From the book Hand to Hand
John’s Road to Healing – Practicing and Teaching Reiki
In 1979, I left the business world altogether and began to practice and teach Reiki full time. The first year was a dreadful time. I did not earn enough money and worried that I would have to go back to business. I offered treatments and presented workshops primarily around the San Francisco area but also traveled to teach in Washington State, New York City, Virginia, and New Hampshire.
In 1984, I moved to Ruckersville, Virginia, about 10 miles north of Charlottesville, having heard the call, “Move east, young man.” I rented a little house in the country and settled in, but I never really established a practice there. The next year, I moved to the Boston area and have been in the northeast ever since. I lived in Concord, Watertown, Marblehead, and Gloucester Massachusetts, and now live comfortably with Lourdes in a lovely, cozy house in New Hampshire.
In 1994, Interface, the popular holistic health learning center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted me Teacher of the Year. My students continue to open Reiki wellness centers and Lourdes and I started one during the spring of 1998. It is gratifying to see academic institutions give credit for Reiki training, and more and more hospitals encouraging the practice of Reiki as a complement to allopathic medicine for the greater benefit of their patients.
So, that curiosity about hands-on healing way back in 1974 changed my life. I have been giving workshops for 25 years and finished my 740th class as of July 2001, each class lasting from two to five days. My style of Reiki, what I term the Usui-Gray Integrated System, includes meditation, scanning the aura and the chakras, and looking for the breaks in the aura, which I call “zings.” More on all that in chapters to come.