I believe that we are shown, given a signpost, to the books that we read. There was a specific message for me when I read, “The Inner Heart of Reiki” by Frans Stiene. The book talks about reiki of course. Specifically, when we say the precepts:
For today only
Do not anger
Do not worry
Be humble
Be honest in your work
Be compassionate to yourself and others
it brings out our anger and worry for a reason. Because we all know that if you say, “I don’t hate you” or “I don’t love you” there’s always some part of you that does hate and love that person. I always thought that I shouldn’t say, “do not play in the park” because unconsciously we want someone to play in the park. What the precepts teach us is that we are human and we do have these feelings and in order to get it out of us, the worry and anger we need to acknowledge that it’s there.
A lot of the time we may not acknowledge our feelings. We just want to float and be in control of how we act, so we don’t have extreme lows or extreme highs. But what I realized by reading is that suppressing it does not help. Saying, “do not anger” and “do not worry” means we are human and we are allowed to have those feelings. And when we continue to chant and repeat the precepts the goal is to intellectually understand them, so we can start to embody them with our whole being.
The hand positions don’t really matter so much, but embodying the mantras and the precepts do. When we fully are (and that takes time) we don’t need to do anything else and we can finally be. Finally being able to be our True Self is what matters. Removing one lampshade from our great bright light again and again.
To be able to stay in the fire (tapas) so we can finally learn the lesson and see our great bright light.