Reiki Notes

THE NADIS, November 2009

For years I heard about Nadis, but they remained as mysterious as their name sounds. I would ask someone occasionally what they were but never got a good definition until I read Richard Gerber’s book Vibrational Medicine, (Bear & Co., Rochester, VT., 2001), arguably the standard classic in the field of subtle-energy therapies. The Reiki Training Manual I am working on now ---Chapter on Energy Medicine--- is excerpted for this post.

Most of us know what Chakras are (or we think we do). Ha! It’s not that simple. According to the widely accepted translation of this word from Sanscrit they are ‘whirling vortices of light’. Gerber describes these specialized energy centers in the body as “transformers to step down subtle energies and translate them into hormonal, nerve, and cellular activity in the physical body”(p171). I recommend reading his Chapter IV which details how things really work in the human energy system and discusses studies in support of the scientific existence of Chakras from as early as the late 1970’s. Translating theory into practice is not always easy, but here we are 30 years later with very little change in how contemporary medicine approaches dis-ease (this has little to do with the actual doctors, who are usually pretty enlightened, and more to do with governmental policies and regulations that support our health care, pharmaceutical and insurance systems).

In other words, the Etheric system that coexists with the physical system is still being widely ignored despite available information mostly from Physics in areas such as Electromagnetics (EM’s) and Squids (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) and the like. Healing potential and physical energy is not exactly a new topic. The International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine has a yearly conference in Colorado and a journal that presents a compendium of information of these topics: www.issseem.org. And by the way, the Reiki in Hospitals website www.reikiinhospitals.org is adding a research component that will critically evaluate and publish studies dealing with Reiki and healing.

It has been suggested that illness begins in the Auric layers of the human energy system and only later descends into the denser physical system. Of course there are predisposing factors, genetics, and frank contagion and injury. But we are not debating cause here, we are talking about the process of healing. When our immune system and the vibrational frequencies that correspond to all the aspects of our physical body are well supported and balanced, dis-ease is less likely to take hold and healing is more likely to occur through the natural support provided by our own system. This is one of the accepted principles of complementary medicine.

The subtle energy system is very responsive to changes in the environment. Something like strong winds or sudden change in temperature, dietary choices, or our emotional state can create a climate of change within us that affects the meridian system. This has formed the holistic approach in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine for centuries, and why methods such as Acupuncture are such effective all around tonifyers for climactic or emotional disruptions.

When healing is focused not only on the more obvious tangible physical manifestations but also directed to the underlying energetic system (of which the Nadis are a part) healing may well be more rapid and more deeply effective. This is the general principle behind the article Aspects of the Human Energy Field and the Healing Process, Rand and Settin, Reiki News Magazine, 2005 http:/www.avantihealingarts.com/news/html. Keep in mind that everything that is said about the human energy system pertains also to other living organisms in the Animal, Plant, Mineral Kingdoms (who respond much faster in terms of the resonances of their vibratory signatures than humans because there is less interference from our nemesis, the brain).

How does this work? The Nadis are energetic tendrils or threads that conduct Etheric energy from one Chakra to the other and from the Chakras to the nerve organ systems and other obvious internal aspects (organs, nervous system) of the physical body. It has been suggested that there are thousands of these energy conductors working in unison to enliven the life force (Chi) that constitute a vast network of feedback to the physical system. One could say this system parallels or underlies the nervous system except on a much more subjective level. The Nadis are so-called subtle bodies --- meaning intangible--- but many of us are able to sense and perceive energy in its subtle state, so they aren’t really so intangible after all, are they? This is why complementary health approaches such as Chakra Balancing ---especially when combined with Reiki--- are rapid and effective ways to harmonize the human energy system. It is important to make sure the Chakras are functioning because otherwise the Nadis can’t function very well. As we say, it is a multidimensional, top-down system.

The key concept in all of Complementary Medicine regardless of the discipline is Balance. Remember that balance does not mean equality or polarity. It refers to your unique individual balance that operates in conjunction with your inner guidance and your Higher Self. Experiment: find what works for you!

Lately the Nadis have been on my mind. I know that usually when a word, concept or issue persists in my awareness --- as in I wake up thinking about it --- it means there is a need for attention there. We had an early onset of winter here in the Rocky Mountains that threw off my hikes with Little Big Red the Reiki Dog, and this combined with a minor knee injury, and an emotional loss affected my physical/Etheric interface. So I gave myself a Chakra Alignment followed by a Reiki Aura Clearing, had some tea, and am going out despite the wind and cold and knee to walk the dog.

