Reiki Reveals the True Self: How Integrative Healing Helps Navigate Life’s Challenges

[00:00:00] I was hitting some pretty intense burnout coupled with my anxiety disorder, kind of reaching fever pitch. And I was really unwell. I was losing weight. I wasn’t able to keep food down. Like all these things were like super wrong and you know, a doctor could only tell me, oh, this is stress. You just have to be less stressed.

I’m like, wonderful. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Like my, my life does not give me. The ability to have less stress. So I have to find a way to manage it. And Reiki was the tool that kind of brought everything together for me. And it remains the thing that I do most consistently. It is a practice I engage with the most regularly.

There are lots of tools in my toolbox, but the thing that I love about it is once you received this training, you don’t have to go anywhere else. It is always with you. And so Reiki has enabled me to go from like a dozen or more panic attacks in a day to like I have maybe a couple of years. Wow. That’s amazing.

Welcome to onward. Live a live stream, focused on encouraging you to create a life you love living. [00:01:00] Now let’s go beyond success to significance in clear on our, why is crucial. It requires doing the inner work, finding ourselves, getting to know ourselves, embracing our inner child, shedding social. And letting go of perfect.

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Is this Emily, the host of onward live and it gets turned into the onward podcast afterwards, and I’m excited to be here tonight to talk to my guest Nicholas Pearson. And we’re going to be talking about [00:02:00] Reiki and I know very little about Reiki, just a little bit. Not even enough to be dangerous, actually.

So welcome. And thank you. I’m com I’m I’m tuning in from Denver. So my room looks a little different visiting my daughter last week, I was in Seattle and I wanted to share I’m so excited today. I got the news that I am a certified coach, and if you have ever. Gone down the coaching path you’ll know what it takes to be a certified coach.

It is a lot of work, a lot of hours, a lot of training. And I’m really proud that I got that notification today and it just made my make my day to day. And I wanted to share that with you guys. So if you’re tuning in, let us know that you’re here. Let, let me know that you can hear me because number one other time, I was live and I guess I had my microphone.

Yeah. So I revealed to you guys that I am not perfect. So anyway, let me bring in my guest [00:03:00] Nicholas, so I’m excited to have him here. Let’s see. There he is. Nicolas. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. It’s a pleasure to join you today. Yeah. I’m excited to talk to you and with you and learn about Reiki and you know, we’re talking about how it can have.

Heal us and you know, how integrative healing can help us navigate life’s challenges. And, you know, I’ve changed my show a little bit. I think from when you first signed up, it was about facing adversity and moving forward and discovering ourselves along the way. And we still talk about that kind of stuff on this show, because I think in order.

You know, w w we, we all want to create a life. We love living. And that’s what I talk about now. Like, how do you create a life you love living? And I want to show that you can do that even after you’ve gone through adversity. So we’re going to talk about one of the things we’re going to talk about today is how you’ve used Reiki to help with your mental health, right?

Yeah, for sure. It’s been a component of [00:04:00] my, my wellness routine. Yeah. So maybe what you can explain first is what is Reiki, because many people may not even know what it is for sure. That is a great place to get started. So the word Reiki comes into English via the Japanese language. And when we look at the original terminology and its original writing system, the Kanji or the, you know, Japanese characters, there’s a lot of nuance there.

And so we, we do our best to kind of. Contract that to a small space as we can, so we can get those cute little buzzwords to use as a translation or definition. Oftentimes they’re, they’re kind of one dimensional. They fall a little short. So some ways that we might define the words, raking English includes something like spiritual energy or soul power or universal life force.

They’re helpful, they’re there kind of way showers, but they don’t really unpack the complexity and nuance that the terms really have. If we were to take the terms, Ray and key [00:05:00] those Kanji and put them in a, in modern Japanese to English translator app, we might get words like ambience or energy. We might get something that means like, Quality.

And the truth is that the connotation of the terms in Japanese has changed a lot in the exactly 100 years ago, this month, since the system was founded in Japan. So when we talk about Reiki, we’re not only talking about this kind of numinous energy, this kind of mystical thing, but we’re also talking about the system of practice.

Which formally we call Reiki Rio hall, which has things, Reiki, healing system, and this type of hands-on healing and spiritual practice comes from a man by the name of Usui Macau, sweeping his family name. You know, like in Japan, I would be Pearson Nicholas. We do not order. So it was Sui Reiki, Rio, or suis Reiki healing.

And the goal for this practice is really about finding our most authentic connection to our real self, to maybe the cosmos at large. And so when [00:06:00] you talk about Reiki as universal energy or universal life force, what we really mean is that it is kind of like the underpinnings of the whole universe and.

The realization that the founder had after 21 days of fasting and meditating on a mountain side in Japan, with the goal of either reaching enlightenment or dying, he was, he was going to do one or the other. We got lucky. It was before he summarized his experience with his expression in Japanese, who to , who chew, which more or less translates to I exist in the universe and the universe exists in me.

So if we think about Reiki, Through that lens. Reiki is the experience of the universe and you and you and the universe. And therefore the inseparability of the two it’s about trying to get to that kind of nondual place. We might do that through meditation. We might do that through hands-on healing. We might do it through all the kind of external things that are in the formal practice of Reiki as hands-on healing, but we might also do it in how [00:07:00] we live and how we breathe and how we connect to others.

And my. My hope is that the real message of Reiki is what we do with our lives and not just what we do in our hands-on healing practice. It’s so interesting. I’m putting a few things together and like, I don’t know if I brought the book up, I’m re I’m reading the book, almost done with it, the power of awareness by Nevo.

