How Our Reiki Teacher Training Empowers You to Lead

The Westcoast Reiki Centre has been teaching Reiki since 2008, and overall our students have been happy.

Happy because we are good at teaching Reiki.

And we are good at Reiki because we are qualified teachers.

Of the hundreds of students that have taken Reiki Teacher Training, very few have actually gone on to teach. We had to ask ourselves why.

After discussing it with our graduates, we realized that most of them had built a strong Reiki practice, and had incorporated it into their lives. They knew the value of the practice. The problem was this - they didn’t know how to teach. Many of them wanted to, but they had no idea how to create a lesson plan. They didn’t know when they should be guiding a student, or when they should be stepping back, and allowing the student to explore. Of course they didn’t! And they shouldn’t be expected to. They were amazing accountants. They did fantastic work in IT. They were phenomenal hair stylists. They hadn’t been trained in teaching.

We believe that Reiki Teacher Training is an integral part in not only the success of the teacher, but the safety of the classes that teacher gives. When Mikao Usui began teaching in 1922, it was a much different world and a much different culture than we live in today. He taught his students individually, allowing him to modify his teaching depending on the student’s need. He saw them and performed Reiju on them daily. All of this allowed for much of the learning to happen energetically.

By contrast, the majority of classes today are taught in one or two days.

They take place in a group setting, making it more difficult to modify the curriculum based on an individual’s needs. Most teachers have follow-up with their classes, and most try to build communities, but that is quite different than connecting daily. And, this is okay. It has to be okay. Our world moves quickly, and we are bombarded by information. One study suggest that the average person consumes 74 GB of information daily. That is equivalent to 15 movies, and the same amount of information that the average person would have consumed 500 years ago. All of this to say, our wold is much different, and the teaching methods used in 1922 don’t work for the average person in 2024.

A teacher today needs to have teaching skills. They just do. They need to know how to structure a class logically, how to communicate the same message in three different ways, so every student hears it. While formal evaluation is rare in a Reiki class, evaluation is still necessary, and a skilled teacher needs to know how to deliver that information - even if it is a little bit sensitive. A safe container needs to be kept at all costs, and to do that, the teacher needs to know how to manage class dynamics - to encourage some students to participate a little more fully, and how to ask some students to give some space for others to speak. We need to be able to explain esoteric concepts that don’t lend themselves to language.

We need to know a lot.

The Centre has created a comprehensive Reiki teaching program. We created it because the world needs it. Within this program, you will learn to perform initiations and many beautiful Reiki practices, but you will also get the practical stuff. The stuff that makes a good teacher.