Building a successful Reiki business: what does it take?
“Reiki” (ray-key) is Japanese for ‘universal life energy’, a term used to describe a natural system to help bring about an improved sense of wellbeing and a positive feeling of spiritual renewal.
This tradition was founded by Dr Mikao Usui in the early 20th century and evolved as a result of his research, experience and dedication. It is a tradition that is open to any belief system and benefits may include deep relaxation and the promotion of a calm peaceful sense of wellbeing.
If there is a common thread among Reiki practitioners, it is the desire to help others. Developing your Reiki practice sounds like an exciting way to do that, but how do you start, then watch it grow?
Those who are disciplined to work day-to-day and yearning for growth have the mindset to work professionally as reiki practitioners. There are many different aspects to think about which require careful planning and thoughtfulness.
One of the first things you might want to ponder is why you want to express Reiki as a business.
Has this been a passion for you since the day you took your first Reiki class or is it just a way to generate extra income?
Having a successful and abundant practice requires the heartfelt intention of helping others and being confident and secure in your practice.
It requires a strong intention, determination, a clear vision and commitment over a period of time.
There is tremendous value in having a thriving Reiki practice […]
In addition to purely financial results, there are also emotional and spiritual benefits that can be even more fulfilling.
You’ll be immersed in Reiki energy several hours a day on a regular basis. This will have a positive effect on your health.
At the same time, giving Reiki sessions to others and seeing them heal and grow will fill your heart with peace and joy. You’ll be providing a service to others and to your community that will connect you to them in a very loving and spiritual way.
Being in this type of energetic environment will quicken your personal growth and move you more quickly along on your spiritual path.
– William Lee Rand, Founder and President of the International Center for Reiki Training
Running a thriving Reiki practice takes time, however it can be financially rewarding, spiritually fulfilling and has the potential to be of great benefit to the people you are trying to help.
In order to successfully start or grow a Reiki business, you need to do two things well: attract clients and provide those clients with consistently excellent service. You need to combine different Reiki tools with several essential business skills.
Below I have discussed the top reasons Reiki businesses fail and how to avoid becoming one of them.
1. Lack of commitment to the goal
The first step toward realizing your goal is to do an assessment of your inner attitudes and beliefs as well as the personal resources you possess that can be employed in the attainment of your goal.
The foundation of all we do is our inner state. It is out of this state that we can create what we attempt to do. Having a strong enthusiastic intention to achieve your goal is necessary.
If you have a half-hearted desire or are not really excited about creating a thriving Reiki practice, or if you don not really believe you can do it, or if you feel that you do not really deserve it, then you are not likely to do very well.
It takes strong motivation backed by emotional energy to achieve a goal as important as this. If you don’t have this state spontaneously, or if you find yourself in a slump once you’ve started your project, there is something you can do to pump yourself back up. Here’s an exercise that is important to do right from the beginning and continue every day. It will give you the energy and enthusiasm you need to accomplish your goal.
Earl Nightingale’s Strangest Secret: The 30 day test
Earl Nightingale was an American radio speaker and author, dealing mostly with the subjects of human character development, motivation, and meaningful existence. He was the author of The Strangest Secret, which has been described as “one of the great motivational books of all time“.
…. Now let’s get back to our definition of success. Who succeeds? The only person who succeeds is the person who is progressively realising a worthy ideal. He is the person who says I am going to become this and begins to work toward that goal.
Think of a ship leaving a harbour and think of it with a complete voyage mapped out and planned. The captain and crew know exactly where it’s going and how long it’ll take. It has a definite goal. Now 9,999 times out of 10,000 it will get to where it started out to get.
Let’s take another ship just like the first only let’s not put a crew on it or a captain at a helm. Let’s give it no aiming point, no goal, no destination. We just start the engines and let it go.
I think you’ll agree with me that if it gets out of the harbour at all, it’ll either sink or wind up on some deserted beach, a derelict. It can’t go any place because it has no destination and no guidance, and it’s the same with a human being.
Earl Nightingale – The Strangest Secret
> Earl Nightingale’s Strangest Secret: The 30-day Test
2. Disempowering beliefs about money
Some people feel that Reiki cannot be practiced as a business and therefore they cannot charge a fee for their services. At the same time, they want to make a living with Reiki. There is nothing wrong in mixing material and spiritual things. We have incarnated in this world so that we could manifest our spiritual values into material form.
There are great healers that cannot make a living with Reiki because they have not taken the time to explore their relationship with money.
