Reiki

Last weekend I got my Reiki Level 1 certification and I think I have finally formulated my thoughts on it.

I have always been fascinated by Reiki and the chakras and I do believe everything is connected and in an energy that we may not be able to perceive normally. On a practical level, I am hoping I can use Reiki to alleviate personal pain, both physical and psychological.

The course was an interesting experience for me. Reiki Level 1 is meant to teach you Reiki for yourself and maybe some people close to you. Reiki Level 2 is for people who want to start treating people professionally. So when I went in I did not expected to mainly do Reiki on myself and maybe learn a little theory on how to apply it to others. Not so. The course seemed very much aimed at people who want to do the Reiki Level 2 course as well and will start having clients. The instructor even referred to the classmate we were treating as "the client". I am not a natural people person and this was not something I was very comfortable with at the start - I even got nauseous and almost fainted giving my first treatment - but looking back I do think it was useful even though holding your hands out over someone can be very difficult on your arms and shoulders. The instructor, who I had received a treatment from in the past, was very good and told us about his journey. One of the messages he received from an acupuncturist was that everything is a gift. This is a hard concept for me to grasp and when he told us he applied this when he was diagnosed with leukemia I may have made some protesting noise. But perhaps adopting some of this attitude will be good for me as I do not deal well with unexpected setback and should I ever get cancer, I do believe a positive outlook will help a great deal. After the course I wrote down other things that I need to work on within myself as well.
When receiving a Reiki treatment from someone else, I did find it very relaxing to the point of almost falling asleep. I did not always feel anything in particular in terms of energy from who was treating me but I did occasionally twitch which is a good thing. When the instructor was giving me a treatment, he used a symbol signifiying emotional clarity on me, immediately after which my eyebrows twitched into a frown (I'm taking him on his word of course, I felt me brows twitch but as my eyes were closed I've no clue what he was doing). This makes sense as I had received an e-mail from my father that morning that left me very emotionally confused.
Since the weekend, I have been practising Reiki on myself every morning with mixed results. Some days I felt very little but this morning as I drew a symbol onto my heart chakra I felt moved to tears, I repeated this three times with the same results. Even on days I did not feel much from the treatment I found the day going smoother and things did not bother me on as profound a level as they might do normally.

Tonight I will be giving my husband a treatment for this first time, so I am interested to see how that goes.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found it interesting and/or useful.

Deserting Tumblr for Blogger

I just created this additional Blogspot page to separate my  more random posts from my portfolio blog. So far I have been using Tumblr for this but commenting on blogs doesn't always seem an option with them and I expect to find a slightly more mature crowd here.

I am passionate about animals and have recently started on the road to a cruelty free lifestyle in terms of what I eat and cosmetics so a lot of my posts will probably be about that. My other interests include art (mainly illustration), literature, film and TV, hiking and other outdoor pursuits, spirituality and a lot of other stuff that does not immediately come to mind. So this blog will probably be a bit of a mashup ranging from shouting principles from my imaginary soapbox to downright geeky fangirling but I will try to keep it as coherent and well written as possible with plenty of pics, or it didn't happen.

I would welcome some tips on the following:
- Who to follow on here with similar interests what I mention up here.
- Good video instructions on how to pimp your blogspot, as coding and anything of that nature is very far from my thing.

Now to see if this works to import my Tumblr posts to this blog. Good luck to me!