The Reiki Digest for September 20, 2006: Harvests & Blossoms

There's a refreshing chill in the air today at The Reiki Digest world headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey,  a reminder that summer here is almost over.

For some of our readers, however, spring is just a couple of days away. So with our global community in mind, this issue celebrates the upcoming equinox, whether it's harvest time where you are, or the blossoming of spring. Whatever your perspective, we've got a bumper crop of Reiki-related news.

In previous issues, we've encountered Reiki for animals, so it's no surprise to find an article about energy healing for plants. Neither the reporter nor the interviewee mentions Reiki as such, but it certainly seems Reiki-related.

Multi-certified Reiki Master Lisa Whatley didn't wait to be interviewed: she wrote her own article, "Why I Recommend Energy Healing," for an online-only news site, Market-Day.Net, which appears to be mostly an aggregator of newsfeeds and keyword-targeted ads.

This week's Celeb-Reiki is our first to receive the distinction twice. Singaporean Actress/model/dancer and now TV host JoJo Struys made the list a couple of months ago for her new television series, "Jojo's Ticket to Wellbeing." She's a Celeb-Reiki again because the show has done so well. Now if only we could see the program here in the United States...

And a Celeb-Reiki update: for those 21st-Century types who have Ipods but not cable TV and therefore didn't get to see the episode of the program "30 Days" that made Jersey guy Tom Collett a Celeb-Reiki last month, you can now find the show on ITunes.

If you'd like to become a Celeb-Reiki, and you happen to live in Syracuse, New York, here's your chance. WCNY-TV is looking for alternative-healing-savvy audience members for a new show, "Evolving Medicine, Emerging Choices: Old Wisdom - New Understanding" -- a long title for a one-night-only program, but you get the idea.

In our mailbox just today we found the latest issue of the quarterly Reiki News Magazine, so far the best issue we've seen. Despite the slogan, "Honoring all lineages and schools," Reiki News still focuses a bit much on its publisher's school and lineage (the only Reiki Training in its listings), but perhaps the goal is not serious Reiki journalism. That said, the articles were so compelling that the entire staff of The Reiki Digest (i.e., your humble editor/publisher) couldn't help sitting down to read them all before getting back to work here.

The pick of the crop for our Reiki harvest is a pair of new items from prolific writers Bronwen and Frans Stiene of the International House of Reiki in Sydney, Australia. It took us a week to deal and heal our way through the Reiki Techniques Card Deck, published in July, and that was just glancing at each card and trying one or two (OK, more like a dozen) of the techniques.



The 45 cards feature techniques from traditional Japanese Reiki as well as nontraditional Reiki, all for Reiki self-care. The cards, and the techniques they illustrate, are useful for non-Reiki practitioners as well, but all the more helpful to Reiki practitioners. If your self-care sessions have become a bit less interesting as you do the same techniques repeatedly, these cards are a great way to break out of that rut and bring some new energy to your practice (and therefore, to yourself). If you don't do self-care as regularly as you'd like, the Reiki Techniques Card Deck can help you get back in practice: just pick a card and make that technique your focus for the day. The beautiful illustrations on the cards are by Lolly Ellena Rados, the same artist who illustrated the Stienes' first book, The Reiki Sourcebook, and the same designer, Stuart Davies. The cards are beautiful, although the type is a bit small for those of us who see the world through trifocals. Fortunately, I can read them just fine with my glasses off as long as I have plenty of light.

But wait: there's more. Not content to rest on their laurels for more than a few months, it seems, the Stienes also have a new book out this week: The A-Z of Reiki:



They call it the A to Zed of Reiki, but to us here in the United States, it's the A to Zee of Reiki. My copy of this little pocketbook is already looking a bit dog-eared because I've been flipping through it a lot. Fortunately, it seems to be of very sturdy construction, so it can probably stand to be thumbed through frequently for years to come. Most any Reiki term you might think of can be found in this book, along with some you've never even heard of or imagined. People, techniques, Reiki terminology in both Japanese and English, Reiki styles and organizations, as the cover states: "Everything About Reiki" has been crammed into this tiny 254-page portable reference book.

Both the Reiki Techniques Card Deck and A-Z of Reiki include information drawn from the Stienes' first two books, The Reiki Sourcebook and The Japanese Art of Reiki, repackaged into even more accessible forms.

Still more: Bronwen and Frans followed up on last week's edition of The Reiki Digest by interviewing Dave Gorczynski, the founder of SPARK, the organization we wrote about last week, for the latest Reiki Show podcast: Healing 9/11 Memories in New York with Street Reiki.

We may or may not be introducing a new feature for The Reiki Digest. You get to decide.

The potential new feature is "Ask the Master Teachers", and the idea would be to put a new question each week to a panel of Reiki Master Teachers from various styles and lineages. So what do you think? Should we add it? If you're a Reiki Master Teacher, would you be willing to serve on the panel and answer readers' questions?

Please let us know by adding your comments -- all you need to do is click on the word "comments" right below this week's post. Or if you prefer to comment more privately, e-mail your comments directly to me: janet@healingmovement.com. Thanks in advance for any and all comments.