Reiki Master. Why I Still Won’t Offer It.

You walked into a room and knew something had happened in it. Nobody had said anything. Nothing was moved, yet you just knew.

Your fur baby was feeling off, and you couldn’t understand why. So, you sat down on the floor with them a little longer than expected trying to discern what was wrong.

A friend called, and a few words in, you knew what they were calling about wasn’t the reason they reached out.

You did all of that without a certificate.

Reiki puts a name to what you’ve already been doing naturally.

We’ve been recognizing and naming this phenomenon throughout human history. Qi in China. Prana in India. Pneuma to the Greeks. Vital force to the doctors of the 1700s, animal magnetism a century later, and Reiki after that. Every few generations we swap the vocabulary. The perception of energy and its mechanics really hasn’t shifted that much.

Most of us are doing it the way we breathe. Constantly, naturally, and without ever having to think about it.

So isn’t a matter of whether you can. You’re doing it right now, reading this. The only real question is whether you’re doing it consciously.

I learned Reiki twice

Not to find out if it was real. To see it from the practitioner’s side.

I went through the training once. Then I went through the whole thing again with a different teacher, on purpose, so I could compare how each one taught and actually understand the mechanism instead of just accepting it at face value.

Both times, I walked in with an innate understanding of what they were teaching. So did everyone else. Nobody instilled anything new. What I picked up was vocabulary, symbolism, and the logic of something I was already actively doing, just without calling anyone in or using specific sigils to do it.

That much I anticipated. What I didn’t expect was that the second course would be just like the first but at a different price point.

What they both taught, and what I struggled to get past

Both of them instructed you to call in Reiki guides to do the work, and to see your body as the vessel the energy runs through.

One taught that you have to perform a ritual at the end to close and disconnect. The other preached that you’d make yourself sick if you took on too much energy without releasing it properly.

As you can imagine, that never sat well with me.

If my body is the vessel it passes through, what’s there to hold? And if the whole premise is that it’s divine energy, wouldn’t it be transmuting and clearing mine right alongside the other person’s, in tandem? It either moves through you, or it sticks to you. Those two things can’t both exist simultaneously.

Teaching somebody to be scared of the modality you just taught them is a strange way to hand over a skill. It’s also guaranteeing they return.

I don’t believe in that division. I believe we all have the capacity to do this ourselves, and already do, in varying degrees.

You can’t spell words with only the vowels

Most teachers hand Reiki over in pieces. Level one, then level two, and finally level three, with hundreds to thousands of dollars sitting at each step.

I don’t understand that.

How do you teach someone only vowels and then expect them to spell a word? It’s a fluid system. I believe it should be taught as such.

Splitting it into three purchases costs more than time or money. It leaves someone walking around with only a piece of a toolkit, convinced the missing parts live behind another pay wall. It’s a rough way to treat a beginner. It teaches them their ceiling is a certificate, when really, it’s just about how much they’ve practiced.

What I want to hand somebody is the building blocks and the structure. Then they adapt. They’re capable of moving toward the way they specifically work with energy, because that’s going to look different for them than it does for me. It was never meant to be stagnant or rigid.

Nobody needs grammar to talk. You were speaking for years before anyone told you what a verb was. All it did was give you a way to see what you were already doing, so you could do it deliberately. A system that hands you a third of the alphabet and then stops isn’t doing that job.

Where the word energy gets people in trouble

The word covers two different claims, and we fluctuate between them without noticing.

One of them is ordinary. You affect the room and the room affects you, all day, every day, and you’ve had that your entire life. The other is a force where one person pushes into another, from across a table.

That second claim has been ridiculed since the 1780s. A royal commission ran what usually goes down as the first blinded trial in history. Their conclusion was that imagination did the majority of the work. When the test is whether a practitioner can feel your field, it doesn’t hold up either. Even Reiki itself, looked at directly for anxiety and depression, came back with too little evidence to say much of anything.

None of that matters because what I’m describing is the first claim. Everything in this post sits specifically within that realm.

I’d rather you know where the ground gets soft than find out from somebody who’s using it to tell you the whole subject is nonsense. It isn’t. But the latter version keeps getting tested and keeps coming up short.

Why I’d rather teach it than do it for you

The phone rings and somebody asks if I do Reiki, and whether I’d book them a session. What they’re picturing is an hour on a table with somebody’s hands resting on or just above them. Some of them are calling frightened and want to be cleared of something, which is a whole separate conversation. I’ve discussed all of this before.

I tell them all the same thing. They’d get more out of learning it than out of having it done to them. When it’s eleven at night and they feel off, one of their pets is stressed out, or a friend needs some assistance. They’re now able to do something about it. They can teach somebody else how to do it.

It’s a tool we can all use. It’s very handy for learning to discern exactly what you’re feeling and how to navigate through it, and for getting clear on who and where you choose deserves it. Most of what drains someone arrives quietly. It’s a hundred small yeses to things that were never worth it. You can’t begin to say no until you feel the cost of the ones you already said yes to.

So I’d rather put it back in your hands rather than keeping it in mine. To each their own, but I quite like my autonomy. And I’d prefer you kept yours also.

So no, I don’t sell this as a session

I don’t offer it as a standard service, and I don’t plan to. I don’t think you need to buy it from me.

You’ve already got the ability sitting in you right now. What a teacher gives you is structure and language for it, and that’s a far smaller purchase than this industry wants you to believe.

If you want me to teach it, reach out and ask. It stays off my list of services because most of you don’t need it from me. I’d rather point you at what actually will move something for you. The mentoring I do runs on this same principle, structure a person then adjusts to fit them specifically instead of a script they follow. Or trying to sell you a course just because it will sell isn’t how I operate.

And if all it ever does for you is make you more mindful of your own energy, and more deliberate about who and where you choose to spend it, then it’s earned its place in your toolbox.