It was not a Reiki moment when this thought first truly came close to me. I was standing in my kitchen, both hands wrapped around a warm cup, when I noticed how naturally my body responded to that simple touch. The warmth spread into my fingers, my shoulders softened a little, and my breathing became calmer. Nothing remarkable happened, and perhaps that was precisely why the moment stayed with me. I did not need to know anything, prepare anything or get anything right. I was simply there, noticing. In that entirely ordinary moment, I became aware once again of how often we overlook what is closest to us once we have learned that an experience needs a special name, a particular setting or certain conditions. With Reiki, this question has stayed with me for years: how much of it is truly distant from us, and how much have we simply regarded as something special for so long that we have forgotten how immediate perception really is?
When I first encountered Reiki, I naturally also encountered ideas about what gaining access to it was supposed to look like. There were terms, explanations, other people’s experiences and established forms that provided orientation. At the time, none of that was meaningless to me. When we step into something new, having a framework can be helpful. But over time, my attention changed. I became less interested in whether an experience matched a familiar picture and more interested in what was actually happening within me. I began to notice that I had known many of these things long before I ever called them Reiki. The warmth of a hand resting on a painful place. The need simply to sit quietly beside someone who is exhausted. The change that occurs when I stop trying to fix something immediately and remain fully present instead. I am not saying that every one of these experiences is automatically Reiki. But they showed me that the basis of direct perception is not something foreign to us.
Perhaps the idea that something is beyond our reach arises so easily because we tend to associate special things with special conditions. If something is valuable, we assume it must be rare. If something is profound, we expect it to be difficult to access. If something is spiritual, there seems to be a threshold that not everyone can simply cross. I have often wondered why this idea feels so familiar to us. Perhaps it gives an experience a certain weight. If I first have to acquire, earn or be granted access to something, it appears more precious. Yet at some point, I began to feel an inner resistance. Not towards knowledge or guidance, but towards the idea that another person could somehow be inherently closer to my own perception than I am myself.
For me, that does not mean declaring every inner response to be the truth. Precisely because I have been exploring spirituality, consciousness and perception since my youth, I have learned how easily expectation and experience can merge into one another. If I desperately want to feel warmth, I will pay more attention to warmth. If someone tells me that something ought to happen in a particular place, that knowledge changes my attention. So, for me, my own perception is not infallible. But it is still the only place where my experience actually takes place. I can examine it, question it and place it alongside what I know. What I cannot do is delegate it to someone else. No one can ultimately tell me what I experienced in a quiet moment if I have stopped paying attention to it myself.
For me, this is where a particular simplicity lies today. Reiki does not begin only when something extraordinary happens. For me, it begins much earlier, in the willingness to perceive at all. I can place my hands on my body and begin simply by noticing that they are there. I can become aware that one area feels warm while another barely draws my attention. I can notice restlessness, tiredness, emptiness or nothing remarkable at all. In the past, I might have regarded some of these experiences as not enough. Today, I no longer experience them as a lack. I have found for myself that depth does not necessarily arise where the strongest sensation appears. Often, it begins where I stop comparing my experience with an idea of what it ought to be.
This thought also changes what trust means to me. Trust, for me, does not mean blindly believing in an invisible force. It means giving my own experience enough space before dismissing it or allowing it to be defined from the outside. There is something very grounded about that. If I feel nothing, then that is exactly where I begin. If I perceive something, I do not have to turn it immediately into a grand explanation. This attitude has given me a great deal of freedom because I no longer need to keep distinguishing between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘not spiritual’. I can experience first and only later ask what I understand about it.
Over time, I also came to realise how easily comparison can draw us away from ourselves. Someone speaks about intense sensations, images or powerful physical reactions, and suddenly our own quiet experience can seem insignificant. I know that impulse. But what does the intensity of an experience really tell us about its significance? A loud experience is, first of all, simply loud. A quiet experience is not automatically less valuable. Reiki in particular has taught me to let go of this hierarchy more and more. Today, it feels more honest to me to perceive a barely noticeable moment fully than to chase after an extraordinary experience that may not even be mine.
At this point, the subject leads me directly to New Reiki – Back to the Source. For me, the title does not describe a return to some supposedly purer past. It describes a movement back towards our own direct experience. I am less interested in how much someone knows about Reiki than in the question of what remains when expectations and external certainties become quieter. What remains for me is a human being who perceives. A body that responds. Attention that shifts. Touch, stillness, and the honest acknowledgement that not every experience needs to be explained. This is where the source lies for me, not as a dogma, but as a return to something that was never completely lost.
Perhaps that is why, at some point, even the word ‘access’ no longer felt quite right to me. It sounds as though Reiki lies behind a door and we must first be given a key. My own experience has led me towards a different image. I think of a room I am already standing in while I am still searching for the entrance. I ask others where the door is, study plans and wonder which requirements I have yet to meet. And then, at some point, I realise that I have been inside it all along. Not with all the answers, not with some final truth and not with any claim to possess something special. Only with my own ability to become still and perceive.
Today, it is precisely this simplicity that touches me most. I do not need to make Reiki bigger in order for it to have meaning. It does not have to be distant, secret or difficult to reach. There is something deeply beautiful for me in the thought that I do not have to overcome any distance in order to come closer to myself. In the middle of an ordinary day, I can pause, feel my hands, notice my own breathing and, for a moment, have nothing to prove. And sometimes I find myself thinking: perhaps the real distance was never between Reiki and me. Perhaps it lay only between me and the trust to begin listening to my own perception again.