Just for Today, Do Not Worry

Posted on 9 August, 202613 August, 2026 by Edward Howell

The Habit of Living Ahead of Ourselves

I have been a Reiki Ryoho practitioner for the better part of three decades, and if there is one thing I have learned in that time, it is this: worry is stubborn. It does not respond to logic. It does not respect how much you know, how long you have practiced, or how deeply you understand the precepts. It shows up anyway, pulling your attention away from the present moment and into imagined outcomes, rehearsed disappointments, and futures that may never arrive.

You probably know the feeling. Your shoulders creep up toward your ears. Your breath goes shallow. Your mind starts looping through scenarios, each one worse than the last. And the strangest part? It feels useful. It feels like staying mentally busy is the same thing as being prepared, like running through every possible outcome is a form of responsibility.

But it is not. Most of the time, worry does not create clarity. It creates contraction. It narrows your field of awareness until you lose the context of what is actually happening right now, in this moment, right in front of you.

This is where the second precept of the Gokai meets us. “Do not worry.” In Japanese, the phrase is shinpai suna — and it is not a scolding. It is a compassionate instruction to set down the burden of anxious anticipation. It does not pretend that life is free of uncertainty. It offers a way to stand peacefully inside that uncertainty without letting it consume you.

“Just for Today” as the Method

Each of the five precepts of the Gokai — given by Usui Mikao, the founder of Usui Reiki Ryoho — begins with the same two words: kyo dake wa, “just for today.” I have always found that framing remarkable. It does not say “forever.” It does not say “never worry again.” It says just for today.

That small phrase keeps the teaching grounded and human. You are not being asked to master all of life at once. You are not being asked to eliminate every anxious thought for the rest of your days. You are being asked to return to the present moment — just for today — where clarity is possible and peace can actually be felt.

In my practice, I recite the Gokai each morning and evening in gassho, hands held together before the heart. It is not memorization for its own sake. It is a practice of return. Every time I place my hands together and speak those words, I am anchoring myself in the present and reminding myself of what matters most. The power of the precepts does not come from admiring them. It comes from repetition, reflection, and application — from living them, day after day.

“Just for today” tells us we only need to practice this for one day. Tomorrow, we begin again. And honestly, I find that deeply reassuring.

What “Do Not Worry” Is Not

Before I talk about what this precept invites, I want to be clear about what it does not ask of us, because I have seen these misunderstandings trip up students more times than I can count.

It is not denial. “Do not worry” does not mean pretending that difficulties do not exist or that challenges will never come. Life contains genuine hardship. Recognizing that is not a failure of your practice — it is honesty.

It is not suppression. The precept does not ask you to push anxious thoughts underground or to shame yourself when worry shows up. I have tried that approach, and I suspect you have too. It does not work. Suppressed emotion does not disappear. It waits, and it comes back with more force.

It is not passivity. “Do not worry” is not an instruction to stop caring, stop planning, or stop acting. It is not resignation. It does not ask you to become emotionally flat or indifferent to your life.

What it does ask is something more subtle and, I think, more courageous: to notice when your mind has wandered off into imagined futures, and to gently bring it back. That is all. Not to banish the thought, but to notice it and return.

Worry Versus Wise Concern

This is the distinction I come back to most often in my own practice and in my teaching, and it is the one I want you to take away from this article if you take away nothing else.

Worry loops. It rehearses outcomes you cannot control. It replays conversations that have not happened yet. It keeps your mind busy without moving you a single step toward action. Worry feels productive, but it produces nothing except tension. It narrows your awareness until the present moment disappears entirely beneath layers of anticipation.

“The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.”

Wise concern is different. It recognizes a situation that needs attention and actually responds to it. It asks a simple question: is there something I can do about this right now? If the answer is yes, it moves into action. If the answer is no, it lets the thought rest. It trusts that the right moment to act will reveal itself when it arrives. Wise concern is grounded and present. It does not spiral. It does not contract. It meets the situation and responds.

The second precept does not ask you to stop caring. It asks you to notice the difference between caring wisely and spiraling mentally — and to choose the former whenever you can.

How Reiki Ryoho Helps Us Practice It

One of the things I treasure about Reiki Ryoho is that it does not just hand you a precept and walk away. It gives you tools to practice it.

The daily recitation of the Gokai in gassho is one of those tools. Each morning and evening, when I place my hands together and speak the precepts, I am not performing a ritual. I am practicing return. I am anchoring myself in the present and reminding myself of what matters. Over the years, that practice has become a kind of anchor I can drop at any moment, not just morning and evening.

The body is a teacher too. When worry takes hold, the body responds before the mind catches up. Your shoulders tighten. Your breath goes shallow. Your jaw may clench. Through Reiki Ryoho, we learn to notice these signals. We learn to feel the difference between a mind at rest and a mind in contraction. That awareness is the first step toward release. When you notice the physical signs of worry, you can pause. You can breathe. You can return — not by forcing the thought away, but by letting it pass through without taking root.

Over time, something builds. Think of it as a kind of internal muscle. The gap between a worrisome thought and your reaction to it grows a little wider. In that gap, you find something precious: choice. You find the space to ask whether this thought deserves your attention, or whether it is just your mind doing what minds do when left unsupervised.

