When to Start Charging in Your Reiki Business

Christian Stone | Standing Stones Healing

I am offering tarot readings, oracle readings, and Reiki healings and offering my services for donations while I develop my business and get my name out there. I’m also working full-time and am a mom, so I’m limited on availability for clients, which also pushes me to feel donation-based is the best route until I have more time or experience. But when should I start charging?

Congratulations on getting started! There are lots of different opinions on this, especially whether to offer any free sessions at all. For me, I did offer free sessions at first. When I took Reiki training, I hadn't been planning to have a Reiki business and it just kind of evolved. I started offering distance sessions on the phone to friends, who referred their friends, and it didn't take long until I realized I really needed to be charging for what I was offering. I talk about it in the video below about my Reiki business journey.
 
There is absolutely nothing wrong with offering free or donation-based sessions, and it can be very helpful for us with feedback, reviews, and etc. Sometimes when we're starting out, offering some free sessions in exchange for practice, feedback, and reviews is very helpful, which means that sometimes we get out of it just as much as the client does...maybe even sometimes more.
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I encourage you to honor your own inner sense of when to charge and how much. Even with a solid Reiki business, I will still sometimes offer free and/or low cost sessions, including if I'm rolling out a new service that I want to try out. This does not mean that I don't value myself or my services or Reiki or any other argument someone might offer, which really says more about them than it says about me. Yes, when someone gives an opinion on if, when, or what you charge, their opinion is more about them than it is about you. 

As a general guideline, it's often a good time to start charging when people are asking us for sessions. It means there's value in what we're doing and people want what we've got. But deep down, each of us know the answer to this question and no one can make the decision for us. I encourage you to follow your heart and know that your prices will adjust, as they do for all of us, since our relationship with money is ever evolving...even whether we have a Reiki business or not. I talk about it in the video below on money. As our relationship with money evolves, our Reiki business prices evolve, too. This is simply part of the process, so know that eventually you will evolve to charging and that you will know when the time is right.  

I also have an episode of the Build Your Reiki Business podcast on When to Start Charging for Reiki. That's below, too.

​Please feel free to snag the free Reiki Biz Kit for more Reiki business support. Blessings to charging...whenever you do and however much it is!