Thank you for sharing

As The Reiki Digest approaches the completion of its second year, we suppose it's a sign of maturity that we have now received a complaint letter: our very first.

The complaint was in response not to anything we've published, but to our standard email request to those who've violated our generous publishing restrictions, asking them to please comply. As this site is about Reiki and the people who "borrow" from it are usually Reiki practitioners themselves, our request includes a reference to the precepts:

"In addition to the Creative Commons license, as you and I are both Reiki practitioners I would also remind you of the Reiki Precepts. One of them is "Be honest in your work." Posting someone else's work on your web site without attributing the source is not honest."

For those in the New York City area, I point out that we are both practicing in the same local market, and their use of my work to draw clients their way is unfair. And it's clearly a commercial use: beyond the limits of our Creative Commons license.

No need to quote the whole letter here. If you'd like to see it in its entirety, just email editor@thereikidigest.com and we'll be glad to send you one.

The practitioner in question had copied sections of the Digest onto her web site, where they appeared to be her own words since there was no attribution.

So here's the letter:

Dear Ms. Dagley,

No need to quote the Reiki precepts quoted to me, I know them very well. I was not be “dishonest” or lacking honesty. I was merely sharing. Forgive me for sharing. To merely think that I am being dishonest speaks volumes of where you are at. “your Reiki classes and services (in direct competition with my own Reiki classes and services).” I am not in a competition with anyone and Reiki practitioners should not be “competing” against each other. There are enough people on this earth that competitions is not warranted or necessary. It’s a shame how COMPETITIVE Reiki has become here. Obviously many so called Reiki Masters have not learned or mastered putting EGO aside. I’m just a simple Reiki practitioner who loves Reiki so much I want to share it’s benefits and any positive news about Reiki with everyone. It’s a plain, simple and honest approach. Your material has been removed from my site.

I wish you enlightenment and healing.

I thank the reader for her comments and her good wishes, but it's clear we still have a misunderstanding. It's easy to share The Reiki Digest without violating our license, and now it's even easier. Here's how:

1) Link to The Reiki Digest and/or any post or article here, instead of copying it onto your own site. To link to an individual post, just right-click on the word "link" at the bottom of the post and copy the link.

2) Email any post to as many people as you like. Just click on the little picture of the envelope at the bottom of each post, or if you're an email subscriber, just forward it: there's a link encouraging you to do so at the bottom of every email edition. Just don't post the email edition on your web site.

3) Add our RSS feed to your news reader, and share that if you wish, just as we share a continuing stream of Reiki-related headlines with you in The Reiki Digest Live Feed on our web site.

4) We've just added another way to share: at the bottom of each post on our web site, there's a little button that says "Bookmark" with various icons next to it. Mouse over that button, or click on it, and you'll see that you can share any post via a dozen social networking/bookmarking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us and others.

5) If you need help doing any of the above, let us know and we'll try to help you through the process.

6) If the use you have in mind doesn't fall into any of the above categories, you can always ask, and we'll do our best to accommodate you. Honestly.