In my recent blog “Reiki teaching: explain, guide, review” I ran through a simple sequence that you can follow when teaching practical exercises to your students.

In this blog I would like to talk about the information that you pass on, how to help the information to stick in your students’ minds, and how to ensure that new information relates to what has come before, and is put in proper context.

And in doing this, I will be relying on some very basic advice that is given to people who do public speaking. In fact, this is the most basic public speaking advice!

How to speak in public

When you give a talk to a group of people, you need to:

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them
2. Tell them
3. Tell them what you told them

So you have an introduction where you run over the main themes or areas that you are going to be covering. This starts to give your listeners a ‘map of the territory’, it provides them with a set of main headings or categories, so when you move on to the next stage (‘tell them’) you can expand on those themes and headings. The listener already has some ‘hooks’ in their memory to add the new information to, so it makes sense, has somewhere to fit, and will be more memorable.

Finally, you tell them what you told them, which means that, after having explored the issues in detail, you conclude by bringing them back to the main themes, points, headings that you started with, leaving them with a final summary of your talk. They go away with the main themes clear in their minds.

In doing this, your listeners have received the same information three times, by way of the introduction, by you expanding on these themes in the main part of your talk, and by summarising things at the end. And we know that repeating your exposure to information, particularly when there is some overall structure, where the info relates to a number of clear themes or ideas, and ideally where the information is personally relevant to you or you can imagine how you might use the information in practice, makes that information much more memorable.

So how does this relate to talking to your Reiki students as you progress through their course?

How to make your Reiki course content memorable

Well, you can explain to begin with what is going to be happening during their day, the big items, the main themes or headings. Tell them what they are going to learning about and practising in the morning, and what they will do in the afternoon. I know they will have seen your course schedule in advance but it’s a good idea to remind them on the day.

Then, whether you’re giving people a quick talk about ‘What Reiki is and where it comes from’ or ‘What Reiki can do for you and the people around you’, or whether you are introducing Hatsurei ho or explaining about scanning, you can follow the “tell them, tell them, tell them” sequence: outline the main points, expand on them and then summarise.

Outline, expand, summarise.

Then move on to the next chunk of your day.

Recapping after a break

When you have had a break (your mid-morning break or the lunch break) it is very useful to give them a quick reminder of what they did earlier, summarise the main points very briefly and then move on to the next section, but showing how the next chunk of your day relates to what has come before: how it follows on, how it builds on what they have already done.

You might use a phrase like:

“before the break what we did was to…”

“we learned that….”

“and you discovered that…”

“now we are going to move on by learning about… and practising…”

If you taught Hatsurei ho and had a break, and now you are going to go through self-treatments, you might end up saying something like this (off the top of my head):

“So, before the break we went through Hatsurei ho, a set of daily energy exercises that you can use every day to start to balance your energy system: to clear, cleanse and ground you. You started by using Kenyoku – the dry bathing – where you ritually cleared and cleansed your energy system and then you moved on to move the energy to and from your tanden in time with your breathing, finally focusing the energy on your hands. It doesn’t take too long to do, is a wonderful exercise to get into the habit of doing, and the audio CD that came in your study pack talks you through all the stages, so you can relax and just follow the instructions.

“Now we’re going to move on to learn how to carry out a self-treatment. There are lots of different ways of doing self-treatments, most of them involving resting your hands on different parts of the body and letting the energy flow. Basically you are firing the energy from lots of different directions to give it the best chance to get to where it needs to go. But sometimes people can find the hand positions a bit awkward or uncomfortable to hold for any amount of time, so fortunately from original Japanese Reiki comes a self-treatment method actually taught by Mikao Usui, where you imagine that the energy is focusing on different areas of your head, and that’s what we are going to go through. By treating the head, you actually end up treating the whole body anyway, and it’s a lovely routine that you can go through whenever you have the opportunity to close your eyes for a few minutes.

“So, this is what we do…”

PS.

Please do not do this…

By the way, as an aside I wanted to say that you should never read a book or manual out loud to your students.

• It is unprofessional.
• It’s so boring: not everyone reads out loud well.
• They can read it themselves so they don’t need you to do it for them.

I have heard of courses where most of what happened was the teacher reading out loud to the student from a manual.

This is disgraceful behaviour!

They are there to learn from *you*, not to hear how well you can read out someone else’s book.

Never read stuff out to students.

You may as well be a performing parrot.

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.

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

Teaching Reiki

“Spot on! I’ve been teaching reiki for many years and I must say I wish this book had landed back then!

I’ve put together courses and really would have loved a book like this to refer back to, it’s concise, clear, laid out really well and is informative and a mini support system to boot.

If you’re entering the Reiki world with an aim to become Master/Teacher then having this book in your armoury will benefit you.”
S J Price

Teaching Reiki

A Comprehensive Guide to Running Great Courses

This is the book I really wish had been available when I started running Reiki courses in 1997. And it would have helped me greatly in my journey as a Reiki teacher thereafter.

