Women and Reiki

Energetic/Holistic Healing in Practice

Judith MacPherson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781845531546
• eBook ISBN: 9781351536820
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Women and Reiki is the first ethnographic study of Reiki and energetic healing in Britain. The book argues that if we are to build an accurate and comprehensive picture of healing we must examine the role of gender, representation and power. Although women healers predominate at the grass roots level these factors have been largely ignored in academic studies of "New Age" and alternative spiritualities. The acknowledgement of women's power in these studies is to be found somewhere between male-dominated biomedical approaches to health and apparently more egalitarian holistic discourse and practice. Using the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault and Meredith McGuire, the book shows that women healers are using Reiki and other healing spiritualities to actively engage in a politics of reclamation.

Chapter One

setting the scene

This book is the first ethnographic study of Reiki and energetic healing in the British context. Overall the book argues that if we are to build up an accurate and comprehensive picture of healing thought and practice we must locate gender, representation and power as central elements throughout. For to date, even though women healers predominate at the grassroots level in both local and international contexts, this key issue has been largely ignored in most academic studies of ’New Age’ and alternative spiritualities.

I propose that the narrative of women’s power and consciousness of healing can be located into the debates between largely male dominated biomedical approaches to health and the apparently more egalitarian holistic discourses and practices (e.g. mind, body and spirit). And I argue that the women in the study operate within fluid fields of force, engaging in personal projects of redefinition, transformation and self-empowerment. By using the work of writers such as Michel Foucault and Meredith McGuire, I aim to show how healers are using Reiki and other healing spiritualities to engage in a politics of reclamation.

In order to begin this evaluation of the development of new constructions of identity within the New Age¹ scene in central Scotland, I have chosen to follow feminist historian Joan Scott’s positioning that ‘gender is a primary field within which or by which means of power are articulated’ (Scott 1986: 1069) For while, as earlier observed, much academic material has been produced on the historical location, modes of participation and beliefs within New Age networks, the at best cursory, inclusion of gender is highly problematic. For it is precisely within these fields of contemporary spirituality that we may find new ideals and alternatives to traditional gender roles. Hence there is space within these fields for women and men to reinscribe, redefine and reimagine their own bodies and their constructions of masculinity and femininity so that possibilities occur for the reclamation of power.

It is worthy of note, however, that while I do, in the later stages of this work, bring in some sociologists’ usage of Foucaudian thought, I am also in accord with McNay when she argues that ‘recent theoretical work on identity offers only a partial account of agency because it remains within essentially negative understanding of subject formation…[with] the idea that the individual emerges from constraint’ (2000: 2-3). It would be better, therefore, to acknowledge that as individuals mutually construct hegemonic and subordinate discourses, space remains for independent thought, action and active negotiation of positioning.

I would argue, therefore, that the evaluation of the formation of gendered identities is crucial work for the scholar of religion. I have placed emphasis on examining how participants are taught to heal in workshops (the Salisbury Centre in Edinburgh being an important location for this) and in evaluating how participants respond to learning new ways of being ‘as healer’. In order to support my ethnographic material I have drawn from various New Age textual literature, both historical and contemporary. Hence sources include, for example, workshop teaching manuals and texts recommended by healers. In this way I also hope to construct an understanding of the issues underlying healing practice.

The basic questions of my research on healing in Scotland are framed well by Meredith McGuire, for she has examined healing in suburban America. McGuire argues that,

If the creation, maintenance and transformation of individuals’ gender identities are indeed among the foremost identity work to be accomplished, then extensive empirical study of the many contemporary instances of gendered spirituality is very worthwhile (McGuire 1994: 254).

I shall relate my empirically researched fieldwork material on Reiki and energetic healing to writers such as McGuire, while also drawing from feminist research in the parallel fields of Wiccan and Goddess spirituality. For in the latter we find writers such as Helen Berger (1999), Wendy Griffin (2000) and Carol Christ (1980) who have provided us with comprehensive evaluations of how women may form new and empowered, ‘healed’, identities.

