09/11/2025
I'm looking forward to teaching Reiki level 1 again next weekend and as part of my Reiki teaching I always include how important it is to connect to nature as part of our Reiki practice. I also briefly touch upon the lost western healing traditions and lineages. The following is an extract from my Reiki 1 manual and will also be included in a forthcoming booklet I’m working on, to share my thoughts on the importance of nature-focused Reiki and ways of re-establishing our lost western healing lineages:
“Despite the differing origin stories of Reiki, we now know (thanks to the vigorous research by many respected authors,) that Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, would have been influenced by Shintoism, Japan’s indigenous, animist religion. His experience and training as a Tendai Buddhist monk would have also influenced him greatly, and that esoteric tradition also contains teachings that can be considered animist, as are most Buddhist teachings when taught in their original Eastern cultures.
Animism, from the Latin ‘anima’ meaning ‘soul’, is the belief that everything has what could be described as a spirit, soul or consciousness, whether humans, animals, places, objects, plants, rocks etc. All ancient, native/indigenous, traditional cultures share this view. We could even refer to this innate soul and consciousness as simply energy, that everything is energy, everything is connected and vibrates at different frequencies. From this viewpoint we could say that all energy is consciousness and all consciousness is energy aka Reiki. It is from this very vast viewpoint and with an open mind, that we can enter into the spirit of Reiki teachings and practice and get so much more out of it as well as feeling a deeper sense of connection and wholeness.
Reiki’s roots in the Eastern animist traditions of Shintoism and Buddhism and the self-revelatory, satori (enlightenment) experience of Dr Usui, means that Reiki can be seen as shamanic in origin and therefore already entwined with practices that connect to nature and the spirit in all things, something that as Westerners, we are mostly still so detached from.
Shaman, (a word that originates from Siberia) means ‘one who sees’ and refers to someone with a connection to spirit guides, their intuition, the unseen and the 'interconnectedness' of all things, and one who helps others with healing and insights, just as Mikao Usui did. Indigenous, shamanic cultures and traditions all revere nature as sacred as part of their animist view, with their sense of interconnected consciousness/energy.
In the West, our indigenous, shamanic culture and traditions that revered nature were pre-Christian and date back many thousands of years. Nature-oriented traditions, knowledge, wisdom and practices were carried down early tribal and family lines and included celebrating the solstices and other seasonal events, what is now called by neo-Pagans ‘The Wheel of the Year’. This means honouring and being in tune with the elements, the changing seasons, the lunar cycles, the solstices and other celestial events, all of which helps us reconnect to nature and ultimately ourselves.
This old knowledge would have also included knowledge of healing herbs, hands on healing, and what we would call mantras today – folk songs or ‘incantations’ (literally meaning ‘chanting over,’) as well as knowledge of the land and ways of living more harmoniously, in reciprocity with the natural world. Today, nature-focused spirituality and related religions are revisiting this lost wisdom and are the biggest spiritual movements in the West.
Western, indigenous shamanism and the knowledge of how to commune with energy, spirits, plants, ways of healing and divination would have been held by the wise men and women of our communities. In old English the 5000 year old word for ‘wise’ was Wicca (male) or Wicce (female) (pronounced ‘witcher’), and is where the origin of the word ‘witch’ comes from, just meaning ‘wise’ without any negative connotation.
This word was later misappropriated and turned into something that meant doing ‘evil magic’ and that negative stereotype still prevails today. These original wise men and women were also called ‘cunning folk’ – from the original old meaning of ‘cunning’ which means ‘knowledge’ and ‘to know’ and many of them would have practiced ‘hands on healing’ as part of their services. This was our lost, western energy healing tradition.
As Western Reiki practitioners, I think it’s really important to know about, acknowledge and re-establish our connections to our Western culture’s lost healing traditions. Most importantly of all, to remember our connection to nature as nature, especially when we learn an Eastern tradition like Reiki, which is all about interconnection. It’s helpful to remember that we also had a form of these practices in our own culture, the knowledge of which has been lost over time, but that ancient knowledge and wisdom might well still be reverberating in our genes and subconscious as intuition, waiting to be accessed.
When Westerners learn Eastern traditions and teachings such as Reiki, we can do so from our place of disconnection and separation from nature and therefore we can miss important and subtle points. So to me, it feels like an important first step to re-establish ways of reconnecting and remembering ourselves as nature, which then helps us to connect to ourselves as ‘Reiki’ too.
Society’s general disconnection and dissociation with nature is something that is causing great upheaval and destruction in the Western world today. Most of us still talk about going ‘out into nature’ and only seeing nature as a local woodland or nature reserve. It takes a big change in our thinking to view ourselves as nature beings and to rebuild the deep connection and reciprocity with nature that our ancient ancestors would have had.
But we can practice remembering this and cultivate feeling aligned with the universal energy/Reiki, with the elements, the seasons, the trees and plants around us – even in a very urban area, we can begin to rebuild connections to the land lying under the concrete. Cultivating this viewpoint of connection and rebuilding these relationships helps to heal our sense of disconnection and transform it into wholeness. This can help us feel as though we truly belong to this world. Reconnecting to nature, to source energy, to Reiki, is ultimately reconnection to ourselves and can feel like ‘coming home’, we feel connected, we feel ‘whole’. This is experience of connection and wholeness is what ‘healing’ truly means."
This is also a blog post on www.mysticholisticworcester.co.uk
Text and image all my own.