You’ll find a wealth of advice about how to set up and run your Reiki courses: read articles about planning and structuring your courses; find out how to explain things to students in a way that honours their learning preferences and personality types; discover how to create top quality course materials and how to support your students long-term.

We look at the differences between ‘Western’ and Original Japanese Reiki and I explain how I created “Reiki Evolution” courses, which pass on the essence of Reiki’s original form. Read this book and you’ll know how to teach “Reiki Evolution” style: what to say, what to teach, and even how to teach Reiki in a ten-week ‘Evening Class’ format.

This book will be of interest to anyone who is about to start teaching Reiki, or to established Reiki teachers who are interested in enhancing the quality of their courses.

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p

Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49

Photo credit: Biblioteca Centrala a BM

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When you teach someone Reiki, you are teaching a practical skill, an art. Reiki is about things that you do: you meditate, you move energy with visualisation or intention, you move through hand positions as you treat other people, and students need to become comfortable with these practical skills by doing them: initially on their Reiki course and then through repeated practice once they get back home, in the days and weeks after their course.

It occurred to me that when I teach Reiki I go through a particular sequence, with the students sitting in front of me, whenever I teach a particular practice, and you can summarise what I do with these headings:

1. Explain
2. Guide
3. Review

Explain

You need to explain clearly to your students what it is that they will be doing: what the stages are, how they will do it. Maybe you need to demonstrate a few points, or a few movements, and have your students copy you a few times so that they are comfortable with the process, before they do it ‘for real’.

Reassure them that they don’t need to remember anything at this stage because you will talk them through the process.

Talk about why you do this exercise, what it is said to achieve and what they might notice, reassuring them that everyone is different and that you are not expecting people to experience a particular thing: that there is no ‘right’ thing that they have to notice.

Guide

Most of the things that we do when we practise Reiki, we do with our eyes closed: meditating, self-treating, performing Hatsurei ho, treating other people, so we need to be guided through these practices for the first time, by a teacher who is paying close attention to us, and who explains what we need to do clearly and carefully, moving everyone through the stages at the same time.

Review

When you have completed an exercise, ask the students what they noticed, what they enjoyed, what they found challenging, how it went for them. You don’t necessarily have to go round eliciting feedback in order, say from right to left, because that might be intimidating for the first person you keep on coming to. Just allow the person who feels most comfortable giving their feedback to do so first, but also make sure that you ask everyone what they experienced, so everyone has the chance to share.

It is useful for students to understand that there are differences in their experiences when carrying out a particular exercise and that is ok: everyone is different and experiences things in different ways. And if everyone noticed a particular thing happening, then that’s great too!

Feedback is useful because it often raises issues, or questions, that you can use as ‘talking points’ where you can provide further advice, or practical tips, or talk about perhaps different ways that the exercises can be used (for example, taking Kenyoku out of Hatsurei ho and using it before treating someone).

And if no-one asks the question that would lead you to give that helpful hint or tip, give them the tips anyway.

Explain, Guide, Review, Repeat

You can cycle through these three stages for each chunk of your course: each practical exercise.

So before you give the first attunement or empowerment, explain what you are doing and why, and what they are going to have to do to participate (for example, “bring your hands into the prayer position when I rest my hand gently on your shoulder”), go through the initiation, let them know when you have completed the process for everyone, and get feedback about what people noticed.

When you teach Hatsurei ho, talk about why you do this exercise, the stages they need to go through, the movements that they will need to make (let them practise a few times), guide them through the exercise in real time and then ask for feedback so you can provide useful hints and tips, reassurance, and talk about how the exercise, or parts of the exercise, can be used in different situations.

And so on for self-treatments and treating other people.

On a Second Degree course, for example, you can use the same sequence to introduce meditations on the energies of earth ki and heavenly ki, to deal with distant healing and working intuitively.

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.

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

Teaching Reiki

“Spot on! I’ve been teaching reiki for many years and I must say I wish this book had landed back then!

I’ve put together courses and really would have loved a book like this to refer back to, it’s concise, clear, laid out really well and is informative and a mini support system to boot.

If you’re entering the Reiki world with an aim to become Master/Teacher then having this book in your armoury will benefit you.”
S J Price

Teaching Reiki

A Comprehensive Guide to Running Great Courses

This is the book I really wish had been available when I started running Reiki courses in 1997. And it would have helped me greatly in my journey as a Reiki teacher thereafter.

You’ll find a wealth of advice about how to set up and run your Reiki courses: read articles about planning and structuring your courses; find out how to explain things to students in a way that honours their learning preferences and personality types; discover how to create top quality course materials and how to support your students long-term.

We look at the differences between ‘Western’ and Original Japanese Reiki and I explain how I created “Reiki Evolution” courses, which pass on the essence of Reiki’s original form. Read this book and you’ll know how to teach “Reiki Evolution” style: what to say, what to teach, and even how to teach Reiki in a ten-week ‘Evening Class’ format.

This book will be of interest to anyone who is about to start teaching Reiki, or to established Reiki teachers who are interested in enhancing the quality of their courses.

