mikao usui

If you’ve done Reiki 1, you can already channel Reiki.

If you’ve done level 2, you’ve been introduced to distance Reiki, symbols, mantras and a more intuitive style of healing.

So why go on? Why become a Reiki Master?

What else is there to learn?

Is it only for people who wish to teach Reiki?

Is it simply an ego boost?

This articles looks at six key ways – some practical, most spiritual – that becoming a Reiki Master can change your life.

Reason 1: Work and Teach with Reiki

Okay, it’s true this is a big reason why many people wish to become a Reiki Master, so let’s look at the details.

To begin with, some practical considerations:

First – and obviously! – Master Level teaches you how to attune others to Reiki energy. So from that basic point of view it is a necessary step in becoming a teacher.

Good Master Level courses do more than just teach you the attunements, however, they also help prepare you for teaching.

They discuss the challenges, potential pitfalls and opportunities involved, and they give you the chance to assists classes to gain experience.

Next, becoming a Reiki Master gives you a kind of ‘credibility’ in the world.

Now, I realize this seems superficial, but from a practical standpoint it’s important. Because even if all you ever want to do with Reiki is work as a healer, you’ll find more clients coming your way if you are a Reiki Master.

The title gives prospective clients confidence and helps separate you from the other Reiki healers out there.

That said, I’d never encourage anyone to do Master Level ‘just for the certificate’.

This, to me, would be a pretty miserable reason to do it.

No, you should only do Master Level if you have a serious desire to learn skills that can change both the world – and YOU!

Before I go onto some of these reasons, I’d like to add that learning to attune others to Reiki doesn’t necessarily mean doing so in a professional environment.

One of the most important things you can do with Reiki is attune your friends and family.

Of these, you might pay particular attention to your children (or even nieces, nephews and the like), because just imagine how big an impact Reiki might make to their lives if they learnt it young, if it were second nature to heal with it, if, by the time they are your age, they had already been practising with it for 15, 20, 30 or more years!

Reiki ought to be taught in schools; but until it is, you need to fill the gap – a gap made bigger by the age restrictions many Reiki associations place on course participants.

Reason 2: Learn to Better Heal Yourself and Others

A lot of Master Level courses are divided up into two parts: A and B. Part A teachesskills to enhance personal practice, part B the teaching components.

Whether the course is divided or not (I, personally, teach both parts together), Master Level should supply you with skills you can practise and develop for years to come. Skills that will profoundly shift the way you experience Reiki.

Common Topics Taught:

·Master Reiki Symbol. This is the most powerful and profound of the Reiki symbols and, apart from being a great healing tool, it is designed to help connect you to the ‘Great Bright Light’ – the literal translation of it’s Japanese name. In other words, it helps connect you to something bigger than yourself, helps you energetically expand, helps you enter what I call the ‘flow’: a state of oneness with the world and everything in it.

·Master Symbol Mantra. All sound carries an energetic vibration. Mantras and carefully chosen sounds that create profound energetic shifts both in an individual and the world. Working with the Master Symbol mantra, you’ll experience what is often an exhilarating energetic shift.

·Esoteric Mantras. Not all Master Level courses teach these and, technically, they are not part of the classical system. Carefully chosen, however, these additional symbols can greatly enhance your ability to connect and amplify certain strands of Reiki energy. This can help both your ability to heal yourself and others as well as energetically clear spaces with less than perfect energy.

·Whole Body Reiki. A good Master Level course should teach you to go beyond what I term ‘cheirocentric’ Reiki (i. e. Reiki that exclusively uses the hands to heal). It should teach you to do Reiki with not just other parts of your body, but your entire body and energy field itself!

·Energy Awareness. Here you will learn to better feel the ebbs and flows of energy, to feel energy outside of yourself.

·Advanced healing techniques, for instance psychic surgery and the like.

·Connecting to Spirit / The Flow. Everything you learn is in some way geared towards this blissful skill!

Reason 3: Shift Your Energetic Vibration

One of the great advantages of shifting your energetic vibration is that it will bring you enhanced clarity in your life (for a detailed account of this, please read my recent article, R + M = C!).

This clarity will help you make better decisions and will get rid of the angst often associated with indecision.

The next critical reason you want to shift your energetic vibration is that it will bestow on both you and the world (!) greater inner calm, happiness and balance.

While I don’t like the terms ‘responsibility’ and ‘duty’, I think it is a great thing if we can contribute to the wellbeing of the planet.

Since our personal energetic vibration makes a difference, improving it is a blessing to the planet.

Reason 4: Improve Your Meditation

As humans, we are programmed to move towards pleasure and away from pain.

For meditators this is often a problem because we can so easily be sidetracked by the stream of ‘bigger and better’ plans our mind constantly offers us.

In other words, it tells us that if we will only listen to it a little longer it can show us a way to either experience greater pleasure or avoid pain.

As a rule, it is difficult to resist the incredible magnetism of our mind’s ideas; but there is at least one simple defence: anchor yourself in a state of great pleasure.

Now, I know the meditation purists will object to this. They will say that you are being distracted by meaningless sensations; but the truth is you can actually use these sensations to help ground you in the present moment – the very thing even these critics will admit is the essence of meditation.

How then can you anchor yourself in a pleasurable / blissful state?

Simple.

Connect to energy and then rest in the energetic sensations that arise.

Since Reiki is all about energy, improving it means a greater connection to energy. This, in turn, means a greater ability to use this energy to BE in the present moment without being lured out of it by the mind.

It’s hard to be sold on a bigger and better deal when we’re already living the BIG DEAL.

If we love where we are at present, why move?

Reason 5: Get the Complete Reiki Picture

The classical Japanese Reiki system is highly structured.

That is, each piece builds on the one before it.

The five main building blocks of the system are:

1. The Reiki attunements

2. Reiki meditations

3. Reiki precepts

4. Hands-on healing

5. Mantras and symbols

There is only one way to see how all of these pieces fit together, and that is to do Master Level. Until then, you are, to a certain extent, living in the ‘Reiki dark’. This, admittedly, is a fine place to be; but understanding the ‘whole’ is illuminating.

Reason 6: Charity Work

If doing charity work is your thing, then becoming a Reiki master is a great step in the right direction.

Not only will you gain access to far more opportunities due to your new credentials, you will also be able to empower anyone you meet with the gift of Reiki.

As an example, right now I am working on a trip to Africa that aims to attune up to 1000 locals. For that purpose I need as many Reiki Masters as possible to accompany me.

Could you be one of them?

Conclusion:

Whether anyone can become a Reiki Master in the truest sense of the term is debatable.

Certainly the founder of Reiki, Mikao Usui, never saw himself as a realized master of the art.

What Master Level really does, therefore, is initiate you into the realm of Reiki Mastership. It teaches your techniques and skills that you will then need to go away and work on for months, years – and perhaps even the rest of your life.

In that sense, you never really feel that you’ve ‘made it’ as a Reiki Master.

But, with consistent practice, you do notice changes in yourself – sometimes big, sometimes small – that ultimately make a huge difference to the way you experience the world.

And, as these changes flow in, you get more and more excited by the journey.

The journey to an ever deeper place inside yourself.