My own paraphrasing:

Love,

For today only,

let go of anger,

let go of worry,

be grateful,

be humble,

Follow The Way with Integrity,

Be kind to All,

Love

“For today only”

A call for living in the present moment. I love this and sometimes chant it over and over. I sometimes say all five precepts with “For today only” in front of each one. It makes it much less daunting if we are only trying to get in alignment today. I can always be an asshole tomorrow, I joke to myself.

“Let go of anger. Let go of worry.”

Anger and worry are natural emotions and totally fine to have. But if we have them frequently enough we can notice that at a certain point we have had enough. Perhaps there is something our feelings are trying to tell us? Something deeper we want to release or address? So we address it and release it in a healthy way, and change what needs to be changed in our life and then move on. We don’t want to live in constant worry or anger because that is a ‘tightening’ type energy. It is restricting, and that restricts Reiki. We all have a certain amount of residual anger and worry stored from the day, and yesterday’s day etc. So it can be helpful to mindfully bring awareness to it and let go. Yoga, Tai Chi and massage can be helpful, as well as sauna, cold water, or baths. Some scientists have found that anger and worrying restrict muscles, and that tightens certain areas and limits blood flow, which limits oxygen and nutrient flow, and causes pain and hurts cells and healing.

“Be grateful. Be humble.”

Gratitude is attitude; a scientifically shown way to be happier which then changes your whole energy and operation of your body for the better. It is always nice to be around humble people isn’t it?

Especially since our view of reality is so limited, we can’t really claim to know anything, so being humble is the most logical thing. The wiser one is, the more humble they are. ‘I am the greatest fool’, like Plato recounts. Any accomplishment isn’t just from us. It is from the sunshine and rain that made our food, and then animated us. It is from our ancestors, our parents, our teachers. In a way, humility and gratitude are linked. When you really start seeing how massive the universe is and how it supports us with every photon that strikes Earth and how insignificant we are, it brings an awe-inspiring sense of humility and gratitude that we happen to be some of the few fluke specks of stardust that got to experience LIFE! Holy shit. We are SO lucky! We are SO small. We are SO supported. It helps the healing process. It is difficult sometimes when we are sick. Reiki, community, and other practices are here to help us get there. It is good to chant and remind ourselves. Miserable people often blame others instead of taking responsibility. Blaming others and judging is not being grateful or humble. It is a tightening type of energy and bitter and spiteful and unattractive. Gratitude and humility leads to openness and makes love come easier. It doesn’t restrict but expands.

Many people like to call each others’ partner adoringly “My Queen!” or “My King!” these days. How can we treat each other more like royalty, as we all deserve? To be truly King-like means to be gracious. That is why in the past, people would call the King and Queen “My grace”. It comes from the same Latin root word, gratia. This is also where the word gratitude comes from.

Grace = Gratitude?

How?

To be graceful is to be elegant and forgiving and generous. To be generous comes in part from the Latin word, genus, which means of High Birth. So it is a Kingly attribute to be generous. When we allow ourselves to let go of victimization and “the world owes me!” mentality and let go of arrogance, what are we left with? We are left with our true birthright as Children of God. We don’t need to be arrogant to make up for insecurity. We don’t need to be stingy to make up for a sense of lack. We know our spiritual lineage. We are all of noble birth. We can give people our greatest treasure: our full attention in the present moment.

We are all naturally grateful and humble. When we are, we act like Kings and Queens. Kings and Queens are graceful, they give graciously, they have gratitude, they give freely without any kind of scarcity-type feelings, and so they are generous. At least this is the archetype we have available to us. We don’t need to try to look a certain way to be beautiful and King-like and Queen-like. We instead can let go of what isn’t serving us and be ourselves, and then we will radiate our true self, which is naturally beautiful, and somehow the ‘imperfections’ are cute. Perfection isn’t beautiful. The Japanese have an aesthetic called wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in natural imperfections. You may have heard of kintsugi, where a broken pot is fixed with the crack highlighted in gold; that is a subset of wabi-sabi.

Be grateful. Be humble. Remember that you are Cosmic Royalty. When you do, you will act like royalty, and you will naturally exude grace, generosity, and the joy that comes from gratitude.

“Follow The Way with integrity”

I took the most liberty with this one. It is also the most difficult to interpret from Japanese. The more literal translation is something like “Do your work honestly”. It was written in a poetic manner, and is thought to have meant your business and profession, and also spiritual path. Attaining enlightenment through the arts and perfecting one’s craft is a beautiful thing in Japan and very palpable there. In the US, “work” and this kind of attitude is difficult to translate. Like a lot of Americans, I don’t have a healthy image of the word “work” so I took it out.

For myself, I will sometimes imagine someone training as a samurai, or forging a beautiful samurai sword with great care, or doing an incense meditation or flower arrangement meditation or tea ceremony as a mindfulness practice and a beautiful expression of the art that is life, and a reminder that we are all artists creating our own reality, our own masterpiece. Follow The Way with Integrity means to yes, make your living in an honest manner, but also to fervently be yourself and follow your own path. Sometimes we get lazy or stray from the path that our heart knows is true. This helps remind me to be true to myself. “To thine own self be true”, and “Know thyself”. It is so fun when East meets West!