Overall I will hence examine how ‘the subjective and collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed’ (Scott 1988: 6) within healing circles and the relationship of these constructions to significations of power. This shall be located alongside an examination of feminist critiques of patriarchal structures and the relevance of these dialogues to ‘contemporary spiritualities’ and ‘holistic health’.

I will argue that discourses of power and authority are multivalent operating within academic, religious, bio-medical and holistic healing circles and at the individual level. For example, debates abound in relation to the prioritization of text and the benefits of quantitative or qualitative approaches to academic research, while in healing circles, some aspects of experiential practice also appear to be in tension with male textual reformulations of healing theology.

In general, I shall regard ‘healing’ as being an aspect of popular religiosity – popular in that healers ‘adopt practices which may be at odds with the religious [and bio-medical] specialists’ views’ (Thomas 1995: 37). For if one locates ‘healing’ as such, then this should enable an examination of counter hegemonic discourses of identity and power. And I shall utilize the term ‘healing circles’ for two reasons. First, it is a motif that is commonly used in the Scottish context. Second, I am following Meredith McGuire in her usage of the term. For she proposes that healing circles tend to be held in members’ homes and that they are commonly composed of people who believe that they ‘can gain power and control over their lives’ (1998: 26) through learning forms of metaphysical and psychic healing. She also observes that within such circles emphasis is placed on providing social and emotional support for members, with social interaction on a day-to-day level. This is very similar to practitioner behaviour in the Scottish situation where women predominate, hence my adoption of the term.

My personal position throughout this work will be that of a bothsider, an academic writer and practicing healer. Being a bothsider has, as we shall see, raised its own particular set of theoretical and indeed personal questions. For I have been changed by my experiences within healing circles as here we find Western science, rationality and objectivity being critiqued with regard to their appropriateness as interpretative frameworks. Yet this book is written for academic evaluation where, in part, ‘”the empirical and logical rationality that defines knowledge as knowledge of fact” is a rationality that is not hospitable to “the insights of art, religion, fantasy or dream”’ (Goulet citing Burridge 1960: 251 in Young and Goulet 1994: 18). This means that tensions have arisen with regard to my own subjective positioning ‘as healer’ and as academic researcher. However, we would also do well to remember that academics do not sit in isolation cut off from the rest of the world. For as Paul Heelas has proposed, some academics show distinct signs of being influenced by spiritual assumptions and experiences in the same way that some ‘New Agers …write in ways which are hard to differentiate from the academic’ (1996:10).

My experiences of this ‘fluidity of identity boundaries’ began primarily with my initiation as a Reiki practitioner. In learning to heal I entered a new world of meaning, a world where emphasis was placed on ‘sensing energy through the hands’ and ‘trusting intuitive guidance’ rather than ‘seeing’ solely within academic and scientific paradigms. I was taught to feel ‘the energy flow’ within the physical body and to acknowledge that there are ‘aspects of being’ that reason cannot grasp.

This has been an enlightening and challenging experience. For it is hard to write about ‘the feel’ of doing healing work. Similarly, while a practical demonstration of Reiki would be readily acknowledged—and indeed expected—by a New Age audience, no such space is made within academic circles. One should, therefore, keep firmly in mind the highly complex nature of sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping ‘senses of self’ and ‘plurality of roles’ and the relationship of the same to ‘authoritative’ discourse and practice. Therefore, throughout this work, my engagement with these sorts of tensions will be reflected in my choice of academic writers. Later in this book, for example, I introduce questions about the artificially constructed nature of academic text and the political positioning of the researcher.

Before I outline further the discourses running through this book, and on a methodological note, it is important to appreciate from the start that within New Age networks (and on occasion within academic writing on this field of contemporary practice), there is a tendency to use terminology somewhat loosely. Correspondingly when I review populist discourse within New Age textual material throughout this book, such as books, healing workshop manuals and New Age web sites that promote holistic healing as part of various energetic cosmologies, we shall find that ‘religiosity’, ‘religious-like’, ‘religious/spiritual philosophies’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ are regularly intermingled by writers and practitioners alike.

