Tuesday 13 September 2016

7 Key Principles of Successful Professional Reiki Healers

Last week I shared some pragmatic ideas for running a successful Reiki business.
 
Those ideas work, and I got a lot of positive feedback from them.
 
But becoming a successful professional healer requires more than just business knowledge. You also need to master certain habits and inner qualities – certain psychological principles for healing success.
 
Today’s video gives you 7 key lessons I have learnt working as a Reiki professional over the last nine years – lessons that will help you not just have success in the Reiki arena, but also in almost any other endeavour.






Note: For anyone interested in finding out more about Jeremy O'Carroll's Reiki courses, visit his course homepage.

If you would like to learn more about his Reiki Master Level, visit his Master Level homepage.

Wednesday 7 September 2016

A Practical Guide to Setting Up a Successful Reiki Business

Namaste Healers,

A lot of you would love to run a Reiki business one day but are not sure whether it is really doable.

Today's video not just shows you how to get going, but even how you could make $18,000 profit in your first year (and I'm not even trying to sell you anything, just show you how it can be done!).

Hopefully, you'll look at my model and say, 'Yep, that could be done. '

Let me know what you think :)


To download the Reiki Business Video Notes, click here.

PS If you're interested in finding out more about my Reiki Master Level, visit the Om Reiki Master Level homepage.

PPS I'm not selling anything in this video, so hopefully I don't need a disclaimer, but in case I do, I'm not making any promises of earnings you might make by following the advice in this video. Every situation is different. Every healer is different. So I will not be held responsible for any losses or lack of earnings you make as a result of anything you learn in this video. I hope this video helps (and my plan is as close to no risk as you can get), but everything you do as a result of watching it is at your own risk.

Tuesday 30 August 2016

Are Your Talents Holding Your Spirituality Back?


It's fun being good at things.

You get to reap the fruits of your talents.

You get to wallow in egoic self-congratulations.

You get to savour that satisfied feeling of knowing you’ve got your just rewards for effort put in.

Because when you think about it, proficiency in an art or skill typically requires a lot of practice.

You've probably heard people talk about the 10,000 hours it takes to become a master at something and, while not necessarily a binding law, it does typically seem to apply – even for those people we would consider child prodigies, like Mozart or former American chess world champion Bobby Fischer. (For more information on this, try reading Robert Greene's excellent book "Mastery".)

But as satisfying as achieving a hard-earned reward might be, it's also true that the difficulty of gaining proficiency in something often deters us from even beginning it.

Because as good as we might one day become at something, in the beginning it can be a long climb out of the ‘I suck box’.

Now, I know this is a harsh way to put in. But from the ego's point of view, starting something new is often akin to getting dragged through a seemingly-endless bog of smelly, slimy goo.

And we’re not even necessarily talking about starting something completely new, either. It can just be a variation on something we already do well – a spin on the familiar that sends us reeling back into the ‘I suck box’.

This used to happen to me quite a bit as a kid taking tennis lessons. Every now and again my coach would get me to change my grip and, even if it might only be a few degrees here and there, afterwards it was often hard to hit the ball.

Now, after a while of course, I'd get used to the new grip and start smacking balls better than ever, but before that they would generally fly everywhere: out of the court, into the net, into the ground – all over the place!

In many ways, the spirit world is the same. When you practise a new meditation, for instance, it often feels clunky. You can’t find your rhythm. You can’t find your groove – and you can't get into those deep states you’re used to when you practise your regular techniques.

It is for this reason that meditators often default back to what they already know and do well. They learn a new technique. They give it a brief shot. But then, before you know it, they revert back to the old and familiar.

Now, I'm not saying that the meditation they revert to isn't great. In fact, it might be fantastic. It might even be better than the one they’ve just learned! But the thing is, they already know that meditation and if they continue to practise it, they won't learn anything new.

So sometimes it's a case of needing to take the proverbial ‘one step backwards to take two steps forward’. You try out the new technique. You possibly struggle with it at first. But then, quite often, you get a feel for it, just like I always eventually did after my coach changed my tennis racket grip.

The important thing to remember, therefore, is that to learn the new technique well, you often have to let go of the old. You have to let go of security, certainty and your need to do things well.

