Distant healing in Usui’s time

Distant healing is an essential part of Reiki in the West. People on Second Degree courses are taught the ‘distant healing’ symbol and they learn how to ‘send’ Reiki to other people, in a way that transcends time and space.

But how was this done in Mikao Usui’s time?

Well, it seems that distant healing was not practised by Usui Sensei’s students, not in the way that we understand it, though they would have realised that such a thing was possible. And although we in the West are taught a ‘distant healing symbol’, these Reiki symbols were only introduced towards the end of Usui’s life, for the benefit of the Imperial Officers who trained with him, and thus most of the people Usui trained were not give symbols to use.

Most of his students used either Buddhist-style meditations or chanted Shinto mantras called ‘kotodama’ to get to grips with certain energies and states, and the work that they were doing was all about their own spiritual development and self-healing; treating others was not focused on or emphasised in the original system for example, and neither was distant healing.

So if the original students weren’t given HSZSN (the ‘distant healing symbol’) to use, and if they didn’t practise distant healing, what did they do that ties in with the idea of distant healing?