The most significant point when we come to Scottish healing at least, is that ‘the spiritual’ is generally regarded as being ‘personally experienced’. ‘Religion’, in turn, is generally regarded as being problematic in its institutionalized form as the location for dogma, patriarchal hierarchies and mediated access to ‘the spiritual’. And although this work focuses on healing in central Scotland, it might sit just as well in the North American or European contexts. For here too, Reiki and other forms of healing practice are carried out on a daily basis with similar aims and ambitions.

Throughout my fieldwork I have subscribed, as Paul Stoller has proposed, to the fundamental rule that even though I am going to research from the position of the ‘intellectualist gaze’, I also need to appreciate that ‘one cannot separate thought from feeling and action – [for] they are inextricably linked’ (1989: 5). I therefore ground my theoretical research in descriptive ethnography for how people come to knowledge of ‘what it is to be a healer’ is intimately tied to one’s embodied state and perceived connections with ‘all that is’.

It is also my intention throughout this research to apply a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion so that I may ask, utilizing gender as an analytical category, questions such as:

• If New Age healers promote the balancing of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ elements within the individual, then who promotes this sort of standpoint and why? How does this relate to representations of the body ‘as energetic’?
• If healers promote new forms of gender identity, how does this relate to ‘assertions of power, authority and privilege’ (McGuire 1994: 284)?
• How do healees/healers form new conceptions of health and disease? How does this relate to reinscriptions of the body and discourses of power?
• Are New Age women engaged in a politics of reclamation with regard to healing practice and theologies of the same? How does this relate to the corresponding development of new and empowered identities ‘as healer’?

As mentioned earlier, when I ask questions such as these I shall keep firmly in mind the centrality of embodied experience within New Age discourses. For as the New Age body is socially constructed and trained through a diversity of practices from yoga to fire walking, an examination of its sensual responses and strategies for empowerment is essential.

Fieldwork Context: Scotland

Fieldwork has been carried out primarily in 2000 and 2001. I was initiated as a Reiki practitioner at two weekend workshops in Dunfermline, the first in August 2000, the second in November of that same year. I continued to take part in monthly Reiki gatherings over the next eighteen months until these stopped with the ‘retirement’ of our Reiki Master. I met up with other practitioners until 2002 and still ‘do’ Reiki for friends and family.

In May of 2001 I also took part in a three day ‘Reiki Techniques’ workshop at The Salisbury Centre in Edinburgh. And although this material will form the basis for another book, in this work, I draw selectively from questionnaire material as completed by 33 of the 40 participants (see Appendix B) and follow-up phone interviews as carried out in May and early June of this same year with the ten respondents who had agreed to be contacted.

The Salisbury Centre was also the location for a ‘Healing Circle’ taught by Maureen Lockhart. I travelled to this one night a week for six weeks in the spring of 2001. It was also at this location that I participated in a ‘Healing Through Consciousness’ two-day workshop in the summer of 2001. Both of these events are discussed in Chapter Four.

I also visited numerous health fairs in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling and Dunfermline and have continued to keep in contact with healers in Tayside and Fife. During this period of fieldwork I always informed participants of the general direction of my book— namely that I was researching healing from a gender perspective— though I did not explicitly voice my particular interest in multivalent discourses of power and representation.

