If you have ever looked into Reiki and energy healing modalities, you may have heard the word “attunement.”
You may find yourself wondering what the heck an attunement is and how it works. It may even sound a little bit like magical thinking.
In a nutshell, a Reiki attunement is a process that your Reiki master goes through with you in class. What the attunement does is open up your energy system, so you can channel energy more efficiently.
The Reiki master prepares by opening up his or her own energy with some exercises or meditations. Then, they go through a very practiced ritual to help you to open your energy system.
I know, you are still thinking that I am talking in whoo whoo talk right? I will explain….
There are many things in this life that effect our mood and our energy. Think about something as universal as music. When you listen to quiet relaxing music, you tend to get relaxed. If you have to do some house cleaning or hard work, you will probably choose something with a good beat. Why do you do this? The simple answer is that the energy of the music can help pick up your energy so you can get your work done.
Your energy is also very much influenced by other people. I don’t think I need to explain much about this. I think everyone knows how it feels to be around someone who is angry and negative vs someone who is positive and happy.
Energy is influenced by many things. We are energetic beings. I could go on about that one, but suffice it to say that every living thing on the planet has an energy field. This field is external and internal.
So, getting back to the attunement thing – If you have an energy field, and your energy field can be influenced by your environment, we can make changes to your field.
This is basically what an attunement is about. When you have an attunement, you will normally be lead through a relaxation exercise or meditation before the attunement. This relaxes you, so you can receive the energy of the attunement more easily. After the relaxation exercise, the Reiki master imprints some sacred Reiki symbols into your aura and into your chakras. They touch your hands and open up your palms so that your hands become more sensitive. There is usually some sort of sacred breath work as well.
It is really quite a simple process and I did mention the word “ritual” earlier, so I will touch briefly on that. Putting aside all spiritual belief systems for a moment- rituals have power because people believe in them. Actions that are repeated again and again with a certain intention will produce emotions and expectations within a person that can be quite powerful. When I perform an attunement on one of my students I am repeating a ritual that has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times all over the world. I am using a very strong intention to influence your energy field. This opens you up to the ability to channel energy and voila! We have another Reiki practitioner.
Some Reiki styles break the attunement into 2 to 4 parts, so you may see some classes with more attunements than others. Rest assured, as long as you are getting at least one attunement per level, you have got the whole thing. 🙂
Hope that takes some of the mystery out of Reiki attunements.