Weekly Reiki Articles - Om Reiki Centre

The Most Fundamental Fundamental

"If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices."

Vladimir Horowitz

The Fundamentals.

They are not ‘sexy’.

They are typically repetitive.

They often bore us.

And they seldom wow anyone.

If you’re a musician, they could be musical scales.

A martial artist, your kata.

A Reiki practitioner, breathing into the hara.

The practice of them is unglamorous, but what you can do with the skills such things cultivate – that is another story.

The Most Fundamental Fundamental

Where Reiki and spiritual practice are concerned, the most fundamental fundamental is consistent practice.

Sure, practising the fundamentals consistently is even better, but before anything else, you want to be doing some sort of consistent practice.

You want to be doing something daily.

In my experience, 90% of the problems my students face stem from forgetting what they know.

Or, to be more precise, not doing what they know they ought to do.

Life gets busy.

Bit by bit they reduce the amount meditation, Reiki, yoga and the like that they practice, and before they know it, they stop altogether.

After that, issues incrementally creep into their lives.

They become more reactive and irritable.

They feel less connected.

They grow less intuitive, less loving, and less connected to energy.

Then they complain that they feel out of whack, that things just don’t feel like they used to.

“And what were you doing when you were feeling great?” I ask.

“Meditation. Yoga. Reiki every day,” they say, eyes lighting up.

“And what are you doing now?”

They look down at the floor and shuffle their feet, uncomfortable. “Um,” they clear their throat. “Um, well, I’m not really doing anything at the moment.

And then they wonder what’s going wrong!

So a lot of the time, we don’t need to reinvent the proverbial wheel. We just have to remember what we know, and we need to do so in the three major areas of our life: body, mind and spirit.

Body, Mind and Spirit

Health is, for most people, relatively simple.

Good diet. Good exercise. Strength training (particularly as we get older).

Our mind is a touch tricker, but it still isn’t rocket science.

Here what we need to remember is that just because we ‘learned’ something a week ago doesn’t mean it will make any difference in our lives today.

So I can read ‘The Power of Now’ and feel as though I’m next to enlightened, but one week later, the practical effect of what I read can be close to zero.

Intellectually, I might still remember all of the book’s wisdom, but on a deeper level, on an action level, its impact on my life is most likely diminishing fast.

In that way, what we learn intellectually is a bit like food.

Just because you pig out one day and feel totally stuffed doesn’t mean you won’t need to eat the next day.

And just because I learned something wise the other day doesn’t mean I don’t need to learn something wise today.

What we learn tends to have a shelf-life, and that means that if we want to keep our ‘mental operating system’ healthy, we need to keep feeding it healthy mind food.

And we need to feed it to ourselves daily so we don’t default back to our society’s mental operating system.

To the average of all the mental stimuli that constantly bombard us.

Because if we’re not intentional about things, if we just absorb what we see on the news, what we read on the web, and what we hear from our colleagues at work, then we’re going to end up thinking (and feeling) as the majority of people do.

Which leads us to the spirit.

To keep it happy and healthy, we also need to feed it daily.

Meditation. Reiki. Chi Activation. Yoga. T’ai chi.

Take your pick.

But do something.

Give yourself a mini-Sabbath every day.