And then I’m also reading this book. Ooh, one minute. Which is all about that. Like how about the collective consciousness and how, you know, how we, the universe is in us, Christ is in us, God is in us. Right. And that’s kind of what you were just talking about. I’m trying to put it together for the basics because that’s where I am kind of in learning.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the, the fundamental thing that we get out of Reiki is hopefully a sense of peace, but where [00:08:00] does that come from? What is the actual mechanism for it? It’s the surrender that we have to that experience of the, the cosmos at large and that we are the cosmos at large. We are that, yeah.

It’s like, we’re not separate it’s oneness, which is what that. But I, so I went to a Reiki practitioner once, and this was right. You may not know, but I retired from working for the Navy. Like over 30 years, 34 years. And you know, I was just like, go, go, go. Not really feeling my feelings, not really understanding what my emotions were and not.

And thinking that once I retired, everything was going to change in my life. And I was going to be able to slow down and meditate and all this stuff. Cause I was been have plenty of time and realizing that no, that’s not going to happen automatically. I had to do some work on myself. Initially, you know, when I went to the, the one time I’ve been to a Reiki practitioner, she was like, had her hands on me and stuff.

I guess she’s feeling my [00:09:00] energy doing something. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t know. And is that because you think that I wasn’t really, I’ve done a lot of work on myself in the past three years, but do you think it’s because I wasn’t really didn’t really know how to just like slow down and be in the moment and not have my mind wander.

That’s a possibility. I always tell clients and students that there’s no right or wrong way to feel Reiki, including feeling nothing at all. There’s nothing wrong with us. If we don’t get all the bells and whistles, you know, if it doesn’t feel like this kind of cosmic force downloaded into us, you didn’t do anything wrong.

Or our capacity to perceive is very personal. And I think it has a lot to do with kind of like the, the bandwidth. We dial into like, what station is our mindset too. And if we’re in this really strange foreign kind of space for the first time receiving a R a Reiki session, then we’re probably at surface level dealing with everything in the space around us and how it feels so different to [00:10:00] ordinary life.

You know, almost almost 20 years into my practice. There are days where I sit and do my hands on healing, and maybe it’s not this beautiful pouring of the cosmic energy through me. Maybe it’s just sitting in stillness. And I think that itself is therapeutic to do that back then. I couldn’t do that for sure.

Just the exposure therapy is really good for us. Like having an answer, we don’t get a choice. That’s really good for the brain. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your story and why you got into studying Reiki. You’ve been studying it for a long time. You’ve written so many books on it, which we’ll talk about too, but like tell us a little bit about your history and why you decided to use Reiki to help heal yourself.

So Reiki has been a really intimate friend and ally and teacher for me through the years, I’ve always been interested in like integrative medicine and the [00:11:00] healing arts will say I kind of came to Reiki, obliquely. I was doing a lot of work. The gemstone therapy and crystal healing, and really involved in some other kinds of esoteric things.

And you can’t go anywhere in the metaphysical field and not meet Reiki people. There’s just so many of us everywhere. Everybody is a Reiki master for whatever that means and their, their former practice. So. I had an appreciation for what I anticipated Reiki was going to be in. Eventually I had the chance to actually sit down and study found a teacher that I connected with herself being half Japanese.

She brought a lot of appreciation and insight into the kind of cultural background behind it. And we did the best we could with the tools we had. And. And in that era, that was a 2006. I took my first Reiki class and we know a lot more about Reiki history. We know more about this kind of circulatory development and all sorts of other things that we just didn’t have access to them.

But at the end of the day, the biggest teacher, isn’t a book. It isn’t history. It isn’t even the person in front of [00:12:00] you giving you access to the system. It is the practice itself. So. One of the main reasons I was really called to working with Reiki is because I have an anxiety and panic disorder and I was doing other things to help manage that I have been ahead at that point already been a frequent meditator and it was working with external tools, whether that was going to see a therapist taking allopathic medicine, working with gemstones and flower essences, but all of those put power in something.

And after receiving the initiation in the system of Reiki and having that, what we call maybe attunement or radio as the original word in Japanese, which means like a soul gift or a spiritual gift that’s conferred to you that gives you the ability or the awareness of this indwelling ability to connect to Reiki energy.

I didn’t need this external force anymore. I didn’t need to hold the rock. I didn’t mean to have the dropper bottle full of flower essences. I didn’t have to sit on the couch and the therapist’s office. Those are all things that continue to do [00:13:00] because they’re good. But I could also feel a difference by just sitting there.

The power was in me and I didn’t have to invest in something outside of myself. I could feel like I had responsibility for my own wellbeing. And also maybe for the first time in years. I learned how to relax. I’m a tightly wound kind of person. Part of that is by design. I think a lot of it is just cultural.

We all tend to be kind of tightly wound people. If you’re a type a person you want to get things done, you, you want it. And I certainly do, but. We can only do that for so long before we’re just running on fumes and eventually we run out. So I was hitting some pretty intense burnout coupled with my anxiety disorder, kind of reaching fever pitch.

And I was really unwell. I was losing weight. I wasn’t able to keep food down. Like all these things were like super wrong and you know, a doctor could only tell me, oh, this is stress. You just have to be less stressed. I’m like, wonderful. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Like my, my life does not give me.

The [00:14:00] ability to have less stress. So I have to find a way to manage it. And Reiki was the tool that kind of brought everything together for me. And it remains the thing that I do most consistently. It is a practice I engage with the most regularly. There are lots of tools in my toolbox, but the thing that I love about it is once you received this training, you don’t have to go anywhere else.

It is always with you. And so Reiki has enabled me to go from like a dozen or more panic attacks in a day to like I have maybe a couple of years. Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah, I am generally, I like to think of myself as a reasonably well adjusted human beings, as well as anyone can be in today’s world, because it’s a strange world and nobody’s perfect.

