Reiki was thought to have originated in Tibet thousands of years ago, but the story of Reiki spans almost all of the written records of humanity, and the healing system itself is even older than any written account.
The traditional Reiki story begins in the 1800s, but Reiki was ancient even then. Dr Mikao Usui is credited with bringing Reiki to us after searching for the secret to healing.
Dr Mikao Usui, who was principal of the Do shisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and also a Christian minister was asked by his students to be shown the method by which Jesus did Healing, it was his purpose to find how Buddha healed the sick.
Usui began a ten-year quest to find and learn the skill. He travelled through Japan, China & Tibet, when Christian authorities in Japan told him that this healing was not talked about much less known, Usui sought the information through Buddhism. There are striking resemblances between the life of Buddha in India (Gautama Siddaratha, 20-543BCE) and the life of the historical Jesus.
Usui was told by Buddhist monks that the ancient spiritual healing methods had been lost, and that the only way to approach them was by entering the Buddhist teachings, the Path to Enlightenment.
Mikao Usui then travelled to the United States, where he lived for seven years. When he received no further answers from Christians here, he entered the University of Chicago Divinity School where he received his Doctor of Theology Degree and where he studied Religions and Philosophies, and also learnt to read Sanskrit, the ancient scholarly language of India & Tibet. Usui still found no answer to his quest, he returned to Japan and had failed to learn the actual techniques to heal as Jesus had Healed.
Determined to find a way Dr Usui climbed Mt Kurama and began a 21-day meditation and fast. At the end of his time on the mountain and thinking he had failed he saw a great ball of light come at him from the sky. The light struck him in the forehead and knocked him Unconscious, but on awakening, he saw millions of small glowing bubbles of energy all around him.
Then he was given a series of mysterious healing symbols that are now part of Reiki instruction. On the way back down the mountain, Usui healed himself of disease and then met a young sick girl, whom he also cured
Dr Usui Begins Healing Work
Dr Usui began his healing work with the beggars in the slums of Kyoto, but before long he realized that those he healed would return again and again for treatment of the same illness.
He believed that many of these people held onto their disease because their illness somehow served them as useful. People preferred to live being sick because they were provided for by others, got more attention, and for other psychological reasons. So Usui altered his treatments to include not only the physical body, but also the mental, emotional, and the spiritual bodies as well.
He also found that to do successful healings on the whole individual, he could not perform his treatments for free. Some form of monetary or energy exchange had to occur for the healing to take root on all levels in the diseased person. Usui also discovered that by healing people on all levels of their being those people suddenly gained the ability to heal others. Usui organized what he had learned into a system he named “Reiki” it is a process of being connected to the Universal Life Force Energy through a Reiki attunement.