Reiki for Cats

I hope comments can now be restricted to Reiki and not completely off-topic subject matter.

Please try and contain the urge to argue. Sorry. Just walk away from the page. Otherwise I will have to close comments and I hate doing that because I welcome visitors and comments particularly as the people commenting her are good people.

I would love to read the story of it being largely due to Reiki that the cat found you.

Pardon me but where did I ‘fire the first shot’ ?
If it was because I misunderstood Grahame being widowed rather than divorced because of his wording, I replied and that was the end of it.
I am merely another contributor to PoC and have no control over what anyone else writes.
This web site is for the good of CATS not about scoring points and that’s why I come here.

My nephew is a consulting psychiatrist and he commented to me about Ted’s extreme reaction to being accidentally characterised as female gender. My doctor nephew says that when people so violently over-react to something trivial, it is a big clue that there are issues there. I urge Ted to get to know himself better. And not to be so liberal with the facts.

I’ve reviewed all comments on this thread and I do not find the ‘shouting in all cap letters’ Ted complains of, nor do I find any attack on the ‘beloved’ member of POC, apparently Ruth. And recall that Ruth fired the first shot, if there even was a shot.

If anyone is trolling, tenaciously working things to death, and utterly avoiding responding to the real issues posed by the cogent and to-the-point member you are all attacking, it is all of you who will not answer his good questions. I think it is because you can’t!

There is no facility on POC for bolding or italics for emphasis. And the man you attack has used a sentence in caps all of once,except for headings on posts, where that is proper usage, and then to call attention.

The bottom line seems to be that y’all cannot answer Grahame and so are trying to insult him and make him look the fool. I stand with Grahame, proudly.

I find it insulting to be called pearl clutching as since when has any red blooded man worn pearls?
It was an oversight I posted as anonymous but why should anyone have assumed I am female?
I don’t think anyone should be allowed to insult others who don’t agree with their views.
Shouting in capitals and ranting are bad internet protocol and a certain person has done a lot of that on this blog as well as picking on a long standing writer who is much loved and admired by many of us.
Passionate discussion…..fair enough.
Ranting and insulting……unfair.

Hello…I like passionate comment. I accept strong viewpoints as part of life. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Out and out rudeness and swearing I object to.

But how many sites never get comments. We should welcome comments and discussion on the internet as it brings pages to life and creates a community. We shouldn’t be too upset by strong viewpoint expressed with passion. It’s healthy isn’t?

For these reasons I tend to favour a laissez faire attitude up to a point.

Trolls and spam advertising I also delete and ban. Regular visitors with opinions I like, even if I don’t like the opinions.

I hope people find that acceptable. This site is as much yours as mine.

‘Anonymous”, hiding in her cloak of anonymity, posts today:
>How very unpleasant some people are!

>Michael I hope your beautiful web site is not going to continue to be marred by ranting and sniping.
It’s a sure-fire way to lose visitors.

You missed out shouting and insulting too anonymous

How very unpleasant some people are!

Michael I hope your beautiful web site is not going to continue to be marred by ranting and sniping.
It’s a sure fire way to lose visitors.

So sorry to post clarification, but I failed to put in my name and so my previous post ‘*Ad Hominem* Attacks: That All Ya Got?’ came on as ‘Anonymous’. It was from me, SO NOW YOU KNOW WHOM TO ATTACK!

~Grahame

Carol sez:
>>Sceptics annoy me,they delight in long windedly airing what they think is their superior knowledge.
They are best ignored.<

Carol, I got what knowledge I may have from 7 years of POSTDOCTORAL STUDY. That’s including my fellowship AFTER my doctoral studies.

Yet you want to tell me I am full of bosh and you are a ‘besserwisser’. Well, I am open to demonstration that, concerning the point at dispute here, Reiki, your knowledge trumps mine. Unless and until you can so demonstrate, I will rely on my education and research, and established canons for elucidating real as opposed to codswallop.

