A Celeb-Reiki roundup

Reiki is not massage, the gazillionth chapter of an ongoing saga

This week starring. . . Mark Knopfler

Photo by Joachim Müllerchen. Some rights reserved

We have no idea whether six-string sultan of swing Mark Knopfler has ever received or even heard of Reiki. We weren't the ones who brought up the issue: Rolling Stone magazine did. When reporter Scott Spencer visited Knopfler's home studio, he wrote:

"The woman who lets me in has the competent but serene look of a Reiki masseuse."

Frequent contributor Pamir Kiciman of Reiki Help Blog spotted the error first, and wrote a letter to Rolling Stone right away:

Subj: Fact Check RS 1058

In your article on Mark Knopfler (great piece on a great artist), you mention "...serene look of a Reiki masseuse." While Reiki certainly creates serenity, it is definitely not massage.There is no physical manipulation in the practice of Reiki. The hands are static in each position. People who give Reiki are 'practitioners' and wellness is derived from a nonphysical source.The benefit of Reiki is spiritual and energetic. It doesn't arise out of techniques used by massage which manipulates muscles, fascia and tissues.

Thanks, Pamir, for taking the time to hammer away on that point, and for letting us know about it. So far, the letter hasn't shown up on the RS web site. In any case, that makes Mark Knopfler a Celeb-Reiki.

But he's not the only one this week.

It would hardly be a Celeb-Reiki Report these days without a mention of celebrity mom/socialite/Reiki Master Ann Dexter-Jones. She showed up in the New York Post last week in a brazenly catty feature, "A Field Guide to Cougars."

In Ft. Worth, Texas, local punk-rockers The Toadies are back together, this time without bassist Lisa Umbarger, who is now a Reiki practitioner.

The rest of our Celeb-Reikies this week are too numerous to mention individually: they're the recording artists of Gemini Sun Records, a niche label focusing on music for "the spa experience" that got a nice writeup by the Los Angeles Times syndicate.