The Five Principles, Part I: Intro

Before starting practice, on oneself or other, there's a whole ritual that goes on for the practitioner. Part of it, as discussed in the other posts, is about surrender and permission.
Part of it is about meditating on five principles that are pretty nifty and come in really handy in life.

They're by all means not exclusive to reiki, you can find them, dressed up more or less differently, in pretty much all spiritual practices oriented toward the Light, and they are a really nice trestleboard for meditation in general.

The five core concepts are always the same, but every practitioner articulates the actual sentences differently, and the formulation changes with experience and based on the emotional/psychological/practical circumstances of the person in the specific time and space they're been formulated in.
For me they've mostly been, up to now, something along the lines of:

I.   Just for today, I will give up anger
II.  Just for today, I will give up anxiety
III. Just for today, I will be grateful, and count my many blessings
IV. Just for today, I will do my due work
V.  Just for today, I will harm no living thing.

(variation could be along the lines of, for example,  "Just for today, I'll let go of anger", or "I will not anger", which when meditated on shows different shades of meanings and reflects different parts of the practitioner's experience, that's why formulations change very fluidly)

So, while the concepts remain the same (releasing anger and anxiety, being thankful doing due work, not harming), ways of articulating them do change.
And actually so do their perceived meanings.

To me, and to the people I talked with, each principle means slightly/very different things, and definitely all five mean very different things from what I first thought they meant even a month ago, or from what I would have thought they'd mean if I encountered something like that in a meditation context, or a spiritual context.

That's the beauty of it: concepts and language are shared, but still different meanings present themselves while meditating, some of them wildly different from the way the words above are used commonly in our language, or other languages. I will cover them one by one in the next post, going over the magical journey of frustrating, redeeming magicalness encoded in these five fuckers.

For now, let's just think about them without preconceptions and see what comes up. If we remain open, pretty nifty stuff is evoked.
To paraphrase Buffy, or rather Xander, let's not be judgy, let's be observy.
Which could probably be principle number six.