There are accounts on the Internet of people who died having relied on Reiki and eschewing proper medical treatment. Western medicine is not the know-all and be-all, yes, but Reiki is mere charlatanism. It is not a matter of sincere people being deluded so much as it is this ridiculous disparaging of scholarship and scientific method by the ignorant with chips on their shoulders. Such will never advance the human race.

How about that advert recently posted by a member of POC, where for $47.00 US anyone can be, instantly, a high-level Reiki MASTER? Hmmm. Cat got your tongue, Carol?

Hi Sylvia, and thanks for having got back to me. I’ve done an extensive Internet search for a poem called ‘Animula’ by Robinson Jeffers and also have had recourse to the almost 800 page collection of his poetry. I cannot find a trace of this poem, and very keenly want to see it, if it exists. Why not post it here on POC? No copyright worries: RJ’s poems are in the public domain, and, anyway, it would be fair use under the copyright convention which would govern were it in copyright, which it is not if by RJ. As I have posted to you, T S Eliot wrote a famous poem called ‘Animula’.

Might I ask you: where did you see this poem? I really want to track this down one way or t’other.

Thanks.

Eh, Carol: Don’t confuse me with facts; my mind is already made up. What a way to advance knowledge. People like this make a lot of pernicious mischief in the world.

Say there, did you know: the moon REALLY IS made of green cheese! I dare you to gainsay me.

Thank you Mary for a great blog which I was very interested to read.
Ruth I am Reiki level one too but didn’t learn the ‘Reiki transfusion’
It sounds such a good and quick method to give someone a boost.

Sceptics annoy me,they delight in long windedly airing what they think is their superior knowledge.
They are best ignored.

Grahame – ‘Animula’ should be somewhere on the Internet. If not, it may be on the Public Library’s connection. Or if MB can e-mail a copy to you – you can ask him if he has time – it will be sent from this address and forwarded to you from his e-mail address.

You, too, can become a high level Certified Usui Reiki MASTER for only $47.00 and fast–only 48 hours and you are set to go. All certificates included. Money-back guarantee.

Reiki sounds fascinating!
Mary and Ruth you have me quite intruiged as it’s something I’ve been mulling over for a while to help frightened cats I help rescue.
I experienced a course of EFT treatment for myself with an altervative therapist and although I don’t know how it worked it sure did!
With EFT you don’t have to believe in it but is Reiki the same, do you have to believe in it for it to work?

Mary I’m interested if a ‘Reiki transfusion’ is normally part of the first attunement ?
As I said, sadly my Reiki Master died, she had fought breast cancer for a very long time but eventually she died, very peacefully with her husband, also a Reiki Master beside her.
At the time of her death there was a huge thunder and lightning storm, her husband said it was as if the Heavens were triumphant to have her.
She had loved storms all her life.
Instead of spreading the attunement over 2 or 3 days, we did it in one long day, she was of the Usui System and the visualisation we did of the ‘past Reiki masters around us’ was very real!
But to the transfusion, she showed us how to hold someone’s hand while putting the other hand on the crook of their inner arm for a few minutes, hard to explain here, a very quick and easy boost of energy for someone who hadn’t the time for a full treatment.
I can still use this on a person or on an animal !
Somewhere on PoC is another page about Reiki, from a good while back. I promised at the time to try to make a short video of giving Reiki to a cat …..must seek that page out again as you have renewed my interest Mary.

Sylvia:

I knew Robinson Jeffers and have long been an enthusiastic advocate of his lifestyle and his writing. So, it really caught my attention when you cited him in your recent long post.

I was especially excited because I did not know the poem you cited: ‘Animula’. I have the 758 page _Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers_ from Stanford U.P., and cannot find such a poem therein. I cannot find it in other sources in my own extensive library.

If this poem exists, I want very much to read it. But do you, perhaps, mean ‘Animula’ by T S Eliot? Eliot’s fine poem takes, as its inspiration, a classical poem by the Emperor Hadrian.