THE TREES, August 2009

"Talk with us, dance with us" is a statement was given to me by a circle of ancient Redwoods in Northern California. I was rather taken aback. I had not been trying to communicate. I was just beaming Reiki to them while sitting on a log (once one of them) appreciating their magnificence. Did they know that I am a dancer? These giants have a feminine aspect to their being with a group consciousness that strongly informs their attitude toward the Earth. Did they know I was giving them Reiki? Colorado Ponderosa Pine on the other hand tend to be loners with a distinctly male presence. Tree "personalities" are not all alike.

When I say female and male I am referring to the yin-yang energy balance that sustains the energy of the tree and is strenthened by Reiki. Shamanic healing, as practiced by the Druids, has perhaps our strongest ancient tradition based upon the energy of the tree. Reiki healing energy work communicates an ebb and flow of high vibration - a way to allow the correct balance Just for Today. Together, they can be a powerful combination.

Some may say it is sheer fantasy to think that communication with trees is possible, let alone that they beam specific messages to us. I had already experienced the gentle knowing-ness that came from plants into my awareness while growing medicinal herbs in the rocky soil of Northern New England. Yet the trees really speak in actual thought-phrases. How they formulate concepts and how they communicate is different depending on the species. I never would have believed how different! As I traveled up the California, Oregon and Washington coast two years ago gathering information for my upcoming book on Trees, gifts were bestowed upon me by trees of many species. Below is a brief excerpt from one of these encounters.

"I reach Lake Quinault, the home of the oldest living Western Red Cedar in North America, just as I am to do a shamanic journey with Robin Meyers, a wonderful healer. I'm always a little disoriented in some ways after shamanic work, and operating on this other level of awareness I conceive the idea to visit the Cedar Being. Of course it is raining, and as I make my way through the rain forest I lose my way, so to speak. Fairy light filters through the high canopy. Contemplating which way to go, under dripping moss and covered with mud after being tripped by roots a small white dog appears. Clean and cheerful, she has not a drop of mud on her! She informs me her name is Jenny, and she keeps pace with me never leaving my side as I slip and slide up and down embankments, until I discover the path and find the tree.

This Old One, with strangely scraggled roots of ancient origin doesn't seem that vital, and it is even difficult to say if he is actually alive. But when I put my hands on him, he speaks immediately. Actually, he sings, and the song stays in my mind long enough for me to notate it hours later. I do not have a good memory, so clearly the mantra has entered my subconscious along with his name in another language that I suspect is native to the peoples who inhabited these woods long ago.

Later I am able to return the favor to Jenny who now is the one who is lost. I find her waiting at the base of the trail. As I cross the road, she trots alongside safety. Turns out she belongs to someone in the area and she had crossed the road and not come home that day. It is not as though there weren't other people walking that trail and crossing that road all day, mind you. As I notice the relationship we have formed, it comes to me that I am not alone, not lost. I have only altered my path, crossed into another dimension, and come back changed in some way."

Trees speak that self-same message. They tell us about resilience and surviva and resilience. For those like myself who bemoan the depredation of the Earth, they are a constant reminder of the great Buddhist wheel of life, Sansara, in which everything and everyone is created and destroyed, over and over. There is always hope.

UntouchedImages©2007 Gianna Settin

REIKI HEALING DANCE AND SOUND, May 2007

Back from presenting the Reiki Healing Dance™ Certification Course/Workshop in Evian les Bains, France, I am amazed at the energy of this wonderfully professional annual European Reiki conference sponsored by Nita Mocanu of ReikiForum (www.reikiforum.com). It is held every May; attend it and you will not be disappointed. There I met the most expert Reiki practitioners and teachers in an inspiring and informative atmosphere. Here, Reiki students are influenced by an immense Cedar of Lebanon outside the classroom.

UntouchedImages © 2007 Gianna Settin

Future Avanti Healing Arts® Workshops incorporate Native ceremony, sound and movement through collaboration with AWAKENING QUEST™, the NEW wilderness self-discovery program of Avanti Healing Arts®. In this time of immense change, we benefit from creative ways of experiencing our own self-healing for Earth Healing.

COLORADO, MAY, 2007.

The mountains call to us. They are ancient beings, ancestors. Here in Colorado, in Rocky Mountain National Park (Estes Park), location for recent Avanti Healing Arts® Reiki Classes, there is sun three hundred and eight days a year. Coming after Maine at sea level and weather which, like the Pacific Northwest, involves vast quantities of rain, it is a welcome pleasure to be here above tree-line, contemplating 14,000 foot peaks, meditating in the thin pure air. There are elk everywhere and the spring flood makes an awesome sound as the Big Thompson River thunders down the gorge.

