Imagine going on a Reiki course, say a First Degree course, for the first time. You don’t know anything about Reiki, really, and you’re not sure what is going to happen on the course. When you arrive, the teacher starts to tell you huge amounts of information about Reiki during your day. It’s difficult to take it all in – it’s all so new, after all, and you haven’t heard any of this stuff before. There are new ideas and concept to get your head around and you have lots of questions.

You try to take notes as you go along, but it’s a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. You scribble away, and while you’re concentrating on what to write down you miss the next bit of what they are saying, and you can hardly replay what they just said! The attunements or empowerments you receive, while often wonderful experiences, don’t help either because they have made you feel all spaced out and blissful, and the energy work is zonking you out too, as you try and concentrate on what is being said.

There’s a lot to take in.

Then, at the end of the day, you get sent home with a cheery goodbye and two sheets of A4: one with your lineage and one with a bad photocopy of some treatment hand positions.

Reiki students deserve better than that.

So what I am going to talk about in this blog are two things that you can do to make sure that your students’ experience does not match what I described above.

You can:

• Provide extensive course materials
• Send out course materials to students in advance

Provide extensive course materials

Your students need to relax, safe in the knowledge that everything you say on their Reiki course is covered in detail in their course materials. You should lay out everything that you teach, clearly and logically, with summaries, illustrations or images, and expand on what you teach on the day, providing non-essential but useful information that rounds out and deepens their knowledge of the system that they are learning.

Your students should not be forced to take notes because this is a huge distraction, stops them from enjoying the day, and trying to take decent notes when you’re all zonked out on energy is no fun.

So your students deserve a proper course manual that covers *everything* that you dealt with on the course, with further explanations, examples, and back-up info. They should be able to use your manual as a reference work that they can return to again and again to check on everything that is needed for that level.

Give your students variations to experiment with: there is no ‘one true way’ with Reiki, so suggest different self-treatment methods, and show how they can treat people in different ways, for example short blasts on someone’s sore back at work, say, head/shoulder treatments, and full treatments.

Cover everything that you say on a live course, absolutely everything, and more besides, and deal with every question that a student has asked you so that what you provide is really comprehensive: a valuable long-term resource.

Your course materials will be a ‘work-in-progress’ for some time!

You should also deal with students’ learning preferences and make your materials multimedia, and I will talk about this more in a later blog.

Send your course materials out in advance

Many years ago when I first started teaching Reiki, I was talking to a Reiki Master that I met at a Reiki gathering or meeting and she mentioned to me that she always sent her students a Reiki manual in advance, before they arrived on the day of their course. My first reaction, because it was different to how I had been taught, was to think, “no, no, no, that’s all wrong!” but it didn’t take very long before I realised that, actually, that was a genius idea. I wish I could remember her name so I could thank her!

By sending a Reiki manual as soon as a student books on their course, they can take their time and read about Reiki, what it is and where it comes from, what it can do for them, how it can help people you treat, at their leisure. There is no reason why all this information has to be blasted at a student for the first time on the day of a course. They can mull over the information, think about it, search for answers to any questions that they might have, reflect on what they have read.

They will also read about the practical exercises that they are going to be guided through on their live course, so they will already be fairly familiar with Hatsurei ho (daily energy exercises), self-treatments and treating others in different ways.

Info is better assimilated over time, in manageable chunks, rather than trying to ‘drink from a fire hose’ on the day of a course.

In fact, when I send out study packs to my Reiki Evolution students, I include a couple of audio CDs, a sheet where they can note down their Reiki goals and their initial questions, and I also give them a list of 20 questions that they should be able to answer. I do this so that their subconscious is primed to look for those answers in the course materials, and once they have found the answers then they have focused on the main points or areas that I wanted them to focus on.

By doing this, when they arrive on their live course they are already quite clued-up about Reiki and what they are going to be doing on their live course.

This means that:

1. The teacher does not have to spend their time sitting down telling the students stuff that they could have easily read about beforehand
2. Students can spend most of their time on the live course actually doing stuff with energy rather than sitting hearing someone talk about, say, the history of Reiki
3. The teacher can spend their time just recapping what the students are already familiar with, focusing the students on the main points and themes and thus reinforcing them

If you’re on a live course, it makes sense to make the time you spend count, to make it mostly about experiencing energy and practising using energy on yourself and on other people, rather than just sitting telling students stuff.

Reiki is a practical skill, after all, and rather like riding on a bicycle, you should spend your time practising it, not hearing about it!

Need some help with your course materials?

I have put together comprehensive and detailed course manuals and easy-to-listen-to audio CDs with commentaries and guided meditations. All these are available for you to use on your own courses (no matter what lineage you have) and you can order them in packs of four at greatly discounted prices. Reiki teachers all over the world are using them. Find out more by clicking here:

Reiki Evolution Manuals and audio CDs.

 

 

 

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Photo credit: Spirit Fire