Reiki and what it means
If you look at the Japanese word for Reiki, it may help you to understand more fully. Japanese words, called Kanji, are more like images than letters. This is why you do not always get a strict translation of a word from Japanese to English. A word is made up of several images or characters.
The two characters for Reiki include the top part (Rei) and the bottom part (ki). The top part translates as “universal,” “spiritual” or “having to do with the heavens,” and it looks sort of like a person with arms outstretched. The bottom part of the top character represents a earth with layers of soil and stone. So you can imagine how this character represents a supreme or heavenly being, sending energy down through the clouds and to the earth.
The bottom half of the Kanji is the part that represents ki or life-force. The cross-like part in the lower left corner represents grains of rice. The line that crosses over top of the rice and sweeps down the right side represents a cooking pot. The three lines above represent steam coming off the pot. Cooking food is one of the ways we receive the ki energy into our bodies. This ki can be directly related to the human body. the grain is the food in our stomachs, the pot is our abdomen, and the steam is the air we breathe into our lungs.
When you join the two Japanese characters together into the word Reiki, it represents energy coming down from above to boost or balance the energy in the body. This connection can then be defined as ‘spiritually guided life-force energy.” or “universal life-force energy.”