How to Save Energy with the First Reiki Precept

It’s a sad fact, but the Reiki precepts are not generally given much emphasis in modern-day courses.

As a rule, they are introduced for five minutes, chatted about, and then forgotten forevermore.

This is a serious oversight because the hands-on healing component of Reiki sometimes actually can’t heal issues (from health to emotional) unless combined with the precepts.

Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, obviously understood the precepts’ importance well because he taught them (along with meditation) before he taught hands-on healing.

He realized that the precepts are not just important, rather they are foundational to the entire Reiki system.

Indeed, by using them intelligently, we can not only heal many chronic conditions that resist hands-on healing, we can also eliminate the major areas of what might be called ‘energetic leakage’ in our day.

In other words, we can avoid the major ways most people consistently lose energy on a daily basis.

To give you an idea of how we can successfully incorporate the Reiki precepts more fully into our practice, this article will focus on the first precept, ‘For today only, do not anger’.

In doing so, you will hopefully get a glimpse of just how useful – and practical – the precepts can be.

If you doubt this, think of the difference between strolling through a beautiful forest for a day and getting stuck for the same length of time in a smelly rubbish dump.

“For today only, do not anger.” 1st Reiki Precept

The Need to Be Honest

One of the challenges I face when teaching spiritual seekers the first precept is that there is a large degree of guilt associated with anger.

In other words, it’s an emotion many feel they ought to be above and so they deny feeling it anymore.

“I don’t really get angry anymore,” they tell me. “I realized that anger doesn’t benefit me,” they say, “so I let it go.”

This may be true, but it is unlikely. All the more so when we consider that the first precept also incorporates ideas of ‘irritation’ and ‘annoyance’.

One of the first steps in working with this precept, therefore, is simply to accept ourselves as we are – with all of our challenges and imperfections..

Yes, we can strive for perfection. But we should be okay with ourselves when we fall short.

We should ‘Be kind’ to ourselves (5th Reiki precept), acknowledge what happened, and then move on.

Beating ourselves up about something will only pump more energy into the issue and cause it to grow.

Denying the issue will simply push it into the unconscious part of our being, where it will continue to haunt us unseen.

Anger is Okay

It might help if we truly spent some time considering that anger is simply energy, and energy is, at the end of the day, a good thing.

The problem is simply how we react to this energy we call anger.

If it causes us to lash out at our neighbour, then we have a problem.

If we try to push it away, then it will soon be back to haunt us.

What is needed, therefore, is a more successful strategy – one where anger doesn’t flare up into conflict, both on inner or outer levels.

This is where the 1st precept can help.

Working with the First Precept

Before I go into the details on how we can use the first precept to effectively deal with anger-related issues, I should mention that the wording of the precept (‘For today only, do not anger’) can cause a few problems.

To begin with, the negative phrasing (‘do not’) may actually result in us focusing on the anger and, as a result, inadvertently growing it (what you focus on grows).

Furthermore, they say the unconscious mind can’t process a negative, so when we say ‘do not anger’, it hears ‘anger’, which is, of course, a quite different instruction!

That is why affirmations, for instance, are always worded positively. You don’t say, ‘I don’t want to be overweight’ but rather, ‘I want to be fit and healthy’ (or ‘slim and healthy’, depending on your aspirations).

Another serious problem is that the wording of the precept may lead us to a policy of resistance, i.e., one in which we are trying to avoid being angry.

Pushing the anger away, however, will not get rid of it. Rather – as mentioned – it will simply force it to go underground, keeping it trapped in our energy body, where it will weigh us down and fester.

What’s more, resisting anger will actually create a target for the anger energy to strike, and it is this impact that causes suffering.

In my courses, I sometimes explain it like this: Imagine you have a hurricane blustering off the coast of Florida. It is sweeping across the ocean top at several hundred kilometers an hour, roaring and screaming, whipping up waves, hurling rain – one raging mass of elemental fury.

But for all its might, for all its bluster, it causes no damage until it reaches land and something — say a house or a tree — tries to resist it.

Then we have impact.

Then we have a problem.

But if nothing resists it, if the tree, say a palm, learns to bend in the face of the hurricane’s fury, then no harm is done. Indeed, scientists have even discovered that when the storm settles, the palm’s root system is even stronger and healthier than before.

And this is the secret to working with the first precept: learning to feel your anger, letting it sweep and swoosh through you — all without offering any resistance.

Observe it.

Acknowledge it.

Feel it.

But never resist or suppress it.

Your job is to stay passive.

To bend in the face of its fury.

To roll with it.

To watch on as it sweeps through you to dissolve into nothingness.

For offer no resistance to the anger roiling inside you, and you will see it for what it is: pure energy — energy that can’t hurt you.

But resist it, and it will be like a pressure cooker. The longer you try to hold the lid down, the more the pressure will build until, eventually, you can’t hold it any longer, and you start venting anger all over the world around you.

A Simple 1st Precept Meditation

With that said, I’d like to tell you about a simple precept meditation that I don’t typically teach in my Reiki courses these days.

But it is powerful, and given everything I’ve just said, it makes a lot of sense.

To do the meditation, all you need to do is sit quietly and repeat the first precept in your mind several times. Then simply wait and feel whatever it is your body feels.

If you don’t feel anything, just stay tuned into your body (which is a great meditation in itself). If you do feel something (you will often feel tension somewhere in your body), then just observe it without doing anything whatsoever to try to make it go away.

In fact, repeat to yourself the magic saying, “I’m not going to try to change anything!”.

Then do nothing.

Be like a stick caught in the current of a river. It has no arms or legs, so it can’t do anything but get tugged this way and that by the water.

It can’t offer any resistance to what’s happening, even if it wanted to.

And if your mind pipes up with some ‘gems’ of wisdom, some grand epiphany to explain everything about your anger, ignore it. This is not the time to intellectually dissect your feelings. It is a time to feel and do nothing.

And if you do nothing, then an interesting thing will occur: the sensations in your body will typically dissolve into nothingness.

As a result, anger that has got stuck and stored in your body will also dissolve, and you will feel lighter and happier.

The key to the meditation is simply not to overcomplicate things.

Repeat the precept a few times.

Sit and wait for any feelings that might appear in your body.

And then, if something does arise, observe it impassively.

Interestingly, you can also do this if anger arises within you as you go about your daily life.

Take a short break from whatever it is you are doing. Sit quietly. Feel the anger. Don’t try to push it away or do anything to it. Just observe it and watch as it dissolves and ceases to trouble you anymore.

So give it a shot. Have fun experimenting with this meditation. Be gentle with yourself and, as always, shine brightly :)

PS If you would like to go deeper into techniques for dissolving negative emotions or energy blocks (or past hurts, etc.), then consider coming along to my Redesigning Your Energy Body course on March 22-23 in Fitzroy North. You can’t find out all about it by clicking here.

(Article by Jeremy O’Carroll)

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