This past month saw a milestone in Reiki classes. Brian has been keeping track of Reiki students since 2004. That is when he started having students fill out comment forms at the end of classes. This month, the number of students that have taken Reiki 1 has passed 400. That is an amazing number. Combining that with 184 students that have taken Reiki 2, and the 90 students that have taken Reiki 3, that means that Brian has taught 674 students in his Reiki classes, and this number does not include those that took classes between 1997 and 2004.    

Caring Palms Massage and Reiki is looking for a female therapist(s) to add to its staff of talented individuals. This person could be full or part time. Caring Palms pays 50% of the billed amount before discounts. All discounts come out of Caring Palms' end. All tips go to the therapist in full. If you are interested, or you know of anyone that might be interested, please have them call Brian at the studio at 904-246-2206, or email him at brian@caringpalms.com to schedule an interview.

by Brian Dean 

We hear this all the time... we're in a situation and need to make a decision, and someone says, "Trust your gut." But what does that mean? Does it mean to listen to the noises coming from there? The rumbling? Maybe your gut is telling you that it is lunchtime. Probably not.

What it means is to have faith in your intuition, your gut feeling. To go with that unseen, unquantifiable something, ignoring whatever reasoning we have built up that proves that wrong. It is to trust something that makes no sense in the face of logic and hard evidence. Good investigators do it all the time. I know. I've seen it on the cop shows on TV.

The problem with gut reasoning is that we tend to explain it away with mental reasoning. When I teach the beginning level of Reiki to students, I teach them hand scanning, a method of locating someone's problem areas simply by running one's hand over them a few inches above the body. What the students do is look for temperature changes (yes, I am giving away a big secret here). When they encounter a change, that is usually where a problem lies. It take some practice and an instructor to help determine what criteria they are looking for.

As I watch students try this for the first time, I see them have doubts at everything they find. First they find something. Then they go over it again to make sure. Then they do this five more time, just to be positive. And somewhere in that amount of retries, they convince themselves that they really didn't feel anything at all.

This is the point where they are sure they never felt anything, where they threw out their gut feeling, and went with cold, hard reason. The problem is that cold, hard reason can be wrong. And it is talking ourselves out of it that turns us away from the truth, whether that be seen, or unseen.

I have been where the students have. Worse, I have been through this in a live situation. I was working one of my Reiki teacher's psychic fairs many years ago. I had something like 20 minutes to do Reiki on people that wanted it, and this time included all the prep work and scanning. So, when I hand scanned, I did it very quickly, so fast, in fact, that I knew I was missing small stuff.

My client asked me if I had felt anything in her left breast. I had not, but on rescanning, I did. Of course, I played devil's advocate with myself.... "Did I feel it because it was there, or because I expected to find something there?" I decided to go with my gut. I did feel something. I could not tell what it was. It could be serious, or not. All I knew was that it was negative energy.

I did the right thing, and recommended that she have it checked out by a doctor. She stated that she did not like doctors. I told her that she thought something was there, and I thought something was there, and that she should have it checked out. These are the people we healers usually never see again, and we have to trust that what we told them was correct. All we can do is have faith in ourselves and that gut feeling that said we actually did feel something. And considering that I scan people now by closing my eyes and looking at their energies, I have to have lots of faith that I am seeing what is there.

So it comes down to believing in ourselves, in our abilities, in our gut. Basically to have faith in ourselves.

And by the way, I did a similar scan on people during the time of the fairs, and there were about three that I had felt had a problem and recommended that they consult a doctor. At one of the fairs during the last couple years before my teacher passed over, a lady came in, saw me and says, "I remember you. You told me I had a problem, and to see a doctor. And dammit, you were right!" So maybe I saved someone's life. I can only hope she wasn't the only one.

During the third week in July, Brian attended mediumship classes at the 9^th annual Stansted in Florida seminar, which was designed to emulate the classes at the Arthur Findlay school in Stansted, England. He and others learned from two wonderful teachers. One track was specifically working with mediumship, connecting to spirit, passing on messages, getting details. The other track was a more advanced and dealt with trance, getting into a trance state, getting information in trance, doing trance healing, and speaking. It was all very enlightening and stretched each student's abilities. Brian is already looking forward to next year's seminar.