Looking forward to your clarification and, perhaps, a text, I remain, with kind regards,

~Grahame

>The unifying principle behind almost all of alternative medicine is that some ëlan vital is responsible for infusing organisms with the property of life. In today’s fashion, this vital force is called the bioenergetic field and is confusingly associated with classical electromagnetic fields on the one hand, and quantum wave function fields on the other.<–First paragraph; see entire page at:
www.csicop.org/sb/show/energy_fields_of_life

Sylvia, as you might imagine, I cannot agree with all that you have written in your beautifully realized post, BUT yours is a model of how to post evenhandedly and elegantly. There is appearing on this site from some quarters a bias against people who can express themselves very well, and even you seem to imply that verbal facility is suspicious as to disingenuosness

I find your post entirely sincere, I read it with great close attention, and I am sending you this note of appreciation.

I have said what I have to say on the subject of Reiki. I detect a dangerous slide towards a flame war by some, and would-be censors. I will not be drawn. Michael does not deserve that, nor do I. POC is too fine a site to let it be coöpted by smallmindedness and envy. I have put my case clearly and I can support it. All here are free to do likewise, and Sylvia shows you a way to do that.

OJ has posted:
>Since when has PoC belonged to YOU?
Also Mary wrote this blog not YOU!<>Whilst I am sure many people are sorry for your loss you won’t gain many friends by your overbearing manner of writing as if YOU are always right.

I loved your write up Mary.
No amount of scientific rantings will convince me that Reiki doesn’t exist.
There is more in Heaven and Earth ……

I have a friend who comforts many terminally ill people when she visits the Hospice to volunteer her Reiki power….

It is your comment to Ruth which is unfounded and cruel.
Whilst we appreciate your grief you have no right to come here and pull to bits others beliefs in alternative therapies.
Nor to accuse an innocent person of cruelty.

A lady writes a beautiful blog about Reiki and other like minded people comment.
Then along comes someone very opinionated and mocks it as ‘woo-woo and woo-hoo’ and spoils the entire harmony of this web site.
I happen to know Ruth personally and far from being cruel she is the gentlest kindest lady you could hope to meet.
I would have come to the same conclusion that your ‘then wife’ was now your ex wife and not your late wife.
I believe in the power of healing, whether it be Reiki, Spiritual or whatever, but if God chooses that someone not be healed then nothing on this earth will save them.

Part 0

Thank you for your beautiful, mystifying description of Reiki and how it affected your cat. And thank you for your patience – if you’re willing to grant it? – in reading the following comment which, as you’ll soon discover, springs from a lack of knowledge in this subject.

Your writing is simple and unpretentious, which argues for your sincerity. But it would be helpful if there were a book about Reiki that laymen could understand. Perhaps there is. Cleveland Armory, one of our greatest animal rights activists – he knew, by the way, ‘more animals than people who deserved to go to heaven’ – wrote of his efforts to get a firm grasp on the ins and outs of astrology, and how to apply them to Polar Bear, his cat. Though Reiki isn’t astrology, is it arcane? Wikipedia’s blurb on I Ching is a morass, and Reiki may be as confusing.

If anything on the Internet is believable, there’s no science to prove that Reiki mitigates pain or heals the ill. Anecdote is all that’s out there. (‘Anecdote’ being the consummate squelch.) And yet, without sounding like someone immersed in flights of fancy, you describe an amazing sensation in your hands when you’re working with a patient.

Whether rightly or not, many people are bored by accounts of the paranormal. Nor can they imagine anything worse than ‘life eternal,’ as described by Robinson Jeffers in his poem ‘Animula.’

Part 1

This is a personality sketch of someone who rejects supposed paranormal phenomena, despite an occurrence on the night following her father’s death. He’d died at 7:00 that morning, and that night she showered before going to bed. .It should be noted that scientists claim a certain area of the brain, when stimulated by an electrode – or by extreme emotional shock – produces visual hallucinations. People often see the person they loved after the person has died.