This might sound shocking to the ego, I know, but you can actually reassure it. Because you don't need to let go of the old for good. You just need to tuck it away for the moment while you focus on the meditation at hand. And if things get egoically desperate, you can always go back to it whenever you wish. But if you can hang tough, then as a reward for your humility, you’ll end up with two meditation options instead of one.

So the moral of all this is that when you learn something new, you’ve got to accept ahead of time that you most likely won't be proficient at it right away.

Then you’ve got to refrain from reverting back to what you already know the moment the going gets tough.

Yep, Zen warrior that you are, you’ve got to continue on with the new technique as prescribed, and practise it until you get the hang of it.

Then, with luck, you'll have a classy new addition to your meditation or spiritual practice.

(Article Copyright, Jeremy O'Carroll 2016)

To find out more about Jeremy O'Carroll's meditation courses, click here.

To find out about his Reiki courses, visit his Om Reiki course homepage.

Wednesday 24 August 2016

Why Your Mind Doesn't Care If You Meditate Well


Have you ever sat down to meditate, told yourself that this time you're really going to quieten your mind, only to find out that your mind has other ideas?

It's like you sit down and say, "I'm going to meditate," and you mind says, "Is that so?"

At such times, it can feel like whatever you do, you just can't get rid of your thoughts.

This typically leads to frustration – frustration that then makes it even harder to quieten the mind!

So what you do if you find yourself in one of these mental spins?

Well, to begin with, understand that your mind is actually a thought-making machine – one that will seldom (if ever) wish to be silent!

So don't get hung up on the need to experience lengthy inner silence when you meditate, because it's unlikely to happen.

What's more – and this is big! – your mind was never created to make you happy, rather to mastermind your survival.

So if you find your head full of plots and schemes and strategies  when you next try to 'bliss out' in meditation, then don't go beating yourself up, because your mind will simply be doing its job.


And it's not even like you can effort your way to success either.

Because if it is true that what you resist persists, then trying to use willpower to battle and resist your thoughts will only make things worse. Indeed, that will be a sure-fire way to ensure they continue to smash about in your mind.

So what we need is different approach. We need to find a way to make peace with our thoughts.

Tibetan Wisdom

I was pondering this problem years ago up in northern India when I learned of a Tibetan saying: "Trying to meditate without thoughts is like trying to have meat without bones."

This got me thinking, and it made me wonder whether thoughts really were the problem after all. For so long, thoughts had been the bogeyman of my meditation, but was I misreading the situation?

Because what if thoughts were never the problem?

What if the problem was that I either a) sought to oppose my thoughts or b) allowed them to suck me off into daydream?

Pondering such issues made me think about what it must be like to be an enlightened person.

I mean, how do enlightened people deal with their thoughts?

It also got me wondering whether a meditation master really could meditate all the time, and it was here that an idea came to me.

The idea popped into my head as I imagined someone famous like the Dalai Lama entering a crowded restaurant with his retinue of followers. I pictured him strolling in. I imagined all of the restaurant's diners lifting their heads from their meals to stare at him. I heard their expressions of surprise as he moved past them.

"Oh, is that the Dalai Lama?" "Look, it's the Dalai Lama!" "I can't believe it, it's the Dalai Lama!"

All around, there would be a buzz of excitement as he made his way through the restaurant.

At this point, a normal person would typically become self-conscious. But what of the Dalai Lama? Because wouldn’t a spiritual master like him remain unaffected by the hubbub around him?

In fact, better than just being unaffected, wouldn’t he be able to stay in a deep meditative state even as he made his way through the restaurant?

But if this is true to life, how would he do it?

How could he stay in meditative state with so much noise all around him?

Having thought about this, my answer was that he obviously wouldn’t buy into chatter and noise. He would treat them as you would the sound of birds twittering in the trees or a lawnmower going off in your neighbour’s front yard. Noises to be sure, but not noises you need pay any particular attention to.

Of course, you might say this all sounds rather difficult. But when you think about it, most of us have listened to music and remained in a meditative state.

And music is a kind of noise, right?

So sound or noise don't necessarily take us out of meditation. What takes us out of it is our reaction to it.