Do you have some dark tendencies? Of course, we all do. That’s ok. That’s part of who you are. Be yourself. Follow it to its natural conclusion. Honor your teachers and experience and ancestors who made you that way. There is some wisdom to it. Learn how to wield it in a positive manner that is in harmony with the universe. Carl Jung says we must embrace our shadow and integrate it. Western psychology agrees that ‘what we resist, persists’. So don’t hold on and repress, but let that shit go.

It is often the judgement of others and society which makes us feel bad. We have amazing gifts and these gifts don’t fit into society. So people make us feel bad about who we are. We repress our gifts and hide our true self. This is one of the saddest parts about being human. Society makes us feel like shit for being special and different. You aren’t bad. I promise. It is the repression that makes us do things we regret. Letting our self loose may be crazy at first. It might get a little out of hand and then we can have compassion for why society creates recommendations and guardrails and norms. We find balance with practice. It is not quite the same as “If it feels good, do it”. It is less hedonistic than that. It is not quite the same as “Follow your bliss”, although that’s closer. It is “Follow The Way with integrity”. Be honest. Be yourself; always.

“Be kind to all”

This one is very self-explanatory. If you are ever not sure if you are Following The Way with Integrity, then ask yourself “Am I being kind?”. Then you will know. Kindness is similar to love and it helps open up the healing. Thich Nhat Hanh says that judgement is the opposite of love. He beautifully encouraged us to practice being in the present moment, and when we observe ourselves, to do so without judgement and then to allow our thoughts to flow and return to the present moment. Again, it is difficult to just follow someone saying “Be kind damnit!”. But by chanting “Be kind to all” we can help it sink into our subconscious. By practicing Reiki, meditation, mindfulness and prayer we can catch ourself when we see judgements about something or someone or think ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like this’. We practice letting the thoughts come and go easily and judgements come and go easily with less attachment. We practice being kind to ourselves. We unlearn the habit of judging and narrating everything all the time. That is the only way we can be kind to others. We cannot be a jerk to ourselves and kind to others. It always leaks through, and people sense that something is off. Be Kind to All is a reminder to be kind to yourself and care for yourself since that is the best way to help others.

“Love”

Love is patient, love is kind… I added “Love” because of my Christian upbringing. I feel like it sums up all the other precepts in one word. It gives me feelings of the mystical origins of Christianity, of the yearning for intimacy with God, of how Israel means “struggle with God”. Adam and Eve, Moses and the fire; it was always about reaching out and communing with God, and God is Love. Noah and the Ark. God just keeps chasing and chasing after us. The prodigal son. I love that story. Our love for Spirit helps us love ourselves and others and gets us in harmony with the Holy Spirit, or as the Hawaiians say, “mana”. Most cultures have some word for it, like “prana” and “chi”.

The word “Love” conjures up a Laughing Jesus in my head, like the one that appeared in Playboy. That makes me wonder if Playboy gets Jesus better than most! That’s how I like to imagine Jesus. I don’t think he was all ‘woe is me’ all the time. My experience with Reiki has taught me that ‘woe is me’ is a restricting energy. Contraction restricts love. Expansion releases love. We don’t need to even focus on love or ethics. Just pay attention to your body. When your body language is constricting you are in some kind of survival Fear Mode and constricting blood and running away from love and feeling stressed. When you are expanding, you are feeling safe, easy, calm, and content and you are in Love Mode and you naturally release Love. You don’t have to try. It is better not to try. If you try, you look like a poser.

That’s the cool, miraculous thing: with Reiki, one can directly tap into Spirit, so you can find your own truth. The truths of other religions don’t need to bother you. Suddenly, billions of people believing in a sad, serious Jesus is more hilarious than it is a cause for war. It suddenly doesn’t matter what people’s politics are at Thanksgiving Dinner. You have a dysfunctional family. What a wonderful thing to laugh about and be thankful for! What a wonderful test to see if you are still getting sucked into petty things and still haven’t learned the lessons they have come to give you! You can be thankful for lessons the way the Dalai Lama is thankful to the Chinese for kicking him out of his homeland. It may take a little faking at first. It’s ok to be angry. For today only, I let go of anger. I feel it, I let it run through my body and I let it go without hurting anyone. That’s love.

Our global consciousness is shifting from old dogma, back to the way things were when we were hunters and gatherers: a shamanic, direct experience with the Divine is opening up to all of us. For me it is with Reiki. For others, it is with other transcendent experiences, and that is a beautiful thing. I hope if it is truly Divine, they will agree with Kurt Vonnegut and “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind!” and not use their divine experiences to make some kind of scam or become egotistical about it and go on and on laboriously with a lot of text on some silly website… anyway…