Senryu

The tiger pounces;
I move aside and can see
the tiger is me.

Archiving

Some references on programming got pointed out to me at the party last night, specifically on Interactive Fiction, which is something I'm fairly interested in, as one of my favorite games is little more than a graphical interface over top of an old text game system. It's divided up into rooms, you give commands through a text parser, etc. (Quest for Glory 1, aka Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be A Hero) Just archiving them before I forget.

http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu
http://nickm.com/twisty/

Healer's Mystery (Edit: Final? Extended Version)

Everything starts with intent
you learn from this enigma;
one into many dances,
vantage of peace and wholeness,
a vision of karuna
healing cannot abandon.

But who is there to say now
as we move in space and time
reasons why we've only seen
the illusion; seperated,
oneness means no man alone
none without a hand to heal.

Forgiveness removes the barb
reaching a true aloha
emptying all hate and fear
years cannot make love forget.

-If I have to say who this is dedicated to, people aren't paying attention. TwoSix of his names are in the poem, and it just should be obvious anyway.

Reiki Preparations

I am beginning to prepare for the workshop I have been asked to give on Reiki to the JMU "Hidden Mountain Bujinkan Shibu" Taijutsu club by its coordinator, Thato Schaeffer. The experience so far is proving interesting.

In pulling together the material I think it would be useful to include, I am finding myself moving away from my teachers in some areas, and closer to a practice that is more uniquely my own. For instance, in thinking of how to explain Reiki for the first time to a group of people unfamiliar with the system, I started looking at rialian's Reiki Intro page for inspiration. I find myself in agreement with very little of what is said there, at this point in my reiki development, though much of the differences are matters of interpretation.

I do agree that Reiki has the potential to be more than a healing modality. I don't agree with his explanation of how Reiki works, exactly, though the differences I perceive are complex. I also don't believe in the sentience of Reiki.

Realizing that I am no longer in agreement on those points, I stopped and tried to think more about my own understanding and interpretation of what Reiki is. This is my attempt at putting that understanding into words:

Reiki is a system through which one may access and work with a powerful external source of "life energy", called ki. Like qi gong and other systems that work with life energy, this energy is often used for purposes of healing oneself and others, but it has a variety of other uses as well.

When working with the Reiki system, the ki energy will often appear sentient. It will seem to know where to go, how to heal, and will react to interference. It is not actually sentient, however. The guiding intelligence you are seeing is that of your own lower self, the subconscious mind, and that of the person you are working on. It, being the mind most connected with both our physical and energetic bodies, often perceives things that the conscious mind is unaware of. And it, in turn, may be guided in its work by the higher self, our inner connection with the divine.

This understanding of Reiki has been informed largely by my work with Huna, and its understandings of the action of mana. I find the two systems very closely related in that regard, and my personal experience tends to support the synthesis of the systems.