Nobody is without error or struggle, but the piece that you cultivate from that stillness from that hands-on practice from really sitting there with. The system of Reiki is something that you carry through. It creates this kind of inertia that you can take out into the world around you. So it’s not just when you’re lying on the [00:15:00] table, seeing the practitioner, it’s not just when you’re in class learning how to do it.

It’s not just in meditation with hands on yourself. It’s your whole life becomes a Reiki practice. So your, for your Reiki practice, do you, you go see other people and they perform the practice on you and you also perform it on your. These days, I rarely get to go and receive a session. I’d say pre pandemic there at least be like, we’d do like practitioner swaps my colleagues and I are friends and I we’d all get together and do like Reiki shares or Reiki circles.

So we can work on one another and on our side, But I have a committed daily self-practice I do self-treatment every single day also recite the Reiki precepts in Japanese every single day. And these are kind of like the heart and soul of our practice. They’re deceptively simple, but they are meant to be the kind of roadmap to get to that stage that the founder had.

You know, we don’t have to sit there on the mountain for 21 days and fast and meditate and hope it’s either [00:16:00] enlightenment or death. Like he made it easier for us since he. Experienced that kind of transmission, if you will, from the universe that gave birth to the system of Reiki, he gave us tools. So we don’t have to do that.

So one of those tools is hands-on treatment. Another one is the five principles. In the second degree, we learned like symbols and mantras that we work with. And the third degree we learned even more tools. So lately I’m really committed to my everyday self practice and wherever possible, of course, I want to share with others and, you know, Pandemic stricken world.

We do a lot of work remotely and that’s one of the beautiful gifts. Being able to come together Reiki. At the second degree, it gives us the ability to treat people who are non-local do distance healing. And also the virtual practice sessions. I host monthly practice sessions that people from all ages can come together and sit in this space and support one another.

That’s interesting. Cause it was like, I think in my first year I’ve been doing this podcast. Almost three years in my first year, I [00:17:00] interviewed somebody about Reiki and that’s when I went to a Reiki specialist and didn’t really notice anything. And then I kind of stopped because I started focusing on other aspects of my coaching and stuff, but yeah.

She told me that she can do Reiki over zoom. And I was just curious, you know, for people who are watching and people who, um, will listen to this later, is there a way to, like, for some, somebody who still doesn’t quite understand what you’re talking about when it comes to Reiki and like what a session would look like, is there a way that you can kind of maybe demonstrate what a session might look like or kind of talk us through a session?

So we have a feel for it. Absolutely. So, you know, let’s say we’re going to see a Reiki practitioner in person. We’re probably going to be invited to lie down on massage table, or maybe sit in a chair, but Reiki can really be administered from any position. It’s all about making yourself comfortable and traditional.

It is [00:18:00] performed with very, very light touch. So, you know, not manipulation of tissues like massage or Reiki practitioner isn’t necessarily moving, manipulating, doing, pushing, sucking, or drawing energy. You’re just a passive vessel. The goal of the practitioner is just to hold space and let let the innate wisdom of the client’s body and heart and mind and spirit kind of draw Reiki passively through the practitioner.

So when I lay my hands somewhere on the body, I’m not sending right. But wherever they’re laid Reiki can be drawn in. So it’s a very, very passive thing. So the most effective Reiki practitioner is the one who does the least, and that’s, that’s a hard thing to do. Now in the second degree, we learn specific techniques and protocols that enable us to practice across distance.

So, you know, a hundred years ago in 1922 in Japan, they didn’t have. Okay. Did you know, FaceTime or smartphone for telephones really? And in rural [00:19:00] areas. So in that case, what you would do is kind of hold the image or the idea of the person in your mind and use a particular symbol or mantra to connect photographs are a really popular way to treat long distance, but most people couldn’t afford.

And although the founder was really innovative and really loved this kind of new found technology because Japan had only kind of recently opened its borders to trade with the Western world and then came this influx of technology. So since not everyone could afford that, the picture taken people would like draw stick figures and label names, or even just write people’s names down with where they were there, other relevant information, and people would use that as a way to treat.

So I think if, if the founder was Sui and were alive, He’d be totally for using the technology that we’ve got. Yeah. As long as we do it with enough respect. So if I were going to meet with a session, meet with a client for a session one-on-one via zoom, it would probably look a lot like just guided meditation, more likely what I would invite them to do is forego.

Zoom. Just find quiet [00:20:00] time to relax. Text or email or something at the start and end of the session. And hopefully they have a nice blissful, you know, 30 minutes or hour, hour long that’s going to be. And if they don’t, we’ll talk about maybe why, but again, the role of the Reiki practitioner is to be that passive vessel through which the kind of compassion of the universe flows.

We might call that an energy. We might call that energy Reiki. We might also just call it the phenomenon of holding space. Got it. So I know some people who’ve, you know, cause I know of, I’ve learned about the chakras and that when we have energy, that’s blocked in our body that can create dis-ease disease.

And that Reiki helps from what I’ve understood clear. Some of those shockers is that true, like clear energy also that stuck, maybe that’s not moving through us. Is that. That’s only one model that we can use. Know if we think about what Japan looked like in 1922, they certainly weren’t using the chakra system, [00:21:00] the tacos system, as we know it today with the seven rainbow colors really only dates to like 1977.

So the system of Reiki in Japan in 1922 was, was we’ll say a little bit more malleable was a little less written in stone. The chakra system is a really helpful model though, for people to kind of relate to energy anatomy and to relate to. Psychological underpinnings that relate to different parts of the body in different energy centers.

So yes, we can use that model. What Reiki does like for one to kind of like summarize what is the effect of a Reiki session? What is the practice? It supports the process of homeostasis in the body, the mind and the spirit. So, you know, like biologically all the homeostatic mechanisms of the body or the.

