IN FEBRUARY 2014, I participated in the Holy Fire Reiki ignition process. Over the months since then, I have had some time to reflect on what this energy is and how it has entered into and changed my life. The first part of this article addresses my under- standing of Holy Fire as it has grown in me. In the second half, I share my earlier first impressions of Holy Fire Reiki and the chal- lenges that I faced that have since been healed by the energy itself.

The energy of Holy Fire is for healing. It is not religious and it has no politics associated with it. In fact, the primary spiritual principles from which Holy Fire arises, God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit are not exclusive to any religion. Holy Fire energy is here to help us heal using Divine Guidance and power to heal our spirit, mind and our body. It is inclusive of all people without judgment. And because these vibrations are combined with Usui Reiki, they are accessible to all people regardless of religion, spirituality or beliefs. The energy heals simply because a person invites it. It is not required that it is believed in, in any particular way.

Usui/Holy Fire Reiki is a combination of traditional Usui Reiki and a contemporary evolution of Reiki.1 Like all Reiki, it works by simple invitation. Everyone can use it. It heals, empowers, guides us easily and with amazing love from pure Source.

Looking back on my life, I see the moments that have led me to the path of Holy Fire Reiki. The choices I have made, the words I have said and how I followed my dreams and listened to Divine guidance. They all lead to this moment in time. My hus- band Robin said it is what I have been looking for for lifetimes. When he and I were kids together, we used to talk about Gand- hi’s teaching of being the change that you want to see in the world, and how we wanted to live a life reflecting this truth.

I have always wanted to contribute to the wellness of the world. Holy Fire is another evolution of my journey through Reiki to live this dream. I thought I had all the spiritual tools I needed, and now I find there is another great growth occurring for me and the planet. As Laurelle Gaia says on her website, “God breathed new life into Reiki.”

Holy Fire told me that it has come to the earth in answer to our prayers. Humanity as a whole has prayed for peace and a change in our collective consciousness. We are asking to reach new spiritual depths and levels of free will. Holy Fire completely honors our free will and will not impose itself on us. So the degree to which it can provide benefit will depend on our ability to receive its help.

In the time I have been ignited to Holy Fire Reiki, I have had many profound experiences. The energy and frequency of the Master symbol is the source of love that our spirit and all life force is made of, the spark of God that exists in all manifestation. It is from the place of pure consciousness where all there is is love. It is beyond duality, form, individuation, masculine and feminine.

Because Holy Fire chose to connect to us through Reiki, we can access it in the same gentle, loving way as all Reiki. It is given to us through grace, and we are directly connected to the Holy Fire healing frequencies. Their healing nature is available to us easily. Everyone can learn it and although it is spiritual in nature, there is no required religion, politics, dogma or belief system. It does not judge or discriminate in whom it is available to. Holy Fire healing frequencies are providing humanity with another method and tool that give us direct access to Divine Love. Holy Fire Reiki brings the Holy Fire energy, the Holy Spirit, the Source of all there is, is love to the earth. When we receive our Holy Fire ignitions (they are called ignitions rather than attunements), we become a conduit of Divine Love. We invite it here through our intention.

When I first experienced Holy Fire Reiki, I saw it as the fire of unity. I was shown a vision of people everywhere handing each other a warm coal for the home fire, person to person to person. The intent of passing it was to provide warmth and the same resource of life-giving fire to all people. It was shared equally so that we would have a never-ending supply of resources for all life on earth. This would bring the possibility of equality for all. Holy Fire is the source that unites us through our commonality. We all need and want the same things. Holy Fire is a fire of cooperation, carrying with it the knowledge that there is enough for everyone—that all our needs can be met.

Now that I have experienced Holy Fire for a while, I realize that it is many fires. It is the fire of life and grace. It unifies our heart, soul and spirit with our physical body and daily life. It does this by first purifying, then healing and then empowering us. The purifying fire heals by igniting the issues presenting themselves. The healing fire prepares us to receive, and the fire of Holy Love ignites our spirit and empowers our life force with love from the core of existence.

I call the core of existence God; others call it by many other names. By every name, it leads to the source of pure conscious- ness and love. Life on earth can disconnect us from that Source, and Holy Fire has chosen to appear to us through Reiki to help the people from all beliefs connect to the God/Source.

Healing My Spiritual Resistance with Holy Fire Reiki

I speak of Holy Fire Reiki with love and love is present, but my physical body and mind were not completely in alignment with that level of love. So I have definitely experienced deep and profound healing, most of which I didn’t know that I needed or felt that I wanted. I think it is important to share this part of my experience because others who have been ignited by Holy Fire Reiki have spoken about similar deep healing experiences as well and it is helpful to understand that deep healing is not always comfortable.

