by Paul Mitchell

For those of us who knew her, Hawayo Takata was the embodiment of the Usui System of Reiki. Many of us have now practiced the System for 18 - 25 years in a disciplined and committed way. Out of this experience we are beginning to understand the breadth and depth of the practice as we learned it from Mrs. Takata.

A few years ago, Phyllis Furumoto gave voice to our common experience of the aspects of the Usui System: healing practice, personal growth tool, spiritual discipline, and mystic order.

For me, the practice began as a healing art with a physical healing focus. By practicing on myself and others, I began to learn about healing. I saw that the energy of Reiki touches all aspects of our humanness - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. I began to see healing occur in all these areas of people's lives. Often, healing focused on one specific area during a given time.

I saw and experienced the awakening of intuition, psychic sensitivity, new levels of body awareness, an inner sense of wholeness and, at the same time, a paradoxically clearer sense of personal woundedness and brokenness. I recognize all of this as part of the healing process supported and stimulated by the practice of the Usui System.

The practice also highlights those things in my life that do not serve my growth and healing. This awareness begins to move beyond the personal to relationship, community, planet. The awareness moves out like ripples of water in a pond that a stone has fallen into.

From realizing what does not serve life, we begin to come more consciously to a sense of natural law or natural order. The process of healing is also a process of understanding. As we understand more clearly the nature of human life and life on this planet, we can act in ways that are more healing simply because they are in harmony with natural order or what we call Divine order.

Part of our growth in understanding is coming to know and accept our brokenness, our individual and collective pathologies. We are children of an age of knowledge, great technological advances and power. One of the myths that drives this quest for greater technological advancement is the need for and the belief in security. This modern myth says: "We can create what we need, we can understand the world, we can control it and therefore we can be secure. Mystery does not exist; it is only unexplored territory and soon we will conquer that territory and then we will be even more safe and secure."

The practice of the Usui System brings us back in contact with mystery. It brings us back to a sense of awe and wonder in the face of that which we know is bigger than and beyond the scope of the human mind. In standing in relationship to mystery, the sense of the sacred is again awakened and nurtured in us as human beings. Here, also, our pathological need for understanding, control, and security begins to die.