What if you found out our planet had cancer? Diabetes? Heart disease? Constipation? High blood pressure? AIDS? Depression?
This topic can be an empowering workshop if you have an opportunity to share this topic with friends, colleagues or students in your community. The whole group brainstorms questions such as, what is the nature of this disease? What is its symbolic meaning? How can we treat it? How can it be prevented?
Organize into groups of three to six people for discussion. Each group selects one disease for analysis and answers the questions as effectively as possible. Afterwards, the whole group joins together again to share their findings. Finally, reflect on how these topics inform us about how we should tend to our personal health.
In response to the above questions during a recent course on sustainable development in Thailand, participants elicited several profound practices designed to heal our planet. Their suggestions included employing indigenous wisdom, rejuvenating nature, establishing a new value system in family and community, practicing perma-culture and sustainable use of resources, learning from elders, celebrating the positive, controlling greed, and awareness raising on all these issues. It was a truly inspiring learning session among participants from China, Indonesia, Britain and a dozen other countries. We concluded that in addition to practicing mindfulness, we also needed to understand the concept of “planetfulness.” We are the mind, the consciousness of this planet, incarnate.
Planetary Responsibilities
Is there any limit to healing? My articles advance a concept of healing that embraces the entire scope of personal transformation. These pages have been dedicated to healing self and others. The culmination of this process aims towards planetary healing. This suggests using every aspect of existence as a tool towards nurturing the planet. The question of healing is no longer limited to healing the individual self, but expanding towards healing life as a whole.
Consider the following questions and how to transform on a personal or planetary level. Choose a particular situation in which you are involved and make it the subject of today’s reflection. You may choose to raise these questions in your own written meditations, or suggest them in your community gatherings or seminars.
- To what degree does this behavior benefit humanity?
- Does this activity nurture or damage the environment?
- Do I actively create the world in which I claim to be a mere victim?
Discuss these topics with your community and see what insights are raised. Another process that you can lead with your Reiki or spiritual community is to collectively send energy to a person with serious health concerns or to trouble spots in the world such as earthquake zones or regions suffering civil unrest. Sit in a circle together and join hands if you like. If it helps, place a photo or news article in the middle of your circle as a reference point to focus your group’s attention. All members visualize the recipient or the troubled area and send distance healing simultaneously. Visualize all three of the Reiki symbols as described earlier and send them just as you would send distance healing to a person.
Another way to extend the realm of Reiki healing is to bring your healing community outdoors to perform planetary healings. Group members place their hands on trees, stones or water to represent the whole earth. If weather doesn’t permit you to sit outside, perform the same ritual using a houseplant as representative of the earth. Visualize Reiki healing the earth in every direction.
You are the universe, so, the practice of healing the universe is the logical extension of self healing.
