Transcendental Meditation, Reiki and Yoga: Suffering, Ritual and Self-Transformation

The paper explores three practices of eastern spirituality taken up by westerners for apparently secular purposes. As an 'emic' account that proceeds inductively from the author's experience, it shows how each of these practices is an attempt to change the meaning of suffering through the creative medium of ritual. Rituals are often used as initiations from one form of subjectivity to another. Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, and Reiki are undertaken as means of self-transformation. They may be adopted as 'magical' ways of achieving personal aims, but they also have the potential to take practitioners beyond the ego towards 'sacred' understandings or 'otherness'. The sacred (or 'spiritual'), however, is not necessarily 'the good'. The paper considers the effects of these practices. Do they become forms of self-mastery and power for the individual ego or do they hold out the promise of a more ethical self (in Lévinas's sense of 'ethics')? In other words, do they help resolve the problem of suffering through creating a more communicative body and a self-for-others?