Seems that every year I just keep getting busier and busier and it doesn’t really seem like I ever have enough time to do the things I really want to do!
Sound familiar? If so, I am dedicating this post to you and offer a few suggestions for making sure there is always enough time for Reiki. Quality time, that is, not just enough Reiki to get you through your daily self-healings, but enough to actually make an impact in your life. Interested? Read on!
In my post entitled Reiki on the Run I briefly touched on the concept of time management. I believe that to be the true culprit in the never ending battle against time. The advice given in that post regarding 33.33 or 22.22 minutes is, if I have to say so myself, pure gold. I cannot lay claim to coming up with the idea but I can sure lay claim to being one of its strongest supporters. If you haven’t tried it, get yourself a little kitchen timer at your nearest dollar shop and give it a while… it really is phenomenal once you get used to it.
Second to the above the best way to free up time for Reiki is by eliminating activities that are not important in lieu of those that are. Steven R. Covey, in his highly acclaimed book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peoplepresents an awesome tool in his Time Management Matrix. In a nutshell we basically spend our time in one of four ways based on whether the activity is urgent (like answering the telephone) or important (things that help us to reach our goals). So the four ways we spend our time are either doing urgent/important things (meeting deadlines, getting the kids ready for school in the morning), not urgent/important things (working, planning, recreating), urgent/not important things (phone calls, interruptions), or not urgent/not important things (surfing the net, chatting on the phone, surfing the television). Covey recommends spending a week listing everything we do and then sorting it into one of these four groups to get a good idea of how we are spending far too much time on not urgent/not important things. Then all we have to do is eliminate them in order to free up vast chunks of time.
Third & finally, you should decide in advance how you can fit Reiki into the things you are already doing. Chapter 3 of my upcoming book on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Reiki Practitioners (and its companion volume The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Reiki Masters) in its discussion of Habit 3 (Put First Things First) takes the above idea one step farther by not only classifying our activities into one of the four above mentioned groups, but also deciding which of these support our Reiki practice (or not). In other words, deciding in advance how we can fit Reiki into our schedule by applying it to the things we already do, applying it to things we should be doing to make the most efficient use of our time.
An example of this is a student of mine who is currently caring for a toddler. She was admitting how she had no time for Reiki. I asked her how much time did she spend and with what frequency did she breastfeed (we had discussed the Reiki aspects of this previously) and as she started to calculate she saw where I was going with that and with an “aaah sooo” solved the dilemma herself.
I highly recommend Steven Covey’s masterpiece while you’re waiting for mine, and would love to hear any and all suggestions for fitting Reiki into a busy schedule.
For further explanation or discussion, your thoughts are most welcome and highly encouraged, please feel free to comment below!!!
