How to Run a Successful Reiki Business

Imagine being able to say 'ciao' to your current job.

Imagine shaking your boss's hand, thanking him for everything he has done for you, stepping out of the office, breathing in the sunshine — and setting off for a life where the only person you have to obey is you.

Now imagine earning a living doing something you both love and find meaningful, and imagine seeing one happy smile after the next as you go about your daily work.

Well, this, my friend, could be yours.

It is what Reiki has to offer.

It is the chance at a life where you heal yourself while healing others.

But…

As appealing as this dream may be, the reality is that not many people make it as Reiki professionals.

For the vast majority of healers, Reiki is a secondary occupation – something they love doing, but something that never quite manages to pay the bills.

This article aims to give you an idea of how to go about becoming a Reiki professional.

A professional who doesn't have to scrape the rent together each month while surviving on porridge, lentils and no-brand tinned tuna.

Throughout the article, I'm going to refer back to my personal experience, the idea being to give you a real-life example you can learn from.

I can't claim to have done everything perfectly along the journey. I can't claim to do everything perfectly now. But I have succeeded in earning a good livelihood from Reiki – and even if I typically wait for tuna to go on special before purchasing it, I can pick the brand I want.

The Building Blocks of a Successful Career in Reiki

If you want to make a living with Reiki, I encourage you to work on 3 key areas:

Reiki Fundamentals (covered in this article)

Business Skills

General Business Tactics

If you constantly improve each of these three areas, you will almost certainly succeed in living your dream. It will take some time (it took me over 2 ½ years before I made a full living off Reiki). It will take plenty of hard work and some miserable 'downer periods'. But ultimately your perseverance will see you victorious.

Reiki Fundamentals

To have success, the most important concept to understand is what the Japanese call 'kaizen'. That is to say, the art of constant and never-ending improvement.

This is the secret to all success in life, because as the cliché goes: 'if you're not growing, you're dying' – and that is very true.

The first Reiki fundamental to apply kaizen to is your personal practice.

To be a good healer and teacher, you need personal experience and understanding, which comes mostly through personal practice.

After all, how can you really understand a healing crisis unless you have suffered one?

How can you really know the most effective ways to shift and move energy unless you have already successfully practised on yourself?

Also, the more personal practice you do, the more your energetic capacity will expand (i.e. your ability to channel greater and greater amounts of chi) and, as a result, the more powerful your healing work will be.

Three Tips to Improving Reiki Practice

Three basic ideas for improving your Reiki practice are:

Make sure it is consistent. As a rule, you are far better off doing a little Reiki every day than a lot of Reiki one day a week. This keeps the momentum going and enables you to build daily on where you left off. If, on the contrary, you start cold, then you won't have any momentum, and it will take you longer to go deep into your practice.

Structured practice. Don't do a bit of everything and not much of anything. Don't skim the surface of a thousand different Reiki and meditation techniques. Choose a few and drill down deeply. That way, you will taste their essence. That way, you will gain a deep understanding of the merits and nuances of a particular technique – and this expertise is the only place you will want to develop your professional practice from.

Don't be dogmatic. Do things as prescribed at first. Go deep. Don't innovate too soon. But then, give yourself the freedom to question and challenge what you have been taught. Give yourself the freedom to learn from a variety of sources. Always respect tradition, but don't be its slave. Allow for the fact that sometimes our modern 21st-century society will get a better result by choosing an action that differs from one taken in early 20th century Japan.

Navigating the Reiki Levels

At least in Australia, Level 2 is the place to be if you wish to practise as a professional Reiki healer.

Once you have your Level 2 certificate, you can apply for Reiki Practitioner status at the major Reiki associations (I recommend the International Institute of Complementary Therapists), and you can also then get your Reiki insurance. Both recommended if you wish to become a Reiki professional.

Of course, you can choose to work outside the system; but without membership at a Reiki association, you will lose a degree of credibility – and without insurance you may lose your house!

Remember that not hurting anyone through your Reiki practice doesn't guarantee you will never get sued.

Maybe a client will trip on your carpet. Maybe an overweight client will have a heart attack three weeks after your session and claim you caused it.

Lots can happen, and you want to ensure you protect yourself from as many unlikely scenarios as possible.

