The first time I was attuned to Reiki, I had the unmistakable sensation that I was holding fire between my hands.
I didn't know quite what to make of it. I was participating in a ceremony, receiving attunements for Reiki Levels 1 and 2, and yet something about the experience felt strangely familiar. I felt physically different afterward, but the deeper sensation was one of recognition. It felt like coming home. There was something incredibly... old about it. Primal, even.
That experience has stayed with me, partly because of how difficult it is to explain and partly because it raises an interesting question: if Reiki is understood as universal life force energy, something already present within and around all of us, what exactly is an attunement doing?
In Reiki, an attunement is part of the way the practice is passed from teacher to student. It happens through ceremony and is understood as opening or deepening the practitioner's relationship with Reiki energy. It isn't simply learning a set of techniques and practicing them until you get good at it. Something about the relationship itself is part of the process.
And yet the energy isn't reserved for people who have received an attunement. So what changes?
I don't have a definitive answer, but I wonder if the question might be less about acquiring something and more about becoming available to something.
In a few days, I'll receive another Reiki attunement, this one a master-level attunement to a set of shamanic Reiki symbols that I've already been working with for a few months. I've been experimenting with them in my own practice and using them in sessions, and I've found them to be incredibly useful. The fact that I've already been working with these symbols makes the idea of being attuned to them especially interesting. If the relationship is already underway, what does the ceremony change?
Perhaps the answer has less to do with adding something and more to do with attention...
Earlier today, I performed an Aimless Wandering along the beach. I wasn't trying to get anywhere or accomplish anything. Without an agenda, attention changes. It becomes less concerned with what comes next and more available to what is actually happening. The world seems to come forward on its own.
Nothing particularly profound has to happen. Simply being there is enough.
This, too, feels like attunement: a continual adjustment of attention toward what is already here. We use our attention and intention to turn the dial... not to create the signal, but to hear it more clearly.
Nature makes this especially easy for me because there is nothing to prove and nowhere to arrive. The ocean isn't waiting for me to have a spiritual experience, and the earth isn't withholding some secret until I learn the correct symbols. Still, I can become more attuned to what is here. I can listen differently. I can become less preoccupied with the separate self moving through a separate world and more available to the experience of being part of what is happening.
This is where attunement begins to brush up against the lived experience of non-separation for me. There is no real need to manufacture connection. There is only the possibility of noticing what has never actually been absent.
Maybe that's part of what ceremony can offer us. It gives us a deliberate moment to turn our attention toward something we might otherwise overlook. Pay attention here. Notice this. Remember. The ceremony may not create the connection so much as mark the moment we begin relating to it differently.
And then the practice continues, long after the ceremony is over. We get opportunities to attune ourselves every day, whenever we remember to stop insisting that reality be something other than what it is.
That is what interests me about attunement now. It isn't necessarily about becoming something different. It may be about becoming available to what has been here all along.