That regulates our ability to stay alive. They keep us in balance, but we also have homeostasis of the psyche. We have homeostasis of the spirit. So what Reiki does is it supports our natural ability to get to that space of equilibrium. If we’re using the talker model, maybe it is dealing with an excess or [00:22:00] deficiency of energy.

If we’re using traditional Chinese medicine and looking at the meridians, you know, maybe we’re balancing the, the, the OCI, the five, the five elements or the five phases. We’re using a different model than we can also kind of apply that to Reiki. It is a pretty malleable system these days when I teach it, I teach it very simply.

We don’t have to have knowledge of the tacos cause we’re not there to diagnose. We’re not there to move them fix. We’re just there to let Reiki do its job. And that’s the great thing about it. We don’t have to have a complex understanding of anyone. We just have to show up for them. And it’s that deceptive simplicity that makes.

Sometimes challenging, like really? I just, I just have to even initiation, put my hands there and that’s going to do it. But even, even clinical data is showing us that yes, that’s really all it takes. And so why do you think that, that, that this kind of healing isn’t really. [00:23:00] You know, I mean, I’ve never had a doctor say, you should go get a Reiki session.

Why isn’t this? Or even a therapist or whatever, you know what I mean? Why isn’t this more widespread in the United States and in different other parts of the. Well, I think we have evidence that it’s getting there. I have colleagues who regularly take Reiki into the operating room who support the surgical team.

I sit there right beside the anesthesiologist and have their, their hands on the patient for the duration of surgery. It’s certainly not the norm. But wouldn’t it be great if it were, and there are collectives of people who are doing this work shortly before the start of the pandemic. I was part of the advisory council for an initiative to have this kind of like national certification to bring Reiki into healthcare would be like an optional kind of thing.

And our health resources are better served by doing other things for the time being in an emergent kind of the fact that we see Reiki. [00:24:00] Joining the ranks of other forms of wellness as integrative medicine, rather than we’ll say alternative, it compliments, it dovetails seamlessly. And as far as like conventional medicine, more and more, the, the kinds of studies that are being done and fields like consciousness and energy medicine, and all sorts of other things, point to a more holistic picture of what drives the healing process.

No more do we tend to subscribe to the mechanical I idea of cause and effect, this thing is wrong. This drug will fix it, or this surgery will fix it. And that will be the end result. We have to recognize that we’re, we’re treating the whole person. We’re not just treating a symptom, we’re treating everything about that person.

And oftentimes. The psyche and the spirit are what are neglected. So seeing spaces where Reiki and other forms of integrative medicine are coming into the scene is really inspiring to me. And I’ve got, I’ve [00:25:00] got some friends who are doing incredible things with it. So it’s to the emergency room. Is that because the patient asked for that?

So like in, in the case of my friend, Raven keys, who teaches us this approach to medical Reiki, it’s definitely because the patient has requested it. It has to be approved by the surgeon. It has to be approved by everyone else, but all, all we can do as Reiki practitioners, who’ve taken this training. Okay.

Is learn the kind of gold standard and best practices for how to show up and support the team and not be in the way and hopefully not faint with the sight of blood or whatever else it’s going to be. But also it’s like helping people learn to advocate for themselves. So nothing happens without that level of self-advocacy, since this is.

Currently the standard of practice. And I have yet to show up in an operating theater, maybe one day, it’s not high on my priority list, but if I were asked, I think I would absolutely do at one to support someone that I love to, to, to support the system of Reiki and to see it moving [00:26:00] into these frontiers.

It’s definitely about asking for it and the. Since it can be done remotely in a time, like now where the number of personnel involved in medical spaces is severely limited to ensure the safety of everyone. We can still do that work from the sidelines, you know, on a monthly basis, I’ve got people reaching out.

You know, my, my best friend is having surgery or, you know, so-and-so is, is undergoing a minor procedure. What can, what can we do? And, you know, I show up for. As best as I can. I get my friends and colleagues and the Reiki community to share. And this is something that I think most of us are really happy to do, because we want to see people feel as if they’re taken care of with people.

Generally speaking, going into a really scary situation like this, just knowing that someone is there even remotely. Holding space for them, sending them love, visualizing, maybe a nice, easy procedure and luminous health. At the end of it is enough to maybe put [00:27:00] us at ease. So our body can then be less taxed by internal stress because that external event is going to be stressful enough.

So why add to, we tend to just, you know, it tends to be that just pills are prescribed, you know, Reiki something that’s covered by any health insurance. Do you know in certain parts of the world? Yes. In lots of parts of the world? No. So for example, in the United Kingdom, you can absolutely go see a qualified, um, practitioner who meets the necessary requirements to be reimbursed through the, the national insurance.

There are a few places in the states where there’s at least some wiggle room for that. But, you know, if you think about it 50 years ago, your massage therapist or physical therapist didn’t get reimbursed for insurance, you had to be pretty well off to be able to afford those things because they were considered fringe and we, we have robust.

Quantitative data that tells us how effective those are for people’s [00:28:00] wellbeing. So where that data is, is still in progress with Reiki, but it is there, it is emerging. There is more and more published every single year. So the hope is that there will be a standardized way. To make this accessible and available to people.

And currently, you know, the healthcare in the U S is very localized, is very different from state to state and, and place to place. So it would take some pretty widespread reform of our health system. I think to see it happen. And to roll out on a national level, but there are enough people who are invested in it that hopefully, hopefully that will happen in my lifetime.

Yeah, I hope so. So it helped you with your anxiety. What other kinds of things can Reiki help with since Reiki supports overall balance and wellbeing? There’s really nothing. We can’t apply it to a, another episode from my own life that I can use to illustrate. In 2012, I was in a motorcycle accident and.

[00:29:00] Unpleasant. I was really lucky for being a motorcycle rider in an accident, but it was still not a great experience. And I was supposed to be out of work for probably six to eight weeks minimum. And after three weeks I was back at work two weeks after the accident, my primary care physician. Was really mad to see me walking into the treatment room, not using crutches anymore.

