THE OPEN HAND
Reiki, Ki, and the Other Side of the Martial Arts
By Mike Frazier
Paperback
Paperback
$29.95
+ $12 Priority Postage
+ $12 Priority Postage
A martial artist stands in a dojo. Feet placed deliberately. Spine upright. Breathing settles into the abdomen. Attention goes quiet. Hands assume a prescribed position. Across town, a Reiki practitioner begins a session in remarkably similar fashion. Calming the mind, slowing the breath, bringing energy to his hands.
The comparison is deliberately provocative. One practice prepares the body for conflict. The other prepares the hands for healing. Yet both are Japanese systems of disciplined bodily practice, developed in the same culture, drawing on much of the same vocabulary of breath, center, and attention. Are these similarities superficial? Or do they reveal something real about the Japanese cultural world Reiki actually came from?
Japanese jujutsu and judo traditions developed and preserved kappō and kuatsu, resuscitation methods taught alongside the very choking and striking techniques capable of rendering a training partner unconscious in the first place — a student who mastered shime-waza, choking technique, was traditionally expected to also master the specific methods for reviving a partner choked into unconsciousness, taught within the identical curriculum as the technique that caused the collapse. True martial artists can paralyze with a fingertip and heal with a touch. They can break a bone and set it. They can kill and restore to life. With such power comes great responsibility, and restraint.
The martial artist studies how bodies lose balance. The healer studies how bodies recover it. The martial artist studies vulnerability specifically in order to survive violence aimed at exploiting it. The healer approaches the identical vulnerability with an entirely different intention, carried in exactly the same trained, attentive hands.
The hand has always known both possibilities. The choice of what to do with it has only ever belonged to the practitioner.
Ask an American what Ki means and you’ll usually get one answer: energy. Invisible, sometimes glowing in cartoons, occasionally fired from the palms in video games. That translation isn’t false so much as it’s a single, narrow slice of a word that never worked that narrowly in Japanese. Ki, written with the character 気, shares deep roots with the Chinese qi, 氣, and both languages have used the term for centuries to cover territory no single English word actually covers.
Ki can mean breath. It shows up in ordinary Japanese phrases about breathing, about atmosphere, about the felt quality of a room. It can mean mood or spirit. It can mean attention, meaning focus your mind. It can mean intention, condition, presence, the felt quality of a person entering a room before they’ve said a word. A traditional Japanese speaker could use ki in a sentence about the weather, a sentence about someone’s health, and a sentence about a swordsman’s readiness, and mean something coherent and related each time.
In Reiki and Martial Arts this matters enormously because both rely heavily on "energizing the hands with Ki" for board breaking or for healing.
Paperback | $29.95
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