This got me thinking further, and I started to wonder what it would be like to treat our thoughts as if they were no different to the sounds all around us.

Because, in a sense, the only difference is the distance they are away from us.

In one instance, the noises are outside of us. In the other, the ‘noises’ (thoughts) are inside our head. But fundamentally, it’s all just ‘noise’.

So if the thoughts inside our head are no different from the noises outside of it, how should we treat them?

Simple.

We observe them and leave it at that. We don't try to manipulate or change them. We don't rage against them. We just think, "Oh, there's a thought. Interesting." And that's it.

This makes me think of another approach that some meditation teachers recommend: seeing the thoughts and images in our mind like you would images and sounds coming from a movie screen.

In this scenario, characters on the screen might be saying terrible things to each other, they might be shouting and screaming and erupting with all sorts of turbulent emotions but, as a spectator, you never buy in. Nope, when you watch a film, you just sit back and enjoy the show.

Of course, the challenge of all this – as you know – is to observe your thoughts without getting sucked into their ‘story’, without getting sucked into the daydream that results when you get tangled up in them.

You know what it's like: you're meditating, you're aware of everything around you – of your breathing, of the rise and fall of your stomach, of the squishiness of the cushion beneath you – and then, next thing, you jolt upright with a start and realise you've just spent who-knows-how-long lost in reverie.

Now, treating your thoughts like external sounds is a big help for not getting sucked into them, but another interesting approach is to use your thoughts to help anchor you in meditation.

In this approach, your thoughts are like a mantra – but a mantra that has no fixed form or shape.

This form of meditation – what I call "Thinking Meditation" – has many layers to it, but to get going all you need to do is think thoughts non-stop and observe the thoughts you're thinking.

To help train people to do this, I sometimes get them to force themselves to think for one minute straight.

The idea is that for this minute they can't have any breaks in their thoughts.

Weird, I know. But that's the technique.

In the exercise it doesn't matter what anyone thinks, they just need to keep thinking!

In other words, the thoughts could be as simple as "I'm thinking about doing this meditation and can't really think of anything decent to say, but I've got to keep forcing thoughts out so I can keep thinking."

The key to the process is to observe the thoughts as you think them and, if you do this, you'll discover something interesting: thoughts help anchor you in the present moment and generate a meditative state within the body.

What's more, if you have already been practising a modality that works with energy and have a flow of energy in your body, then focusing on your thoughts as you force them out will actually strengthen the energy flow in your body.

What this shows is that thoughts are definitely not the problem when we meditate, because in this instance, the thoughts we are thinking actually help us to meditate! So the problem, as we said before, is simply the way we react to our thoughts.

So if you want to experiment, try doing one of the two things we discussed in this article:

1.    Practise treating your thoughts as if they were the same as the sounds outside your body

2.    Force yourself to keep an uninterrupted flow of thoughts tumbling into your mind, being sure to observe your thoughts the entire time.

What's really neat about the second technique is that you can do it even when your mind is ridiculously busy.

Heck, you can do it when you're busy!

You can do it as you cook, as you clean, as you wait for a bus, as you go for a jog – whatever.

Since you typically have no shortage of thoughts, all you need to do is give them an extra nudge so they continue to flow uninterrupted, and then observe them as they tumble into your mind.

Do this and your ability to meditate ‘on the go’ will likely take on a whole new complexion.


(Article copyright 2016, Jeremy O'Carroll)

Postscript

If you’d like to go deeper into the intricacies and subtleties of these meditations, consider coming along to one of my
CBM meditation courses.

The C stands for 'core', and in the section of the course devoted to it, you will learn to connect with your energetic core, i.e. your chakras and Sushumna (an energy channel that goes from your base chakra up to your crown chakra).

The B stands for 'body', and in the section focusing on it, you will learn to connect to your energy body, i.e. your energy field and aura.

The M stands for ‘mind’ and, among other things, the course goes deeply into the meditations we have discussed in this article.

The final CBM meditation course for the year will be held on 3 September, and you can either enrol by 
clicking here or find out more by visiting the CBM meditation website.

If you have any questions, just reply to this email or call me on 1300 853 356 or 0417 328 457. I'd love to tell you more.