Limiting beliefs are those which constrain and limit us in some way. Self-limiting beliefs can have the potential to negatively impact upon you achieving your full potential.
Beliefs are conditioned perceptions that are built upon old memories of pain and pleasure. These memories are based on how we have interpreted and emotionalised our experiences over time.
Beliefs are the foundations of your expectations. These expectations help you to better understand yourself, to better understand others, and to better understand the world around you.
If your expectations unstable, everything that you will be building on these foundations will be unstable. Therefore, it is very important that you start by understanding what negative beliefs you have about money.
If you really want to run a successful business, it is paramount that you become aware of your relationship with money.
Some limiting beliefs about money:
– I am no good with money
– Money is dirty
– Working hard is the only way to earn lots of money
– I am too old to try something new/to be successful
– I never have money
– There is always somebody else who needs more money than me
– Money does not make me happy
– Rich people are greedy/corrupt
– Everything happens to me
– Rich people live an unhappy life
– I’ll start tomorrow, I have lots of time
Start by identifying your limiting beliefs and do your best to change them.
If you usually say, “Money stresses me out” catch yourself saying it/thinking it and replace it with “Money is a source of joy for me“.
If you think “Money is dirty” replace it with “Money is pure and abundant“.
If you catch yourself thinking “I do not deserve to be rich” replace with “I deserve financial abundance and personal fulfilment “.
Write all your limiting beliefs on a piece of paper, place it between your hand, connect to the Reiki Source and ask that Reiki heals these beliefs in your subconscious mind. Use the distant symbol and distant healing techniques to work at the root of the issue.
3. Not taking responsibility for healing themselves
“Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are.”
Rachel Naomi Remen
Takata Sensei always taught her students to start their healing practice with themselves, providing Reiki self-treatments daily. Before you can help others to heal, you must first heal yourself.
Even if you only have five minutes per day, use that time to place your hands on yourself and allow the Reiki energy to flow. This will not only help you master the skills needed for Reiki, but it will help to keep your energy flowing freely and improve the health of your body, mind, and spirit
Whenever possible, perform a full Reiki self-treatment, which includes 16 hand positions. Hold each hand position for three to five minutes. This is why Reiki is a discipline – because to help others heal you must have the discipline to put in the time and practice to heal yourself.
Think about Reiki self-healing sessions as just another form of personal hygiene – like bathing or brushing your teeth. When you combine it with daily meditation, you’ll find you can make Reiki a part of your daily life, no matter how busy you are.
Reiki practitioners have a choice of very powerful Reiki symbols, and techniques such as the Hatsurei-Ho Technique and the Gassho meditation, that can support them in their self-healing practice.
Healers must be aware of how negative energies can affect them, their clients and their business.
Creating a Reiki crystal grid is also a very powerful way to empower your Reiki business with a clear intention and continuous Reiki energy.
4 Lack of essential business skills
Starting a reiki healing business requires a strong intention, desire, and energy to start reiki healing.
It requires taking responsibility for making a difference in the quality of life, health, and well-being of others. It requires taking responsibility for our own quality of life health, wellbeing and acquiring all the skills that are needed for doing the best job we can.
Many Reiki business owners are very passionate about Reiki and helping others, but they may be operating their practice informally. To make their practice successful perhaps they may need to consider to operate in a more formal way.
Being a Reiki business owner requires much more than being good at giving Reiki to others; it requires having self-discipline, motivation, long-term goals, and acquiring additional skills in marketing, accounting, communication, personal development, listening, organising, planning, information technology.
It requires to understand the laws and regulations that apply to complementary therapies, to know about confidentiality, professional boundaries, data protection, and much more.
Having a clear manifestation of your business model is necessary for starting your own reiki Business Practice. Having a written business plan will help you structure your business specifics and discover the unknown.
The first consideration on how to start a reiki healing business is identifying a target market. As I mentioned above, a range of patients is looking for reiki practice. They all, however, have one thing in common—they are seeking your assistance in healing their ailments. They believe, on some level, in the power of energy and are hopeful that this is a healthier alternative to Western medicine. Identifying your target is an essential step towards defining your costs, charges, and number of daily sessions.
The next foundational step on how to start a business as a Reiki practitioner and/or teacher is identifying operational costs. To make things clear you can divide start-up costs and ongoing costs.
You then need to define your business name and service fee.
Other important business elements to consider:
– Do you have the right qualifications and licenses?