He was even more upset to roll back my pant leg and not understand where all this swelling could have gone. What have you done? Like go, I don’t know. I’m just, I’m just following your orders and staying off my leg and, you know, icing it and keeping it elevated because you shouldn’t be way more swollen than this.

And it’s one of those things where I, you can’t touch. The body and not touch the solely. You can’t touch the mind and not touch the body. So wherever we are focused on with our Reiki practice, we tend to experience a wellbeing on many levels simultaneously. So we might use this because we have a very physical thing.

We want to [00:30:00] heal. I know many people who are undergoing a treatment, conventional treatment. Critical terminal, serious life-threatening illness who also use Reiki to support their wellbeing because it hastens recovery. There are some pilot studies that show a recovery time after surgery, after chemo, after lots of other things is much shorter when Reiki is present versus when it is not.

But we might also use it for our mental and emotional wellbeing. We might use it if we’re experiencing grief. Loneliness separation anxiety, overall stress uncertainties fears. The, the ways that we can experience the blessings of Reiki are myriad. And they’re really malleable to, especially because you can do it anywhere and anywhere that you can sit down and lay hands on the body after you’ve received the training, you can, you can just perform Reiki wherever you are, you know, hopefully, you know, for, in a car in traffic, we’re keeping our eyes open to do this.

Certainly. [00:31:00] Any day I’m on the road, have one hand somewhere on my body and went on the wheel if I’m stuck in traffic. So that way I can stay calm and stay grounded and be present for whatever life is going to throw my way. So what’s the, how long has the training. I suppose that that depends on the teacher, the style or the lineage of Reiki.

Traditionally, you know, a hundred years ago, it could be months and months before you were even eligible to take the second degree. You’d be attending meetings and practice sessions every single month after you received that initial kind of training seminar these days. We like things done more quickly.

So there are weekend seminars. There are one day seminars. I mean, there are there zoom classes available and there’s high quality and low quality Reiki training of all varieties. There’s high quality and low quality online training as well as in-person training. When I teach the system of Reiki, a first degree class.

So like the level [00:32:00] one class is about eight hours of class time, depending on the size of the class and how we’ll say interactive the classes, you know, if we got lots of questions, We’re going to use up more time. When I teach the second degree, it’s usually between five and eight hours. And then when I teach the third degree, which is like teaching people to become teachers, that’s a three-day seminar.

So I like to see people who are committed to their practice, committed to seeing others, the whole. I know, I can’t be there to like spy on them and no one doing this, but the hope is like, after they enroll in a first year class or they take secondary together, they’re going to go out and use it for their own benefit for the benefit of their loved ones.

And then. You know, if they’re really, really excited about it, they’re going to want to find other ways to share with others. And that might be why they enrolled in their training. Um, so it, can they find people find out about the training through your website, the luminous pearl.com? Yeah. Currently I don’t have any in-person training dates listed.

I’m going to have my very first conventional Reiki class. Since [00:33:00] the, before times coming up next month and it’s going to be a small socially distance kind of thing, but I’m hoping as things move forward and open up for travel later in the year, I’ll be able to visit some different territories and be able to offer some classes.

And all of that will eventually appear on the website and across my social media for the time being, I do a free monthly online Reiki shares. Whether or not, you are already a practitioner or you’re just interested in Reiki, irrespective of any lineage or from a practice you’re exposed to, you can always join me for those.

And I keep those links in my link tree and elsewhere. So that way you can track them down. And that’s just for anybody who wants to experience that firsthand. Okay. And it’s showing your link tree there and I’ll also put it in the. So, okay. Well, what if someone says, I don’t really have time to do any of this?

I mean, you know, like how long does it take to, how long does it take to practice Reiki every day, once you’ve gone to your seminar? You know, I mean, how much time do people have to set aside to practice? To have it work for them. I [00:34:00] guess the real question is how, how much time do we want to invest in, in feeling good?

So if we’re looking for a quick fix, there is no such thing. Not anywhere, not in allopathic medicine, not in psychiatry, not in Reiki. We, we generally don’t get sick in a day, so we tend not to get well on a day. My kind of like anxiety condition is something that is like generations in the making. If you look at my family makeup, if you look at the genes involved in.

18 years of my life before it rose to a head so much to fever pitch that I had to do something about it. So it wasn’t like I took it an eight hour class, but my hands and my body for 30 minutes and never had an anxiety attack again, it’s, it’s not at all like that. Generally speaking, that benefit we receive as proportional to the effort we put in.

Beautiful thing about Reiki is it’s not really effort. It’s just holding space. So maybe it’s uncomfortable to sit there and stillness. So maybe you’ll do it while listening to music. Maybe will do it while watching television. Is that as great as doing it in a meditative [00:35:00] state? No, but it’s better than nothing.

So I encourage people to try, try to give themselves 30 minutes of Reiki a day. Once they’ve received the training, if you can do 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the evening. Miles ahead of someone without Reiki practice. If you have the propensity to give yourself more than by all means, go for that.

An hour long treatment feels like bliss. I I’ve heard it said and felt it myself. That 15 minutes of Reiki is proportional to like an hour nap. I feel more rejuvenated after 15 minutes of self-treatment than I do lying horizontal, trying to be asleep for an hour in the middle of the day. I’m not a good napper.

Just not built that way, but it is so. So refreshing to just devote this time to you that if you really have that experience, you usually find excuses to do it. Maybe it’s five minutes here and 10 minutes there in the course of the day, I probably give myself well over an hour treatment, maybe an hour and a half, you know, [00:36:00] 30 minutes or so before bed, while I’m in bed, I’m treating myself, I give my some self, some first thing in the morning and then on my daily commute as well.

