Certified Reiki Master

Ok so for the sake of argument if we assume that Reiki works, that they should get paid, and that they shouldn't teach the craft to others, at what point is Reiki a career (and how much should they be paid for it) or a hobby/spiritual side hustle?
Is it ethical to even charge for spiritual services in the first place (beyond a bare minimum to keep the services available)? What if someone can't afford Reiki at the prices you charge?

Rex wrote: Ok so for the sake of argument if we assume that Reiki works, that they should get paid, and that they shouldn't teach the craft to others, at what point is Reiki a career (and how much should they be paid for it) or a hobby/spiritual side hustle?
Is it ethical to even charge for spiritual services in the first place (beyond a bare minimum to keep the services available)? What if someone can't afford Reiki at the prices you charge?

Most people I've known to employ Reiki in their profession use it in combination with some other healing modality. Some people hang out a shingle announcing their services as holistic healers, perhaps employing some combination of massage, nutrition counseling, chiropractic, and Reiki in the mix of services they offer. More conventionally, there are a number of licensed nurses who, with willing patients, will administer Reiki to augment conventional medical treatment. In those cases, it's at least a component of a career. Offhand, I can only recall meeting one person who endeavored to rely on offering Reiki treatments as a sole source of income. The demand just isn't high enough to make that a practical course for most.

A number of those same people though quite frequently also provide Reiki services for free to those in need and unable to pay. When the very foundation of a professionally-applied skill rests upon compassion, I would argue there's a mandate for the service to be freely given when it's practical to do so without jeopardizing the healer's ability to meet their own physical needs.

Reiki practitioners who have been attuned to the Master level actually can teach others to apply Reiki, and often happily do so. Early Reiki masters tended to charge huge amounts for such training, but that is no longer the case; someone can take a weekend course in Reiki level one for the cost of three or four treatments, and use it on themself and others for the rest of his/her life.

Personally, I think it's unrealistic to expect people to consistently provide either mundane or sacred services for free. Kindness, empathy, and devotion don't eliminate someone's need for food and shelter. Churches and charities have to ask for money to continue their work; healers face the same conditions. On the other hand, it strikes me as hypocritical for someone using a healing energy claimed to be a conduit for an ethereal form of love to practically bankrupt their clients. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that the average hourly wage for American workers in 2019 is about $23.50 per hour. Charging many multiples of that detracts from the client's quality of life as much as it adds to it.

I thought I was done on this topic, but Omhu Cuspor brings up another good point: If you charge those who can afford it, and you don't charge those who can't, everyone wins.

Think about it:

• People who can afford high-cost treatments are more likely to attach value to something they've paid for--it will be worth less to them if they pay less for it.
• People who can afford mid-cost treatments are more likely to receive benefits that fit into their disposable income.
• People who can only afford low- or no-cost treatment are subsidized (in the eyes of the practitioner) by those who can afford high- and mid- cost treatments, since the practice of reiki has no overhead.
• The practitioner still makes enough money to cover the cost of their training and necessities, because the cost of treatment averages out among all clients

It's not a bad system, and that's why I use it.

People are paying for an experience, simply put...

It's never intended to replace medical treatment, medication, or a trip to the doctor's office. Your attempt at picking apart why someone should charge in the first place (or if it even exists), is evidence you don't understand what is truly going on during these attunements...

Most Reiki practitioners that I know of who do this partially or full time as a living, invest a decent chunk of money into the experience that goes into these encounters...

LTK wrote: My friend recently posted that she's now a certified Reiki Master and has started offering sessions for 175/hr.

That's a bit steep? In the UK you'd pay from £40-60.. That's the same whether they're an Okuden or Shinpiden I believe.
I've recently attained Shoden in Reiki so I'm not expert yet.

LTK wrote: Personally, I believe Reiki is pseudoscience, but it got me wondering: if there is this universal healing energy that is accessible to all, do you think it's ethical to monetize and charge for it?

