Noncompetitive Spirit

After recently teaching one of my day-long Reiki classes, I met a friend for dinner who asked me, “Aren’t you glutting the market with Reiki teachers?”

My own teacher said her family thought it was crazy that she was training so many people to do her job.

However, many members in the Reiki community discourage the idea of competition between various practitioners and teachers, believing that such rivalry goes against the harmonious spirit of Reiki.

The thinking is that there aren’t nearly enough practitioners and teachers to give Reiki to the billions and billions of people who could benefit from healing sessions and training classes.

And thankfully it is true that Reiki is rapidly gaining in popularity as more and more people look for holistic alternatives to Western medicine and seek deeper spiritual connection.

It would be wonderful to live in a world where everyone was interested in healing themselves and others through practices like Reiki. Our collective consciousness and vibration could be raised to the point where the cooperative spirit pervaded more than the competitive spirit; where we realized that helping worked so much better than hurting one another.

I feel so blessed to play a small part in that consciousness expansion through my Reiki classes and hope that the ripple effect of my work is much greater than I can even imagine. Those ripples swell into much greater waves of change when my past students start practices of their own.

Many people who take Reiki classes have little or no intention of ever starting a practice, and that’s perfectly fine. Reiki is a wonderful tool to have for one’s personal evolution on all levels (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) and to use to help loved ones.

When I took my introductory Reiki class in 1996, it was purely to help myself heal physically from six years of chain smoking. I had no clue I’d be doing this professionally by 2002.

It took me six years to get around to starting my own practice. There’s no telling how many of my many students to date will eventually feel called to share in this work.

In fact, a lot of my students have expressed interest in eventually starting their own practices, and a handful of them already have. A couple of those have started and stopped, for whatever reasons.

Three of my students, Jim Leach (Kevala Reiki in Marietta, Ga.), Levar Nevers (Soul Expression Reiki in Atlanta) and Nancy Flaherty (A Reiki Experience in Snellville, Ga.) recently posted Websites for their new practices (see the Links section of my main site). I know that more are on the way.

I tell everyone interested in starting their own practice that a Web presence is really important in this day and age when we’re much more likely to Google (in the verb sense) than “let our fingers do the walking” in the Yellow Pages.

That’s why it’s really important for any business (and a Reiki practice is a business) to turn up high in the search engines. When people look for Reiki in Atlanta, I want my site to come up near the top, and I employ the necessary strategies to make it so.

Which leads me back to competition. Sometimes I feel a little competitive (gasp!). My concern over search-engine placement is a perfect example. We can’t all show up in the top 10, although I wish we could.

Since childhood, we’ve had the notion of competition ingrained deeply into us (in birth order, school, sports, etc.). It’s what capitalism is all about, right? The way we Westerners think the whole world should work, even though our society is far from perfect.

Can we humans evolve past the Darwinist notion of “survival of the fittest” or is that further separating ourselves too far from the reality of nature? I don’t know.

I can say that whenever I catch myself feeling competitive or even threatened (blush!) about another Reiki startup, I remind myself that the universe is limitless in its abundance. I can be as successful as I make up my mind to be. It’s my thinking that creates my reality.

For those interested in starting a Reiki practice, what’s far more important than worrying about Google searches or other specific marketing strategies is to keep choosing this profession over and over – to be unwavering in one’s resolve to manifest numerous clients and students.

The International Center for Reiki Training advises the early step of showing the universe you’re serious by simply printing up some business cards.

My first business cards after my Usui and Karuna Master training immediately advertised Reiki classes, but my teacher advised me to focus exclusively on Reiki sessions for a good six months before beginning to teach.

I needed to amass lots of hands-on, practical experience to inform my teaching. And like the saying goes, I found that the students began to appear once the teacher was ready (just as the students find the right teacher once they’re ready). And that started to happen after about six months of concentrated session work.

Though the title Reiki Master is quickly earned through an attunement, attaining true “mastership” of energy work’s many mysteries can be a lifelong process, perhaps stretching across lifetimes. Healing is certainly an endless process.

Five-plus years in my Reiki practice, I definitely feel like I’m still making breakthroughs, and that my commitment to this healing art is deepening all the time. As it does, so grows my Reiki practice.

I’m thankful to say that the last few months have been the most fruitful both fiscally and fulfillment-wise to date.

It seems inevitable that I’ll be doing healing work full time at some point, but for the foreseeable future, I’m content to maintain my dual career as a writer/editor for Georgia Tech. I certainly value the steady paycheck, health care coverage, and other benefits, and I find the work reasonably stimulating.

The irony is that I’m writing marketing-oriented materials very focused on competition (beating out other schools for rankings, students, grants, donations, and media coverage). I work for the business school, for Pete’s sake.

So it’s not surprising that competitive thoughts occasionally discolor my idealistic perspectives on Reiki.

I was recently placed in the uncomfortable position of having a prospective student call me and ask what the difference was between my teaching and that of Amy Weeks, my teacher whose practice is called Southeastern Reiki Center.

I emphasized my many strong points without disparaging my teacher, telling the student she’d be well served whichever way she decided to go (and most importantly, to trust her intuition about the right teacher for her).

But that was a pretty easy situation. Amy and I both follow the guidelines of the International Center for Reiki Training, which has done a commendable job of standardizing instruction in this healing art.

Of course, some Reiki instruction is much better than others. I’ve encountered a teacher whose ego depends so much upon being the “Master” that she rarely lets her students progress to that level, throwing up many hurdles. But at least she creates a strong sense of respect for Reiki.

I’ve heard of other teachers who’ll perform all the attunements in a half hour or lesss, then send people on their way with only a textbook to guide them, and not any hands-on instruction.

William Rand, founder of the International Center of Reiki Training, writes that people leave these experiences "with little training of what Reiki is, or how to practice it. These students go on to attempt to practice Reiki but without all the necessary information or training, simply abandon Reiki or even worse, pass the debased training they received onto others.”

Many offshoots of Reiki have developed (from Rainbow Reiki to Heart Reiki to Tera Mai Reiki to Crystal Reiki). The list goes on and on. While the International Center preaches tolerance and cooperation among various types of practitioners, there is concern that Reiki could drift too far from its roots into some misguided directions.

People’s ego trips or eccentricities can certainly get in the way of a good thing.

Maybe I should start “Brad Reiki” or “Feline Worship Reiki.” Please note that “Wellspring Reiki” is simply the name of my business, not an individual system of Reiki.

What approach is best? I’m sure that a lot of these nontraditional systems have validity and some effective techniques they’ve added. I also practice Karuna Reiki, which is a well-established evolution of the Usui system.

The best course of action for me is to not worry about competing with other systems of Reiki or other teachers of Usui and Karuna Reiki.

I like to believe that students will find the right teacher for them. And that may not always be me.