I received a great question from a Reiki student today who was researching Reiki for an assignment at college.
Q. I was just wondering what your opinion is about differing qualities of Reiki given by a reiki Master or a level 1 or 2 practitioner?
This is a wonderful question, which I am pleased to be able to offer an opinion about.
I can really only speak from personal experience. For me, the ‘quality’ of Reiki coming out from my hands didn’t really change from Level 1 to Level 2, but increased dramatically when I did the master level. Having said that, I think there are so many factors influencing the ‘quality’ of a person’s Reiki, including how grounded they are, how much spiritual development they have done, whether they’re coming from a heart space or ego space (especially!), how strong their spiritual practice is, what’s going on in their life at the time, and how much of a “click” factor you might have with them in general. I’ve had Level 1 or 2 people put their hands on me and it’s been just wonderful and I’ve had “masters” put their hands on me and I’ve wanted to slap them and run away!!
My general advice, at all times, is to ask your higher self to direct you to where you need to go and then trust your instincts.
I don’t really know how I feel about the ‘scientific’ study of Reiki… I appreciate that we all want to quantify things and that ‘research’ gives us great arguments to defend what we do. But, personally, I’m not really interested in defending something that I simply know to be true. (In my experience, defending something rarely gets results anyway because the people on the attack aren’t really interested in hearing the answers.)
The biggest problem for me with ‘research’ of Reiki is that it assumes you can control the energy, and the first principle of Reiki is that we must let go and let the Reiki do its own work. We cannot control it. To assume otherwise is laughable. And, because of the individual’s effects on the ‘quality’ (as discussed above), for me there can be no such thing as a ‘control group’ because that would assume that the Reiki coming from everyone’s hands is exactly the same, and we know from experience that that’s just not true.
In summary, I don’t believe that the level of Reiki necessarily affects the quality of the healing and I don’t believe that it can be ‘proven’ one way or another. So, trust your instincts and take guided action.
As a fellow Reiki Master and animal practitioner I agree with your experiences and your assessment. I, too, have met some Level I practitioners who used Reiki daily for themselves and for clients in hospice, and they were powerful conduits of Reiki versus some Reiki Masters who were a mess energetically and emotionally.
Learning to trust the energy and your own intuition is one of the biggest challenges in a Reiki practice as in any energy practice.
Beautifully said! Thanks for stopping by and keep up the great work
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