UK Reiki Regulation in meltdown
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- Complementary therapy regulator expels Reiki and other therapies!
- New breakaway regulators compete for business!
- Reiki society makes a grab for power and control!
If there was a Reiki tabloid newspaper then I am sure that these would have been the headlines in recent months, since I hear on the grapevine that the whole area of Reiki regulation has descended into a mire of infighting and grabs for power.
I will try and explain the background to all this and I will be as brief as I can…
In recent years there have been moves to introduce some sort of ‘voluntary self-regulation’ (VSR) for Reiki and other complementary therapies. The way it worked was for the various associations and societies for each therapy to get together to form an ‘umbrella organisation’ which was then responsible for deciding how each therapy was going to be regulated. Various documents would be produced dealing with such things as a code of ethics, training standards, registration requirements, continuing professional development (CPD), a draft disciplinary procedure etc. The Reiki umbrella body is called the Reiki Regulatory Working Group (RRWG). The idea was that the umbrella organisation would at some stage then ‘go live’ and become a ‘proper’ Reiki Regulatory body, and in the case of Reiki the body would be called the ‘UK Reiki Council’.
Representatives from Reiki associations and societies, and those from other therapies like Aromatherapy, Massage, Reflexology etc have all been working along these lines, forming umbrella organisations, developing codes of practice etc, with the idea that there would eventually be a Reiki governing body, a Reflexology governing body and an Aromatherapy governing body etc. We should remember that this is *voluntary* self-regulation, though, so there would be no compulsion for practitioners to join in with these voluntary regulatory schemes.
But a new idea came into being, which was that there would be some sort of a ‘federal’ system. This means that there would be an overarching complementary therapy governing body responsible for the licensing of all complementary therapists of whatever denomination, with common basic standards and registration requirements for all therapists. A Federal Working Group (FWG) was set up with a view to achieving this goal.
But there is a problem. It is a big problem. The Federal body, in a fit of pique, expelled the Reiki people, and the Reflexologists, and the Aromatherapists, and others who were against the huge bureaucracy that was being proposed, leaving the supposed overarching complementary therapy regulatory body with very few members, though it is still forging ahead it seems, as ‘The Natural Healthcare Council’. And since so many people and therapies had been excluded from the process, competing alternative regulatory bodies were set up and are now touting for business.
Meanwhile, in the field of Reiki regulation, the UK Reiki Federation is trying to position itself as the only proper “professional accrediting body” so that when the UK Reiki Council comes into being to regulate Reiki, it will be UK Reiki Federation that will be making all the decisions, and societies like The Reiki Association (the first Reiki association to be set up in this country I believe) will be reduced to having only ‘observer’ status and have no involvement in the decision-making process, which of course would be disastrous.
Ever since this whole process of voluntary self-regulation started, many Reiki people have been very, very unhappy with this endeavour, for a lot of reasons. Many question the need for the regulation of Reiki in the first place, and while the RRWG (Reiki umbrella body) continually emphasises the need to ‘safeguard the public’, not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to demonstrate that the public are currently being damaged and endangered through the practise of Reiki in the UK.
A few years ago now, one of the Reiki societies – the UK Reiki Federation – put together a now notorious ‘draft core curriculum’ for Reiki, which must have been written by individuals who had no real understanding of the practise of Reiki, and which was subject to a great deal of negative comment and even ridicule on online discussion groups. The Federation reacted hysterically to criticism of its proposals, and the attitude was very much one of ‘we are right, we know best’; sadly, this arrogant attitude continues through into the Reiki umbrella body (RRWG) and decisions are being made on everyone’s behalf without proper consultation, behind close doors.
This idea of a core curriculum still rumbled on and proposals were put forward by the RRWG in 2006, ostensibly for public consultation. Reiki people were given the opportunity to comment on the proposals, with a deadline of December 2006, but the issue was not promoted or publicised properly and many Reiki people would have known nothing about this whole process. It has been estimated that the RRWG represents 10,000 people (through its member organisations) and that there are a further 10,000 practitioners who are not members of any society or association. So we have a pool of 20,000 Reiki practitioners and only 81 people responded to the RRWG questionnaires! This shows how poorly the process was promoted, and any decisions made by the RRWG about the hoops that practitioners will have to jump through are on the basis of no proper mandate. The RRWG’s supposed goal was to achieve a consensus, yet refused to send out any amended proposals for further discussion.
The latest incarnation of the core curriculum requires practitioners to have carried out 75 full treatments (five under the supervision of someone who is ‘occupationally competent’) and carried out 135 hours of training (including 45 hours of in-person training with a Reiki teacher) over at least a nine month period before they would be approved as a practitioner.
So what we have here is a group of people with too much time on their hands, getting a taste of power and jockeying for control of the Reiki regulatory process, all with a goal of trying to impose an arbitrary and illogical set of requirements on practitioners of a simple folk art that does not harm and does not require regulation, voluntary or otherwise.
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