The Hidden Wisdom in the Usui Memorial Stone
May 21, 2025
If you don’t know what ‘beaming’ is, it’s facing your hands towards someone or something and ‘beaming’ Reiki at them. In my recent Online Reiki Coaching Group, animal Reiki teacher Janet Dobbs spoke up about how frightening and possibly even aggressive ‘beaming’ can come across, when working with animals. By animals, I always remind myself that humans and non-human animals together exist as One, we are all animals. And it made me consider what beaming with the hands is actually doing and whether we even need to work in this way.
Recently, I left my three dogs in the care of a lovely house sitter. One of the dogs, Muttley, has severe separation anxiety due to being left in an abandoned house after losing his human. He hid in the garden on the first night and then slept under a weatherproof sail on an outdoor lounge throughout the rest of our absence. From here he could watch the ‘intruder’ (ie. the house sitter) as he waited for his real humans to come home. This mightn’t sound too dire, but the weather was abominable and one thing Muttley truly hates is rain. How did his human and non-human animal friends help him get through this scary experience? With Reiki, of course.
Bowie, my big white Maremma, immediately took charge. Normally Bowie is quite jealous of Muttley, but he put that aside (for now). It’s pouring rain and out he goes to sit by Muttley, present and calm, offering himself without agenda. This natural response reveals something profound about what it means to heal that I think we’ve complicated in Western Reiki practice. When we think we’re ‘beaming’ energy from our hands—we’re creating separation where none exists. We have forgotten what the Japanese Reiki association’s manual tells us: Usui taught that we heal with our hands, our eyes, and our breath. This isn’t just about literal body parts—it means we heal with our entire being.
The moment we imagine we’re projecting energy to another being, whether human or non-human, we’ve missed the point entirely. A dog doesn’t try to support healing by sending energy across the room. It lies down, sharing warmth and presence. This instinctive wisdom understands what traditional Japanese practice has always known—healing happens in shared space, not projected distance. When we place our hands on any living being, we’re not transmitting something from ourselves to them. We’re remembering our connection where both beings know the wholeness that was never actually broken.
Dogs teach us about true presence because they can’t perform spirituality—they can only be it. A dog doesn’t pretend to channel energy when nuzzling another dog; it simply offers authentic connection with its whole being. Yet we humans have turned this natural capacity into something we think we must do rather than something we simply are. Those dramatic hand positions and visualisation techniques can create the very separation that healing seeks to dissolve. In traditional Japanese understanding, the more empty we become of our own agenda—the more we stop trying to fix, send, or direct—the more space there is for natural healing to unfold.
The difference between beaming and being present shows up in our bodies too. When we’re trying to project energy, there’s tension, effort, a sense of pushing something outward. But when we show up with our whole self—hands and body present, intelligent eyes loving and softly direct, breath flowing naturally—something different happens. Our breath naturally synchronises with another being. Our nervous systems begin to co-regulate. And our minds stop clutching at thoughts. This isn’t mystical—it’s biological. We’re recognising the field of aliveness we’ve always shared, whether with our child, our dog, or ourselves. Dogs know this instinctively, which is why their healing presence feels so genuine.
True Reiki practice is as ordinary as a mother’s hand on a fevered forehead, as natural as sitting quietly with a grieving friend or, as in my case, being with Muttley from afar. It requires no special poses, no dramatic gestures, no performance for social media. Unlike Bowie with Muttley in the rain, we humans need to practice our meditations and contemplations to help ourselves to let go, to be like them and for that we have the system of Reiki. The system that teaches us to show up fully present with our entire being, hands, eyes, and breath unified in authentic connection. In this art of not beaming, we discover that the most profound healing happens when we stop trying to heal at all and instead offer the gift of our complete, undivided presence. Just like a dog who knows instinctively that love is presence, not projection.
Listen to a podcast about this subject:
