Date: Mon Sep 20 2021 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
After you have taken Reiki training, there's a question of whether to start offering Reiki healings for pay. In other words, do you, or when do you, open a commercial Reiki practice? Once you've ascertained this is the best route for your life, it's necessary to learn how to operate a successful business.
Your first step is to understand whether or not it is best for you to develop your Reiki practice into a commercial operation. Did you just finish a Reiki Master training course last weekend, and now you want to jump in with both feet as a professional Reiki healer? If so, I strongly urge you to first read Choosing whether or not to become a professional Reiki Healer. That page is full of questions to ponder about making Reiki (or other energy healing practice) your career.
Another prerequisite is exploring your beliefs about charging money for spiritual services, like Reiki healing sessions. There are many beliefs on both sides of that question. See: Receiving payment for Reiki, or offering Reiki at no cost
The rest of this page is for those who have decided to go forward with Reiki or other healing practices as your career.
The requirements to start a business vary from country to country. That means we can only describe an outline rather than give specific exact plans.
We can spend a lifetime in fear of whether or not to develop a business offering Reiki or healing practices. It may be best to just get started, or as they say feel the fear and do it anyway. It may also be best to start out small, at the least cost possible. You're unlikely to be able to immediately implement a full scale healing practice.
With that in mind, let's start the simplest model.
The simplest model for starting a Reiki business
You probably have a "day job", meaning some kind of current employment. Like many of us, you will have been taking training courses on the weekends. The question is making the leap from your current employment, to working full time as a Reiki practitioner, supporting your life from that work. At the outset it's best to set reasonable goals, such as having one or two paying clients per week (or month).
Before launching a business offering Reiki, it's best to have some practice operating on your own as a healer. Reiki practitioners often gather for group Reiki sessions, and can get a lot of practice as a healer under the guidance of the leader of those sessions. But offering Reiki as a paid service means knowing how the work on your own. How do you handle the conversations around making appointments, making followup appointments, scheduling your time, and so forth? An effective step is to set up an area in your home to receive clients, and offering healing sessions for free to friends or family or acquaintances.
Once you've decided to start charging money for Reiki sessions (again, this applies to other forms of energy healing), here's a simple straight-forward model to follow:
- Start part time, keeping your day job, to avoid financial distress
- Set up a simple website using a service like Wix, Weebly, or SquareSpace
- Domain name: about $12-15 per year, such as via PairDomains
- Services like Wix, Weebly, or SquareSpace allow "anyone" to build a website using simple-to-use design tools
- Make sure to pay enough to remove advertising and assign a domain name to the website
- Explore their eCommerce capabilities, and whether that will aid in charging for healing sessions
- Using a spare bedroom in your house as a healing room
- Determine whether local laws allow businesses to operate from home
- Determine whether local laws and/or landlord's allow you to operate a business a rented home or apartment
- Buy a simple massage table, and a few simple decorations for that room
- You might prefer to rent a room by the hour in an existing healing center
- This can help with finding clientele, and build connections with colleagues
- Set up a simple business telephone
- The simplest is to own a second cell phone that you use solely for business
- Consider how to maintain good audio quality over the telephone
- Consider using a voice/video service for conducting remote healing sessions
- Set up a simple business banking account
- It is good accounting practice to keep personal and business funds from intermingling
- It may be required for businesses to use bank accounts explicitly designated for business use
- Use Stripe or PayPal to support taking credit cards
- There are a number of ways to get a credit card terminal to take in-person payments
Depending on where you live, and how much of this you set up, the minimum costs are approximately $100 per month. Using a spare bedroom may become a large cost if it means you must move into a larger apartment or house.
Use the experience of running a small-scale business to decide whether or not to make the leap to running a full scale Reiki business. If the experience teaches you to not proceed, your financial commitment will have been very small. If, instead, the experience teaches you to expand, it is easy to build upon this foundation.
What qualifications do you need to start a Reiki business
It's best to have trained as a Reiki Master before launching your business. That's to ensure you've received enough training. But, before starting a business, ask yourself whether there is required knowledge beyond what was taught in the Reiki class? Did learning how to invoke the Reiki symbols, and how to give Reiki attunement's, prepare you for the full range of all possible situations you'll see in your healing room?
The certificate from your Reiki teacher is technically all you need before starting a business. It certifies you as a Reiki practitioner who can also teach Reiki. Because governments do not regulate Reiki, no additional certification are required.
In some areas touching your clients will require being certified as a massage therapist.
As cool as those certificates are, they do not carry any legal weight. There are no localities in the world where a Reiki certificate is anything other than a piece of paper. This is true for every form of energy healing. I spent five years training with the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, which cost tens of thousands of dollars, who gave me a fancy looking diploma, and informed me that I can use the title Brennan Healing Science Practitioner. But that diploma has no legal meaning.
In the world we live in, establishing a business is a legal process that varies from one locality to another. It's way outside the scope of this article to describe the method of starting a business in every locality in the world. Therefore the following sections are an outline of what you'll need to do.
Usually there are adult education classes which can teach most of the required knowledge. At least, back in the mid-1990's that's what I did, but today there are many online training choices. That is, YouTube, Udemy, etc, but watch out whether those online trainings help you with local knowledge about requirements in your area.
Establishing a business license for a Reiki business
Research the requirements to establish a small sole-proprietorship business. This obviously varies from locality to locality. Look for a business structure that provides some shielding from liability.
While you may be able to handle the business filing on your own, think about hiring a lawyer.
