have been addressing it for centuries. Now it’s just been ramped up about a billion electronic notches per second.)
The searching, the lack, the killing desire even touches the world of healing. I saw a Yelp review about a Reiki practitioner the other day where the reviewer was disappointed because she didn’t have an “amazing enough” experience.
NEWSFLASH:
Your amazing experience is on YOU, not some outside source you hire to fulfill your own empty heart. I want to scream, “Wake Up World!”
But of course that’s my whole point here: Neither I nor anyone else can wake up anyone who hasn’t made the connection between the searching and misery, or who has made the connection but doesn’t really want to do anything about it (except maybe to scroll more furiously.)
It’s so fun and easy to say, “You do you, Boo!” Some people come to this planet already sure that they are enough, deserving, gifted, perfect beings. Some read a meme and, suddenly CLICK!, the switch flips: “I’m enough! I don’t need to scroll anymore!”
The majority of us, though, feel some slight or overwhelming sense of bodily pain, emotional unrest, or spiritual despair. We don’t know what it is, so we begin to scroll…
Turning inside through meditation, yoga, writing, creating, whatever it is for you, is a solo process. The same is true for Reiki. Reiki is a meditation system, the majority of which is practiced alone. In our Reiki Circle, we come together to share our experiences and to practice together.
Reiki is getting some attention right now. I think it seems “cool” because of the hands-on healing aspect of it, because maybe a friend went and had an “amazing experience.” Once exploring it, though, people soon learn that having cool experiences is just the surface of it.
To really understand Reiki’s meditative healing process, you have to be willing to reach beyond the coolness. You have to be willing to move into the uncertainty, the fear, the boredom. You have to be willing to stay there. And one day you will feel the shift, the true coolness, when you find yourself believing even for one spark of a moment the possibility that you indeed do not need fixing.
Instead of life hacks, you begin to crave true amazing experiences of “you doing you.” And you realize you don’t have to crave anymore because you can do you any time you want. Like now. Or all the time.
Or at least for a late Sunday afternoon in Reiki Circle.
(You’re invited to Reiki Circle too Boo. Sign up on Meetup. Either that or text me.)
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