For Most HAC Students, The Journey Begins and Ends In the Ocean of Reiki Room Five years ago, The Healing Arts Center relocated from its former location on Big Bend Boulevard in Maplewood to its current location on Manchester Avenue in Warson Woods. At one time the old location had been a house and had a very homey feel to it, but the property owner sold critical parking space to the City of Maplewood and the building could no longer be used as a school. The new location is centrally located and, while not in the most picturesque building ever seen, has two very important features - it is very quiet and there is plenty of parking. In preparing the space for the school a great deal of purification work had to be done. Flaming salt bowls were lit. Reiki blessings and Pranic Healing purifications were made. The space had last been used by Missouri College before that school moved to the Hanley Road location that closed last year. Now it was time for The Healing Arts Center to make the space its own. Why HAC Names Its Classrooms Every classroom was given a name. Headmaster, Tom Tessereau was largely trained in the Eastern style of education wherein devotion to the guru is an essential part of the learning process. As a consequence, two of the rooms at HAC are named after two of Tom's most important teachers, Dr. Robert Boyd, D.O., the founder of Biocraniopathy and Grand Master Choa Kok Sui, the founder of Pranic Healing. In 2014, Tom & Sabrina Tessereau enlisted the help of others, and together they painted a motif on the wall of the main classroom resembling free flowing water and the room was named the “River of Success” room. Recently Tom was thinking about how much Reiki has influenced the education and business conducted at HAC and he decided to rename the room the Ocean of Reiki. The room is decorated with a large framed print on the wall that says “Reiki” in Japanese kanji next to the picture of the Reiki founder, Mikao Usui. After the school opened, a group of Tibetan monks visited The Healing Arts Center and put on a public display of the making of a sand mandala. This ritual is said to concentrate great blessing around the mandala in that the entire construction of this ritual art is meditative in nature. The monks chant prayers as they painstakingly create the mandala out of sand shaken out of small copper tubes. Ordinarily, a sand mandala is destroyed after it is complete and the colored sand poured into a river or lake to bless the geographical area in which it was built. In this case, however, Lama Lobsang Palden Rinpoche, a friend of HAC and Headmaster Tom Tessereau, convinced the monks to preserve the mandala so that the blessings of the Medicine Buddha imbued in the beautiful sand art would continue to support the healing work done at the Center and the community. Hence, the room became known as the Mandala Room. A local Buddhist group, Kagyu Droden Kunchab needed a place for their weekly meditation practices and was given permission to set up a formal Buddhist shrine in the room. A Very Special Space HAC students spend a great deal of time in the Ocean of Reiki. Reiki is a required subject at the school for a variety of reasons. First, it has excellent healing qualities and profoundly assists mind and body to come together to cause healthy being. Second, Reiki very directly causes students to have to look at the people they are working on as beings and compels the students to develop a sense of compassion for others. Compassion is an essential part of the human healing process and gets overlooked in some vocational education processes. At HAC, however, the school puts “consciousness first” and that is expressed by the school's steadfast commitment to transformational education, starting with waking up to the needs of others. In recent years, Reiki has enjoyed acceptance by mainstream medical care providers. The Veterans' Administration hospitals use it to treat PTSD. Cancer Clinics of America as well as a host of other cancer clinics use Reiki to provide relief to cancer patients. HAC honors students and graduate volunteers practice Reiki on clients in the Healing Arts Center's own Free Massage Clinic for Cancer Patients. Reiki is used by some hospitals in the psychiatric department to treat drug addiction. Reiki is an important part of how HAC is known to the community. The school has been teaching Reiki and championing its use as a healing modality for decades. It is only fitting that the main classroom name reflect a key part of our education here at The Healing Arts Center.
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