When William Rand called to tell me about the new Reiki energy he had received and that it was named Holy Fire, my first response was enthusiasm, and I couldn’t wait to hear more. I wanted to know how I could receive what he described as beautiful love coming from the heart of God. Then my second response snuck in, and I worried, “What will everyone think? How will this work?” and more thoughts like these. Fear had begun to infiltrate my heart.

I talked with William about my fears, and he very compassionately asked me to receive Holy Fire Reiki and work with it for a while, and then decide what I thought. He said I could easily return to my original style of Reiki if I decided to.

Because Holy Fire retires the Tibetan Reiki symbols as the Master symbol of my lineage, I worried that I would miss these old friends of mine that I had learned so much from. I spoke with the symbols and found them in complete support of my change. They said they had reached their potential with me and that they were happy for me to move forward with the new energy I would receive from Holy Fire.

In my shamanic training, I have spent years working with specific energies and spirit guides so it was reasonable to me to agree to work with Holy Fire to see what I thought. I said “yes” to Holy Fire itself, and committed to working exclusively with it in all of my Reiki practices. The first experience I had was a message from the spiritual guides and symbols that I had worked with for years. They all were supporting my spiritual growth and agreed that it would benefit me to work with Holy Fire exclusively for now in order to really get to know it. This was validated for me at a ceremony held within days of receiving my Holy Fire ignitions.

I am an Associate Teacher for the LightSong School of Shamanic Studies and Energy Medicine here in Portland, Oregon. I have participated in the growth of the school for 17 years and have built the Reiki program within it. Reiki is an important part of our shamanic training and the school curricula. Three days after my last ignition to Holy Fire, LightSong held a powerful spiritual ceremony. At the end of the second day of the ceremony, one of the students, David Lewis, still merged with his spirit guide, came to me, placed his hand on my heart and said, “You have new symbols in your heart. They are going to change the world. You will be a leader in this, and you will have everything you need. The symbols are going to change the world.” I hadn’t told anyone about Holy Fire at this point. Only my husband knew. Tears were rolling down my face as I listened. I knew that I was being blessed and was being told to follow the path of Holy Fire Reiki by the spiritual guides of LightSong that I had worked with for so long. They were and are in complete support of Holy Fire Reiki. They also told me to completely trust that I would have everything I needed, and everything was already all right.

That “everything is already all right” seems to be a theme of Holy Fire Reiki. Even though I was going through some very deep healing, I knew that everything was going to be all right and that it was even an answer to my prayers. I didn’t have to figure it all out, I could simply listen to the guidance available to me in that moment. I found that I was far more able to trust in that than ever before.

I had said yes to Holy Fire and to Holy Fire Reiki. So I lived in the yes. There were days that I had resistance to all the changes I was making, so I asked Holy Fire to heal them and to empower me to live the love rather than the resistance.

Healing my Christian Prejudices with Holy Fire

Another healing crisis I encountered in myself was a reaction to the name and terminology of Holy Fire Reiki. I found fears that I didn’t know I had, and prejudices I had never acknowledged, in spite of the fact that I had often thought of myself as a recovering Catholic. Over time, I had developed a distrust of Christian terminology. In part this distrust came from the knowledge that attempts to control the use of these names have caused incredible human suffering and pain.

Like many others who leave behind parts of their formal religion, I had been judged and criticized because of my spiritual practices and beliefs. Through my journey with Holy Fire, I realized that I had had equal judgments towards those who I perceived as having judged me. What I didn’t realize was that I had created limitations for myself by distancing myself from all things with a Christian belief. I see now that I had also kept Jesus at bay, only admitting to my relationship with him by qualifying that he wasn’t the religious Jesus. I hardly ever said “God” and if I did I made sure I included all the other names for God I could think of, including bio-field energy. This was of course out of respect for all the beliefs, but mostly my reluctance to use the name came from my prejudices. One result of this was that I never connected with Holy Spirit.

Many times in my life, I had been told by members of religion that I didn’t have a relationship with Jesus because I didn’t believe in him “the one right way.” Years earlier, I had talked with Jesus and had asked him why we fight over him. After years of listening for the answer, I now received one. He told me, “The judgment you receive is equal to the judgment you have.” I knew then that I had to let go of the judgments I had had of those I had perceived as judging me. Once again, I was reminded of my childhood desire to be the change I want- ed to see in the world. Holy Fire Reiki had come to me to help me heal those prejudices.

