As we know, Western-style Reiki has drawn to itself a lot of dogma, rigidity and blinkered-thinking, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of distant attunements.
As far as many Reiki teachers and societies are concerned, teaching Reiki to someone who isn’t sitting in front of you is tantamount to heresy and we are all expected to believe that distant attunements do not work.
In fact, if I recall this correctly, one of the requirements of the UK Reiki Council’s core curriculum is that the student, to be properly taught Reiki, has to believe that attunements must carried out face to face, so we even have Reiki thought-police at large in the world!
This is nonsense, of course, and it takes quite some mental gymnastics to believe both that Reiki can be sent from one side of the planet to the other just by thinking about it (à la distant healing) while maintaining that you can only be initiated into Reiki by being corraled in the same room as your teacher for some close-quarters mystical hand-waving.
But new evidence has just come to light which shows that Mrs Hawayo Takata, the lady responsible for teaching Dr Hayashi’s version of Reiki in the Western world, the source of Western Reiki, actually gave a distant attunement and taught someone remotely, in fact ‘over the telephone’.
The research was carried out by Robert Fueston, who was examining archive material at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. You can read a fuller report on this by visiting Pamela Miles’s Reiki site: Takata and distant initiation.
This is very important.
Hawayo Takata was *the* source of Reiki in the West and until very recently all Reiki practitioners and Masters will have had Mrs T sitting there in their lineage. In many quarters, Mrs Takata’s approach and her teachings are almost sacrosanct and underpin the approach of the Reiki Alliance, for example, or the Reiki Association in the UK.
And it will be these more ‘traditional’ organisations who will be dead against any sort of distant teaching of Reiki.
But now we know that distant teaching, and distant initiations, were right there from the very beginning.
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