Reiki Levels – Getting The Timing Right

Introduction

These days we want everything fast. Fast Food. Fast cars. Fast degrees – fast Enlightenment.

Reiki is no different.

Look on the Internet and you will find dozens of websites offering ‘Master Training’ – not just in 24hrs, but online to boot.

It’s all gain and no pain – the most perfect of worlds.

Of course, few people – I hope! – actually believe that they can pay a few dollars and have someone transfer Reiki Mastery on them from afar without any practice or work.

Where things are less clear, however, is with regular – in the flesh – Reiki degrees. These days there seems to be no clear consensus on how long someone should wait before attending the next level.

Traditionally in Western Reiki, Level 1 students were advised to wait at least one month – preferably two – before taking Level 2, and then 1 year – preferably two – before taking their Master Level.

Nowadays, the time frames given by Reiki teachers are so inconsistent they are of little help. As a result, students are often uncertain when to take the next step.

The question we all want to know, therefore, is this: Is there an optimum time to wait before taking the next Reiki level? Or does it actually make little difference?

Rand’s Rocket

It would probably come as a surprise to many Reiki traditionalists to find out that William Lee Rand, one of the world’s most well known Reiki teachers, often teaches level 1 and level 2 together.

To explain why he does so, he uses the analogy of a rocket blasting off from Earth into outer space. When it does so it uses a huge part of its fuel just after take-off and much less after that. Indeed, once it has broken clear of the Earth’s gravitational pull it will hardly need any fuel to shoot immense distances through space.

The moral?

According to Rand, the Level 1 attunements can do a great deal of work in helping you break free from old energetic structures and behavioural patterns; but to experience really deep change you will often need an extra ‘boost’ .

In his opinion, second Level attunements – if done immediately following the level one attunements – will provide you with this boost. They are like the booster rockets that get you out of the Earth’s gravitational pull. Without them you would never quite be free.

Does the Analogy Work?

In theory, this sounds great. An extra boost and away you go. But is the analogy accurate? Can we really compare Reiki attunements to a rocket blasting off into outer space?

The problem is that in practice, level 2 tends to build on level 1. In other words, to get maximum benefit from level 2 you need to practise what you have been taught in level 1. And to get a good feel for what you have been taught you need to practise over a period of time. You have to increase your ‘energetic capacity’ until you can fully appreciate the intricacies of what you have learned. Otherwise you may well ride an energetic high for a brief time after the second level attunements, but it is unlikely you will get any longstanding benefits.

Think of it like constructing a building: one storey goes on the next which goes on the next. In particular, you need a solid foundation before the rest of the building can go up. You can have all the materials for the mainframe of the building, sure, but if the foundations are dodgy everything will still collapse.

What’s more, the attunements are actually a two-way energetic connection between the Reiki Master and the student. How powerful they are depends on both people. The student will gain little benefit if the master is low on energy; just as the amount of energy the student can absorb will depend on his or her very own ‘energetic capacity’.

As a result, students should find that second and third level attunements are more powerful, not so much because there is anything intrinsically more special about them, but rather because the student has grown energetically. This means that he or she can more deeply experience communion with the teacher (or, to be more precise, Reiki energy).

Reiki Levels 1 and 2 According to Dr Hayashi

To be fair to William Lee Rand, he does have other reasons beyond his rocket analogy for teaching level 1 and 2 together. An important one is that there is actually a famous precedent for it, namely Dr Hayashi who taught them together.

That said, Dr Hayashi taught levels 1 and 2 over five days – not two – so these extra days may have enabled students to make the energetic shifts necessary to get the most out of the second level, even without a substantial break.

Personally, I still feel that students will benefit more from a period of practice before doing level 2; but as William Lee Rand rightly pointed out to me, everyone should be free to act according to their inner guidance.

What’s more, students will tend to be attracted to the teacher who resonates best with them; so it’s quite conceivable that students who would benefit from doing the levels together will gravitate towards teachers who teach them together, and that students who would benefit from a gap between the levels will be attracted to teachers who provide one.

The Levels in Mikao Usui’s Time

In order to better work out what time frame is right for us, it is instructive to examine how the levels were taught by the founder of Reiki, Mikao Usui. If we do, we will soon realize that his method of teaching Reiki differs considerably from the way it is taught today.

The most significant difference is that Reiki for him was not nearly as rigidly structured as it is today. Instead, he taught it bit by bit – students only been shown new things when they were deemed energetically ready.

In other words, a student would be given a technique to practise and he would practise that technique for as long as it took to master it. When mastery was achieved he would be given another technique and so on all the way up the Reiki ladder.

The method was a patient one, because it was understood that you could only benefit from latter techniques if you had already mastered the earlier ones.

Of course, this style of teaching depended very much on continued contact between teacher and student and is less practical in today’s busy world. But while we may not be able to replicate it, we should nevertheless learn from it. In particular we might learn that it does not matter so much what ‘level’ you are said to be, but rather how deeply you connect to Reiki.

Your practice is what it is, regardless of the label you put on yourself. You can call yourself a Level 3 Reiki Master because you got an instant attunement on the Net; but if your Reiki stinks, it still stinks. Far better to be a Reiki 1 who has practised and developed her skills than a ‘cyber’ Level 3 without substance.

As such, we need to stop being greedy. We need to put the ego aside and stop worrying about how we will appear in the eyes of the world. Because when we come to heal either ourselves or another, the only thing that matters is the quality of our Reiki, not the quality of our Reiki tag.

Is it Always Bad to Progress Quickly?

That said, it is not always bad to progress quickly. If you are ready, there is no point dogmatically holding back because a rulebook somewhere tells you to do so.

Take Mrs Takata, the founder of Western Reiki, for example. She was attuned to Level 1 in 1936, Level 2 in 1937 and went on to get her Master Level in 1938. In other words, she did it all in approximately two years. And she could do that successfully – despite not having done any energy work beforehand – because for those two years Reiki became the centre of her life. She practised it. She lived it. She embodied it.

Timeframes will therefore vary from person to person. How quickly you can take the next level will depend on how much practice you do; what innate talent you have; how energetically evolved you were before learning Reiki – and many other such things.

If you had practiced meditation for ten years before encountering Reiki, for instance, you will most likely be ready to progress more quickly than someone who spent the majority of his last ten years downing pints in a pub.

Conclusion

If I had to give a general guideline, I would say that a student should wait anywhere from 2-6 months before taking Level 2 and a further 1-2 years before doing Master Level. In most cases, progressing more quickly will not accelerate your Reiki development.

If we wish to find the optimum time to do the next Reiki level, however, we need to throw away theory and trust our intuition. If we are honest; if we get rid of the ego, silence the mind and look within, we will almost certainly know whether we are ready or not.

The trick is simply to do what we are told.

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Tagged as: Getting, Levels, Reiki, Right, Timing