An excerpt from Your Reiki Treatment by Bronwen and Frans Stiene
From the first moment that you make contact with your Reiki practitioner she will influence you—that is human nature. This same natural law also ensures that you will influence your practitioner.
How you influence each other and what you take to, and away from, your shared experience is something that you both have control over.
Your practitioner can influence you through her looks, words, actions, and attitude. A Reiki treatment is safe, non-invasive and non-manipulative, the only danger that it can pose is when a practitioner forgets her duty of care to the client. Ethically, one of the basic concepts of any therapy is respect for the client’s autonomy. A practitioner must hold a client’s safety and individual rights uppermost in her mind at all times.
Your Client Rights
It is fundamental to a just and ethical society that people are autonomous and able to control their bodies and what others are permitted to do to their bodies. It is for the client, not the practitioner, to determine if and when any procedure or treatment should occur.
Complementary Medicine: Ethics and law
Michael Weir
The practitioner’s attitude toward how Reiki itself works will also greatly affect the client and the outcome of the treatment. Reiki may incorrectly be seen as a tool for the practitioner rather than the practitioner being a tool for the energy to move through. A practitioner who believes that the energy is a tool, something to “use” for healing or spiritual growth, is one who believes she is in control of the energy. This can lead to a practitioner diagnosing or judging what is best for the client, which in itself can lead to an attempt on the practitioner’s behalf to offer an undue influence on the client. This is not considered to be beneficial or ethical for either party.
Reiki works at all levels of our human experience. It is not solely logical or physical in nature, it is a holistic system. By deciding what is right or wrong for a client is not working holistically or with the client’s best interests at heart. A Reiki practitioner is not trained to advise clients on their health status; energetic matters are subtle and advice concerning them is inappropriate. For example, if a practitioner tells a client that her energy is blocked then the client may come to believe this and experience serious issues (some even physical) relating to the practitioner’s energetic diagnosis. Energetic diagnosis is entirely subjective.
As a client it is important that you feel empowered throughout your Reiki treatment and that you ensure that the practitioner’s influence is a positive one. A client may decide at any time before, during or after a session that the practitioner’s duty of care has been unsatisfactory. It should be reasonable for a client to ask questions of the practitioner at any time. This is where you can influence the session by constantly taking up your right of choice. Your choices are numerous: Is your practitioner a woman or a man, close to your home or a train ride away, in a clinic or at her home, what does she charge? Every step of the way there are choices for you to make and you must make these in an ongoing effort to remain empowered, ensuring you receive the best treatment possible. Intimidation or bullying exercised by a practitioner in a treatment environment is unacceptable and indicates a lack of duty of care.
Bronwen and Frans Stiene are the co-founders of the International House of Reiki and co-authors of The Reiki Sourcebook, The Japanese Art of Reiki, Your Reiki Treatment, The A-Z of Reiki Pocketbook and the Reiki Techniques Card Deck. Bronwen and Frans teach in the USA, Europe and Australia. Visit the Courses page to find a course near you.