Reiki & Finding Forgiveness

I haven’t come across a self-help book yet that doesn’t tell you to forgive yourself. The writings of all religious paths and of mystics also put forgiveness at the heart of their teachings. It’s good advice, because when you forgive yourself, you’re at peace with your life, and that means you can forgive others.

The problem I’ve always felt about this advice is this – everybody tells you to forgive yourself, but they don’t really tell you how to do it. I agonised over this for years. Could I meditate myself into a state of ‘forgiveness’, I wondered. Well, not really as it turns out. During the state of meditation I would often feel a sense of bliss and love for everyone and everything, only to find that a matter of minutes after finishing my meditation that this feeling of peace had evaporated.

Forgiveness is not something that occurs in the mind – it is not something we can conjure up with thought alone – we need to ‘feel’ it in our heart-mind, and in our emotional energy body.

Here's a story about finding forgiveness through Reiki:

A friend asked if I would give her mother a Reiki treatment. This lady had never experienced this form of energy healing before but she was game to give it a go before going to hospital for a hip operation. When I got to the stage of the treatment where I put my hands on her back, at the point which is the back of both the heart chakra and the physical heart, I felt a presence around me that put its ‘hands’ over mine. I experienced a feeling of bliss and something else that I couldn’t define at the time. When the treatment was finished, the lady didn’t say anything other than that she had enjoyed the treatment. However, her daughter came to tell me that at the moment the hands were laid on the back of the heart chakra her mother felt a release from all the anger she felt towards her ex-husband and was able to finally forgive him for the hardships he had put her through.

So, this was an example of ‘forgiveness’ happening spontaneously and being experienced as ‘feeling’ that the conscious mind then recognises and labels with word ‘forgiveness’. But, our spirit recognises it first. Spirit knows – but the mind needs a word to describe it in order to know what that thing is.

Forgiving yourself removes guilt and acknowledges that our actions are just moments on the journey that help us learn more about the nature of being human. Sometimes those actions hurt others, sometimes they help others and while ‘do no harm’ is the bedrock of human being, those who act to the contrary are also teachers of the truth.