And don't I know it. Nearly two years ago I was instructed by a Reiki Master into the first of Reikiís three degrees, but have, for the most part, kept it to myself since then. Now I find I no longer can contain my enthusiasm for Reiki, nor hold myself back from describing to other people who are intrigued by it what it means to experience it. Certainly part of Reikiís appeal within our highly individualistic culture, and to me, is that there is no "right" way to experience it: some use it to heal themselves, some to heal others, some teach it or make a living by practicing it, while others simply let it transform their lives and then let it go.

Nor is there any sort of stereotypical Master: Beyond a shared belief in avoiding expectations of any specific outcome, and the shared experience of witnessing medical miracles, through the use of Reiki, the seven Masters interviewed for this article have all adapted it to fit their own interests and styles. Benes treats pets and attends hospital patients as well as her usual clientele; Mary Dudek of Elizaville in Columbia County teaches Reiki at Columbia-Greene Community College as part of a community services program; Rev. Catherine L. Parisi is also a registered nurse, spiritual counselor at the Center of the Healing Spiral in Woodstock; Regina Seigel, also a polarity therapist and the proprietor, along with her husband Gary, of the Linden Tree Holistic Healing Center in Poughkeepsie, plans to eventually include horses in her Reiki practice; New Paltz's Lisa Apuzzo, proprietor of the Awareness Shop, also works as a psychic and crystal energy therapist; Rev. Sylvia Scott, of Pleasant Valley, also a psychotherapist, therapeutic touch practitioner and spiritual healer, offers the option of Reiki/counseling sessions; and Tamalyn Kelly, who has trained with womenís spirituality movement leader Diane Stein, and works from her Wappingers Falls home and The Dreaming Goddess in Poughkeepsie, brings a very positive feminist aspect to Reiki.

Along with Apuzzo, I too "would love for everyone to have at least Reiki I, because through it everyone grows and transforms, and if we could all experience Reiki and use its energy, this would be a better planet." Like Rev. Scott, I believe that Reiki is "a sacred gift from the highest level, whatever we call that," and is sometimes not so much about physical healing as it is about "work, but empowering work, about moving through emotional issues and baggage ... and the more a person moves into working with the Reiki energy, the more a person can be empowered and move into a space of grace and unconditional love." And I echo Benesí hope that someday Reiki clinics will be "lined up like pizza shops, down every street in every town," because "people have the right to have it and they ought to, and they will."

My leap onto the Reiki bandwagon came about as a result of my recently doing Reiki II, as well as reading womenís spirituality writer and Reiki Master Diane Steinís Essential Reiki: A Complete Guide to an Ancient Healing Art (The Crossing Press, 1995; $18.95 pb), a controversial, ground-breaking book which has helped make Reiki not only much more public, but no longer an expensive, elitist healing art. While Iíd never planned on doing Reiki III, I have been so profoundly affected by Reiki, both physically and emotionally and psychologically, that my desire to write an article succinctly explaining Reiki to the uninitiated quickly turned into a quest for the right time, place and Master for me to take the final level. While interviewing the seven local Masters for this article -each of them equally dedicated to their art and compelling as speakers -things they each said began clicking in my mind, along with their constantly asking me what Reiki, and my work in writing about it, told me about where I am going with it. Benes says that she knows an initiate is ready to become a Master when he or she "is ready to walk the walk and talk the talk -all the time." Since Iíve already begun talking the talk, Iíve decided, then Iíd better start walking the walk as well.

I was first introduced to Reiki several years ago by a neighbor who used it at the women's shelter where she worked. Although her verbal descriptions of what Reiki is and does seemed confusing to me, her demonstration of the technique on my son, then a toddler, when he couldnít settle down one hot afternoon for his nap, got me hooked on the idea of eventually having Reiki for myself. As I watched her gently place her hands in various positions on my sonís head and then work her way down to his feet, I saw his little limbs gradually loosen and his breathing slow down; and I noticed that I, too, felt calmer and somehow opened up in a way I couldnít explain. I began checking out the Reiki ads in alternative magazines, marveling at the wide range of fees -from hundreds to thousands of dollars -commanded for each degree, and the various schools of Reiki out there, some of them claiming to provide the only true path to enlightenment. I had corresponded with a New York-based traditional Master who promised the only authentic Reiki instruction available, until I got tired of his evasive answers to my questions about what Reiki is, and why his method -priced far beyond my means -was the only one worth knowing.