And any other kid time that I can after dinner during my lunch break. So it’s not necessarily that your practice has to be in this holy sacred container of silence in a sacred temple for it to be effective, real life happens. And I want people to feel encouraged to make use of Reiki during the life experiences.

And I would say too, like when I, I told you about initially when I retired, I was all hyped up and I just thought that I could easily, you know, relax, which I didn’t know how to do. And. It didn’t automatically happen. And my coach asked me to meditate for a certain number she’s she gave me options. How many minutes a day you have to meditate.

And it was like 15 was the lowest, I think an hour was the highest I was going to pick an hour because I’m retired. I could, I could do an hour. And then I thought, well, I probably won’t do an hour. So I’ll pick 15. And then every day she’d asked where [00:37:00] every week, you know, what day are you on? I’d say one.

And she’d say why? And I’d say, because you don’t get it. I’m totally. And she wanted me to do it for 40 days straight. And, and she says, she started me off. Then again with some moving, you know, like you said, do it with music or do it some with some moving meditation, which was easier for me. And then I gradually got to the 40 days straight and that’s when I realized it really does make a difference.

On days when I tell myself I’m too busy and I don’t have time and whatever, my day doesn’t go as well. When w when I start off my morning with that, it feels better. And so what’s the difference between meditation and rape. So all Reiki practice at its heart is a meditative experience. Meditation itself is a really big umbrella that encompasses a lot of different terms and ideas and approaches.

So, you know, you have like, The Pasana [00:38:00] meditation, you have yoga like traditional yoga, Sonos. The postures that you do are meditative in their own, right? You might have maybe more mystically inclined meditations where you’re doing creative visualization or reciting an affirmation. And this can be meditative too.

So the difference between that and Reiki, I mean, first and foremost, Reiki is kind of a closed practice. You, you become initiated to be a practitioner, and once you receive that initiation, you’re a practitioner. And then what we do during our meditation might look a little bit different on the interior landscape, even though on the external it’s pretty darn similar.

So we’ve got certain focal points we use that kind of give us a shortcut to getting there. So one of them is almost like a moodra or a posture that we use called Gahcho. Really poetic term. It just means palms together. Literally we sit with our hands together and we have a particular kind of breathing that we do.

And when you don’t have time for anything else, you can spend a few moments in Gahcho with your [00:39:00] palms together, doing this breathing, and you get into that Reiki space. And we might also reflect on or recite the 5%. I like to say in the Japanese, cause I’m kind of a language nerd and that works for me, but we could recite them in any language that’s meaningful.

And the goal, the instructions that the founder actually laughed, or like he says morning and evening, put your hands in God, show, hold these precepts in your heart, recite them out loud. And what he’s saying on one hand is yes, do this little ritual of recitation, make this a meditative practice. But also if you do that, In the morning and you do it in the evening.

It’s not just twice a day. Say them it’s live your life from sunup to sundown as if you were embodying the precepts. So you start to see that your whole life becomes a meditation when you work the practice itself. Oh, awesome. So what are the five precincts? Thank you for asking. They’re actually my favorite part of the system of Reiki.

So I’ll, I’ll just to show off, I’ll say once in Japanese and then we’ll do like a line-by-line translation. They’re super simple. So it starts with the title and the title in [00:40:00] Japanese is show Fuca know-how Monday and then the actual body of the Texas

Guilbeau huggy makes Stony sheen sets to me. So that bevel title poetically translates to the secret. The secret art of inviting happiness, the spiritual medicine of all illness. And then the precepts opened with this expression, Kule dot K Y, which means today only. And that kind of applies to all five precepts.

So there are six lines, but only because this is like a preface to the mall. So today only anger not worry, not practice gratitude, be diligent in your work and show kindness to people. They off with that. I’m telling you, you start your day off with that. As a reminder, it sets you up for the day and then you end your day saying that, and you could even reflect on your day and maybe realize, oh, in this situation I got angry.[00:41:00] 

And so one of the things I’ve learned, I don’t know what you would say about this. Nicholas is okay. You can think you reflect on your day in this situation. I got angry. Visual show some self-compassion first, we’re all human for sure. And you can visualize yourself, repeat that situation and not get angry.

So visualize that situation happening and how you would have preferred to react. We practice that and the next time it happens, we’re going to be more aware and catch yourself sooner. And react, maybe not from a place of anger. What do you think about. It is a really great and healthy exercise to do that kind of thing.

One thing that I always kind of remind my students is that the precepts don’t say don’t get angry ever again, because that, that is statistically impossible. You cannot, that is not actionable. It’s not achievable. It’s not a [00:42:00] tangible goal, but it’s like, The actual verb. If we break it down and Japanese is like going to bear anger.

And if we look at the Kanji, the it’s, it’s a very kind of descriptive term and it shows the heart being in this really low state when we get into that space of anger. So it’s, don’t let this consume your heart. Okay. You got angry, you lost your temper. Did you sit in fume for hours and days and weeks and months, maybe we’re doing something wrong.

There anger is a natural human emotion. It’s neither good, nor bad. There are so many like wrathful deities that we see in esoteric Buddhism that certainly the founder being a Japanese man, a practicing Jodo or pure land Buddhist, he would have seen these things Reiki itself as non secular, as non-religious.

And we practice for anyone. But, you know, if we think about the images, he would have been familiar with. Enlightened beings who are full of wrath. And it’s not because you can be angry and enlightened at the same time, but, but we use those experiences of anger or worry or lack of compassion or lack of diligence as fuel for doing better.

So [00:43:00] don’t hold them up on what went wrong. Look at how we can channel that into something better. Channel it into a creative. Yeah, you’re right. I mean, so many, you know, it’s just not worth it to stay angry for days on end or, or to, you know, be stressed for days on end. We, you know, so yeah, I sounds awesome.

