When I first heard about Reiki, it was from my friend’s husband, a dental surgeon who spent a weekend learning this “healing thing” from a hospital colleague. I was a banker then, and the words Reiki entered one ear and left through the other one.

 Two years later, still a banker, I was initiated in the Reiki healing art.

As a child I had an artistic inclination. I would fill my days with painting, beading, sewing, and writing. I started writing as soon as I learned the alphabet. I had dreams of being a writer and illustrator of my own books, just like St.Exupery did with his “Little Prince”. Then life happened and I followed a logical, practical path of education and occupation. My university years were followed by years of working in the corporate world: International Trade; Freight Forwarding; Banking. I have trained myself to make educated choices, based on my logical, analytical thinking. I stopped writing, painting and anything crafty or artistic, except for my cooking.

 Most of my nine years of banking were spent in the international trade business section. Following procedure was part of my work: opening letters of credit; making money payments; correspondence with other banks. But a large part of my work required swift and effective decision-making, often against deadlines. Sales were also part of my job’s requirements and I was to find creative ways to sell lines of credit, credit cards and sometimes insurance to my clients. I thought of myself as less than a talented sales person, and even though I had great rapport with the bank’s clients, I could not sell them a banking product if my life depended on it.

When I decided to learn Reiki, I was in the middle of reading a book on this healing art. I was thinking “this is too good to be true” and “this is way out there” while secretly hoping that the book’s claims were true after all. The Reiki class involved some theory and hands-on practice. The central part of it was a ceremony of initiation, during which my teacher performed unusual movements around me while I was sitting with my eyes closed. To me this all looked bizarre, and I was ready to run away and ask for a refund, but something made me stay. Soon after the ceremony, I started seeing beautiful swirls of colors in front of my closed eyes, as if spiraling from my “Third Eye”, the midway point between my eyebrows. Within a few days, my feet took me to an art supply store and next thing I knew, I walked out of there carrying a bag full of artist’s chalks, pastels and a sketch book. I started painting and drawing again; later on, I began writing. My creativity had returned!

Here’s how I used creative problem-solving to promote my business and initiate, plan and organize a business event:

 When I noticed the many positive changes the Reiki initiation brought me, I decided I want to pursue it professionally. I quit my banking career and became an entrepreneur. Moving to a new city some years ago, I joined BNI, a well-known business breakfast networking organization. My chapter colleagues were business people or entrepreneurs from various sectors: lawyers, real-estate agents, garage mechanics, house inspectors, insurance agents. They didn’t consume healing arts as part of their lifestyle and often chuckled at my infomercials on Reiki. After going through boxes of Kleenex with tears of discouragement, I decided to take action and solve my problem creatively. I mentally connected to the Reiki energy and focused on a solution. Inspiration came to me like an instantaneous software download.

 I decided to educate my BNI colleagues and organize a health and wellness awareness event.

 From follower to leader, equipped with Reiki!

Inspired by the Reiki intelligence I demonstrated what I never thought I had flowing through my veins: leadership skills!

I logged on to the BNI website of my geographic region and looked up anyone working in the area of health, wellness and personal development. I found a list of chiropractors, naturopaths, psychologists, personal trainers, reflexologists and even other Reiki professionals. I sent out an email to all of them, inviting them to join me in organizing a health and wellness event through BNI, in order to educate everyone else on our professional field. I received tens of enthusiastic replies. Within a few days, I had the approval of the two regional executive directors, and I was chairperson of the BNI Health and Wellness Event committee. The event was a success, a win-win for all, and it blew my own socks away: Wow! I didn’t know I could do that!

To me, it was an increasing desire to uncover and achieve even more. How much more can I create? What other abilities can I explore that I didn’t know I had? What can this tremendous inspired creative problem-solving capacity do for my business?

 I found out that success builds on success. Flushing the creativity channel brings more and more downloads – streams of ideas and intuition based on the purpose that I place my focus on. So when I want to expand my business, I focus on it, connect to the flow of Reiki, and I watch the ideas come. Whether it’s business or money-making ideas, writing topics or any other endeavor, I find myself addicted to the feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that comes with a creation work well done.

  “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

 Why would Archimedes, Einstein, Edison or Robert Kiosaki benefit from inspiration? What good serves intuition to the logical thinker? Intuition is paramount because every scientific discovery or entrepreneurial solution comes from an intuitive spark, an “aha!” The greatest inventions are not results of logical analysis of the left brain. The left brain is your computer, dealing with data entry, data processing and storage, data retrieving. Any new ideas come through your intuition, the creative right brain, and for that to happen, the creativity channels must be open! Great ideas come from a source other than logic and Reiki is a type of frequency that comes from the same very source as Edison’s light bulb idea, Mozart’s music and DaVinci’s inventions. Whoever connects to Reiki connects to the same source of information. The source of information is a broadcast available to all. Reiki opens up pathways to this source. It’s as simple as that.

 Reiki is a type of Life Force Energy (Chi / Ki / Prana) guided by universal intelligence (Rei). Rei is largely referred to as “Spirit”, therefore Reiki is known as Spiritual Energy. While the source of all energy is one, there is a great variety of frequencies around. Just like all music is essentially sound, no two songs are alike. There is a great variety of musical experiences from folklore songs to jazz to symphonies. Similarly, there are varieties of spiritual energies stemming from the same source.

 As a healing art, Reiki can only be acquired from a Reiki Teaching Master who has been “wired” with the ability to open others to its frequencies. Originated from Japan, the western Reiki has a lineage of Reiki Masters going back to Mikao Usui, a Buddhist Monk from Japan. In this age of East-meets-West and Right Brain-meets-Left brain, Reiki is spreading widely throughout the world, used for anything from health and wellness to human and spiritual development to creative problem-solving. Just like I do.