People often ask me which types of energy work are the better than others. My experience is that all energy work is the same thing regardless of how it has been branded. I use the term reiki because it is fairly well understood, but the truth is, I was doing reiki when I was a child without having a label for it. My grandma would demonstrate by doing reiki on a plant and telling me what she could feel while she was doing it. Then she would turn to me and say, “It’s your turn now. Give him some juice!”
She used to use the word juice a lot. She referred to turning on a light switch as turning on the juice, and she referred to pushing the gas pedal down in a car as giving it some juice, so all I knew about juice was that juice makes things go.
The first time I went to a reiki workshop, I was surprised to learn that it was really nothing more than what I had been doing since childhood. I had been expecting something exotic, and maybe even difficult to do. I was a bit perplexed that anyone would pay for something that seemed to me like just a normal part of life, and for a long time I charged for bodywork, but I only gave reiki away for free. Eventually, I came to realize that people pay for normal things all the time. They pay to have their houses cleaned, their lawns mowed, their cars washed, and their food prepared, so of course people can choose to pay for energy work, too.
I am a very curious person, so I have continued to go to many types of energy workshops over the years. Some that call themselves reiki are very different from one another, and new styles of reiki are being marketed all the time. I can tell you from experience, that energy is all the same and that the emphasis people make on specific styles seems to me more of a marketing gimmick than anything. The energy that makes up the atoms and subatomic particles in our bodies, is not any different than any other energy in the universe. Energy, is energy, is energy, and it is far beyond our comprehension even though we know it exists and how to utilize it. Did you know that even though we are able to use electricity, scientists still can’t fully explain how it works? Even though from a practical standpoint, we know we can use copper wire to conduct electricity, what is actually happening is still a mystery.
My guess is that someday we will have scientific equipment that can detect what is actually moving when electricity is happening. Until then, we are fully capable of putting it to practical use. That’s also how I see reiki, or energy work by any name. It is a mysterious process with practical applications.
Most of us need to earn a living, so of course, we like to be paid for offering reiki. Having said that, my experience is that the benefits have more to do with the practitioner than the style or the price. Just because someone is charging $ 100 or even $ 500 a session, doesn’t mean that they are better at reiki, although it might mean that they are excellent at promotion and sales.
Don’t worry about whether someone is a reiki “master” or not. That is just a marketing gimmick. Energy is energy is energy. Some folks are better at helping move it around than others, just as some folks cook better than others, but the labels that people apply to themselves are all about trying to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and do not have any correlation to their abilities. If anything, I find that the new names people are giving to their personal brand of energy work and the titles they give themselves tend to make it more confusing for clients, but alas, that seems to be the way of the world.
The best way to choose a reiki practitioner is to trust your intuition and to stay within your financial means. A truly grounded practitioner is not coming from a place of fear and does not need to pressure you into scheduling right away when you would like to think about it, or into paying in advance for multiple sessions if you would rather pay as you go.