I'm still getting my head around it. I myself believe healing should be free, but I was curious enough to see if healing using Reiki was different and paid for the initiation. It was a fairly spiritual and moving course. The idea behind behind paying is that people will value your healing as much as you do.. so to respect yourself and your abilities, you should charge something. If it was free, then people would take it for granted or think it was fake.. It's a tricky balance and subject to think about tbh.

LTK wrote: 2) It's probably my own preconceived prejudices but when I read the Bible as a kid, I don't recall Jesus asking for payment when performing a healing service. If Reiki is a healing service shouldn't it be free, even if it takes time?

If it's your living, I can see it's hard to not charge for it, but if it's something you do on the side because of your love to heal others, monetizing it seems odd to me. In my old religion we called it priestcraft if you charged money for using sacred powers to help others.

I can also see not charging anything and instead leaving an option for a donation.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here with this link but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway lol
https://bit.ly/2LFlWA1
And sure, I’m positive some of them could argue that it isn’t the same thing enough to satisfy their beliefs but it doesn’t cut it for me. It’s just more of the same hypocrisy and politics as anything else.

To summarize a very large paragraph I just deleted - if someone believes in Reiki healing they’ll be willing to pay someone to do it because learning it takes time and effort - and giving a session also takes time and effort. Even if most people don’t believe in it, the ones seeking it out do and know and understand there is cost involved.

I think I would take donations. People will naturally show their thanks and gratitude..

I wouldn't want to rely on energy work for income. I think having other income would be optimal for me.. servicing others and myself in the process

My force i use to heal others and while it does sound psuedoscience like it's much more then that. Ever faced your fears and felt relieved after some sort of warm energy that relieves or something? That is technically reiki energy which is the healing energy usually silver then using blue you can be soothing, calming and flowy. The green can ground and if you have energy that is red or an overactive chakra use the green maybe combining with blue force color aka the aura. It depends on the energy needed at the time and red is circulation yet can be mapped out which if it's red would mean inflated or irritated nerves.
pardon my poor formatting if it is and it's something one can experience to truly figure it out or call it more then a psuedo. You use it whether or not your aware of it though and hope your doing well. Just my input as i have done and received that energy.
mtfbwy

Mira wrote: My force i use to heal others and while it does sound psuedoscience like it's much more then that. ... mtfbwy

I think there's a helpful point there, Mira. I would not call Reiki as we now rely upon it "science", not even pseudoscience. I do not think it has passed the criteria that the discipline of science would require for it to be accepted as scientifically validated. I honestly don't know if that's even been attempted.

But that said, there are thousands of people whose subjective experience with Reiki has been positive. I am one. It was through working with a Reiki practitioner that I overcame joint pain from a fall down some stairs that my physician said would be with me the rest of my life.

To those of us who have experienced tangible benefit from energy work like Reiki, accusations of being involved with pseudoscience don't matter. We know what it contributed to our lives. I am not an anti-science person, but the longer I live the more I think that the scientific paradigm, while profoundly helpful, may not by itself be able to provide a complete understanding of the universe in which we live.

So is this like Force Healing? How can I learn it?

Fyxe wrote: So is this like Force Healing? How can I learn it?

Hi Fyxe. You could look at it like Force Healing, yes.

Reiki was discovered by Mikao Usui sometime in the late 1800's or early 1900's. Dr. Usui studied and practiced a variety of Eastern disciplines; he was a Buddhist monk, practiced martial arts as well as the Oriental healing discipline of Chi Kung. At one point, at the end of a 21-day period of fasting, he experienced a vision of several ancient Sanskrit symbols that became the basis for his method of healing. I know this sounds sufficiently exotic to read like good fiction, but Usui's biography is pretty well documented.

If you wish to learn Reiki, you can do so in far less time than it took Dr. Usui, and no fasting is needed. Accessibility to a Reiki teacher kind of depends on where you live; it is probably easier to find a teacher in larger towns than very small ones. I'd suggest just performing an internet search for Reiki plus the name of the city where you live.

