This text aims to explain the benefits that I gained during my time learning Reiki, and what the required process is to become a Reiki Master, and then subsequently a teacher, if that’s what you want to do. I’ll often recommend my clients to attend at least a Reiki I, if I think it will help them, if nothing else for the self-healing and self-awareness aspect of it. I also frequently recommend that they find a local group to study with, based on my experience of what I gained and learned with my own local group and subsidiary activities outside of the classroom.
In around 2017 I became involved with the activities being offered at the ‘Well-being Centre’ in Marlborough, Wiltshire, in the UK. It was an amazing resource for spiritual growth and health and wellbeing in general, with offerings across vitamins, minerals and oils, crystal healing, sound healing, and a plethora of practices for example, yoga, hypnotherapy, spiritual counselling, and weekly guided meditations, to name but a very few. But the one practice that fascinated me the most was that of original Usui Reiki.
My primary incentive for enrolling on a Reiki I course was simply to see if I could begin to explain energy healing from a quantum perspective, as I suspected that it was very likely that I could. I was not disappointed when I joined Jill Sudbury, self-professed Reiki Goddess owner of Marlborough School of Reiki. Jill is amazing, and has spent her life dedicated to healing and self-healing, having spent much of her early career working with patients in psychiatric care, and subsequently studied and practiced pretty much every other known spiritual tool and discipline (often meeting and spending time with the founders) during her long and fruitful career. What she hasn’t done probably isn’t worth doing or knowing about!
Wrapped up in a corporate 9-5 career, as soon as I walked out of the doors after this first weekend course, I consciously almost forgot all about it, but gradually I began to remember what I’d learned, and began to practice the self-healing that’s central to this first stage of Reiki development. I began to reach out to Jill’s local group and get involved in the monthly Reiki share sessions. After one early session, where I had 5 or 6 Reiki Masters all working on me at the same time, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I experienced no pain for up to 3 hours after. It was incredible, and although the pain came back, it gave me my first glimpse of the possibilities and power of energy healing.
After six moths of having completed the Reiki I course, I then spent a further 6 months annoying Jill by relentlessly asking her if I was ready to do Reiki II. She brutally, but understandable and honourably made me wait a year before I attended my Reiki II course.
This was the most important one for me at the time, and for two primary reasons. Although I’d embarked upon my self-healing journey, I still found performing local healing while standing at a healing table uncomfortable, if not debilitatingly painful. Often I’d use a chair for support.
However, Reiki II introduced me to the use of symbolism in remote healing, and the use of healing mandalas, and more importantly, the ability to send healing to anyone anywhere in the world, while sitting on my arse in complete comfort!
I also began to realise the power of the Gassho position (in conjunction with the symbolism), as the practice sees you grip the personalised mandala sheets between your hands in this position, and I observed the mandalas physically distort and crumple with the heat that I generated during the exercise. This was one of the first physically tangible observations that I experienced, and I think beyond the heat that one would naturally generate when simply adopting the Gassho position.
The other thing that excited me so much about learning about remote healing was how I could see the tangents with quantum entanglement, and how it could be explained from this perspective. This was in line with the remote healing principles that I was studying surrounding the Rife technology that I was also using. With remote healing in Rife, you use a bit of DNA, like from that of a fingernail, to remotely locate your patient, whereas with Reiki, you just needed the persons full name and post-town. Both methods provide very tangible results.
So, I practiced Reiki remote healing for six months, and built up a portfolio of around 50 subjects from around the world. I had people reaching out to me via word of mouth, through friends and family, asking me to send them energy for various reasons. Since I could do up to around 50 at one time, I’d spend about 15 minutes a day, not only sending healing to as many people as I could, but also in deep meditative state myself. Win – Win!
Anyway, after six months I went back to bugging Jill about doing my Reiki III, Reiki Master course. Again, she made me wait the full year, and again, I respected that immensely as if nothing else, it demonstrated her integrity and professionalism.
By the time that I got to Reiki III, I’d already spent much time in the local Reiki community, including regularly helping out at the weekly Reiki-Drop-In sessions at the Wellbeing Clinic, and through learning from my peers, I’d built a catalogue of techniques, visualisations, and ‘add-on’s’ to what I could do. By that time, I’d already began developing my own mind-energy techniques, and my guided meditation journey to the rainbow bridge, that I describe in my book. I’d also attended many of the Reiki satellite courses, such as ‘Reiki Time-lines’, which showed me how to take a client back in time and heal them in ‘real time’, and then to take them forward to the future to begin to explore the future of their desires. Another of the courses, for example, was ‘Trans-Reiki’, which looked at how to adjust the frequency of your voice to create a hypnotic state, for better accessing a clients sub-conscious directly.
The whole Reiki III course was great, but not as powerful or as immediately rewarding as the previous two, and I think that it may have been because even before going into it, my sights were already firmly set on my ambition to become a Teacher; so that’s what I wanted to do next.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait a further year for this, and I competed the course quite soon after. I absolutely loved it, and taught my first 3 students in Reiki I shortly after. What an amazing gift, which I was extremely grateful for. I think I got as much from it as my students, and have done ever since!
Equally, I had not until that point been able to get my head around charging for giving Reiki, and so had never charged anyone for the work that I did, as I was primarily doing it for pleasure, and simply because I could. Now the whole financial remuneration side of it made more sense for me, as I was charging for something seemingly far more tangible. I’ve since recognised the blockage that I initially had, which I think was more related to a confidence thing, but even now, I’m very happy to send anyone energy that needs it at any time, completely unconditionally.
During this time I also had several sessions with a Shaman in Glastonbury, experiencing ceremonies involving mushroom, Huachuma (San Pedro cactus) and Ayahuasca. They were pretty mind blowing.
I would not recommend that anyone engages in these ceremonies without proper consultation with an experienced and authentic shaman or practitioner, because if you’re not ready for it, or are not provided with the right environment, guidance and support, then you may not get the benefits that are possible from the plant medicine.
So, when working with plant medicine in this way, it’s important that your shaman provides you with precise instruction in preamble to the ceremony. I was given strict instructions for fasting for several days before the event, and also advice on how to begin to communicate with the plant spirits, in order to get the best from the experience, and to ask for what I wanted to achieve.
I’ve said this many times, but you have to be very careful what you wish for! I primarily asked for more energy. What I really meant, and what I probably should have asked for, was more stamina. More energy, or more direct access to tangible positive energy, is what I got!
Whilst tripping my tits off (apparetly official terminology), I became fascinated with my hands. I’d already had my palm chakras activated through the process of learning Reiki, and I’m not sure if this was significant, or not, but at this time I held my palms together in the prayer position, or Gassho position, but with a gap of about a centimetre between them. I felt as though I had created a capacitor as I could feel considerable energy building up in the gap. The energy intensified as I gradually closed the gap. When I closed the gap completely, I felt an intense power running through me, and had what I can only describe as being a life changing experience.
The result was that ever since, when I put my hands in the closed Gassho position in any situation, I immediately go into a deep meditative state, and what I believe to be a fifth dimensional consciousness. This has been extremely useful for meditation and Reiki ever since, and no wonder it’s classically the prayer position! Also, see an article from the Reiki Guide for more information.
In May 2022 I was invited to give my first workshop on ‘Quantum Reiki’, which attempted to explain energy healing from a quantum physics perspective, drawing on the works of Deepak Chopra and Joe Dispenza, for example. The day course was well received, and I left thinking that if I polished my final section where I connected the biology into it, then I would have a very useful and informed course for future use.