Take Your Time

Of course, just because you have your Level 2 certificate hanging on your wall doesn't mean you are ready to practise professionally.

Give yourself time to go deeply into the techniques you have learned.

Give yourself time to use your friends and family as guinea pigs to gain experience.

Try to wait – at a minimum – several months before practising professionally.

This will help to ensure you give clients great value for money before charging them for your services.

Becoming a Teacher

To become a Reiki teacher, you will need to get your Master Level. In the majority of cases, this involves waiting about 9-12 months from when you did your Level 2.

Like for Level 2, once you get your Master Level certificate, you will want to do some serious practice before teaching your first course.

My recommendation for teaching courses is to start with Level 1 (where you can gain confidence and experience).

Then, after many months of Level 1 courses, you can move on to teaching Level 2 and then, after an even lengthier wait (ideally a couple of years or more) to teaching the Master Level.

You only want to teach Master Level when you feel fully confident in your Reiki Master skills.

You are hardly going to inspire confidence in others if you don't have confidence in yourself – and you want to ensure that any certificate you issue means something. You want to ensure that people doing your course do so for its inherent value, not just the certificate.

Better Service

If you want to succeed professionally, you need to keep improving the value you deliver to your customers.

It's not enough for people at your last course or healing sessions to be happy. You need to keep asking yourself how you can serve your customers better.

You need to remember that you are not the only healer out there, that your potential client has a lot of options – options that go well beyond Reiki. These could be meditation, qi gong, t'ai chi, pranic healing – or just going for a stroll in the park instead of attending a Reiki healing session or course.

So you need to offer enough value to entice people into your doors.

You need to make a compelling case for what you do.

And you need to back that case up with service and action.

You need to deliver everything you promise and more.

And since, at the beginning, your Reiki 'infrastructure' will be scratchy – you almost certainly won't have a full range of materials and options to offer your clients – you will need to build these bit by bit over the years.

This might be as simple as improving the look and feel of your healing room, improving the quality of the candles and oils you burn, improving the range of music you play in the background, or it might be something that requires a little more effort like improving a manual or creating a follow-up program for a course.

You must never stop improving, because even if your clients will be happy with your current level of service, the Universe will not!

Believe me, if you get lazy, if you don't continually nourish the Reiki in your life, then your powers to energetically attract clients will diminish, and your business will dry up.

This is intangible, I admit; but anyone in the business knows it to be the case.

When you are not energetically involved in your work, the Universe ignores you.

To give you an idea of the kinds of things I am talking about, here are some of the things I've done to improve my service:

I've written, rewritten and fleshed out all of my Reiki manuals (I started off using one of my teacher's manuals)

I've created a 21-day e-course follow-up program for all of my Reiki courses (when I started, neither I nor anyone else had such things).

I created an online video and article membership portal that my students can access to gain further support and information to develop their practice. I then entirely redid my level 1 and 2 portals, greatly improving the range and quality of the videos.

I continually attend Reiki, spiritual and business courses to improve my service.

To give you an idea of how committed I am to improving my service, one year I spent almost 20K on mechanical equipment (video cameras, lights, computers etc.) to help me develop my online video portal, and close to 30K on attending courses (travel and course costs).

So I'm always re-investing what I make to improve what I do and, as a result, continue to grow my business.

If all this sounds like a lot of money and effort, then you're right; but if you love what you do, it's exciting, and if you invest prudently, your investments will help you to make more money. (Note: I prefer to only invest money I already have, rather than speculate — something that could lead to disaster!)

Finally, if you're not sure you want to invest in further education over the years to come, let me remind you of something you already know:

EXPERIENCE IS A SLOW TEACHER.

If you try to learn everything on your own, then you're often going to take a long time learning things that someone could have told you in a couple of minutes.

As the cliché goes: 'If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.'

Conclusion

This article has focused on getting the fundamentals right, and my philosophy is a simple one: do that, and the rest will follow.

Get your fundamentals right, persevere over time, and you won't have to worry whether you'll have any clients or people turn up at your course.

They will.

Get your fundamentals right, and you won't have to worry whether you'll be fed and sheltered at night.

You will be.

For if you do your part, the Universe will do its.

That's the deal.

That's the game.

Good luck.