The five Reiki principles, and what they ask of you daily

Every student who trains with me meets the five principles in the first hour. I still fail at three of them by lunchtime most days, and that is closer to the point than getting them right.

The five, as they are

They are short enough to fit on a card, which is part of why people underestimate them.

• Just for today, do not anger.
• Just for today, do not worry.
• Just for today, be grateful.
• Just for today, work honestly.
• Just for today, be kind to every living thing.

I give these to every Level 1 student alongside the manual and the attunement, and I tell them what I am telling you now. These are not a mood board for the wall of a treatment room. They are a daily instruction, and most days you will not manage all five. That is not a failure of the practice. It is the practice.

Do not anger, do not worry

These two arrive together for me. Something goes wrong, a client cancels at the last minute, a flight is delayed, and the anger and the worry show up as a pair before I have decided anything at all.

What the principle actually asks is not that I stop feeling either one. I do not think that is possible for anyone, and I would not trust a teacher who told me otherwise. What it asks is that I notice the anger or the worry within the day it happens, rather than three days later when it has turned into something sharp I say to someone I love. Just for today is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It is not asking for a different personality. It is asking for one day, and then another one tomorrow.

I have been sitting with this principle for twenty years now and it has not gotten easier. I have only gotten a little faster at noticing.

Gratitude, and the one people skip

Be grateful is the principle people quote most and think about least. It is easy to say and easy to leave unexamined, a nice word rather than a daily task. I try to make it a task: naming one specific thing before bed, out loud if I am on my own, rather than letting it stay a vague feeling I assume I have.

Work honestly gets skipped entirely, and I think that is a mistake, because it is the principle that keeps the other four from turning soft. For me it means giving the session I said I would give, not the shorter version I am tempted by when I am tired. It means telling a student, before her attunement, that it will probably feel like not very much at all, rather than letting her imagine something dramatic and then quietly disappointing her later. Honesty is not a separate value sitting beside the other four. It is the one that makes them true instead of decorative.

Kindness, and what twenty years actually changes

Be kind to every living thing is usually read outward, toward other people rather than toward yourself. I read it toward myself first, because that is the direction I forget.

On a hard day I am unkind to myself long before I am unkind to anyone else. I decide I have failed at the four principles above it and use that as evidence against myself. The principle does not say be kind to every living thing except the one holding the list. It includes me. It includes the person reading this.

This is part of what I try to hand a student before her own attunement, alongside the practical side of it covered in what to expect going in. The principles are not a test she passes or fails on that one day. They are what she is signing up to keep working at, long after the attunement is over and mostly forgotten.

I do not experience the five principles as spiritual instructions. I experience them as a short, blunt checklist for being a decent person on an ordinary Tuesday, which is a smaller job than it sounds and a harder one. Nobody manages all five every day. I do not. What changes with practice is not the difficulty. It is how quickly I notice I have dropped one, and how little drama I make of picking it back up. Just for today, try again.