It is inspiring and bittersweet to be here (the extremes are the most challanging and yet wonderful aspects of life). I came to Colorado to be near my mother in her last days. She passed in March of 2007 and I stayed on, in the mountains that were also so dear to her. Hiking in the Roosevelt National Forest, I experience the fragrence of Ponderosa Pine and the whistling of the Golden Marmot, hear the hummingbirds swooping in their dance and the roar of the spring flood in the river. It is a healing place.

The people of Colorado are much like those in Maine: they love the outdoors. And best of all, there are no black flies! So if there are mountain lions around while hiking, invoke the power symbol and project the thought form that there is room for us all. Or when tenting off the trail, and a black bear wanders by, remember that this shy creature only wishes to walk the land of its birth, to do what is to be done on the Earth. The way of Reiki is to project vibrations that accept all into harmony. However, the girl scout code applies here: Be Prepared. Reiki is great but I pack a whistle and pepper spray too, and hang my food high in a tree.

It was not easy to have left my beautiful retreat in Maine to travel here and there to teach Reiki, but it was time to move on. People are curious about why. It actually was a spiritual quest, beginning with a persistent message (replete with technicolor visuals) to go out into the wilderness with a cart and a donkey. At first I thought it meant to literally be out there bumping along with my cart doing who knows what. Then I thought, "oh, it is another life I am seeing", or a metaphor, so I relaxed into the idea that I did not have to make any big changes, just to understand the message. Later, seeking a simpler explanation of life in the moment, I thought it was a manifestation of my recent farm-sitting experience with horses and donkeys (see article Reiki on the Farm on News page). Finally, I realized that it meant that I needed to actually do something, not just dream of doing it! So here I am for the moment, on the road in my cart (my trusty steed, the Subaru Outback with the Thule on top) driving up the West Coast, being an itinerant Reiki teacher, giving treatments as the opportunity arises.

It is not where we are located, or what we are doing in the moment, that matters--- it is what we are, what it means to us to simply "be" one with ourselves and with our Higher Self, which is what we call Spirit. Yes, people have said this over and over, we all have, but living it is another matter all together! Sometimes I don't do very well at this but it helps to remind myself that I am only a human and to offer it up. It is an enormous challange for me to be in big towns with so many cars and people and noise after the peace of my tranquil place. This is a reminder to me to not miss daily Gassho (in Japanese "two hands coming together") meditation.

It is also a reminder to go on Retreat if I am losing my center. Two days spent at a Benedictine Abbey (St. Walburga) in Virginia Dale, singing the psalms from morning to night, gave me back my self that had become overshadowed by the stressful car trip across America from Maine to Colorado. As I entered the Chapel, peace descended upon me immediately. One of my favorite things to do during Mass used to be to invoke Reiki and feel the amazing connection with my highest guide, a blessed combination that never fails to bring me to where I need to be, and cannot find alone.

No matter how lonely, or hard the path, there is joy at the center of our being, awaiting awakening. There are many ways to center oneself. I have a friend who is often depressed. His "chapel" is his camera. He takes macro photograhs of only the smallest little things, no matter where he is, and it helps him to always be mindfully looking for that special image hiding somewhere, waiting to be uncovered and noticed. These little discoveries take him out of himself, and bring him happiness, by putting him in touch with the tiny places of beauty that exist everywhere, if only for a moment.

The day after my mother passed on, I found a scrap of paper floating around in the bottom of a drawer, written to her on her 16th birthday by my grandmother. It was a stanza of a poem by Charles Kingsley: "Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever. Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long. And so make life, death and the great hereafter, One grand sweet song." I had been hearing the first line of this for three solid years in my meditations, without having the vaguest idea where it came from or what it meant. Now I know that it was my grandmother, who I never knew, telling me to get out there and manifest my dreams.

Just For Today: Walking on the right path. May 27/07

NEPAL, November, 2006.

Reiki in Nepal this year was offered enroute to and from the Annapurna Sanctuary, and the Master class finished up in Kathmandu. It was your usual unbelievably beautiful October mountain scenery, the friendly and open spirit of the people, and the land that called me back. When we travel, we do not see the real people unless we take the time to try to speak with them in their language. I treated myself to a much needed massage in a tiny mountain village by a very professional Nepali massage therapist who was deaf and non-speaking (and who understood much more than needed to be said intuitively and spiritually).