An extremely important piece of knowledge is the legality of offering Reiki services in your country. In many countries, healing services like Reiki look enough like a medical therapy that you will run the risk of being arrested for practicing medicine without a license. In such cases there is a fine line to walk where you keep your statements, claims, and promises within certain boundaries. A good lawyer should be able to provide advice. It is probably not in your soul contract to go to jail just for offering Reiki healing.
You may need to register a trademark related to your business name.
Handling business taxes
Most localities will tax business activity. This means tracking your costs and your income, then filing tax forms on the required schedule.
In some cases the forms are simple letting you handle them yourself. If you cannot handle the tax filings yourself, hire an accountant and/or tax preparer.
Establishing a business location
It's best to operate a healing practice from a regular office rather than from your home. You look more like a legitimate business by having a regular office.
This is most important if clients are visiting you in person. If your business activities are all conducted online, your clients will not know whether you're operating from home or from an office.
Are there any special requirements for offering a healing practice in an office space? Does having a massage certificate change the requirements? In some places, massage practitioners are required to have shower facilities available. In some places, offering anything that looks like a psychic service requires getting informed consent from the neighbors.
There's a difference between renting your own office space, versus sharing an office space with other healers. Often a group of healers will jointly rent some space, splitting the cost and complexity.
A related idea is renting an office by the hour, or by the day. This can easily limit your costs, and renting from an existing healing center can help you in other ways.
Marketing is about informing the public you exist
Your website must be your primary tool for marketing your services. The content of the website should be essentially a large flyer. Take a look at websites for other healers to get an idea of what's involved. It can be as simple as a few pages:
- Home page gives a high level introduction
- One page lists a range of services
- One page describes your training
- One page describes the theories under which you perform healing sessions, how you believe it to work, etc
- One page describes your location or locations
- One page describes how to schedule healing sessions, and the fee schedule
The next stage of marketing is to place advertising with magazines, or online advertising. It is tricky to get this to work well, and it's not recommended for a beginning healer.
What's more likely to work is to print a flyer describing your services. Take a look at flyers for other healers to get an idea of the structure. You then distribute those flyers through new age book stores and any other place where you can post flyers.
Getting back to your website, there is a thing called Content Marketing, which is about using the content on your website to draw in visitors. The basic idea is to match written content on your site to questions that people are asking. A common question might be Can Reiki heal a given condition, such as back pain. If you do a good job of answering enough questions, then the search engines will send people asking those questions to your site.
What insurance does a Reiki practitioner need
There are the basic types of insurance every business owner should have, such as general liability insurance (covering "Slip and fall" incidents). You could think about "business continuity insurance", or "flood insurance" and other types of insurance to cover other types of events that threaten your business.
Another branch of insurance could cover "malpractice" allegations, sexual misconduct allegations, and the like. While it's claimed that Reiki is a safe energy, that never causes harm, will a Judge in a Court accept that argument? What will you do if a client dies while under your care? There's a number of ways such a scenario can play out, some of which can land you in a court of law explaining to lawyers and judges whether your healing practice is legitimate and safe.
It's unlikely to find insurance of this sort just by calling insurance companies at random. Instead there are Reiki practitioners associations that often have group insurance plans with coverage tailored specifically to Reiki professionals. For example, a quick web search turned up the International Association of Reiki Professionals, IARP, who offers insurance in several countries.
Offering both Healing sessions and classes teaching Reiki
Under this heading we want to discuss a typical business plan. Most Reiki healers offer not just healing services, but Reiki training. The typical pattern is:
- Offer individual healing sessions
- Once a month, or so, offer Reiki classes
- It's recommended to hold Level 1 and Level 2 combined on one weekend, and to hold any Master trainings separately
- Your Reiki Master students should be required to assist with later Level 1 & Level 2 classes, so they have practical teaching experience
- Once a week, in the evening, hold a Reiki gathering where people can experience Reiki, and practitioners can practice Reiki
With this combination it's possible to build up a community of folks who will feel encouraged to return again and again.
The full scale Reiki business
Earlier we discussed the minimal form of starting a Reiki business. That plan was kept small scale to make it easy to get started. But, it is possible to develop a larger business with several services as laid out in the previous section. Clearly it's possible for a Reiki business to grow in several directions over time. Some examples include:
- Operate out of multiple locations, for example you might have several cities within reach and desire to hold office hours in different cities on different days
- For this purpose, seek arrangements for part time (by the day) office rental
- Use a meeting hall for Reiki gatherings to be able to host more people
- This gives you a larger space for a larger gathering that you rent on an as-needed basis
- As just described, don't limit yourself to individual healing sessions, but also teach Reiki and related subjects
- Expand to include other modalities, to expand the depth of your services
- Blogging, recording videos (YouTube).. this is called "content marketing" and can be used to bring in new clients, and possibly earn a few dollars from advertising
- Writing books, can bring in direct revenue from the book sale, and additional clients
Notice how this full-scale business has multiple streams of revenue. That can give some flexibility in case one area of the business suddenly shrinks, you might be able to expand the other areas.
Resources related to starting a Reiki business
- Reiki Marketing: Step By Step Marketing For Your Reiki Healing Sessions, Reiki Classes, and Reiki Workshops
- The Reluctant Reiki Master's Step-by-Step Guide to Creating and Sustaining a Thriving Reiki Practice
- Holistic Practitioners Business Bible
- Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity
- Legal Guidelines For Unlicensed Practitioners
Reiki and Healing books, videos, tools