I’m going to start, I’m going to come to one of your seminars that you said you hold monthly and then I’m going to look for a Reiki practitioner in my area. I know that there are some, and I’m looking forward to learning. About it. Let’s talk about your books. You’ve got well, here’s your website, the loop luminous, Pearl.

How’d you come up with that? It actually comes from, um, a piece of pen, useful Clore about this kind of mythological stone that glows at night. So crystals are like the other big passion. I’ve got the people know me really well for, and I’m, I’m always about like those light bulb moments that people have.

You know, a cliche to say, you can lead a horse to water. You can’t make them drink. Like I’m there. I can give [00:44:00] you tools, but you’ve got to work them yourselves. And so I love teaching. And when I see those moments of illumination, that that just makes my heart sing. That is like the best feeling in the world.

So being able to share those, those little pearls, that light us up is, is magical. So. All right. So tell us a little bit about crystals. I went to a crystal. The other day with my daughter and I’ve been to them before too. And I just see like, it’s overwhelming all these crystals, like, and they each have, I mean, I don’t know how you remember, remember everything.

They each have like a, a healing modality, I guess, or whatever. How does a crystal healing. Well, I suppose, I guess the real question is how does anything eat less? So, uh, Chris was themselves are catalysts. If we look at things through the lens of physics and electromagnetics, we see. Everything is kind of in this dance of ecstatic motion, nothing is really solid.

Nothing is really standing still. And the more [00:45:00] orderly something is the more orderly its energy is going to be. And crystals are defined as a usually solid substance with a regular composition. So it’s the same ingredients certain, and through that have a repeating and symmetrical structure. They are the most orderly things that exist.

So they’re also going to have therefore the most orderly electromagnetic fields. If we bring that into. Into our own. We are anything coherence. Sorry, if you’re a listener and I’m calling you in coherence, but you are because your liver a different function than your big toe, which is different than your hair and the makeup and structures and rhythms of all those things are different.

So we are a veritable sea of vibrations. It’s in a constant state of flux. So when we bring in something like this little piece of citrine that I’m holding out versus a particular. We’ll say bandwidth, the particular note. So purely, and so clearly that it’s almost like a tuning fork. I can then subconsciously my energy body wants to come into harmony with that because it is such [00:46:00] a clear and fewer tone.

So that is one way that crystal seal, there may be some other models that we could explore in depth. A lot of my books do that for anyone who’s interested, but the, the great love that I have for the mineral kingdom comes from my background in mineral science. My fascination with all things mystical. And it was pretty early on that I saw crystal hailing is like the perfect intersection of things like folklore and mythology, because there’s plenty of, of culturated ideas around rocks and minerals and gems.

And. But then I also kind of put on my mineral science hat and started looking at these correlations between what minerals have iron and what people say about them or things that are formed by metamorphic activity or things that are found in really arid regions. Like what, what kind of correspondences are there between the geology?

Of crystals and they reported effects that people have been writing about since, I mean, literally the beginning of writing some of the earliest texts that we have in Kaneohe form that come from [00:47:00] like Mesopotamian Babylon scenario or are lapidary texts that are descriptions of stones and their healing qualities.

So this is a really ancient thing and I just love kind of unraveling that thread and seeing how it all connects.

Cause I I’m going home tomorrow. I’m in doubt in Denver. And I saw that a new crystal shop opened right in downtown Stanton, Virginia, where I live. So I’m looking forward to going and checking out that shop and now we’ll be looking at it from a different point of view. And so, yeah. And so in these crystal shops, they sell pendulum.

Um, w w do you use pencil? Occasionally sometimes it’s, it’s not my favorite tool only because if you feel really strongly about the answer, you’re going to get the answer you feel strongly about. So whether it’s the one you want or want to avoid, it’s really easy to influence that. So I’m kind of like how in Reiki would just hold space and let things happen.

If we want to be effective at dowsing with a pendulum, you have to be able to just hold space without being attached to the outcome. [00:48:00] All right. Awesome. Well, you’ve written, how many books have you written? I have seven on shelves now and an eighth one coming out next spring. Oh my gosh. So if they go to this book website, which is interdigital traditions.com and under your name, they can find all of the books.

Absolutely. And so I’ve got, you know, traditions. I’ve got five books on crystals, one on Reiki and one brand new one coming out next week on flower essences. All of them are going to be there, but also where you normally buy books, you can find them if you just type Nicholas spirits and into the search bar on Amazon or Barnes and noble or anywhere else, you’d like to buy books.

I’m sure you’ll be able to find me. Yeah. So your book’s coming out on five April and flower essences. And I went to a natural, I guess you call it an naturopath healer or something like that. And I met with her online and she gave me this bottle of flower essences that I put these little drops under my.[00:49:00] 

Tom. What if our essence is due though, I’m trying to figure that out. So they are kind of like tuning forks for our emotions. So they’re not in the business of fixing something for us, but by, by playing the correct pitch, we can see where we’re out of balance. And subconsciously we start to make those little tiny adjusted.

The founder of modern flower essence therapy described them as flooding the system with virtues causing disease and imbalance to melts like snow in the sunshine. Well, I definitely have felt I’ve been doing it for two weeks. And then she gave me some certain teas. She mixed up these herbal teas and with all these flowers and stuff and there, and it’s really, I like the taste of it and everything.

And I’ve noticed it was to help me feel more relaxed, you know, to just like, be able to be more present and stuff. And I feel like this is all helpful. [00:50:00] Yeah. That’s one of the ways that I worked with flower essences around that same time, just before I learned Reiki, I had a friend who was a flower essence practitioner who offered me this magical little bottle that I, I was eager to try.

I mean, I was going to try anything at that point. I was a new freshmen in college and just everything about that experience is kind of stressful going away from home for the first time that I was woefully under prepared for over prepared for academically, but like real life. It was the kind of thing.

