The Reiki has landed

Having recently gotten to know someone who is a ‘Reiki doctor’, I felt I needed to look into this practice to see what it was all about.

What is Reiki? After a quick Wiki I managed to gain some fundamental understanding of this form of healing. Spiritual healing to be precise, and if you asked me to define ‘spiritual healing’ in reiki lingo I would fail hopelessly. There is no scientific evidence to support the existence and manipulative healing effects of human ‘ki’. Ki is simply described by those familiar with it as ‘mysterious atmosphere’, ‘spiritual energy’ or ‘life force’. After reading those definitions the scientist in me screamed “ARRRGH! Hippies!!!” After hearing about so many reiki success stories the scientist in me shrugged and said “placebo effect…the dumbasses”.

I read further and came to the conclusion that reiki would theoretically work… it’s basically a method of getting your mind to communicate with your body. Too often in modern society do humans push themselves to the limit, their minds always want to achieve more but their bodies simply can’t cope with these ambitious targets and start degenerating as a consequence. In simple English “Stress can and will kill you”.

My relatively uneducated opinion is that when and if reiki does work, it’s because it manages to get high strung and generally stressed out folk to unwind. Simply telling these people to “chill out and stop stressing” won’t work because they have zilch intention of actually listening to you. Now, bring in a reiki doctor to lay them down on a comfy table and wave hands over them for 90 minutes whilst placing colourful “energy charged” crystals/rocks onto their head, chest, genetalia… add a bucket load of frowning, thinking and intense concentration and something DOES happen. The patient will start to BELIEVE. Once this is achieved the reiki doctor has basically done their job. A change in mindset is often all that is needed to overcome the toughest of obstacles.

Reiki hand positions...

hmmm...

I have no doubt that many people will disagree with my views (…most of them reiki practitioners and their patients). But they have to realise that I’m not slating the reiki business. Quite the opposite in fact, reiki is genius! If you could get someone to overcome their weaknesses and illness without actually doing anything or prescribing any drugs (abandoning he usual expenses, side effects and such) then by all means do so.

Queue analogy:

It’s like watching a good movie, nobody was thinking about how 90% of the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings were computer generated images while they were watching (if you were, Congratulations! You are officially the biggest party pooper on the planet). If something is done convincingly enough, our minds perceive it to be real (even if for a short while… (Why is Frodo Baggins wearing shades and killing people in Sin City!!! The Ring! He MUST have… Oh… wait… nevermind…)).

Needless to say, when my acquaintance offered to do a quick reiki session on me I thought “Hmmm, what the hell, let’s see what comes of this” before placing my outstretched palm under hers. She frowned and thought for a little while. I really was expecting something profound after seeing those facial expressions… “Your Ki is unhappy, you need to bath under the waterfall of a clear mountain stream…” or “Your midi-chlorian count is low, you need to eat less junk food”. Heck even an uncertain “It’s difficult to say, your spiritual energy is blocking me out…” statement would have done the job.

Nope…

The reply I got surprised even me:

“Hmmm…” she said after a short while “You are not constipated”

(silence)

That’s it!!! Not Constipated!!! I could have told her that! She looked into to my Ki! Invaded my personal mysterious atmosphere! And all she could comment on was the passage of excrement through my anus!

Then I laughed… and brought my first ever reiki session to an abrupt end…

The home remedy

I feel that home remedies are slowly dieing out. What with aspirin and painkillers around every second corner. I thought it would be nice to dedicate a post to the old ways (even though I don't belive in them).

Many people will still stand by their weird concoction of dog ear flakes and mashed earthworm saying that it will kill off those pesky whatevers before you know it. I just see these people as frizzy haired, wear my undies over me trousers and blink uncontrollably while staring at my kneecaps...what was I saying again....
I any case. The placebo effect can be a useful ally to the ingroant mind.

Sure once upon a time when a person couldn't find a solution to a problem, they would simply make one up out of desperation. But now things are different. Scientists have more than likely already conducted research on your problem and have come up with a solution (or if not, have at least prooved that your home remedy is bollocks).

Moving along.

When I was a kid I was subjected to various home remedies as a first resort (probably handed down from my great great grandparents). Luckily sanity would prevail and my father would bring out the medication and injections before things got too bad.

I'm not sure if anyone else did anything similar to what my family did, it would be interesting to find out. in any case some of the home remedies that stand out from my childhood are:

• Toothache remedy. rub baking powder on and chew cloves with the offending tooth. I guess this was a temporary fix at best. it probably worked by distracting your mind from the toothache pain by having an awful taste and interesting fizzing sensation. Nowadays we simply go to the dentist for a filling.
  
• Chicken pox remedy. This one was particularly useless in my opinion. I was stripped of my clothes (which is fun when you're 5) and covered in a mixture containing crushed mulberry leaves probably with some other stuff in there too. It didn't work... I smelled funny and still itched all over. This probably oringated as a joke, imagine seeing your kid covered in bits of leaves and trying to scratch its back by rolling in the carpets. heheee I think I'll carry this one forward to the next gen. Now we just give the kid a bath in calamine lotion (still smells funny but stops the itching).
• Weight (loss) home remedy. Having a number of females in my family I often laughed at the things they would do to try loose weight 'the easy way'. Solution WONDERBEANS! I'm not sure who came up with this or what species the wonderbean was but somebody made a killing selling packets of dried beans to overweight people. How it worked>>>replace one meal a day with a few wonderbeans and you will miraculously loose weight! If this did work it was because you only ate two meals a day as opposed to three. No thanks...

There are a whole bunch more. I don't want to make this post too long so I'll stop here. I'm interested in hearing about other home remedies. leave a comment!