floating candles

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Global Reiki Lights festival is an annual offering in December from The Reiki Association. Inspired by previous experiences of self treatment in-person as a group, and wanting to keep it simple this year, I invited Reiki students to join in-person at my home.  After the Reiki self treatment, there is an invitation to light candles near the still point meditation. Rather than give each student a separate candle holder, I chose to offer floating candles in one bowl filled with water. Each one of us lit a candle and placed it in the same bowl.

I was feeling curious about why I made this choice. Understanding started to dawn on reading this excerpt the next day about relationships – “Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

The day after Reiki Lights, I feel that we are all in the same ocean of relationships.

I trust that each one of us who was able to join or wished to join the Reiki Lights was lit up by the healing light of Reiki. One of the invitations was to connect with loving kindness that is present in each one of us and send it to each other and all the places where it is needed in the world at this time. Today my wish is – May the healing light of inner loving kindness radiate in all our relationships.

It feels so appropriate to have this celebration of light at this time of long dark nights in the northern hemisphere. After all light is visible only in the dark.

Deep gratitude to The Reiki Association for continuing this offering over the years, since 2014. It was inspired by Phyllis Lei Furumoto, the Spiritual Lineage bearer at the time.

The Reiki Association welcomes all Reiki students who have received Reiki initiations in-person from their Reiki Master. I have been a member since 2004. There are many benefits of belonging to this Reiki community. Over the years it has helped me grow in many many ways. Being part of this community often feels like going for a walk in woods with many mature trees.

Here is the full excerpt from the book: Gift from the Sea “by Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.

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