The Two Kinds of Students I See After the Certificate
August 2026 · 4 min read · By Vanessa Chugani
Most of the people who finish Level 2 or Master Teacher with me never open the manual again. I do not say that to make anyone feel bad. I say it because it is true, and because nobody tells you this part before you sign up.
Two paths, not one
After a training finishes, a student goes one of two ways. Some keep a hand on it: a weekly session on a partner, a monthly slot for a friend, sometimes a small private practice that grows over years. Others close the manual, put the certificate in a drawer, and that is that. Both groups paid the same fee, sat through the same attunement, and left with the same knowledge. What happens next has almost nothing to do with how the course went.
I used to think the second group had failed somehow, or that I had failed them. I have taught long enough now to know that is not right. A course can go beautifully and still end in a drawer.
What actually separates them
It is not talent. Some of my most natural hands belong to people who never practised again, and some of the steadiest practitioners I know found their first attunement underwhelming and said so honestly. It is not how moved someone was in the room either. A big emotional response on the day predicts almost nothing about six months later.
What I do see, again and again, is this: the students who keep going are the ones who practise on somebody real within the first fortnight, before the details go soft in memory. Not a course requirement, just a partner or a friend willing to lie down for half an hour. The ones who wait for the perfect moment and the tidy room tend to wait until the whole thing has quietly slipped away. Preparing for an attunement matters less than what a student does in the fortnight after it.
The other thing I notice is smaller and less romantic: whether someone already had a reason to be in a room with people asking for help. A nurse or a mother of small children tends to fold Reiki straight into what she was already doing. Someone without that daily contact has to build the habit and the audience from nothing, which is a great deal harder than the training itself.
The closed manual is not a failure
I want to say this plainly because I think it gets skipped over. Plenty of people take Level 1, Level 2, even Master Teacher, and never intend to treat anyone else at all. They want to understand their own nervous system, or they are curious about a lineage their grandmother mentioned once, or they want a tool for the nights when their own mind will not settle. None of that requires a practice. A manual that stays shut on a shelf can still have done its job.
I would rather a student arrive at Level 1 knowing this than imagining a business waiting for them at the end of Level 2. Some do build one, and training through to Master Teacher is a real path if that is what you want. But I teach the person in front of me, not the practitioner they might become one day, and I would rather they leave with accurate expectations than romantic ones.
What I tell people before they start
When someone asks me at the start whether they will end up practising professionally, I tell them the truth: most people who train do not, and that is not a mark against them or against the training. I would rather say that on day one than let someone discover it themselves a year later and wonder what went wrong. Nothing went wrong. Some people come to learn a craft they will use on a handful of people they love for the rest of their lives. Some come to learn it for themselves alone.
If you are trying to work out in advance which way you will go, it is a hard question to answer before you start. It tends to depend less on how the training feels and more on what you do with your hands in the fortnight after it ends. A private session, in person or by distance, is often a more honest test of whether this is for you than a full training booked on hope alone.