The Reiki Roundup, super-sized (with video!)

This week's Reiki Roundup includes so many articles (and one really, really good video) that our Roundup is the lead article. Otherwise, you'd need more than a week to read it all.

We begin in London, where The Times Online interviews pioneering spiritual healer and Reiki practitioner Angie Buxton-King and others on the topic of spiritual healing. Buxton-King works full-time with cancer patients at University College Hospital in central London, as does her Reiki practitioner husband, Graham King. If you have 7 minutes to spare, you can learn more about their work from this video, which we recommend for everyone with even the slightest interest in using Reiki in a medical environment:



That video offers background on the Sam Buxton Sunflower Healing Trust, the charity Buxton-King and King set up to raise money to support even more practitioners and serve even more clients. This September, Deep Purple will headline the annual Sunflower Jam, the charity's main fundraising event.

Next stop, askmen.com, where Stress Management Specialist Julian Marcus asks, "Reiki: Can it Heal What Ails You?" The men's portal site claims to have 5 million readers a month, so that's a lot of exposure for a more-accurate-than-usual article on Reiki.

On to Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where Reiki practitioner Lauren Deknis Bortolami gets a nice writeup in The Enterprise about her hopes to make Reiki more available to public safety and military personnel.

Let's head west from there to Green Valley, Arizona, where Reiki practitioners and other alternative healing practitioners, as well as nurses and doctors, make house calls.

Not to be outdone, practitioners in Calgary, Alberta, Canada not only make house calls, they travel to clients' doorsteps in a mobile spa that even has its own zen garden.

In Kolkata, India, we find a Reiki practitioner who is said to have "earned her five levels of Reiki Grandmaster" — that seems to go far, far, far beyond the levels Reiki founder Mikao Usui taught, but then inflation has affected most everything since Usui was teaching in the 1920s. But since Usui himself wasn't a grandmaster, we wonder how anyone else could be. The 5x grandmaster also tells the interviewer that Reiki can help people win a Ferrari, which brings to mind our recent discussion on The Secret and the Reiki Precepts.

In Johannesburg, South Africa (Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela!), we find an article on the spa at the luxury Westcliff Hotel, where two of our favorite non-massage modalities, Reiki and Thai yoga, are combined, which somehow leaves the reviewer believing they are massage. Anyway, it sounds like fun, especially with the heated beds!

In Australia, The Age lumps Reiki in with a bunch of other alternative healing modalities in an article with the edgy headline, "Laws 'only way' to stop pharm-yard quacks."

In St. Paul, Minnesota, we meet a victim of childhood sexual abuse who uses Reiki, among other modalities, to heal herself and help others as well.

Elsewhere, Reiki gets a brief mention in a variety of articles, usually as part of a list of healing modalities:

"For the dog that has everything: Botox and a massage" — The Guardian, UK

The Boston Globe addresses the pet care issue as well in an article headlined, "How Far Should We Go to Save Our Pets?"

An article on a new director of pain management in suburban Philadelphia — Phoenixville News

"Boom currencies beating the credit crunch" includes a Reiki practitioner who accepts barter payments — thisismoney.co.uk

"Healing comes in more forms than you think" — a reporter goes to a Holistic Expo —
The Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire

The Washington Post has a mention of Reiki in a travel article about the "hippie-era holdover" of Goa, India.

And The Scotsman mentions "a chilled out zone of Reiki head massage" in its coverage of the annual T in the Park music festival.

Finally, in Turkey, Reiki is mentioned in passing in a Turkish Daily News piece about its coverage of women.