What I Learned from Doing Reiki on Minecraft by iridescent_soup
When I first started playing Minecraft, I found myself in a forest. Ahead of me were two foxes, one of which I approached and (naively) tried to pet, but this turned out not to be possible. The fox flashed red and ran away. Apparently, the only interaction I could have with animals in the game was to turn them into food or some other kind of consumable. Pigs turn into pork, chickens into feathers.
I’m talking here, however, about a specific mode in the game that you can choose: Survival Mode. This entailed mining raw materials from your immediate surroundings. This didn’t sit well with me, so I chose to play on Minecraft’s Creative mode instead, where you have an unlimited supply of building blocks, food and materials and need not whack a cow to death until it turns into beef. I then began to contemplate whether Creative Mode is any better than Survival mode at all. Is it in fact encoded with more harmful ideals? Is playing on Creative mode nothing unlike the urban lifestyle wherein I need not worry about where a tomato comes from, how it’s made and what it takes to care for the plant that bears it? Is it merely another false illusion of unlimited resources? As it turned out, there was no escaping the neoliberal game mechanics if I was going to simply play “vanilla” Minecraft; Survival and Creative mode were merely two sides of the same neoliberal capitalist coin.
The ideology behind Minecraft is very capitalist. As a player of the game, one sees the landscape as an infinity of standing reserves — a commodification to exploit, consume and use to produce. According to many players of the open-ended game, it stimulates creative thinking and imagination, but games like Minecraft aren’t just a blank slate where players can create worlds. Players world-make within a certain framework and encoded game mechanics. As Minecraft rewards players for subverting the other inhabitants of the game world for their consumption, players participate in a larger media ecology that honors a neoliberal worldview. I wondered, if it’s possible to modify some of Minecraft’s code (since it’s open source and written in Java), could I create pockets of alternate realities within the game in which I didn’t have to succumb to a capitalist world making system, in which a community based on a different set of care-based values could thrive? And from this, what might we learn about the possibilities IRL?
I learned that even from within a Western patriarchal capitalist world making system such as Minecraft, alternatives are possible. And from within, around and adjacent to a healthcare system that no longer seems to serve us, especially as the capacity to care becomes scarce as we do our best to isolate ourselves from each other, we simply need to be more creative in caring for one another.
In 2019, since I had already been practicing Reiki on myself, I wanted to start practicing on others because I noticed how many of my friends were experiencing stress, anxiety, depression and overall burnout, but I didn’t have the physical space to do it. Since Reiki can be done via distance (some people do it over the phone or through video chat), I decided to do it in a game world, which turned out to be a more visceral experience than mediums like phone or video, creating intimacy without proximity.
In search of a new way of caring across vast space and time, I created Portal’s Temple, a private Minecraft server where I hosted individual and group healing sessions. It involved Reiki (energy) healing, meditating, planting a virtual tree, a published in-game spiritual detox guide, and intimate conversations.
How it worked
When a person entered my server, I would take them to my temple, where I gave a brief introduction to explain the process. Then, I would give them a Birch tree sapling and ask them to choose a place in the forest below that feels intuitively right for them and to plant the tree. I ask them to meditate on the tree until it fully grows and while, behind the screen, they are meditating with their eyes closed, I’m performing the attunement. When it was over, I would tell them they could open their eyes, and to their pleasant surprise, their tree would be fully grown. Here I wanted to create an association between their own (spiritual) growth and that of the lanscape (nature).
After the meditation and attunement, we would go back to the temple where I would give them a four-page spiritual detox guide in the form of a book I published in-game. After this, we would remain in the temple for a while or sometimes row a boat around the lake and talk about what each of us felt, discussing some points for reflection moving forward.
Through this type of virtual social presence, users experience a feeling of inhabiting a shared space with one or more others and when we start to provide care based on the unique capacities of the virtual world and build communities in it, the fact that the world is situated in a game recedes into the background and it becomes a space for real healing, intimacy, and trust.
When I first started building this server, I based it on things one would normally find in the physical world: beds, food, shelter and religious architecture. Early on, while testing the experience, I realized that in a game world, these things were absurd. As it turns out, beds are only useful in real life and actually inconvenient in a game. A virtual experience loses its authenticity when one merely copy-pastes what they can already experience in the physical world and this is squandering the potential of virtual spaces. I then started to tailor the healing experience specifically to what Minecraft made possible.
Instead of healing on beds, I did my attunements in the forest. In having people plant trees, meditate over them and place wooden signages beside them where they could type down messages, I realized how profound creating in-game rituals could be. The tree in my server was symbolic of one’s own spiritual growth in relation to the landscape. When we play a video games, the rituals we can create are specific to the virtual world and sometimes a bit absurd. But a player’s relationship to a game is much like watching a play or a movie, wherein one is already cogni tively predisposed to ‘make believe’. It then becomes much easier to create meaningful rituals and experiences in the virtual space, making it an effective space for healing and internal change.