Reiki and the Power of Love

by Walter Lübeck

We need love to live.
In my opinion the best way to experience the power of love is to watch parents with their newborn baby. See how their eyes glow with love, watch how they care, how much understanding and warmth there is in the atmosphere. How much they like to give comfort and protection to their little one. And this is exactly what the baby needs to grow, to develop her or his own personality, to become strong, intelligent and wise, gifted with a warm, loving heart.

But isn’t there a baby within each adult? So maybe love is as important to grown-ups as to a little one? Maybe love is a key ingredient to a high-quality life? Love is what makes life work. It gives us support for all kinds of relationships. Therefore it is an important ingredient in each spiritual healing. In my opinion, we cannot learn enough about love. There is always something related to that topic that gives us a new idea, an inspiration, an amazing perspective that opens doors for us and builds bridges. Listen to your heart for a moment and think about all the precious moments you have shared, given, or received love. But what is love?

What is love?
Love is the glue which holds the universe together. We all need it like the oxygen we breathe. Love always tries to create and support unity, peace, understanding, and happiness – to name only a few positive qualities. And love builds bridges between the spiritual and the material realms. So, why don’t we add love, which many people consider to be the strongest and most positive power in the world, in a more conscious way to our practice of Reiki?

Maybe you are thinking: “What does he want? Of course I include love in my Reiki practice! That’s the usual way. That’s how it should be!” And you are right. I know quite well that nearly every Reiki practitioner understands that love is a necessary ingredient for a good healing session with Reiki. Reiki people enjoy giving and receiving love – like during the annual Reiki Retreat in New York where several hundred people from all over the world meet and share Reiki, love and their experiences, have fun and regenerate from the business and the stress of the rest of the year.

But to profess or affirm something makes it stronger! To consciously choose to act in a loving way is an act of divine free will and therefore causes a lot of good karma that in turn will help to get rid of accumulated bad karma! This is why it makes sense to consciously integrate acts of spiritual love, such as those described below, into a Reiki session.

Isn´t Reiki already Love?
Reiki is not love. There is nothing in the KanjiReiki or the Master symbol which can be translated as “love.” But Reiki promotes every quality that is sufficient for life – like love, if we invite it! The more consciously we do something positive, the more divine this act becomes, because consciousness is a divine quality, like love and personal responsibility. The more we use these qualities consciously in a practical way in our lives the more Reiki can do for us by making these and other positive energies stronger and stronger.

Reiki promotes the process of life! A part of the process of life is, without any doubt, love. But as we all know, Reiki needs to be accepted and embraced by the client. If the client consciously agrees to love him or herself, the subconscious will understand this as an order to open up for healing. If the Reiki practitioner consciously agrees to help open the heart for the client, Reiki will be accepted and received to a much greater extent.

Adding Love to Spiritual Healing
I have achieved astonishing results through experimenting with the powerful energies of the heart chakra, with the different styles of heart meditation of the Sufis, Buddhists, and Shamans. With the exercises described below, I share with you some of my journey to the heart. Please understand that it is important to have a regular practice with these exercises to enjoy maximum results.

Love Creates Stronger Healings
Everybody knows from experience that the energy of love and spiritual healing work together well and support each other. But why is this so? The very center of the chakra system of a human being is the heart chakra. The heart chakra unites the visions from the spiritual realms with the possibilities, shortcomings, weaknesses, chances, and other given structures of the material realm. Its main and fundamental spiritual power is love. This divine quality always tries to create unity. It is even possible to create unity through love if the partners to be united are totally different – like spiritual visions and material structures. In a way, magnetism and gravitation are faces of love. The sun produces the warmth and the light we need to live on our beautiful planet through nuclear fusion, by creating unity, by producing a new, more developed element (helium) out of a simpler element (hydrogen). Applied love always tries to build more complex, more developed structures. Love supports any process of growing together, of oneness – and everything that supports this process or makes it possible, for example, qualities such as tolerance, understanding, and compassion.

This is an excerpt from an article in the Summer 2006 issue of Reiki News Magazine.