Nobody stopped to show me how to do it. There’s a certain kind of overwhelm that comes from that. And the beautiful thing about flower essence therapy is that because it is vibration in nature, it’s not like a homeopathic remedy or an herbal tincture or an essential oil. There are no actual plant compounds in there.

It’s just the energy, the essence or spirit of the plant. The, the worst thing that happens if you take the wrong essence is nothing. The best thing that happens is maybe you feel better. So they work on kind of the [00:51:00] principles of frequency you want to take it often. It’s not like if I have a bottle right here of bamboo fluorescents that I, I use for motivation and kind of like stick with fitness.

If I take the whole bottle, it’s no more effective than taking just a couple of drops. So the goal is to take a couple of drops often because our, our state. Out of tune very easily. It’s like, if you’re a piano tuner, you got to strike the tuning fork and adjust the, the tension in that, that wire and you got to ride, you’ve got to strike the tuning fork again and hit the key and then adjust and so on and so forth.

So to see. On pitch or not. We just have to introduce that tuning fork over and over again. So flower essences are extraordinarily gentle. They don’t interact with anything else that we’re doing because they’re not chemical in nature. They’re not going to impede the ability of any other part of your wellness gene.

And they’re, they’re just a joy. It’s like a little concentrated dose of nature in a bottle. [00:52:00] And I’m looking forward to seeing how I feel when I get back. Like, I think that this was started because I went on a. I was away from home, out of my normal routine for a week in February. And then when I came back the whole weekend, I was just like completely exhausted.

But also like I felt depression and I felt like a hand was on my, was on my back and I couldn’t get off the couch and I have tended to get that way when I get out of my routine. And so I’ve been away from home. 18 or 18 March, I think. And so I get home tomorrow, so I’m really interested to see how this tea that she gave me and then this flower, essence and stuff like that, that she’s given me, helps me over the weekend.

Cause I don’t want to feel like that again, so, well, I hope you find success with them and may they bring you balance? [00:53:00] Thank you. Thank you. So let’s see. Here’s your other book? That foundations of Reiki. How do you call Rio? Ho yeah. So tell us about that book. So this is my love song to Reiki. It is a complete manual to the practice for the first and the second degree, I kind of wrote it in part to be my classroom manual, like the textbook I use when I teach, but also to consolidate a lot of research that hadn’t been collated in one place to provide my own translations of some of the original Japanese to provide a text that found common ground among different lineages and forms of practice.

Post 1988, things really kind of began to branch off, especially in the early two thousands. I mean, we’ve got a complex family tree of Reiki practices around the world, although it’s all one point of order. A hundred years this month, things tend to evolve. So I wanted to kind of map out how that happened and to help us find common ground through shared history, shared forms of practice, shared ideas that might be [00:54:00] expressed in myriad ways, but are still the same heart and soul.

And so the hope was that people of any lineage could find some use in it. And definitely it’s got lots of hands on practices to add to your, your healing. Awesome. Sounds like a book I need to order. I didn’t order all sudden have your books and read them before this interview. Sorry. I just, so you know, I interviewed so many authors and it’s hard to get all, you know, get all the books and read them all, but yeah.

And so you have an Instagram account too. Let’s see. Let me put that up there so that people can go there. It’s the luminous. Pearl is your Instagram. For sure. And that’s the place I’m the most active, so you’ll see more content going there. Free talks every week and all sorts of fun stuff. Awesome. What does living out create a life you love living?

What is a life you love living mean to you? In part, it is challenging myself to grow and learn and kind of integrate new things. But I do that really with like the service. [00:55:00] On me growing personally, just for myself is all well and good, but I have this platform to help others to teach others, to unite others towards growing and healing.

So I find fulfillment in being able to share and make authentic connection. Education is the outlet that that’s expressed in. Whether that’s a book, someone is reading or a seminar I’m giving, or, you know, informal Q and a that I do on Instagram. It’s, it’s that ability to be of service while still being able to, to grow together is just magic.

Wow. That’s awesome. I’m so glad that you reached out to me and that we were able to get you on the show. And how cool is it that it’s in the a month? Is it March where we’re celebrating the a hundred year anniversary or is it April? It is. Yeah. So 100 years ago this month he was on a mountain for about three weeks and came down and here we are, we have Reiki in the world today.

That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Any last minute tips before we end the show now? I think one thing that’s specifically with Reiki and [00:56:00] mind, if, if you were overwhelmed by the options, take a step back and just find a, an approach to Reiki and a teacher practitioner who kind of meets your needs really well.

There, there are lots of things that we can do to find that right person, but ultimately Reiki is about you and your wellbeing. So whether you are learning for self practice or going to school, To receive hands-on treatment from them. Find something that supports your picture of wellbeing. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you being on the show. Nicholas, thank you everybody for watching tonight. I really appreciate you guys. Um, getting on a flight and, uh, leaving first in Virginia from Denver tomorrow. So I’ll miss my daughter, but I’m looking forward to being home after about two weeks and to see my doggie and to learn more about Reiki and to visit.

The crystal shop that just opened in Stanford, Virginia. Now I’ll look at it from a whole new perspective. So I’m looking forward to that. Thank you for joining me and I’ll be on [00:57:00] again. Next Wednesday at 7:30 PM. Eastern onward live is sponsored by Emily Harmon, coaching and consulting. Visit my website, Emily harman.com to learn more about me and my coaching program.

I’d love to help you create a life you love living. Remember every adversity is our own personal university. Sometimes the lessons are different. And we must learn from our experiences. Vulnerability is your super power. You are lovable and worthy, and we discuss these topics and more because professional is personal.

Thank you for joining us and engaging with me and my guests. I look forward to seeing you next time.