Traditional Reiki is called Usui Reiki for obvious reasons. Many styles have been added since Usui's time; I believe some are good and some are suspect; anyone, after all, can hang out a shingle calling themselves a Reiki practitioner even having had no training at all. The Reiki practitioner who first helped me was trained in Tera Mai Reiki so I can vouch for that system too; my training, though, is in Usui Reiki, and I recommend starting there if you can.

There are three levels to traditional Reiki training. Level One is primarily focused on direct healing of yourself or others who are in the same room with you. Level Two offers the additional ability to assist in the healing of others at a distance. Level Three is required if you want to be a teacher yourself, and pass along the tradition to others.

Training for each level is simple. In traditional Usui training, you'll typically spend a weekend with a teacher and a small group of fellow students. Information will be shared, and at some point the teacher will provide an attunement - a short, ceremonial process where the teacher essentially provides an energy infusion directly to you that makes Reiki energy a permanent part of your being. It is an easy and comfortable process. During your weekend class, you can also expect to exchange healing sessions with your classmates several times.

Costs for the training can vary. In the early days of Reiki teaching (after Dr. Usui), it was quite expensive to become a Reiki practitioner, but that is no longer the case. I'm a little out of touch on current rates, but I'd guess you should be able to enroll in Reiki I training for no more than $200. The costs tend to rise as you progress to Reiki II and Reiki III, but if your teacher charges upward of $1,000 or more for the third level, I'd look elsewhere. I think you can probably pay considerably less than that.

In selecting a teacher, I'd ask him/her to share their lineage. My teacher could trace her lineage directly back to Dr. Usui through a half-dozen generations of teachers - so she wasn't too far removed. A longer lineage isn't a bad thing necessarily; the key point is that the best teachers know how Reiki training flowed to them.

Finally - if you're genuinely considering this and have never experienced Reiki, before getting training I'd recommend undergoing at least four or five Reiki healing sessions yourself, either with your prospective teacher or one of his/her students. It'll help you decide if this path is right for you.

I hope that's helpful. I'd love to hear where you take this!

Wow that sounds amazing, but I'm mostly interested in building force healing power. But this might be a good place to start. But I'm from a very small town and 200 bucks is a lot!

Are you a master? If so can you help me remotely? I looked up classes and there are none near me but I found an online course where he will teach me to be a master remotely by buying his home course for only 47 dollars! That seems pretty cool so what do you think of that?

I want to use the training to develop my force heal talent. I want to use the force though not a Japanese energy system. Do you think we can work on this or something like that?

Don't worry. Reiki isn't a Japanese energy system, either.

Oh sorry thought he was from Japan. In any case whatever oriental energy system he made I want to tap into the force energy.

Call me old-fashioned if you must, but I still feel a general sense of unease about encouraging and promoting getting scammed... Like sure, if you happen to have more money than sense, by all means, burn as much of it as you see fit, nobody can tell you what good you should be doing with it instead. But once we start broadly promoting this pseudoscientific garbage like that we are risking deliberately causing real harm to people on no better excuse for it than that the victims - our victims at that point - were not savvy enough to see through it in time. Again, from a libertarian standpoint I cannot form an objection to it, but I'd like to think of us as better than so callously uncaring...

Gist, you do realize you can just, y'know, not post in threads, right? Like, it's possible to see something you don't agree with and just shut the hell up instead of being a parade rainer, right?

Yes, I am aware of that. Thanks.

