Threshold Notes -- Self Attunements

In my first Reiki 3/Reiki Master class (1994) my teacher was Elizabeth Gilberg, a former student of William Rand, who also gave out his Reiki manuals in class.  So it was Rand's material where I first got the idea to explore distant attunements and self attunements.  Self attunements were such an interesting aspect of the class for me that I retained this idea in my own Threshold Reiki classes, expanding on it as I explored this with students and friends through the years.  We would either use ourselves as the actual focus for the attunement, or we might use a stuffed toy or pillow as a surrogate; or just an empty chair.  In the latter 2 cases, we might simply send the attunement 5 minutes into the future, and then upon finishing the ceremony we would sit down and receive it.  It's a fascinating and fun exercise to explore.

The purpose eventually came to be one of using the attunement ceremony to increase our own Reiki potential and ability with a given Reiki energy, or with Reiki in general.  This came out of my own discovery that the energies seem to integrate more and build faster as I took part in more and more attunements, and then followed this each time by making use of the energy in my daily life, as well as in healing sessions. Some of us began to discover what the URR Gakkai had taught, that we had become the Reiki energy.   Eventually we moved on to exploring attunement concepts with other healing and personal development energies as well.  Reiki wasn't the only energy to benefit from this process.

The self attunement ceremony then could be as detailed and involved as whatever ceremony we normally used; until we met up with Mr. Hiroshi Doi from Japan.   You might be aware that he's the Japanese Reiki Master who was also a member of the URR Gakkai, and whom my friends and I invited to teach his Gendai Reiki Ho concepts outside of Japan.  During our second set of seminars with him, in Kyoto in 2000, he surprised us with a couple additions to his self-made Gendai Reiju process.  One was called Gendai Self Reiju.  This proved to be a much simpler method to make use of attunement/reiju energies to focus such a process on oneself.  You can read the procedure (see link below) at my web site and watch a video of me demonstrating it as well.  If you are not a Reiki Master but at least have Reiki 3, 3a or Shinpiden training, you can try this on yourself using any Reiki energy you have been attuned to.

An even easier process emerged one day when I was teaching concepts around the 4th Usui symbol.  It occurred to me that in order to present the attunement/reiju energies to a student, the teacher had to hold as much or more of the intended energies in order to achieve this.  And of course this is done for the entire ceremony, or longer.  It seemed obvious to me that the teacher was also experiencing a self attunement or self reiju at the same time as giving one.  So just as every Reiki healing is a kind of 2 for 1 process, meaning both the practitioner and recipient experience the Reiki, so too do both the teacher and the student experience the attunement/reiju.  For some of you newer Reiki masters, this might explain why class attunements leave you a little buzzed or experiencing unusual sensations during and after the ceremony.  And of course the more people involved, the more intense your experience might be.  

The next time you are offering an attunement, you might think of this and be aware that you might just be the giver and one of the receivers in the ceremony.  That might make it an even more special experience for you.