The Reiki Digest for October 18, 2006: Digest meets Podcast

This week The Reiki Digest and The Reiki Show podcast converge for a special program in which yours truly gets to turn the tables on regular co-host Bronwen Stiene of the International House of Reiki. As guest host, I got to interview Bronwen about the books she has written with her husband (and Reiki Show co-host) Frans: The Reiki Sourcebook, The Japanese Art of Reiki, The Reiki Techniques Card Deck and The A-Z of Reiki.

We spoke across space and time -- she in Australia on a Tuesday morning, I in New Jersey on a Monday evening -- so we had to work around a slight delay as our voices bounced off the satellite.

Click here to listen to the program.

That makes Bronwen Stiene this week's Celeb-Reiki! Congratulations, Bronwen. (Regular readers may have noticed that last week's edition did not feature a Celeb-Reiki, partly because of the Ask the Masters feature and partly because the previous week featured a long list of Celeb-Reiki's.)

Keeping in mind the Reiki precepts' recommendation to be humble, we nonetheless recommend the show to our readers, and welcome the many new subscribers who discovered The Reiki Digest via the podcast.

Some of those new subscribers have already volunteered to help with our Reviewing Reiki Online Project, and if you'd like to get involved, it's not too late. If you'd like to be a reviewer, or if you have a site to submit for review by our readers, just leave a comment on our web site or, if you're an e-mail subscriber, reply to this message.

The next step is developing a standard set of criteria for rating the sites, and your suggestions on that are welcome as well, whether or not you want to volunteer. We'll be choosing the Top Ten Reiki Sites of 2006, announcing the winners in early 2007.

Also in early 2007, January 15 to be exact, the New York Open Center will hold its first Reiki Symposium, an all-day event featuring experiential presentations, interactive lectures, Q & A forums, a panel discussion, master sessions, and more. I'll be among the Reiki Masters making presentations, including an active morning workshop on Qigong for Reiki Practitioners and a presentation (with fellow Reiki Master James Rosenow) on Reiki in Cyberspace. If you reserve your space now, you can save $25 off the door price. For more information, speaking of Reiki in Cyberspace, check out the new Reiki Symposium blog. With the blog, the Reiki Symposium can stretch beyond a one-day event, since we can begin our discussion via the site's comments feature now even though the Symposium is still months away, and we can keep the conversation going long after the event is over.

Reiki Roundup

This week's roundup of Reiki in the news begins with The Times Online in the United Kingdom, where Reiki is one of the bright spots in the stranger-than-fiction, but true story of a novelist who was paralyzed for a time, and left permanently disabled, by an infection from unpasteurized dairy products.

On to Albany, New York, where the Times-Union features a doctor who also practices Reiki in an article headlined, "Soothing the Spirit to Help the Body."

In the state of Washington, The Olympian includes a brief listing requesting Reiki practitioners and other "comfort therapists" to volunteer for a hospice program. I include it here simply because I like the term "comfort therapists" and hadn't run across it before.

In Cincinnati, Ohio, a program for cancer survivors is also looking for Reiki practitioners.

In Moline, Illinois, WQAD TV features a news item headlined "Dealing with Pain - Reiki" that is not exactly the most accurate, as illustrated by, among other things, the misspelling of "chakras" as "shakras," and this generalization: "There are colors a relaxed Reiki patient can see when their eyes are closed during a session..." While Reiki recipients (and anyone, really) sometimes see colors with their eyes closed, that is not specifically a feature of Reiki and doesn't happen in every session.

Finally, take a look at the definition of Reiki as distilled by Google at Googlism, a site that turns Google search results into a sort of cyber-poetry.