Having personally engaged with and travelled along a ‘seekers’ path’ before commencing this research, I knew the location of many New Age bookshops and I had spent considerable time perusing the Mind Body and Spirit sections of mainstream bookstores. I was aware of the popularity of the ‘spiritual shopping’ perspective where one could purchase crystals and incense, Buddhas and Ganeshas and place these in the home where they might be used in ‘spiritual practice’. However, at this point I had not taken part in New Age workshops where one could actually learn to heal or where one could listen to emotional, narrated life stories of ‘what worked for me in my spiritual journey home’. It is to my experiences of these sorts of workshops that I turn in later ethnographic chapters. However, the initial appeal of locations such as The Salisbury Centre in Edinburgh is perhaps the emphasis on learning particular types of healing in a weekend or evening workshop so that these can later be utilized at home for practical, transformative effect. Their brochure puts it in the following manner,

We believe [that this Centre] provides a valuable resource to anyone who would like to improve the quality of their life by becoming more internally conscious and aware (SC2: 2003 Brochure).

Hence learnt skills are taken back into the local community where circles of healing practice become located – frequented primarily by women. It was primarily for this reason that I chose to focus on the above centre. This location appears to be the starting point for many women in central Scotland on their way to ‘improving their life’ in a holistic manner and in the forming of circles of ‘like minded’ acquaintances. The Salisbury Centre also appears to be so well regarded in central Scotland that they do not need to advertise at health fairs. Rather, past attendees spread news of their experiences to other men and women in a generally ‘why not go and try this…it worked for me’ kind of format. And it was precisely this ‘word of mouth’ transmission of experiences of healing practice, which led me to one of the primary focuses of this book. For in nearly all of the locations I had visited, I kept hearing the same question. ‘Have you tried Reiki yet?’

Reiki is described by practitioners as being a healing practice that was rediscovered in Japan in the early years of the nineteenth century. It is highly popular within British and across American settings, with further groups practising in Japan, Europe and Asia. Therefore this seemed to me to be an ideal practice to focus on rather more extensively. My initial aims were to find out more about shared constructions of ‘how the world works’ and look at how these ideas related to people’s experiences of the actualities of healing practice, while also looking at the formation of gendered identities and power. In order to facilitate this research I have spent over four years within Reiki circles in central Scotland and have stepped sideways in New Age fields to learn more about auras, chakras and perceptions of the relationships between energetic pathways and the body as holistic.

Hence I am in accord with James Clifford (1986) for example, when he argues that it is necessary to study people in fluid social and political cultural contexts where they engage in continual dialogues of power and representation. This positioning is of considerable relevance to this study of healing. For healers do live in a world where identity boundaries are blurred (as with, for example, my location as a bothsider). And healers do learn to represent their practices and beliefs in particular ways for particular audiences in decentralised relationships of power.

However, before I begin to present ethnographic and literary material as found over these last four years, it will be useful to briefly locate this particular study of New Age healing and gender alongside feminist critiques of contemporary methodological debates - as found in social and cultural anthropology. These will be drawn from the work of Henrietta Moore (1988) and Marjorie Woolf (1992). Specific feminist ethnography relating to healing in the parallel fields of Wicca and Goddess spirituality will be introduced in the next chapter. I will close this chapter by introducing feminist historian Joan Scott’s (1986) ‘gender as an analytical category’ framework, for this framework will be conceptually underlaid throughout this book as it fits well with Meredith McGuire’s proposal that ‘analysis of gendered spirituality may shed light on new patterns of individual-to-society relationships, the changing nature of identity and autonomy in modern contexts, and how religion (in both traditional and new forms) shapes and reflects these changes’ (1994: 274).

Feminist Ethnography

A common theme as introduced in this chapter has been the acknowledgement that issues of power and authority must remain central to anthropological research. This research for example, is a first step in addressing the academic under-representation and silencing of women engaged in New Age practice in Scotland— particularly as women make up around seventy percent of participants. For power operates at all levels of ‘received knowledge’ and is a particular concern for feminist writers. Marjorie Woolf, for example, proposes that,

The feminist’s sensitivity to power as a factor in all our research, and our enhanced understanding (through political struggle) of both ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Setting the Scene
• Chapter Two The ‘New Age’
• Chapter Three Healing in the ‘New Age’
• Chapter Four Energetic Bodies
• Chapter Five Writing Reiki History
• Chapter Six Doing Reiki
• Chapter Seven Powerful Bodies
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors