Reiki Practitioner Training Follow Up FAQ 1

If you are an existing or budding Reiki healer, this is one in a series of articles to help you along the way. First of all, let me congratulate you for walking this path. Reiki is a beautiful energy and way of life, and it is wonderful to help people heal, grow, and develop. Well done for having come this far, and for caring!

The question we are answering today goes something like this: "I had a Reiki client last week. This client was suffering from physical pain and some stress. Today the client gave me feedback about the Reiki, saying that they did not feel any different and did not notice anything. The client reported good days and bad days and wanted to attribute the good days to the Reiki but as a rational and perfectly reasonable person, of course did not want to jump to conclusions. The client had also reported during the healing getting thoughts whizzing around in their head, as is normal for that client, in other words, there was no deep relaxation, unlike most of my other experiences giving people Reiki. I am sometimes uncertain what to say in these instances when people do not have any apparent benefit during the session or afterwards. What should I say?"

In order to best answer this question, let us borrow from NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming. Frames of reference, otherwise simply known as frames, provide a context for our thoughts and actions. It provides a frame of reference for what we experience. This is like the way a picture frame puts a border around what we can see in a picture. So we feel the experience within the boundaries of the frame. Our frame of reference with regards to any particular issue has the power to limit what we think of as possible or can open our eyes to many possibilities. For example, coming to a Reiki session with the belief that deep relaxation is most likely to occur or an expectation of feeling heat can limit the client in what they experience. Changing that frame to be more allowing can help us expect and therefore realize limitless possibilities. An important frame is a preframe. This acts as a frame within which our expectation of what is going to happen lies. When we make that frame broad with limitless possibilities, the client can expect the unlimited to happen. After all, Reiki connects us to the abundant and limitless realm.

So, having preframed the answer to this most frequent question, this is what I usually say before a client agrees to a Reiki session. I always say at the beginning that although there are amazing exceptions, Reiki usually does not get felt, for example, like a pain-killer that starts acting in our bloodstream 15 minutes later, and Reiki goes where it is most needed, not where we expect it to go necessarily. The client may feel the Reiki as warm, cold, a wavelike feeling, a tingling sensation, an electrical or vibration feeling, experience various thoughts, maybe temporarily uncomfortable emotions, or a nice relaxation; or the client may just not feel anything at all, which often happens and is perfectly normal. Which one of these reactions or non-reactions will be the client's reaction, is just fine. Reiki works in the background, whether we are immediately aware of it or not. It is best for us to have a course of say, 6 sessions, so that we can have enough chance for Reiki to do its work. Sometimes people need more, but let us think about a course of 6 for now.

When I first started giving sessions, I composed something like the above paragraph and printed it out to read to the client before agreeing to do Reiki. This helped me in remembering what to say, in order to provide as limitless a frame of possibilities as possible, as well as give the best service possible by having a complete course of sessions. Maybe you can re-write the paragraph in your own words, print it or memorise it, and be ready for the next client's abundant possibilities of healing!