The first level.

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 arranging anything. 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.

He is a Reiki master, qualified to teach the second level and to make other masters. He does neither, and that is a choice, not a stage he has not reached.

So the first level is not step one of three here. It is the whole of what is taught, complete in itself, with nothing kept back to be sold to you later.

The second level and the master level are taught by a great many people in London. If that is what you are after, he will say so plainly, and you can go and find it.

Reiki has one credential that can actually be checked, and it is not a certificate. It is a list of names: every teacher between Mikao Usui and the person teaching you. Kilian is the eighth name on his.

Usui opened his clinic and his school in Tokyo in 1922. He initiated Chujiro Hayashi as a master in 1925, and it was Hayashi who ordered the hand positions and refined the attunement into the form still taught today. Hayashi made Hawayo Takata a master in 1938, which is how Reiki left Japan. Between 1970 and her death in 1980 she made twenty two masters, and every Western line runs back through one of them.

The first three names are public and you can read them anywhere. The ones after them are his own teachers, and he gives them by name to the people he teaches. Each pass was one teacher to one student, in person.

A line gains a name every time a master makes a master. Eight of them cover the hundred years since Tokyo, and since the master level began to be taught in weekends, lines have grown faster than that.

A shorter line is not a stronger one. It is a shorter list, and every name on it can be said out loud.

It is taught to one person, or to two who come together. Never a group.

£450 for one. £350 each for two.

In person, in Battersea, South West London. It is taught rarely and not to a timetable, so the date is arranged between you and him.