Date: Wed Sep 22 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?
By David Herron
In my many years taking healing training I've met many fine people, fellow healing students or even healing teachers, who speak some common questions:
- "when can I have my healing practice?"
- or "where is the best location for my healing practice?"
- or "what healing modality is best for me?"
- or "where is the best place for me to live?"
- or "is it better for me to stay in my job, or to be a healer"?
To be sure, I'm also one with these questions. We want to contribute to improving the world around us, both our own lives and the lives of others. It's rarely clear what is the best way we can work on improving the world we live in. If nothing else, the society around us works overtime to keep us thinking we are small and insignificant, and that surely we cannot have a major impact.
Many of us training in the healing arts develop an expectation that it will turn into a career. After our Reiki training is "finished", we'll start a Reiki practice. It might not solely be a Reiki practice since so many of us take training with multiple healing modalities.
There's a similar expectation in other fields. After training as an accountant, your next step is passing the Certified Public Account (CPA) exam, then get an accountancy job. Or after getting a computer science degree (as I did), spending many sleepless nights developing toy operating systems, or toy compilers, the next step is finding a software company and writing lots of software. So, it's a fair assumption that after training as a healer, the next step is to open a healing practice, and start seeing clients. But, consider a couple questions:
- Of the trained healers, how many develop successful healing practices?
- Or, how many trained healers have a soul purpose to operate a successful healing practice?
- Or, how many healer training programs also train the healers on successful business and marketing practices?
In this page we'll discuss whether your purpose in life is to become a professional healer. It is part of a series of pages in which we consider whether to charge money for Reiki services (See Receiving payment for Reiki, or offering Reiki at no cost), and how to launch a business offering Reiki services (See: How to start a Reiki business or Reiki practice).
The Soul Purpose for learning Reiki healing practices
Why do we really take energy healing classes? That is, dive deep inside, where your divine essence shines, and ask "what is my life purpose", or "if I remove the layers of EGO, what do I really want to do with my life".
For myself, the answer to asking internally "what's my healing practice," my spiritual guidance responded with "well, what do you want to do" -- that is, what does the deeper down wanting in the divine spark of my self-truth desire to do? I believe the same is true for everyone - Each of us has a passion and life purpose that wants to speak loudly through our flesh and bones in a glorious manifestation of divine will.
Is there a divinely inspired jobs board which will assign us to a career path and work site through which our healing gift will manifest? Are there divinely inspired job councilors, or divinely inspired work/aptitude tests, that will lead us to the correct career path?
Our authentic work, according to some, comes from how our divine core self responds to each context we live in.
Delving deep into ones personal true self helps one discover what sort of change you wish to manifest in the world. Once connected with that aspect of yourself, a gate may open through which the motivation flows that will guide you towards methodologies you'll use to manifest the change your deepest self wants to bring forth.
Did that sound like a mouthful? Let's try it again. As we connect with our inner self, we may open into a source of inner wisdom from which we're flooded with motivation related to the change we most deeply want to make in the world.
Does your soul level purpose include addressing health care issues?
As much as we believe energy healing is useful and relevant, most of the people around us do not. That means anyone working as a professional Reiki practitioner must address how to providing health care services without being licensed. In some areas of the world, working as an unlicensed provider of health care services can lead to jail time. As much as you might think that's unfair, look at the legal code for your area and determine what qualifications are required to practice legally.
Some of us are honestly "up" to the challenge, while others of us are not. Some of us resonate with the goal of reforming the health care system to support a holistic view of health. There sure is a big story occurring where modern medicine is causing tremendous harm, and spiritual healing practices like Reiki arguably may create beneficial health changes in our clients.
Others of us resonate with other stories.
- Someone with a background in accounting may resonate with the entrapment practiced by credit card companies, or the rest of the financial industry. Such a person might resonate with helping people to regain their power through better personal finance decisions, and therefore teach people methods for financial independence by living beneath ones means.
- Someone who loves bicycling may channel that passion into advocacy and teaching about walkable bikeable livable cities, and the potential for better urban design to deeply address climate change issues.
- Someone who's worked in high-tech software development may want to teach about the potential danger from over-dependence to modern gizmo gadgets.
Those are just a couple examples. The process of spiritual awakening which occurs while training in spiritual healing may allow the soul to speak more clearly. What would be the message your soul has for the world?
What's blocking you from developing a Reiki practice?
Fixating on questions like those listed at the top of this article can be a complex way of blocking or preventing oneself from moving forward. The inner-saboteur can be very resourceful in creating doubt or other kinds of road blocks. Some folks asking those questions do not give room for an answer to arrive, which will obviously prevent receiving the answer.