A Practice for the Day

When I teach this precept, I give students a simple question to carry with them. When you notice worry creeping in, ask yourself:

Is this something I can act on right now?

If there is a clear next step, take it. Send the email. Make the call. Have the conversation. Action dissolves worry more effectively than any amount of mental rehearsal ever could.

If there is no clear next step — if the concern is about something outside your control, or something that has not happened yet — let the thought rest. I do not mean dismiss it. I mean acknowledge it, set it down, and bring your attention back to the present. You can return to it later if you need to. Most of the time, you will find it has lost its urgency by then.

I also want to encourage you to have a gentle relationship with this precept. “Do not worry” is not a command to be perfect. It is an invitation to return, again and again, to the present moment. Every return strengthens your practice. Every pause creates a little more space between fear and reaction.

A Daily Practice of Freedom

What I appreciate most about “just for today” is its realism. It does not ask for a lifetime of certainty. It asks for one day. That is all. And that is what makes it both attainable and wise. We are given permission to meet the day as it is, rather than as our fear imagines it to be.

In that way, “Do not worry” can give us something unexpected: a sense of freedom. It reminds us that peace is not the absence of challenge, but the refusal to let challenge occupy the whole of our awareness. Trust, in this context, does not mean everything will unfold exactly as we want. It means we no longer need to carry tomorrow in our hands today.

When the mind is not overwhelmed by imagined futures, it becomes easier to respond to what is right in front of us. Intuition, presence, and appropriate action become available again. “Do not worry” is not passive. It is active, disciplined, and quietly courageous.

When I recite, “Just for today, I do not worry,” I hear an instruction and a blessing at the same time. I am reminded that today is enough, and that the present moment is where healing begins.

Just for Today, Do Not Anger

Posted on 22 July, 202622 July, 2026 by Edward Howell

Just for Today, Do Not Anger: Reflections from Our June Reiki Ryoho Share Circle

Online Group Sharing — June 24, 2026

Each month, this group of Reiki Ryoho practitioners gathers to inform and strengthen our practice of Usui Sensei’s teaching — not as affirmations to recite quickly and forget, but as a living practice of seishin kaizen, spiritual improvement, held with respect across a shared session of breath, contemplation, and self-treatment. I wanted to share how our evening unfolded, along with the fuller teaching we sat with together, for those who joined us and for those unable to attend.

How We Gathered

Our time together followed the rhythm Usui Sensei describes in the Usui Reiki Ryoho Hikkei: initially settling the mind through breath, then turning to contemplation, then as we ran out of time for self-treatment, we closed with community reflection and Q&A.

We opened by settling in — phone notifications silenced, comfortable in our seating, hands resting on the lap, three natural breaths, a brief return to Usui Sensei’s original intention that Reiki Ryoho is, first, a path of inner development, with healing arising naturally out of that practice.

From there we moved into a component of Hatsurei Ho, specifically Joshin Kokyu Ho — a cleansing breath meditation. This practice quiets the analytical mind deliberately before we turn to the precepts, so that when we do sit with them, the contemplation has room to be personal rather than merely intellectual. The Joshin Kokyu Ho practice was experienced via a 20 minute guided meditation.

Joshin Kokyu Ho Guided Meditation

On completing Joshin Kokyu Ho, we turned our attention to the Gokai.

The Gokai — Just for Today

We recited the five precepts together, in English and/or in Japanese for those who carry it that way:

Just for today,I do not anger.I do not worry.I am grateful.I fulfill my duties.I have compassion for myself and others.

Each month one precept is chosen to sit with more deeply, rotating through the five over time. This month, we turned to the first precept: Ikaru na — Do not anger.

Why “Do Not Anger” Comes First

Usui Sensei lived through the Meiji and Taisho eras — decades of extraordinary upheaval, loss, and social transformation in Japan. The Gokai was never written for a comfortable life. It was written for people, like us, living through real difficulty and needing something sturdy to return to daily.

It’s worth contemplating why this precept was placed first. Not, I’d suggest, because anger is the worst of our failings — but because of all our inner disturbances, it is the one that most immediately disrupts the flow of Reiki. Ikaru na is not a call to suppress feeling. It’s an invitation to witness anger as it rises, rather than be governed by it.
Inner witnessing, not inner policing.
There’s an important difference between the energy of anger — which can be a genuine signal that an important boundary has been crossed — and the habit of anger, which clouds judgment, creates resentment and contracts our energetic field. Usui Sensei was pointing us toward the latter.

The Linguistic Layer

“Ikaru na” carries more weight than the simple English translation of “do not get irritated” or “do not anger.” In certain contexts it edges toward held resentment, grudge-holding, or wishing ill on another — territory that may overlap with the phrase, Norou na (“do not harbor deep-seated resentment”). This precept addresses the poison we marinate in over time, not the fleeting irritations of an ordinary day.

