How to Know When a Reiki Session is Over

Christian Stone | Standing Stones Healing Co.

How do you know for sure that a Reiki session is over or that you should move to a different area?

This is a good question and one that many practitioners wonder. It's probably why we have Reiki music with timers to change hand positions when we hear the ding.

But I personally don't use a timer to guide my sessions. There's nothing wrong with this, and it can be helpful, but I personally simply allow the structure of the session to guide me, meaning that I follow the more traditional hand placements in their more traditional sequence. Reiki as a system has a built-in process for helping us with the structure of a session, and that's the sequence of hand placements.

During a session, I sometimes might feel called to stay at one place longer, and we absolutely can use our intuition for this. But I think having structure to our sessions is helpful, especially if we're newer to offering sessions to others. Of course, I'm older in this regard, but I think structure is always helpful because we go into a session knowing what we're going to do and how we're going to do it so that we don't have to worry and can simply be mindful in the session. If you only followed the hand positions and used each one for a similar amount of time, you don't need to worry about trying to determine when to move on or end.

Structure is not only helpful for us, but it's helpful for the client, as well. It sets up expectations for the client and helps to keep us consistent from one session to the next. I know of some practitioners who go by intuition to determine when a session is over: "it takes as long as it takes," as I've heard them say. But the problem with this approach is that we can go into a session never knowing exactly how long it might last. We might have sessions that are 20 minutes and others that are 2 hours. This is problematic for our own scheduling purposes and unfair to the client, who deserves to know how much time they can expect to spend with us. Simply following a set structure respects our time and the client's.

I think that we can combine these approaches of structure and intuition because they're not mutually exclusive. So we can have structure with the length of the session, the amount of time we spend with a client, and the hand positions we might generally use. If we're newer and feeling challenged to know when the session is over, structure will help give us confidence.

But we can also use our intuition to know when to change hand positions without relying on a timer to tell us. Some practitioners go by feel, whether of hot or cold, or of a sense or inner knowing. In the traditional system of Reiki, for instance, with Byosen scanning, the encouragement is to send Reiki to a particular area that feels different in terms of temperature until the sensation of the temperature changes. I believe structure is helpful, but it doesn't need to hold us back from using our intuition, either There's no one way and no right or wrong, and as you practice, you'll develop your own way of knowing. Please feel free to tune in to this episode of the Build Your Reiki Business podcast on developing your intuition, and of course, please feel free to get the free Reiki Biz Kit. Let me know if you have any questions, and blessings to your sessions!