Another piece of advice my guidance gave long ago is that they (the divine presence, that is) don't set us up for failure. Instead "they" want only the best for us, and "they" want us to succeed at what we choose to do. Often the resources to resolve any issue are within reach, if only we open our eyes to see them. Instead, it's we who set ourselves up for failure, because of an inner-saboteur.
It's useful to internally question your self-talk and learn to discern the ways of your inner-saboteur.
If you don't feel ready for the role of offering healing to the public
- maybe that's authentically recognizing the need for further training or experience
- or maybe the inner-saboteur is needlessly delaying your progress
Lastly, consider that opening to the inner spark of divine presence may influence you to more automatically make choices in positive alignment with your divine purpose.
The "reality" of personal economics and the time spent as a Reiki healer
Let's first talk about some practicalities. Whatever you choose to do as your work to improve the world, whether or not it's a healing practice, how do you fund your life? How do you pay the rent or mortgage, keep food on the table, keep yourself clothed, and save up for retirement needs?
The world/society we live in is driven by a "market economy" that runs everything. Everything that can be done involves exchanges of money. Like it or not, that does apply to you who are spiritual seekers just as much as it applies to everybody else.
That's the reality of life in this world at this time of history. Much as you might think you remember worlds that don't run on money, this world does. When in Rome, and all that...
Many believe spiritual work must be done for free. There is a huge example in the New Testament of the Bible in the form of Jesus the Christ and his healing practice, which he did completely for free. That was then, and this is now. In this day and age how are you going to pay the rent? How are you going to eat? And is it in your life path to live on the street? (without money you will be on the street pretty quickly)
In other words, the "spiritual work must be free" belief runs afoul of the market economy we live in. Who's going to give you a free place to live, free food, free clothes, and a free retirement account? That's not how the market economy functions.
It may be important to consciously make a distinction between charging for the time versus charging for the healing. For example, clearly reminding your clients of their responsibility for self healing is truthful, honest, and may keep you from getting carried away with the healers ego trip.
Again, we went over this in depth in Receiving payment for Reiki, or offering Reiki at no cost.
Is your life task to work full time as a Healer
What are you "supposed" to do with your life? How do you choose? What makes one choice "right" and another "wrong"? Who decides what you are "supposed" to do versus what you want to do?
If you go to a psychic for an Akashic records reading to discover your life contract, have you made your own choice, or have you turned your power of choice over to the psychic? How can you be sure there is a "life contract" anyway? Yes there are lots of books talking about this concept of "life contract", but how can you be sure such a contract even exists?
There's two writers I've found to offer some excellent advice along these lines. They both boil down to the "what do you want" question my guides have asked me.
Barbara Ann Brennan: Is a gifted clairvoyant and healer, and formerly a NASA scientist in astrophysics. She operates one of the premiere schools of energy healing The Barbara Brennan School of Healing (I graduated 2001), and a big question of the latter years of BBSH training is to delve into uncovering your own life task.
The paradigm she presents is that your "wound" leads you to your life task, and that there are two levels of life task. By "wound" she means the core & deepest schism in the depths of your being. That schism is what you most desperately wish to heal. You have come to live this life, in this world, at this time, in order to heal that schism.
There are two levels of life task she discusses. The "personal task" is the form which this wounding, and its healing, takes in your personal life. What you're going to do for yourself, and how you are going to heal yourself. The "world task" is, given the healing you find in your personal task, how do you bring that to the world? What form of action does it take in the world? What lesson have you learned that you want to shout from the rooftops and tell everybody?
Finding these tasks requires noticing what issues are hot button issues for you. The world task isn't going to specifically be that issue, but instead is something about that issue. There's going to be a series of hot button issues, each different in concrete form, and each has something in common. That's what you're looking for, the commonality.
Don't worry if you don't know what your Ultimate "personal" or "life" task's are. It's a process of learning and exploring that can, and likely will, take a lifetime to unfold. And even then it's likely you will miss something and "they" will send you back to another lifetime to get the part you missed.
Rick Jarow: Rick is a college professor and practicing "career consultant". He offers "anti-career workshops" to teach people to look for work that isn't a "career" but their lifes work. I have only listened to the "Your Life's Work" audio tape set, and feel that it's excellent material.
In the tape set he takes you through an exploration of the underlying, spiritual, formation of who people are. How this shows up in the Chakras, the process of abundance and manifestation, alignment of will versus divine, the creative impulse, and more. Along the way he gives excellent and abundant examples from his own life.
The material matches well with what I described above of BBSH's teaching.
What's the answer?
I certainly don't have your answer, your answer is up to you and your guidance.
How much longer are we going to wait? How many more times are we going to say "hmm, maybe I'll wait a couple months"?
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