Carnival of Healing #203

Cue the calliope. . . it's Carnival time again!

Laydeez annd genntlemenn, step right up and join the festivities as we celebrate the 203rd edition of the Carnival of Healing.

It's been many months since the Carnival has set up its virtual tents here at The Reiki Digest, so we have hundreds of newer readers who may be wondering what's going on. So we'll begin with a brief explanation. The Carnival of Healing is a weekly roundup of personal blog posts on the topics of holistic health, wellness, spirituality, and self empowerment. The Carnival travels constantly through cyberspace, landing at a different host site each Saturday. Last week the Carnival set up camp at Cari Campbell's Your Joyous Life, and next week's host is Rosanna C. Rogacion at Melisma. The Carnival founder and organizer is Phylameana lila Desy, About.com's guide to Holistic Healing. (Phylameana also happens to be a Reiki practitioner, as are many other Carnival participants.)

This week your host is the world's only weekly publication about the gentle yet powerful spiritual healing practice of Reiki, home to a lively community of approximately 5,000 readers in more than 150 countries. For those Carnival visitors who may be unfamiliar with Reiki, here's a description from the National Institutes of Health.

Familiar or not, every post in this week's Carnival fits perfectly with the guidelines that we Reiki practitioners try to follow every day: the Reiki precepts. Here is our favorite translation from the original Japanese:

For today only:

Do not anger

Do not worry

Be humble

Be honest in your work

Be compassionate to yourself and others.

You don't have to be a Reiki practitioner to follow those precepts -- they make sense for everyone. We found a precept in every post in this week's Carnival contributions. Take a look and see what we mean:

For today only: Sam Alexander of Glowing Face Man gets us started with How to Take Control of Life -- it's all about focusing on the moment. And sometimes the best way to stay in the moment is to stop trying so hard, as Kaushik Chokshi at beyond karma explains in Call off the Struggle. If you've got seven minutes to enjoy being in the moment, Catherine Van Wetter of To the Heart of the Matter has a Seven Minute Break for you in the form of a video meditation. One of the ways we drift away from the moment is by making excuses -- Daylle Deanna Schwartz (Reiki is one of her many skills) of Lessons from a Recovering DoorMat tackles that subject in the 48th post in her ongoing series on the Law of Attraction: Excuses.

Do not anger: Sarah has plenty of reasons to be angry, but instead she writes about Overcoming Hatred on her blog simply called Writing. (Note: Sarah's site has music when it loads, so keep that in mind if you're in a place where that might be an issue.)

Do not worry: There's no way to eliminate the worry from dealing with cancer, but Amy B. Scher at Healthcare Hacks offers some encouraging words on How to Embrace Losing Your Hair During Chemotherapy. And animal Reiki specialist Beth Lowell asks, "What's more scary: change or cancer? in her article, "Canine Wellness -- Prevention and Treatment of Cancer."

Be humble: Humble, as in, "It's not all about you." Two of our contributors, both nursing-related sites, take that to heart by providing lists of valuable links to other online resources. Emma Taylor gives us "100 Web Tools to Help You Live to 100" at OnlineNursingPrograms.net, and Barbara Williams at RN Central offers "100 Blog Posts You Should Read Before Going to Nursing School."

Be honest in your work: At Personal Web Guide, Outshined writes about Dealing With and Understanding Liars.

Be compassionate to yourself and others: Peggy Vertrees of stillpointreiki contributes some vivid and moving tales of Reiki for animals in Holy Cow. And Covert Hypnotist writes about how to show that compassion by establishing rapport in How Rapport Can Help You With Hypnosis. One of the best ways to show compassion is with encouragement, as Adam Faughn writes in "15 Things You Can Do to Encourage."

That's it for this week's Carnival! For more Carnival of Healing fun, check out last week's edition at Your Joyous Life, and next week's edition at Melisma. Many thanks to all our contributors, and thanks especially to Phylameana for all she does to keep the Carnival going. (Hmm. . . I guess that makes her sort of a cyber-roustabout.)

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