Whenever this woman was sleep-deprived, she noticed what she thought was optical nerve fatigue – when she stood in the dark, objects shone with a neon green glow, the point of this being the objects were tangible: a bedside lamp, a pillow, etc. They weren’t phantasms.

After drying herself, she switched off the light and walked down the hall from the bathroom towards the bedroom. As she neared the doorway, she glanced to her left and saw her father standing ten or twelve inches from her shoulder.

She’s not statuesque – picture a Mary Poppins with upside-down coke bottle legs – and her father was three inches shorter. So was his neon green self, and she had to look down at a slight angle into his face. She was too tired to feel startled – besides, his presence was natural to her – and she stood there for only three or four seconds as they gazed at each other, he with his lifelong, kindly smile, his features worn with exhaustion. He looked, as he had looked in life, like an elfin, wispy-haired Barry Fitzgerald. She was too numb to stand any longer, so walked into her bedroom and fell asleep in minutes.

For months she had hypnagogic dreams about her father, a twilight between waking and sleeping in which they talked about his death, and their happy times throughout the years. Though she never dared touch him – he was a noli me tangere vision – these dreams defeated Death. Nothing about her father repelled her. She knew he had died, and yet her comfort to sit with him never wavered. Their peas-in-a-pod personalities crossed the chasm from life to death. Even so, to this day she rejects as repugnant the concept of an afterlife.

With regard to her health, she’s always been well except for a half dozen bouts of PVC, the longest lasting 13 months. A hellish affliction. A crazy-maker. Painless, but insanely exhausting. Attacks can last for 21 hours before subsiding for half a day, and then flaring up for another round. PVC is said to have numerous origins, most of them theoretical, nor does there appear to be a cure: some sufferers have it all their lives. She tried an allopathic drug – a Beta-blocker – with no success. She tried homeopathic nostrums, with no success. Each time she’s recovered on her own, and has ceased to hope that allopathic or non-traditional medicine can treat this malady. Fortunately, it’s stayed away for four years.

Part 2

You don’t sound like a mystagogue, Mary. When you say that you feel this magnetic sensation in your hands and when your cat also seems to feel it, your words ring true. But what causes this pulling sensation? Do you know, or does anyone else?

The placebo effect – how can animals have it? – is sometimes referred to with faint condescension, as if it lacked the ‘gravitas’ of scientific proof. But a name is only a reification. Whatever the cause, when things appear to be helping or working, what does its name matter? Is the placebo effect less real than the ‘proofs’ of invincible science? ‘Creative visualization’ is futile for the terminally ill. When a person is dying, science is equally futile.

For all their prestige, psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis are said to have the lowest batting average of the ‘helping professions.’ For all the years-long rigor of their medical training, the M.D’s in Sam Shem’s House of God didn’t achieve that many cures. In the end, they killed their most agonized patients with a lethal injection in the armpit.

And yet none of these individuals are branded quacks or ‘wishful thinkers.’ Our science, heaped with garlands of awe, will be quaint and obsolete or – at best – a borderline useful stepping stone in several hundred years. But let an alternative healer fail as often as our sanctified professionals, and he’s an ignoramus and imposter.

Somewhere out there, there must be a life force – an energy source. Whether it passes from a Reiku practitioner to a patient is something perhaps you could comment upon at greater length, if you visit again. Has your work been successful? It seems unlikely you’d post your essay if you’d failed in your career. It also seems odd that Reiku, if it were only a hoax, would last for eight or nine decades.

The ageing bemoan the graying and loss of their hair, their wrinkles and crumbling dentition (though it’s seldom a tooth that falls apart: it’s hollowed into a shell in their youth, and the fillings drop out in later life). But unless we over-abuse our body, it has a wondrous capacity to heal itself, barring diseases such as cancer and osteoporosis. What manmade machine can last for a century and beyond? Oldsters can suffer bruises, burns, cuts and sprains, and the injuries heal. They can build muscle by lifting weights. They can improve their balance by getting out of their chair and walking.

