About Us
THE MISSION OF PACIFIC REIKI
At Pacific Reiki, based in Aptos, California, our mission is to help us all connect with our Whole Self, through healing, teaching, and community. While our focus is on the traditional teachings from Mikao Usui, when applicable we will share techniques from other traditions as well. All traditions are ultimately talking about the same Source, whether you call it the Great Bright Light, the Tao, the Brahman, the fundamental ground of being, or simply everything. The mysteries of energy, spirit and healing are too complex for any one tradition to describe fully, and when need be we can draw the best from each.
We encourage a balance between tradition and experimentation. In the tradition of Western Empiricism, there is a time to suspend disbelief and try something whole-heartedly to see if it works. However, there is also a time to try doing things a new way, experimenting to see what works and why. And, there is always a time to unask the question, to transcend it in a completely new way, or to let go just be Reiki.
Our primary focus is to help people lead richer, happier, more fulfilling lives, by learning to work with their energy, to be able to ground, center. and balance themselves whenever need be (even in the most difficult circumstances that life can bring), and to open and awaken to connect with the entirety of their self.
RYAN BUSH, Ph.D., FOUNDER
As the founder and Master Teacher/Practitioner of Pacific Reiki, I'm honored to be able to teach and practice a traditional Japanese form of the system of Reiki, called the Usui Reiki Ryoho. These time-honored techniques were developed and formalized by Mikao Usui in the 1920s, and passed down from teacher to teacher in our lineage.
My lineage:
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Mikao Usui
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Kanichi Taketomi
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Koyama Kimiko
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Doi Hiroshi
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Frans Stiene
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Joyce Leonard
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Ryan Bush, founder and master teacher/practitioner of Pacific Reiki
In addition to being a Reiki Master/Teacher, I am also an abstract photographer (including almost all the images on this site, and all the images at www.RyanBushPhotography.com), the author of The Music of Trees and From Wandering to Illumination, and co-author of A Singing Wire.
My path to connecting with Reiki and the healing arts has been a meandering one, as I have always had many interests. When I went off to college, I thought I would major in Physics or Mathematics. I ended up receiving my B.A. in Linguistics and Russian from Swarthmore College in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2000.
Linguistics greatly expanded my ability to look at a complex system from many different angles (such as syntax, semantics, and phonology). Studying Linguistics also helped instill a focus on the Western empirical method - suspending disbelief for long enough to try try something, which has helped me be open-minded and curious, but not willing to take dogma at face-value. As much as I enjoyed Linguistics, I kept wondering how it would directly help people.
I had always felt that there was something more, in some sense. Sometimes it felt like there was a mysterious world hidden just beyond an invisible curtain, like in the fantasy or science fiction books I read (that now seem strikingly similar to transcendental experiences of Emptiness, and to String Theorists' models of how our universe could loosely interact with universes on other 'branes').
As a child, I had looked for answers at church, but didn't find answers, or signs of any direct experiences of the divine. Like many people, I was turned off by what sounded like dogma and a need to believe just for the sake of believing. That attitude softened into agnosticism once I acknowledged that there was so much about the universe that I didn't know, and wanted to be open-minded.
While growing up, my main way of connecting with the mysterious Other world was always music, as I played the flute in orchestras, and on one published CD. There's a lot more to say about my experiences since 2014, and how I got into Reiki, including a powerful flows of energy (kundalini awakening), and a powerful mystic experience that changed my life. In the months after my experience, I searched through many traditions, that's how I found Reiki. For more details, please see my books, presentations, and social media posts, or feel free to ask me.