Sorry I interrupted. Please carry on standing by doing nothing as people advice each other on how best to get scammed. And I'll carry on giving a damn whilst keeping in mind that I could also "just shut the hell up", as you put it. Thank you for reminding me that the negligent, disinterested route is an option. I keep overlooking it...

is it a scam though? if someone genuinely feels that they have benefited or learned then that is all that matters to them. i have seen enough energy work to know that i do not know everything (i have seen frauds and i have seen people get legitimate results) and that the scientific method cannot explain everything (even scientists have admitted that there are things science still can't explain). the power of belief is difficult to understand or explain...i know a man that had a tumor that medical science could not get rid of and he was told by his doctors that he only had a few months before the tumor would eventually kill him, the man turned to "pseudo sciences" and holistic treatments and after 3 months the tumor stopped growing, after 6 months it began to reduce in size, after 3 years there was no sign of him ever having the tumor...there must be something to these ancient methods if they're still around after all these centuries, even in the face of modern science and medicine....just saying...

RyuJin wrote: is it a scam though?

Yes.

if someone genuinely feels that they have benefited or learned then that is all that matters to them.

That's awful. I would hope more things than that would matter irrespective of what they feel benefits them, but maybe that's too high an expectation to make of people... At any rate, I recall saying that I can appreciate an argument in favour of letting people waste their resources. What is concerning to me is encouraging and promoting that wastefulness in others, but I guess I better "just shut the hell up" than dare voice any such concern...

i have seen enough energy work to know that i do not know everything (i have seen frauds and i have seen people get legitimate results) and that the scientific method cannot explain everything (even scientists have admitted that there are things science still can't explain).

It can't explain where the storks stash the babies before they fly them to young parents, nor how the storks keep those babies from growing up all that time. Just because science can't explain something doesn't mean that there is a thing there to be explained in the first place, let alone that woo-woo can explain it.

the power of belief is difficult to understand or explain...

And yet, it has been.

i know a man that had a tumor that medical science could not get rid of and he was told by his doctors that he only had a few months before the tumor would eventually kill him, the man turned to "pseudo sciences" and holistic treatments and after 3 months the tumor stopped growing, after 6 months it began to reduce in size, after 3 years there was no sign of him ever having the tumor...

So does this man or his doctors have names? Was the location size and growth behaviour of the tumor noted down and what were the uncertainties on the prognoses? How old was the man, where did he live, what job did he work and what was his immediate family's history with cancer like? What tests were performed on him before, during, and after these "procedures"? Which one of the procedures was the one that did the job? Which ones and in which order, if they were multiple? What mechanism specifically did the working procedure employ that the doctors refused to in their efforts to help the man (if any such efforts were made), and did they keep their licenses after this was made public? Why is it that we hear all of these countless anecdotes of anonymous people with unspecific sequences of vaguely described events, but not one thoroughly documented case, not one properly conducted study?

there must be something to these ancient methods if they're still around after all these centuries, even in the face of modern science and medicine....just saying...

First of all, no, that's nonsense. Just because something is old or has persisted for a long long time doesn't mean there must be something to it. It doesn't even mean there could be, if we're being technical. Stork theory of child conception has been around for quite a while, too, as has astrology, but if we want to stick with medicine, there are people in the west still attempting at balancing their humours despite modern science and medicine rightly abandoning that practice because they know better now. People aren't always up to date and even more seldom critical enough to tell fact from fiction. And that's ignoring vulnerable people who are biased towards the comforting lie over the harsher reality they face.
But at any rate, Reiki is not an ancient method, so that point is moot anyway. It's just under a century old, you can buy certificates for pocket change and any credible evidence to support its efficacy is yet to surface, which may be part of the reason why it is so often cited as one of several prime examples of modern pseudoscience.

This seems to be a roundabout way of saying that Gisteron's opinion doesn't matter. Today many are too quick to tell those that don't agree to be quiet or that they shouldn't be allowed to speak. The point of these types of forums should be the open exchange of ideas. Instead of dismissing their opinions, perhaps you should present your side of the argument with evidence to rebut Gisteron's position and show the efficacy of proposed treatments.
We can have civilized discussions without resorting to dismissing each other's opinions. You may not change their mind, but you will at least be respecting their opinions and their rights to express them.