Part 3

A second personality sketch is of a woman who looks like America’s former President Jimmy Carter, and whose son – if she’d had one – would have looked like Ken Burns. Throughout her life she’s been a political activist, a member of anti-war organizations, a tireless proponent of Health Care for All (she pickets and marches, and stands at her card-table in malls, passing out pamphlets and requesting signatures for her ballot). She’s a world-traveler who hosts exchange students from dozens of countries, a beekeeper, a hybridizer and grafter of fruit trees, and a spectacular vegetable gardener. She grows nearly all of her edibles, and preserves enough of her harvest to feed the armies of Alexander. Her cupboards are loaded with jars of tomatoes and orchard fruits, her boxes and bins with dried apples, dried peas, beans and raisins from her grapevines. She brews her own wine, ripens her own sauerkraut in crockery jugs, concocts salsas and herbal teas. She participates in every meaningful demonstration for human rights, promotes the philanthropies of her church, has sheltered homeless women for months, sews top-stitched blue jeans, bridal gowns and tailored suits without a pattern, knits, quilts and crochets, is skilled in using carpentry tools, plasters, paints and tiles everything in her house, is a wonderful homemaker, and a devoted parent to her family of Ph.D. daughters and grandkids.

She’s never had a medical doctor except when her daughters were born, and when she had cataract surgery. Instead of M.D.s, she swears by her homeopaths and naturopaths, her massage therapist and homemade alternative remedies. Is she mired in delusion? In pie-in-the-sky ‘wishful thinking?’ Is she simple-minded? Superstitious?

She’s none of these things. She earned a fifth-year teaching degree shortly after her nineteenth birthday. And when she retired, she joined the Peace Corps within a few weeks, and for two years taught school in Africa.

But is she intellectual? Her failing is this – if it’s a failing. She has less interest in words than in deeds. Though she has no high-altitude hopes for humanity, she is committed to helping people, and chooses hard work, with this goal in mind, over clever palaver proving she’s right and others are wrong.

Her age? Ninety-one.

As the saying goes, the frogs in the pond never heard of the ocean. We’re surrounded by the inscrutable. Whether or not everyone benefits from this healing, you’ve given us a heartwarming glimpse into your work, and how your cat enjoyed your skills. And you write with quiet and gracious refinement.

Thank you again for a fine essay, and please visit us again.

Now hold on Grahame,YOU appreciate Ruth’s participation?
Since when has PoC belonged to YOU?
Also Mary wrote this blog not YOU!

It reads to me too as if you are divorced.

Whilst I am sure many people are sorry for your loss you won’t gain many friends by your overbearing manner of writing as if YOU are always right.

Ruth is one of my favorite PoC writers who does a hell of a lot of good on-line AND off.
So lay off her!

I am sorry you are widowed, if you had said my late wife instead of my then wife I would of course have known she had died.
You can ask anyone here on PoC if I am ever deliberately cruel to a person or to an animal.
Well I hope you feel good that you have got your revenge as you have upset me deeply by implying I am cruel.
My own late mother died of liver cancer, I watched her writhing in agony and wished I could take her pain instead.
I studied Reiki after that, I do know it couldn’t have taken her pain away or stopped her from dying but it might have given her some comfort.
I’d take the pain of the entire world if it would stop others hurting.
I’ve learned that being bitter doesn’t help, the only thing that does help is doing as much as possible to make the world a better place for other people and for animals.

Ruth, I am a WIDOWER. My beloved wife, with whom I was very much in tune, DIED of CANCER.

I appreciate your participation in Pictures Of Cats Blog, Ruth, but your recent comment to me is unfounded and, in the event, cruel.