Many books have been written on the history, art and value of Reiki; in fact, the seven local Masters interviewed here recommend a wide range of authors, including Karyn Mitchell, Joyce Morris, Kathleen Milner, Bodo J. Baginski, Maggie Chambers and Libbie Barnett, as well as Stein. While there is far too much information on each of these aspects of Reiki to adequately address in a single article, a synopsis of Reikiís history is useful to those interested in learning this ancient healing art, at least to clarify what the terms traditional and non-traditional Reiki mean.

As mentioned earlier, the ancient technique of Reiki was recovered in the mid-1800s in Japan by a man called Mikao Usui, who sought Jesus' hands-on healing technique through researching Buddhism and considering the similarities between the life of the Buddha and Jesus. Dr. Usui, as one version of the story goes, was told by Buddhist monks that Jesus' technique had been lost, but could be recovered by entering the Buddhist Path to Enlightenment. Scholars debate exactly how Jesus' methods became incorporated into Buddhism, and some of the details of Dr. Usui's life remain sketchy. He is said to have been a Christian minister and a principal of the Doshisha University in Kyoto, as well as a University of Chicago student, but Stein speculates that these facts have been created by Westerners in order to provide him with so-called "credentials."

The only actual records in existence of Dr. Usui's life, according to Stein, who quotes renowned Master William Rand, confirm that he lived in a Zen monastery after returning to Japan. This is where the story of Reiki as we now know it really begins. This monastery contained Sanskrit texts describing the healing formula which Dr. Usui sought. Having deciphered the texts, he wandered to Mt. Koriyama to fast for three weeks and ponder how to activate the formula in human beings. During his last meditation there, a projectile of light struck his forehead, or third eye. He went unconscious and awoke to see "rainbow bubbles" and then the Reiki symbols appearing before him. This was the first Reiki attunement.

While descending the mountain, Dr. Usui experienced four healing miracles, including using his hands, which became hot, on his own torn toe, and on a woman afflicted with a toothache who served him his first meal. He named the method Reiki, and became a pilgrim, taking it first to the Kyoto slums, where he healed many beggars who returned to the streets because although their bodies were healed, their spirits were not. Hence the justification of the traditional $10,000 fee instituted by Hawayo Takata, a third-generation Reiki Master (trained by Dr. Usuiís successor, Chujiro Hayashi) charged today by traditional Reiki Masters as members of the Reiki Alliance. Having been healed of several fatal diseases, including an ailing gall bladder, at Hayashiís Reiki clinic in Japan in 1935, Takata is responsible for taking Reiki to the West by opening a clinic in her native Hawaii in 1938. As Hayashiís successor, Takata was so convinced that Reiki would not truly be valued without a high price -especially in the commercialized West -that she charged her own family members. Although the principle behind her thinking makes some sense, many Reiki Masters today are, as Benes puts it, "rebels in the ranks who don't believe that Reiki should be only for rich people," and who therefore teach it for sliding scale fees, or even for free. Certainly if it werenít for Takata, I, for one, never wouldíve heard of Reiki; but if it werenít for our dedicated local non-traditional Reiki Masters, who charge roughly $600 to $1,000 for all three levels (although Apuzzo offers a 14-week apprenticeship course leading to a Master's degree for $350), I would not be writing about it now.

My own quest to learn Reiki led me to Parisi, whose Reiki demonstration I attended at Esoterica in New Paltz about two years ago. I liked her sense of humor and matter-of-fact approach -and her energy, as they say -not to mention her reasonable prices. I also liked the fact that as an RN who teaches Reiki to medical staff at a major local hospital; she scientifically grounds her enthusiasm for Reiki, citing numerous medical studies of its many beneficial physiological effects, such as slowing respiration, lowering blood pressure and temperature, and changing hemoglobin and hematocrit. When Parisi placed her hands on my head that night, my arms and legs immediately became heavy and my hands and feet tingled. With my eyes still closed I saw the darkness turn to shimmering golden red light. I signed up for her next day-long Reiki I workshop then and there, and began counting down the days leading up to it.

