Background

I remember a New Year custom in the times I was a little kid. On the New Year’s Day, my mom used to put a handful of wheat seeds on a layer of cotton balls on a small plate and asked us to water it daily. If the seeds germinated and grew nice green grass, it was a sign that the New Year will be prosperous. I suppose this is a common custom in many agrarian societies.

With this memory in mind, I decided to do a small Reiki experiment. I knew that Reiki would influence seed germination, but I wanted to show this to other people too. So, I decided to take pictures of my experiment daily.

Plants are complex multi-cellular organisms considered as sensitive as humans to different types of energy. Sound is known to affect the seed germination. Sometimes seeds are treated with ultrasounds in order to speed up the germination process. Music has a known effect on plant vitality. Mozart music has a benefic effect on plant growth, while heavy metal music may damage them. Many plant lovers know that talking daily to their plants can help them grow healthy. In the last decade there have been a few scientific studies on the effect of healing energy on the seed germination and plant growth. Unfortunately, these studies do not have a wide popularity!

Experiment

I took three saucers that were the closest thing to Petri dishes I found in the house. I placed a small sticker with numbers from 1 to 3 on the dishes. I laid a rectangular cotton pad (the kind ladies use to remove make-up) in each of the saucers.

I took some wheatgrass seeds. I counted three groups of 100 wheat seeds, without making any selection, and I placed them randomly on the three pads. I added enough water to moist the pads, without covering the seeds.

I placed the three dishes on a windowsill next to each other, in ascending order from left to right. This arrangement was meant to ensure identical light and temperature conditions to all three lots. At this point I took the first picture.

I gave equal quantities of water to all three saucers, three times a day, in order to maintain identical humidity conditions to all of them. I used tap water, filtered through a Nikken counter-top filter.

In order to give Reiki to a saucer, I would take that saucer and put it on a nearby table and give Reiki to it for 5 minutes at a time. I placed my hands on each side of the dish, without touching it, and I gave Reiki without using any Reiki symbol, or meditating, or setting up a certain intention. At the end of the session, I placed the dish back on the same spot by the window. Every morning and evening I would give Reiki to the seeds in the first lot, and every noon to the ones in the second lot. I never gave Reiki to the seeds in the third lot.

I took a picture every afternoon/evening. I wasn’t able to go by the same schedule for the pictures everyday, but the changes were so slow that this did not make any difference.

After three days, because the size of the seeds was increasing due to their humidity and they had started to fall off the pads, I replaced the rectangular pads with bigger, circular ones. None of the seeds had started to germinate at that point in time.

After 20 days, when it became obvious that the plant growth had hit a plateau, I stopped the experiment. I took all the seeds and plants from the saucers and placed them on three towel papers to dry them off. Then I measured and counted them. I also took a picture of each lot of seeds placed on a sheet of paper.

Visual observation

The pictures that follow were taken every day.

Statistic Analysis

The visual observations are confirmed by statistic methods applied to the three lots.

The total number of plants, so the number of germinated seeds in the three lots, presents a large variation from lot to lot. The number of germinated seeds in the control lot is 38 out of 100. The number of germinated seeds in lot number 2 is 50 out of 100, 32% more than in the control lot, while the number of germinated seeds in lot number 1 is 56 out of 100, 47% more than in the control lot.

The maximum height of the plants in the three lots is sensibly equal: 23, 22 and 23. If we correlate this with the fact that in the last two days of the experiment there wasn’t a significant increase in plant height, this number reflects the maximum potential of plant growth in the given conditions.

Since we had non-germinated seeds in all three lots, the minimum height in all three lots is 0.

The average height of the plants in the three lots are: 10.68 cm, 7.90 cm and 7.95 cm, which correlate with the median point of the samples in the three lots: 12 cm, 8 cm and 8 cm. This means that even though the number of plants is bigger in the second lot compared to the control lot, the small amount of Reiki given to the second lot was not enough to increase the growth speed of the plants in that lot. The growth speed is significantly increased in the first lot.

The standard deviation of the height of the plants in all three is similar: 5.51 cm, 5.35 cm and 5.49 cm. This reflects the fact that the three lots are relatively uniform.

Conclusions

The first and the most important conclusion of this experiment is that the Reiki energy produces an important increase in the number of germinated seeds. This can be explained by the increase in the vital energy of the seeds, following the Reiki mini-sessions.

The second conclusion is that the Reiki energy contributes to a faster growth of the plants. As we know, all a biologic system needs for development is energy. Usually, it takes it from the seed in the beginning, and from the air, water, and soil after that. In this case, a portion of the necessary energy was provided during the Reiki sessions.

A third conclusion is that the Reiki energy was absorbed evenly by all the seeds and plants, and this is reflected in the uniformity of the three lots (same standard deviation). The fact that not all the seeds sprouted in the two treated lots is due to the fact that, in some cases, the additional energy was not enough to reach the threshold were the seeds are able to germinate. Given a bigger amount of Reiki energy, those seeds would probably germinate, but this remains to be proven.

A forth conclusion is that the amount of Reiki given to the seeds made a difference, both in the number of sprouted seeds and in the vitality of the small plants. There was not enough evidence to determine the type of dependence developed in the seeds on the total duration of Reiki sessions , and it is possible that this dependence to reach a plateau after a certain amount of Reiki sessions.

A fifth conclusion is that the maximum height of the plants was not affected by the Reiki energy or the amount of Reiki energy. This was to be expected, because all the Reiki energy does is make the plants reach their true potential, which was genetically written in their seeds, in the given environmental conditions.

The sixth conclusion is that the Reiki energy cannot be contained in an enclosed space, but it is irradiating around that space, creating a gradient of energy. The non-treated plants in the control lot benefited from the Reiki energy given to their neighbors, creating the uneven height of the plants in the control lot.

Note: Because of that last conclusion, in future experiments and for more accurate results, the identical light and temperature conditions have to be created without placing the plants in each other’s proximity.

The overall conclusion of this experiment is that Reiki energy affects living biologic systems directly and the seeds and plants can detect and use this energy for their development. This conclusion can be extrapolated to any living beings, including humans.