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p

Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49

Photo credit: Intel Free Press

At Reiki Evolution we have a steady stream of students coming to us to re-take their Reiki courses because they weren’t very happy with their original Reiki training, and we hear quite a few horror stories about wholly inadequate Reiki training courses.

The main criticisms fall into three categories:

• Aimless drifting through the day of the course, talking about things unrelated to Reiki
• Emerging from the course without a clear idea of what Reiki is or how to use it
• Hardly any hands-on practice at actually doing Reiki, but a lot of talking

So if a student ends up spending their time on a course sipping herb tea while chatting randomly about what everyone thinks of Reflexology or what the last Natural Healing Exhibition everyone went to was like, as if there was no time pressure at all, drifting through the day not really finding out very much about Reiki and not having much of an opportunity to try doing Reiki, that course is not good enough.

Work out your course structure

Effective Reiki courses need to have a definite structure, where the teacher knows in advance what they are going to say, what they are going to demonstrate, what exercises and practices they are going to talk their students through, and what they aim for their students to know and be able to do by the end of the course.

You set a schedule and stick to it because if you spend an hour too much on one particular task or practice then you end up rushing, and skimping, on another area. You need to keep an eye on the time, and stick to your schedule as far as is practical.

Work out what you are going to cover in the morning, and what you are going to cover in the afternoon. Give your students a definite mid-morning break, at a definite time, so you break the morning, and the afternoon for that matter, into two separate sessions, and give your students a definite lunch break; I think lunch should be at least 45 minutes.

Students need a chance to get out of the room, get some fresh air and maybe go for a bit of a walk to clear their heads

In your pre-planned sessions you’re there to talk about, demonstrate and supervise people practising Reiki. In your scheduled breaks you can chat about whatever you like, and remember that you need to have a decent break for lunch, too, to clear your head and get some fresh air and a change of scenery.

Reiki Evolution First Degree courses

As an example, here’s a list of the ‘main headings’ from our Reiki First Degree courses:

• Introduction
• Reiju empowerment #1
• Practice: Experiencing energy
• Reiju empowerment #2
• Practice: Daily energy exercises
• Reiju empowerment #3
• Practice: Self-treatments

LUNCH

• Talk/Demo: Treating other people
• Practice: feeling the energy field
• Practice: scanning
• Practice: give and receive a full treatment

You can see that in our morning session, the students receive their three Reiki initiations, they are introduced to the idea of energy and given the chance to feel energy for the first time, they learn how to carry out some daily energy exercises (Hatsurei ho) and they are guided through a form of self-treatment (in this case, the self-treatment meditation that Usui Sensei taught).

The afternoon session moves on from working on yourself to working on other people, with the teacher giving a talk and brief demonstration of a Reiki treatment, showing hand positions, giving hints and tips, and then students practise working with energy again, this time feeling another student’s energy field and trying out ‘scanning’ for the first time. This leads on to the giving and receiving of a full treatment.

Reiki is a practical skill

You will have noticed that there is a lot of hands-on practice in this schedule. There is a good reason for this: Reiki is a practical skill, and you learn a skill by doing it, not just hearing about it. You can’t learn to swim by attending lectures about swimming: you have to get in the water and do it, with advice and guidance from your instructor.

It’s not enough to tell them what to do: they need to have had practical experience of actually doing the things they will do when using Reiki for themselves and others.

Our aim is for our students to come out of our First Degree course with a clear idea of what Reiki is, where it comes from, and how they can use it simply to work on themselves and treat other people. They will have experienced energy in different ways, practised a self-treatment, used Hatsurei ho and they will have given and received a full Reiki treatment.

These are the essential components of a Reiki First Degree course. You can read more about what Reiki 1 should be about by visiting this page:

Back to basics: all about Reiki First Degree

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.

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

Teaching Reiki

“Spot on! I’ve been teaching reiki for many years and I must say I wish this book had landed back then!

I’ve put together courses and really would have loved a book like this to refer back to, it’s concise, clear, laid out really well and is informative and a mini support system to boot.

If you’re entering the Reiki world with an aim to become Master/Teacher then having this book in your armoury will benefit you.”
S J Price

Teaching Reiki

A Comprehensive Guide to Running Great Courses

This is the book I really wish had been available when I started running Reiki courses in 1997. And it would have helped me greatly in my journey as a Reiki teacher thereafter.

You’ll find a wealth of advice about how to set up and run your Reiki courses: read articles about planning and structuring your courses; find out how to explain things to students in a way that honours their learning preferences and personality types; discover how to create top quality course materials and how to support your students long-term.

We look at the differences between ‘Western’ and Original Japanese Reiki and I explain how I created “Reiki Evolution” courses, which pass on the essence of Reiki’s original form. Read this book and you’ll know how to teach “Reiki Evolution” style: what to say, what to teach, and even how to teach Reiki in a ten-week ‘Evening Class’ format.

This book will be of interest to anyone who is about to start teaching Reiki, or to established Reiki teachers who are interested in enhancing the quality of their courses.

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p

Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49

Photo credit: Joakim Silverdrake