She brought Reiki to India

Paula Horan, the lady universally acknowledged for introducing Reiki to India, is a wiry, red-haired woman of indeterminable age. “I’m not going to tell you how old I am — how can you ask a woman her age?” She guffaws.

For someone who is almost revered by vast numbers of Reiki practitioners and believers she is refreshingly down to earth, slightly irreverent and wholly engaging.
 
In an age of hype and hoopla, when she could have easily passed herself off as some thing of a guru, she has determinedly eschewed that path.

“I ain’t no different” she says to me, complaining of a pulled neck-muscle, the result of an uncomfortable flight that she was trying to heal minutes before I met her. “To delude people is a grave sin that attracts heavy karma. I look at all the people who believe in deceitful gurus and think well — their lesson is discernment.”

Describing herself as a Citizen of the Planet, and having lived and travelled in places as far flung as Egypt, Japan, and India in her childhood and youth, she is of American decent but has for many years has lived and worked in Goa.

She held her first Reiki class in Mumbai in 1989 and there has been no looking back since. What started off as a small awakening soon swept over urban India like a tsunami. Not a day passed in the nineties without some Reiki- related activity and the newspapers were full of Reiki practitioners advertising their wares.

Paula is well aware of the phenomenon that she started but is underwhelmed by its downside. “Of course it became commercial, and I found people were doing the first degree and the second degree over two weekend sessions” she says wryly. “I refused to teach people who seemed in too much of a hurry. And then there were those who thought that after doing the second degree, and discovering that they had certain siddhis or powers, doing the third degree would amp it up.”

She laughs, “Not realising that the third degree was about losing the ego!”
For the uninitiated Reiki is a form of healing which involves the laying of hands and believes that there exists in every sentient being a life force that connects with the universal life force and can be channelled to great healing.

Paula herself has cured herself of two tumours, and there are too many instances of spontaneous healing associated with Reiki to dismiss it.

“Of course, because it challenges traditional methods of healing the international drug lobby has a vested interest in rubbishing it,” Paula says.

These days she has taken on a new cause: The promotion of Ozone therapy on which her newest book is based. Again, she feels the pharma-big business lobby is not going to take too kindly to this alternative form of natural healing.

But Paula is not all alternative and other-worldly. Ask her if Reiki can help one lose weight she says, “I’ll tell you what can help lose weight: drink lots of water, eat smaller portions and exercise daily.” Paula herself does three hundred sit-ups plus a set of calisthenics daily.

No mumbo-jumbo there.

s_malavika@dnaindia.net