Grahame, you are entitled to your own beliefs of course but I ask you this, even if you are right and Reiki doesn’t exist or help anyone, what harm does it do ?
It brings warmth and comfort at the very least and the closeness of another person who cares about you.
You were obviously out of tune with your wife.
Please don’t write off something a lot of people and animals find comforting.

Thanks to my cats and blogging on “Pictures of Cats” that i have learnt of something new , the science of “REIKI” healing.

There is, more and more, a lot of woo-hoo appropriating the language of scientific method. True believers talk of, say, quantum mechanics without understanding such concepts at all.

It has been fashionable to assert action-at-a-distance. Reiki Mary does this. When apparently faster than the speed of light effects were asserted, the woo-hoo folks claimed that this proved action at a distance.

BUT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HARNESS THESE EFFECTS FOR MESSAGING!

Some background: there are certain calcite crystals that, when excited, release two photons out of phase with one another by 180 degrees. Experiments demonstrate that if, say, a polarizer is inserted into the path of one of these photons, the other, by now extremely far away from origin, this photon also alters accorodingly. This got a lot of the woo-hoo types all excited. “See, they claimed; this PROVES ESP” was one of their claims. It does no such thing. We cannot use these effects for signalling purposes.

Thus far, there are no valid proofs of signalling at a distance, harnessable action at a distance. Claims of so-called Reiki energy transmission at a distance must fall inasmuch as there is no means to verify these claims by falsification of hypotheses. And as “Skeptic” posted, anecdotal claims are worthless for proofs.

Victor Stenger, a very erudite physicist, author of many excellent books, has provided a very accessible account of why such things as Reiki are untenable. His book is not an attack on Reiki, but, passim. such things are considered.

_The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology_,(Amherst N.Y.,Prometheus Books,1995.) This is a serious piece of scientific reasoning, not a polemic. As I say, it is accessible to almost anyone.

Michael:
“They are more in connection with nature while the sad human is distanced from nature.”

Me:
And yet it is the “distanced from nature” human who is, supposedly, the vector of this supposed energy transmission.

I studied with a very esteemed and famous Chinese professor of medicine. I asked him his take on Reiki. “Kitsch”, he replied.

As Mark Twain said: “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they will like.”

I was the recipient of so-called Reiki treatment” from a certified practitioner (these credentials are problematic in their own terms) and it had absolutely no effect on me over weeks of “treatment”. The practitioner was my then-wife. An enthusiast might say that I was not receptive. I say that there was no transmission to receive.

A major problem with these sorts of things is that these claims are not falsifiable, and so not amenable to any sort of scientific testing. Don’t come back at me that there is more to Being than is accessible to science. Absent falsifiable hypotheses, there is no way to verify these claims. Unverifiable claims are just that. One can assert anything, and many do. Anecdotal claims are insufficient. And the human capacity for wishful thinking seems boundless.

Mary seems very sincere.

But color me skeptical.

I enjoyed reading your article Mary as I attained Reiki level 1 a few years ago and although I didn’t go any further (my much loved friend and Reiki master died) I still have the healing power in my hands.
We had 4 cats at that time and a neighbour’s cat who almost lived with us too. Only one cat didn’t like me practising my Reiki on him, the others loved it.
I have another Reiki Master friend so could pick up on it at any time with her to attain level 2 and 3, but the time never seems right to do so.
The interesting thing about it is that when she goes to peoples houses who have cats, they always join in the treatments by sitting on or around her portable Reiki table. She isn’t a dedicated cat lover, doesn’t have any cats of her own, so it must be her Reiki power which attracts them to her.
No you can’t prove to anyone else that there is something real about Reiki, but I find even now if I place my hands in position on a person or a cat, they warm up and sometimes I can feel the healing throbbing from them.

Thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge, Mary.

I like the concept of Reiki. I like the naturalness of it.

I wonder whether cats are good patients. I sense that they are very good patients because of their heightened senses and intuitive behavior. They are more in connection with nature while the sad human is distanced from nature.