Preparing for Your Reiki Level 1 Attunement

Most pages about Reiki Level 1 will give you a timetable. Very few tell you what the day is actually like, or answer the question nearly everyone arrives with, which is some version of: how will I know if it worked?

What an attunement is

An attunement is a short ceremony. You sit in a chair with your eyes closed and your hands in your lap. I move around you, sometimes touching your hands, shoulders or the crown of your head, sometimes not touching you at all. It takes a few minutes. There is nothing you need to do, and nothing you can do wrong.

In the Japanese tradition the word is reiju, which is closer to "offering" than to "initiation". It was given repeatedly, not once. That is worth knowing, because the English word attunement has picked up a sense of a switch being flipped, and that is not really how it was taught.

The day itself

Level 1 with me is one full day, in a group of no more than six. We start slowly. I teach the history honestly, including the parts that are contested. You learn the hand positions, and then you practise them, on yourself first and then on each other. The attunement happens partway through, not at the end, so you have hours afterwards to notice what changed and to ask about it.

You do not need to have meditated before. You do not need to believe anything in particular. Several of my students have arrived openly sceptical and stayed that way about the theory while finding the practice useful. That is a perfectly good outcome.

What people feel, and why feeling nothing is fine

Warmth in the hands is the most common report. Tingling, a heaviness in the arms, sometimes a wave of emotion that arrives without a story attached. Some people cry and cannot say why. Some feel pleasantly sleepy for the rest of the afternoon.

And some people feel nothing at all. This upsets more students than anything else, and it should not. If you go looking through Reiki forums you will find the same distressed post written hundreds of times: I got attuned and I felt nothing, did I waste my money. Sensation is not the point and it is not the measure. Some of the steadiest practitioners I have taught felt nothing on the day.

The three weeks afterwards

You will read that a twenty one day cleanse follows the attunement, and that each of three weeks corresponds to something. Treat that lightly. What I actually observe is more ordinary: people sleep differently for a while, dream more vividly, and often feel a bit emotionally thin skinned for a week or two.

My advice is dull on purpose. Drink more water than usual. Go to bed earlier. Practise on yourself daily, even for ten minutes. Do not make large decisions about your life in the first fortnight simply because you feel stirred up. The stirring settles.

How to prepare

1. Eat beforehand. It is a long day and you will be sitting still.
2. Wear something you can sit cross legged in and stay warm in.
3. Come without a plan for the evening.
4. Bring your questions, including the sceptical ones. Those tend to be the good ones.
5. Do not arrive straight off a long haul flight if you can avoid it.

Can an attunement be given online?

I teach both in person in Canggu and live online, so I have an obvious interest here and you should read this with that in mind.

My honest position: yes, I teach Level 1 online and I stand behind it, but the two are not identical and I would not pretend otherwise. What you lose online is real. I cannot put my hands on yours to correct a position. I cannot see the small things, the shoulders that never drop, the breath that stays high in the chest. I cannot feel the room change when it changes.

What you keep is the teaching, the practice, the questions, and a real teacher present with you for the whole of it, live, not a recording.

The thing I would steer you away from is the automated attunement. If you can buy it in a checkout and receive it without a person ever being present with you at an agreed time, you have bought a PDF. Whatever you believe about how Reiki works, a ceremony with nobody attending it is not a ceremony. Ask any teacher, including me, three questions: who attuned you, when, and will you be present live for mine.

After Level 1

Level 1 is for treating yourself and the people close to you. That is a complete thing in itself. Plenty of my students never go further, and use it for years on their own aches, their own sleep, their own bad weeks.

If you want to go on, Level 2 and Master Teacher exist, but there is no need to decide any of that on the day. The training page has the practical detail, and you are welcome to write to me with questions before you book. I would rather answer ten questions than have you arrive unsure.