The Energetic Layer

In Reiki Ryoho, energy follows intention and attention. Anger and resentment are among the densest, slowest-vibrating energies we carry, and they tend to stagnate Ki (Qi, Chi, Prana) in the body — particularly along the (TCM) liver and gallbladder meridians:

Liver — anger, bitterness, resentment, competitiveness, defensiveness, jealousy, possessiveness, relationship stress, desire for revenge.
Gallbladder — fear of loss, abandonment, poverty, hunger, insecurity around support (emotional and material), and fear of aging. (reference: Rita McNamara, Energetic Bodywork)

A practitioner carrying anger struggles to hold the neutral, observant presence that Reiki Ryoho asks of us — the energy can become discordant, or simply weakened. Resentment has a way of tethering us energetically to whoever or whatever we’re resenting; we hand over our life force (Ki) every time we replay the grievance in our mind. Usui Sensei’s teaching was to release the situation immediately — not for the other person’s sake, but for our own. As Usui Sensei reminds us in his Hikkei: if you cannot heal yourself, how can you heal others?

The Spiritual Layer

Usui Sensei wasn’t a moralist instructing us to “be good” — he was a healer offering practical tools for living. Ikaru na, placed first, likely draws on Mikkyo (esoteric Buddhist) philosophy: anger as the root of suffering, born of attachment and a grasping ego. Anger, left unaddressed, reveals our spiritual practice to be built on sand.

Anger is also, perhaps, the fastest way to disconnect from Rei. The moment we take up anger/resentment, we place ourselves in a victim position and hand away our own power. Usui Sensei’s message here might be read as: take radical responsibility for your own mind. No one can make you angry — you choose whether or not to hold the resentment. Take your power back immediately.

The Ultimate Intention

At the deepest level, this precept points toward Misogi — ritual purification. Usui Sensei seems to have created his Gokai as a form of daily spiritual cleansing. We cannot be fully attentive while we’re internally holding resentment toward a boss, a partner, ourselves, or our circumstances. “Do not anger” isn’t a command. It’s an invitation to inner peace — a reminder that our resentment doesn’t protect us; it only binds us. We’re always being offered another choice.

In practice: when anger rises, pause. If you’re able, bring your hands into Gassho. Take three calming breaths. Whisper, “I do not anger” — not to suppress what you feel, but to observe it, accept it, and choose not to let it take root.

Sitting With It Ourselves

A few reflection prompts we carried into our group discussion — you’re welcome to sit with them too:

Where did anger visit you this past month — in a situation, a relationship, or toward yourself?
What does anger feel like in your body before it becomes words or action?
What would it mean to simply observe that energy, without acting on it?

For self-treatment, we can bring quiet awareness to the liver area (right side of the abdomen), traditionally associated with anger in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), holding the intention of softening and releasing. As the familiar phrase goes — attributed to James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy (1993) — “where attention goes, energy flows”.

For the Level 2 and above students: an invitation to reflect on how your Reiki Ryoho practice shifts on days you’ve been moved by anger, and what Joshin Kokyu Ho and the recitation of the Gokai have offered you as a practice of re-calibration.

Group Reflection

We closed our circle with light, non-analytical sharing — what people noticed in their body or mind during the practice, whether the precept surfaced during self-treatment, and what each person might want to carry forward into the coming month. We hold space in these circles for every kind of experience: a busy mind, physical sensation, or seemingly nothing at all. All of it is valid.

Carrying This Forward

Our shared home practice for the month ahead: recite the Gokai each morning in Gassho for five minutes, or practice Joshin Kokyu Ho before your daily self-treatment. As Usui Sensei reminded us — the secret to inviting happiness is to count our blessings and work on ourselves, and that work continues quietly between our meetings.

If you’d like to join our next online gathering, or explore this month’s precept further in your own practice, please reach out. In gratitude and Gassho.

You are welcome here — exactly as you are

Posted on 5 April, 20265 April, 2026 by Edward Howell

A message to our Reiki Ryoho community

Life has a way of pulling us in many directions. Sometimes the practice that once felt so natural and nourishing quietly slips into the background — not because it lost its value, but because life simply happened.

If you received your Reiki Ryoho training and then found your practice fading — perhaps gradually, perhaps all at once — you are far from alone. The reasons are as individual as each of us: demanding work schedules, family responsibilities, personal challenges, or simply a season of life that called for something different. Whatever your reason, it belongs to you, and it needs no explanation.

Our monthly Reiki Ryoho Share gatherings exist for exactly this reason. They are not a test of how diligently you have practiced, nor a space where dedication is measured or compared. They are, quite simply, a gentle door back in — open to anyone who trained in Reiki Ryoho and feels a quiet pull to reconnect with it.

What you will find here:

✓ A non-judgmental space — there is no hierarchy of commitment in this room

✓ A warm welcome whether you practiced yesterday or haven’t touched Reiki in years

✓ An opportunity to remember what drew you to Reiki Ryoho in the first place

✓ A community of fellow practitioners who understand that the path is rarely a straight line

Perhaps you have been hesitant to attend because you worry about what others might think. Please know this: every person in that room has their own story, their own gaps, their own quiet doubts. The Share is not a place to perform your practice — it is a place to simply be with it again.

Reiki Ryoho has a way of meeting us where we are. You do not need to arrive ready — you only need to arrive.