Reiki, taught in this room.Reiki, taught in this room.

Level one is where every Reiki practitioner begins, and it is the one you learn for yourself. Three things are given in it. The attunements. The hand positions, in their order, and where they sit on the body. And the practice of laying them on your own body, before anyone else's.

That last part is the whole of the first level, and it is the part people do not expect. The first body you learn to put your hands on is your own.

It is for people who have had this work done to them and would rather be able to do it for themselves, at eleven at night, without booking anything and without explaining themselves to anyone. No previous training is needed and none is assumed.

It is not a medical training and it treats nothing. What you are taught is a practice to keep, not a qualification to sell.

Level one is complete in itself. It is a practice you use on yourself, and you use it from the evening you learn it.

The second level is where the symbols are given. Each one has a name, a shape, and an order in which it is drawn. They go from his hand to yours, in the room, and nowhere else.

In the first level the practice goes through your hands onto your own body. The second teaches the form that is held without that contact. You practise with no one in front of you.

No part of it is medicine. What the level adds is a way of practising, and the symbols that carry it.

He teaches it to people who took the first level with him, in this room. That is the way in, and it is the only one.

It runs to two half days at most. How much of that it takes depends on the student and on what he teaches them.

Reiki has one credential that can actually be checked, and it is not a certificate. It is the list of teachers between Mikao Usui, who began this work, and the person putting their hands on you. That list is called a lineage, and his is set out here.

Usui opened his clinic and his school in Tokyo in 1922. He made Chujiro Hayashi a master in 1925, and it was Hayashi who ordered the hand positions and refined the attunement into the form still taught today. Hayashi taught Hawayo Takata, who brought Reiki to the West in 1938 and was a master by 1940. She is how it left Japan.

Takata taught more than ten thousand students. She made twenty two masters, and every Western line runs back through one of them. Since the master level began to be taught over weekends, lines have grown faster than that.

Kilian's runs through Phyllis Lei Furumoto, Takata's granddaughter. In 1983, a gathering of Reiki masters wrote a statement acknowledging her as a Grandmaster in the direct spiritual lineage of Usui, Hayashi and Takata. Carrel Ann Farmer, the name after hers on this line, was at that same gathering, among the founding members of The Reiki Alliance.

His line has eight names. A hundred years from Tokyo to this room, in eight passes. A London lineage published online begins with the same five and runs to ten.

The first five names are public, and the two after them are his own teachers. Every pass was one teacher and one student, in the same room.

None of this makes a treatment stronger, and anyone who tells you it does is selling you something. What it makes is a short list: few hands between the first one and yours, and a name for each of them.

When he teaches you, he tells you them.

Reiki is taught to one person, or to two who come together. Never a group. Nothing in it is done over a screen.

In person, in Battersea, London. He teaches rarely and not to a timetable, so the date is set between you and him. Level one is two half days on two days that follow each other: two mornings, or two afternoons.