01 Mar Reiki and Social Media
Social media offers an excellent opportunity to practice Reiki. Whether for personal or business use, your every post may be empowered with Reiki, amplifying positive intention to a potentially vast audience. This positive energy is returned through community, friend.ship, and support. Besides connecting with old friends and making new ones, social media can also help at.tract clientele to your business.
I used to have a completely differ.ent perspective on social media. I was caught up in the negative aspects of it—the anger, the arguing. It was taking a toll on me. At one point during an election year, I needed to turn off my Facebook account altogether. What the algorithm was showing me in my feed was extremely negative. Back then, I was suffering from some chronic health conditions, and social media wasn’t helping my state of mind or healing. I ended up taking a break, which was a good thing. I was less stressed afterward.
In 2017, I attended my first Reiki Retreat in Sedona, a life-changing retreat. I met many amazing Reiki people and wanted to stay in touch with everyone afterward on social media. So, I found myself back on Facebook. However, it transformed with more Reiki people contributing to my social media feed. The negative was replaced by the positive, and the energy began to resemble the collective frequency I want.ed to be a part of. Now, I was excited to see what everyone was doing, what they were offering, and how they were helping to spread the message of Reiki. It felt like I had a reason to be active on social media positively instead of wasting my time scrolling and accumulating negative thoughts mindlessly. I be.came empowered by this change. I started my Reiki business page and a group on Facebook to stay connected with my students and provide Reiki resources to them.
The following year, I was inspired to bring social media to the International Center for Reiki Training. A team com.posed of Robyn Benelli, Karen Caig, and I created the ICRT social media pages intending to empower others in our Reiki community. We would use social media to provide Reiki re.sources such as videos, articles, helpful tips, the World Peace Meditation, inspiring quotes, events and classes, global heal.ing events, and more. Over the last four years, we’ve built up a following of over 30,000 people between our Facebook and Instagram pages, and we’re still growing rapidly.
Social media can be divisive and sometimes ugly. But to succeed in business or any organization, it is important to avoid this whenever possible. After all, our goal with social media is to bring people in, not turn them away. So, for us, an important aspect of writing content for social media is creating from the authentic self. The positive vibrations from this perspective come back to you as people respond because it speaks to their authentic selves. It’s the most effective way to leverage social media to empower others. And when you empower others, you create a community that empowers you.
In Holy Fire® Reiki, we define the “authentic self” as the part of ourselves that is who we really are. And as a baby and small child, we usually have a clear idea of our authentic self and identify with it. William Rand states, “Within each person resides a compelling and extraordinary aspect of our inner nature composed of the pure, unaltered self. This part connects directly to God-consciousness and possesses the awareness and power of the Universe. It is unlimited in its ability to know what to do, and who we really are.”1
However, as we develop through childhood and into adulthood, we are guided by our parents, relatives, and society to develop the social values and mannerisms that allow us to have good relationships with others and fit into society. In Holy Fire® Reiki, this is called our “culturally created self.” And the culturally created self is given such value that it causes many to lose touch increasingly with the authentic self until the culturally created self becomes the dominant part of our personality.
As part of the development of the culturally created self, we are guided to take our unresolved emotional distress, and rather than seeking a way to heal it, we are trained directly as well as through body language and mannerisms to hold it inside ourselves until this process becomes automatic and eventually takes place without our conscious awareness.
And yet, all the unexpressed feelings do not go away even though we are no longer aware of them. On the contrary, they continue to exist in what we call the “dormant self” and express themselves by attracting the difficult people and unwanted experiences in our lives.
And when these ignominious events occur, we often blame others for creating them rather than accepting responsibility for them. But, in truth, the long-ignored parts of us are the cause.
If we give voice to our wounded, culturally created self on social media, we often get undesired results far beyond what we intend. The unresolved emotional distress in others gets triggered and directed back at you.
By connecting to Reiki and directing it inwardly, our authentic self is more completely revealed. Once connected more strongly to our authentic self, creativity and solutions become readily available, whereas before, filters of negative conditioning obscured them. Success comes easily to the authentic self. Intuition becomes more available and guides you to solutions. Possibilities are limitless. Who wouldn’t want to tune into that? Reiki will dial you in.
Recently, a student of mine reached out wanting advice on how to use her social media page positively. She was upset by things she saw in her feed and sometimes want.ed to lash out. But, she said, “I don’t want to post what I’m thinking because I know what I’m going to say could be hurtful to others.” I think most of us can relate to that experience, but maybe not all of us have the presence of mind not to lash out. But we should exercise restraint. Social media plays an ever-expanding role in our lives, like it or not. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. To the authentic self, it’s a playground of possibilities.
My advice for her was to connect to Reiki before post.ing and let Reiki lead the way. Forget about the likes and shares. Set your intention to inspire others and be helpful. If you activate Reiki before you post, you’ll be given all the information you need to create content from your authentic self. Then you will unlock the real potential of social media.
Holy Fire® is the registered service mark of William Lee Rand.
Jill Thiel is an ICRT Licensed Reiki Master Teacher, the owner of The Minnesota Reiki Center for Healing and Training and has been teaching Reiki since 2007. She is also a licensed massage therapist, certified foot reflexologist, and sound healer. Jill lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she is a skilled gardener and expert on sustainability and winter food growing. Reach Jill by email at jthiel@mnreikicenter.com or through her website at www.mnreikicenter.com.
Endnote 1 William Lee Rand, Usui/Holy Fire® III Reiki Master Manual, Online and In-Person Training (Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, June 2020), 49.
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