When we communicate using our sensation and perception, we hear the real stories: the stories behind the mudslide that killed an entire village; the loss of crops that resulted in families having to leave homesteads hundreds of years old; the cultural confusion surrounding the introduction of "civilization" into a country that until 5 years ago had only one road running between the two largest cities of Kathmandu and Pokhara; the intrusion of foreign violence; the question of how to protect the environment and still meet the needs of a burgeoning population.

And also the joyful things: the extended families living under one roof with their goats enjoying the same shelter; the solitude and peace of silence alone on the trail; the laughter and comraderie of the village coming together to dance; the simple pleasures of sharing what food we have among many. We don't have to go away to Nepal to have this, though it is compelling to believe that it is different elsewhere. Truly, our needs and gifts are the same no matter where we live. What we learn is that everyone shares the same feelings, perceptions, consciousness.

Then, shockingly, while we are happily sharing snapshots of our families, one of our group is robbed on the trail and suddenly nothing is the same. The Nepali people helping us run countless kilometres across the mountains to try to apprehend the robbers--- they are so upset to think that one of their own has done this. And they find them!!! If only we in the United States could mobliize that kind of grass-roots response to our own violence perpetrated against others....it used to be so, before so much changed.

Sometimes I bemoan the fact of change, sometimes I welcome it. There is no holding back what is happening now. But we can influence our future to some extent by our intention for what is to come. Meditating for inner peace is a way to do this.

Or, with a small donation. In Nepal, there is a monastery in Pokhara where they have more Tibetan refugee monks coming, but they cannot support them. If you wish, I think it would be good place to help buy books for education. At this time, all grades are in one room. We visited the Shree Gaden Dargayling Monastery and could see that they had practically nothing. During the occupation of Tibet by the Chinese, and the subsequent exodus of Tibetans from their homeland, Ven. Tulku Lobsang Jamyang, the head lama, was asked by HH the Dalai Lama to establish this modest monastery in Tashi-ling Tibetan camp in Pokhara, Nepal in 1984. There is a need for classrooms, books, a facility for a teacher (there is no place to house one), food and clothing, and medical supplies for the young monks who are being educated there.

There are thousands of causes in the world to be involved in. The positive intention of many can create a powerful mantra that reverberates around the planet, that will lead each of us to the place we are supposed to be. This mantra calls us to support those in the world who have less than we do. Even if we do not have much, it is necessary to be part of the sharing. Look for what is right for you---and do not neglect to look in your own community. If you are interested in helping Tibet in Nepal, email: sgdling@fewmail.com.np.

In the mountains, in the Annapurnas which consists of at least 4 awesome peaks of that name making up the Annapurna massif, the opportunity on our teaching-trek to have an attunement to Reiki was extraordinary. There were challanges, illnesses, losses and disappointments, but without these, there is no growth and the dark is a necessary component of the light. Polarization is not beneficial. To have one without the other is out of balance.

While the others went on to Annapurna Sanctuary, I stayed behind for 2 days at Macchapuchare Base Camp in a barren, freezing cold stone cubicle in my trusty sleeping bag, laid low by a virus that decimated my body's normally healthy ability to hike under any circumstances. I lay there and did self-Reiki for hours, slept, meditated, prayed, tried to eat soup (unsuccessfully) that people brought, drank a lot of water, talked to God, and did more Reiki. Eventually my trekking group re-emerged from the mountain mists. It was comforting to know that there was no need for anxiety or worry, because I had something to do to heal myself and was totally protected by Spirit. My growth was to understand how fast I had been going. I slowed down (the ultimate purpose of most illness).

Live life to it's fullest, welcome difficulty when it presents itself, don't worry about its "karmic" lesson, just know that it opens the path to healing and greater understanding of the soul journey we are individually experiencing.

The mountains remind me of my mother: she knew everything there was to know about mountain climbing (from books). The greatest sadness of her life was not being able to read any longer because of macular degeneration. I honor her by keeping her entire extensive book collection intact. Her journal entries detail the travails of the climbers, the angst and exhilaration. When she and I went to Canyon de Chelly and sat on the edge of a modest little butte to experience the power of Grandmother Spider's spire, she couldn't go near the edge. I had no idea until that time later in her life that this fearless mountain woman was afraid of heights.

We are always learning more about our families if only we ask the questions and listen to the answers. Don't wait. Do it now before it is too late. 11/26/06