At the workshop -which I attended feeling "open-minded but semi-skeptical" as Parisi says she did before me, I learned and practiced the hand positions on myself and others, and received a Reiki session given by my fellow students, as well as an attunement -a mysterious, individually transforming passing of energy from a Master to an initiate by way of breath and sacred Reiki symbols, previously held secret, but which Stein reproduced publicly for the first time in her book. Stein describes the attunement to her students as nothing short of "a miracle, and if after they receive it they can give me a clearer definition, I want to hear it ... The attunement has to be experienced -it cannot be described in any left-brained way."

Kelly explains the attunement process this way: "We all have the ability to do Reiki; it's programmed into us. it's like you're a wired-up house, and the attunement flips the circuit breaker and so electricity starts flowing through you. Metaphysically speaking, it opens the chakras, causes them to vibrate at a higher rate, and clears them out after they've been clogged up through years of toxic emotions and the environment and the stress we put in our bodies every time we get angry or stressed or worried. Afterwards you can channel more energy and handle more energy flow. You're more intuitive. You light up. I see it in my students all the time."

I drove home after my first attunement in a state of quiet bliss, enumerating to myself all the things I wanted to do with my life, feeling like I'd awakened from a long, deep sleep. I wanted to tell everyone what I'd experienced, but following the majority of responses I received -ranging from a good-natured rendition of the theme from Twilight Zone to enthusiastic affirmations of "Cool!" followed by "But what is it?" -I came to keep quiet, in most circles, about Reiki. Beyond blank smiles and vague nods, most of my friends didn't seem to appreciate it. For two years, I used it exclusively on myself (especially successfully for treating insomnia, headaches and cramps), my kids and my cats, all of whom have come to ask for it, despite initially wiggling too much for a nervous novice. Reiki II, a recent gift upon finishing graduate school, came to me when a friend introduced me to Seigel, who only teaches Reiki one-on-one. She spent two long afternoons with me. Initially, she attuned me and explained the meaning of the three symbols given in Reiki II (briefly, for physical, mental, emotional and distance healing); two weeks later we met to review my experiences so far in using them. Then Seigel gave me my first hour-long Reiki session, during which I dozed, dreamed, cried, saw colors, and guessed her every word. I felt as still and heavy as if I'd been placed under sedation, and I could barely move my lips to answer Seigel's occasional questions. I emerged feeling utterly calm, but far too spaced-out to drive straight home. After Reiki II, Seigel warned me -and several other Masters have since concurred -things change, radically -and the patterns in which you have been comfortably stuck are no longer tolerable or meaningful. While I don't wish to reveal the details of my personal life in print, I will say that this has turned out to be the case for me.

In early July, exactly one month, I later realized, after doing Reiki II, I had a session with Scott. I was by then in the middle of writing this article and being stymied by a series of personal problems. This time, while seemingly pinioned to the massage table on which Reiki is generally given, I felt a concentration of energy as palpable as a baseball roll back and forth between my hips, which rocked back and forth when Scott placed her hands on them. Then I fell asleep. It was a rainy day, but when I woke up, keeping my eyes closed, the sun seemed to come through my eyelids. When it was over, I looked out the window. Still gray. "Were you rocking me?" I asked Scott. No, she said, but she'd noticed many patients saying that lately. I stumbled to my feet and thanked Scott as she advised me to drink two quarts of water over the next 24 hours to help rid myself of toxins, and wished me good luck with my article. "May it just come through your fingertips as you type," she said. Driving home, I realized that I could no longer worry about writing this: if I were meant to continue with Reiki, the article would just write itself. But I still wondered, ultimately, what I would ultimately say, and do, about Reiki. "There's great yearning for God, or spirit, or the higher self, in people's hearts," I remembered Dudek saying. "When someone opens up and realizes he or she can receive Reiki, and the energy will do what it needs to, it brings such incredible relief." I opened up, and waited. Days passed and although each day was far too busy, nothing happened with my writing. And then in the midst of a heat wave and utter chaos, I sat down to type, like a Reiki Master, with no expectation of any sort of outcome. In the end, as it was meant to, this article wrote itself.