I began to realize that this internal struggle I had with my own prejudices was blocking me, and that it was time to release the block. Holy Fire Reiki started doing this for me. One of the first healings I received from Holy Fire was from one of its powerful healing frequencies called Holy Love. I found that the voices of my ancestors were contributing to my Christian prejudices. My ancestors were leaders on both sides of the holy wars and were therefore both the persecuted and the persecutors. It turned out that their voices sustained an underlying drive and influence within me. The brilliant light of Holy Love can travel to our ancestors to heal them. Holy Fire Reiki traveled back to my ancestors and provided healing, grace and forgiveness for all of them who had participated in the human atrocities in the name of God. Holy Love filled them with the great compassion, mercy and unconditional love of God. It released them with grace and released me from their voices. My connection to their beliefs was dissolved in the love. I hadn’t known how loud their voices had been within me until they were gone. Holy Love filled me and empowered my own free will, aligning it with Divine guidance instead.

Then Holy Fire Reiki and Holy Love worked to heal me in this lifetime by going back to my spirit at conception and as an infant and child. I was shown that I also needed to heal my Catholic baptism and First Holy Communion. There were vows spoken on my behalf in the ceremonies that my spirit had agreed to and vows said that my spirit hadn’t agreed to. Since those didn’t belong to me, they needed to be released. Healing Fire, another Holy Fire frequency, lifted the inaccurate vows from me, then filled me with Holy Love. The vows I did agree to were empowered and strengthened. These involved my love and relationship with Jesus. I had known him before I was born and had certainly wanted him to be a part of this lifetime. I was glad that he was there to greet me as I was born on the earth, and my spirit wanted to be baptized to him. I was shown that my spirit loved my relationship with Jesus—the understanding of him I had had as an infant and a child. Holy Love brought back these memories of how much I had loved Jesus and Mary then—of how I used to dream about them and had known that they were in my room with me, talking and watching over me. The love and wonder of God from my childhood came back to me and opened my heart. I had been returned to the time before my prejudices developed through my life experience and outside influences. I remembered how I felt and the innocence in my connection to God.

All of this healing happened fairly rapidly. The love from this symbol is so strong that it simply ignites and purifies the injuries of the soul in the light of love, as if the fire consumes the injuries and leaves only the light. I spontaneously received grace and forgiveness washed over me, empowering me to let go of the prejudices that I had retained.

All those hopes I had begun to realize about judgment and change beginning within me actually did begin to change into a new reality. As I worked with the development of Holy Fire, I was able to release my resistance to the growth in my spiritual guidance and the language used to describe this growth. I looked behind the terminology to see the grace and the love that is available there. For the first time since I left the church, I was actually open to knowing Holy Spirit and using terms like God, Jesus, Holy Love and Divine Revelation. I began to listen to the Divine Guidance from those sources with excitement. I wanted to know what they meant and how they could help in my person- al life and my healing work. Over these last few months, I have gratefully received that help in innumerable ways.

I have now taught many Holy Fire Reiki students and, at the time of the writing of this article, I have given well over 150 Holy Fire Reiki sessions. I am getting to know and love the energy and its healing abilities more and more. They empower the pure love within by igniting the Holy Spirit within a person.

One of my many realizations has been that a lot of my Reiki students and clients have the same issues of personal trauma stemming from religion. A lot of them also describe themselves as recovering Catholics and Protestants who have been judged by religion. They come to Reiki because they are trying to find their way back to their relationship with God. They echo my story of seeking a way to contribute to the wellness of humanity and the planet Earth through Divine assistance.

For many of us who let go of our relationship with Jesus because of religion and the actions of humankind, we can reunite our relationship to him through Reiki. He wants his teachings to return to love and Holy Fire Reiki is a pathway for that to happen. This is what I am experiencing and it is the healing of this lifetime for me. I have missed my relationship with Jesus and am so glad to be connected with his powerful love again.

As other Reiki practitioners have the opportunity to offer the Holy Fire healing energies to all people, regardless of their beliefs, religion, politics or any other reason, there will be more stories of great healing that reflect other1aspects of people’s lives. I look forward to watching this unfold.

Colleen Benelli can be reached by email at colleen@reikilifestyle.com, by phone at 503.912.0664, on her website at www.reikilifestyle.wpengine.com, or on her Facebook page, Reiki Lifestyle-Colleen Benelli. Join Colleen’s monthly ReikiChat™ conversation, www.reikichat.com.