– Register for taxes
– Register as a legal entity
– Set up a separate business accounting
– Get an insurance
– Build a website
– Market your Reiki Business practice
5. Lack of self-discipline
Self-control stems from your values and choices, and getting to know yourself empowers you to build self-discipline.
But to get the full benefits of self-control, you must also create an effective strategy. By understanding how your will, desires and plans work together, you are able to increase your willpower and harness its power in your life.
Learning how to gain willpower starts with understanding the nature of willpower itself. Self-discipline is not a skill, an art or a strategy: It’s all of the above, and it is far more complex that merely sticking to the rules.
Human beings are social creatures with a drive to survive. Our wants, needs and choices are driven by our fears and our desire for pleasure and contentment. These are largely a product of our values, which are often unconscious until we work to discover and define them.
Tony Robbins
Self-discipline can be simplified to one simple concept: automating your behaviours.
According to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit.
The study also concluded that, on average, it takes 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic.
Each day you repeat the behaviour you intend to automate, you need less discipline no make it stick. 66 days later it takes little discipline to maintain the habit, it becomes your automatic behaviour.
Have you haver giving up practicing a meditation technique, such as the Gassho meditation, after a few days, or a few weeks, because thoughts kept distracting you, it was too difficult or nothing seemed to happen? This is probably why. You have not practiced it long enough to make it a new habit.
What is your WHY?
The most basic definition of self-discipline is the ability to control your urges in order to meet your long-term goals.
How to build self-discipline – Martin Meadows
Your long-term goals are the reason why you say no to instant gratification.
Having a strong WHY helps you as you can remind yourself of it when faced with a temptation.
Some questions you may reflect upon:
– Why do you want to invest money and time in Reiki training? What do you want to get out of it?
– Why do you want to work as a Reiki practitioner?
– Why do you want to teach Reiki?
– Are you prepared to do whatever it takes to create s successful Reiki business?
– How many clients do you need to see every week to make your business profitable?
– How many Reiki classes do you need to run every month?
– Are you prepared to work with all types of clients? If not, why?
– Are you prepared to work with yourself, to work with your limiting beliefs, to release anything that no longer serves you, in order to create a thriving Reiki practice?
The above questions can help you coming up with a strong WHYs and appropriate long-term goals for your Reiki business.
Write a Definite Chief Aim
A definite chief aim is a specific, clearly-defined statement of purpose in which you are looking to achieve an outcome, a desired state externalised in reality.
It has the power to guide your subconscious mind.
The goal of the Definite Chief Aim is to bring forth your desire from the perspective of spirit of harmony.
Your definite aim statement is knowing where you are headed and what you ultimately want to achieve and not lose sight within a time frame.
Keystone Habits
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains that keystone habits create a chain reaction; they don’t create a direct cause-and-effect relationship, but they can spark chain reactions and help you develop other good habits. And as a result, keystone habits foster the success of other habits.
Keystone habits are small changes that we introduce into our routines that lead to the development of other good habits. They start a chain effect in our lives that produce a number of positive outcomes.
Keystone habits are the foundation for other healthy habits to thrive.
Understanding keystone habits can help you greatly in building self-discipline.
Affirmations
Affirmations are one of the most powerful tools you can use to change limiting beliefs about money and support your self-discipline. You can either use affirmations that have been already written for you or come up with your own.
Use only affirmations that feel right for you. Write them down in your journal every morning upon waking and every night before going to bed.
Some examples:
– “Abundance flows freely into me”
– “I deserve lots of money”
– “I give myself permission to experience financial and personal abundance“
– “I love paying my bills“
– “Making lots of money is good and fun”
– “I love making money”
– “People love to give me money”
– “I have a thriving Reiki practice. I see twenty or more clients a week and teach Reiki classes.”
Have any of these statements made you uncomfortable? Do not use it but make a note; it may be an indication that there is some deep-rooted belief that needs to be reviewed. Use the distant symbol and distant healing techniques to work at the root of the issue.
Write down the positive affirmations on a piece of paper and hold it between your hands your Reiki self-treatment. Ask the Reiki to send these positive affirmations to your subconscious mind and being integrated in your daily life.
Related Articles
– How To Become a Reiki Practitioner
– How Long Does It Take To Become A Reiki Master
– Professional Reiki Practitioner Diploma
Giancarlo is a fully qualified Spiritual Healer, Reiki Master, Hypnotherapist and Past Life Regression Therapist. He lives and work in London, United Kingdom. Read more.
