Victoria Mary Clarke

Mari Hall interview

Mari Hall interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2002-07-29

Mari Hall was not a huggable person. Not remotely what you might call approachable. She frightened small children. In fact, she frightened herself. But at the age of twenty seven, she had been diagnosed with a congenital back problem and been told that by the time she was forty she would be paralysed and in a wheelchair. And her life was about to change far more dramatically than that. She was about to embark on a mission to hug the entire world. A mission of love and peace. As a reiki master, she has travelled the world, teaching people to harmonise their energy and to heal themselves and others. So far, she has taught reiki to more than thirty five thousand people. And she’s here in Ireland to expand that number, by teaching her workshops and to share her vision of a peaceful world.
When Mari was diagnosed, she was already experiencing some paralysis on the left side of her body. The left side, she tells me, is the feminine side, the receiving side, according to Eastern philosophy.
“ I was raped and molested, as a child, so perhaps I unconsciously wanted to erase my feminine organs. I had nine female surgeries and a complete hysterectomy by the time I was twenty one. Because for me it wasn’t safe to be a woman.”
Upon hearing the diagnosis, Mari tried to commit suicide.
“I was in a shaky marriage,” she says, “And I had a young child. I didn’t want her to feel burdened by her mother, and I didn’t think my husband would be around. So I ingested a hundred pills. I remember waking up, three days later, with my doctor, who was a friend of the family standing beside me in tears. And he said ‘Are you going to do that again?” And I said no, if I’m alive, then there has to be some reason why I survived, and I have to find a way to make you wrong about me being paralysed! So that became my focus and I went from being completely logical to trying every silly thing there was.”
One day, Mari left her office at lunchtime, to go in search of a self-help book . And a woman approached her, in the bookshop and hugged her.
“Can you imagine? You just didn’t hug Mari! And she wasn’t really a close friend. I got my book and went back to the office. And I could still feel her hands on me. So I rang her and said “What did you just do to me?” And she said “I hugged you.” And I said “I know you hugged me, but I can still feel your hands.” And she said ‘I did a reiki course last week.” I said “A what?” And she tried to explain it, but it’s hard to explain reiki, it really is.”
The woman gave Mari the number of her teacher , to see if she could explain reiki, but the teacher said she couldn’t explain it either.
So Mari signed up, without really believing that reiki would be any use to her. But in spite of herself, she says, she was hooked. Even though she didn’t have any spectacular experiences, in the class and she couldn’t feel the energy that everyone else claimed to be feeling.
“ I had no magic initiation, but I didn’t think I was going to have anything, anyway. So, everyone else was saying Wow, wasn’t that great? And I was saying No, not really. But for some reason, I kept it up. There was some ray of hope that this could be the thing. And it was, it really was.”
It took about a year for the physical symptoms of paralysis to go away and for Mari to be able to walk normally. But the reiki had changed her far more fundamentally.
“ I had been the kid that always thought there was a black cloud over my head. I was told I was bad, anyway, so I thought if anything bad was going to happen, it would happen to me, that was just the way life was.”
Why? I ask.
“I think it was a reaction to my life’s circumstances. My mum was alcoholic and abusive and manic depressive. My dad coped with that by getting assigned overseas, he left her with me. And for the most part, I was my mother’s caretaker. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, I just thought that was the way it was. And I closed up. I just said You’re not going to break me, I’m not going to show you that you can hurt me.”
Mari says she stopped showing any emotion, at the age of three. Despite the abuse, though, through reiki she learned to forgive. This, she believes was crucial in healing her body, this emotional healing.
“Part of my forgiveness process with my parents was learning to understand that more than likely those two people were hurt as children as well. And for me to demand any more from them was completely unrealistic. If somebody has never been shown love, how can they show love? My mother was brought up in a strictly Victorian household, she was not allowed to cry when her grand-mother died. She said she could remember standing by the coffin and taking a tear and putting it in the coffin so that her grand-mother would know she was sad. So how could I expect my mother to be openly demonstrative? Part of what’s happened to me since reiki is that I’ve been able to be much more compassionate, much more understanding. I’ve gone from being a very mistrusting, closed woman to being someone who’s quite open and enjoys and embraces life.”
Mari divorced her husband and moved to England, initially for three months to train in regression therapy. Upon arriving, she began to teach reiki. No-one had ever heard of it there, but a group of doctors in Edinburgh invited her to give reiki sessions to their patients and this proved to be enormously successful. But she put herself out of a job by training the doctors to do reiki themselves. And she needed a new direction.
“I got down on my knees,” she says, ‘And I asked God to give me a direction. I said I’m willing to be your instrument, just show me where to go.’
Ten minutes later, the phone rang. It was a friend who’s just come back from Czechslovakia.
‘Mari, you must go to Czechslovakia,” he said. “They need you.”
The message had arrived and Mari went. With no money and no knowledge of the language.
‘I didn’t even know where Czechslovakia was!” she laughs. But she got a job, teaching English in a hospital and pretty soon she was teaching reiki as well. The hospital provided her with a room to treat patients in. Eleven years later, Mari has decided to move on again. And she feels Ireland is the place for her. She’s teaching reiki in Meath, today, to a small group.
“Because if you use reiki for yourself and you are harmonised, everybody around you feels it,” she says. “You don’t have to do anything! The more you use it, the more harmonised you become and the more your life will change for the better.’
The reaction of the group is mixed. Some people see colours, during the initiation, some feel the energy moving through them and some don’t feel anything. For me, it is an entirely blissful experience, like coming home and knowing that home is always there and like being in love and knowing that your lover will never leave you. It feels like joy is bubbling under the surface in an inexhaustible supply. I want to be reiki’d all day, if possible. One woman says she’s worried because she feels nothing but peaceful and relaxed. “Goodness me,” says another. ‘Sure what more do you want?”