UK Reiki Accreditation

Since arriving back in the UK I've been looking into the different accreditations, which are quite different from Singapore and may be confusing for those new to Reiki. Hopefully this summary will help if you are as confused as I was!

What is needed to practice as a Reiki therapist in the UK?

Firstly, you do not need any official accreditation to practice Reiki as a therapist or Reiki teacher in the UK. Reiki is still an unregulated field with individual Reiki teachers creating and certifying their own courses.

To practice Reiki as a private sole proprietor:

With any Reiki certificate you will be able to get insurance and register with a Reiki Association to practice Reiki as a therapy in private practice (ie as a sole proprietor). As long as:

1. The Reiki attunements have been done face to face (not online)

2. Your Reiki teacher lineage is intact and can be traced back to Mikao Usui (check with your Reiki teacher if you are unsure)

If you are considering adding Reiki to your healing modalities as a complementary therapist, or thinking about offering Reiki professionally as a sole-proprietor business you can do this with any Reiki training as long as it is face to face attunements (online courses will not allow you to register with Reiki Associations at present - don't get me started on why on earth this is still a thing!).

To be doubly safe, just check the course is registered with a Reiki Association such as the UK Reiki Federation, this means the course lineage and quality has been checked and you will not have any issues. My face to face hybrid Reiki courses are all approved by the UK Reiki Association (my online courses are not).

To practice Reiki in the NHS, a charity or hospice, or for a salary:

If, however, you are looking to work in the NHS or in a hospice/care home charity and get paid a salary for providing Reiki, you would probably need to be registered with the CNHC (Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council). This is a voluntary register for therapists who have met certain practitioner standards.

These standards are quite arduous including 9 months of training, 75 documented Reiki treatments, an exam and assessments via an external assessor. Do note that there are very few jobs that pay a salary for Reiki, so realistically the majority of practitioners offering Reiki do so in the private sector, and are not CNHC registered.

For a Reiki practitioner who is seeing clients from home or a clinic and even as a Reiki teacher whose focus is teaching Reiki for self-care and self-healing, CNHC accreditation is simply not necessary. However, if you are wanting to take your practitioner training to a more "official" level, then CNHC accreditation may be something to consider, especially as this will become more important in the future as complementary therapies become more mainstream.

From my own experience, I was lucky to gain a salaried position in a hospice in the UK working with Reiki and those at end of life. I had to be CNHC registered and despite having 30 years of healing and teaching experience, as it wasn't "properly" documented and written up, I found it very difficult to translate my experience into paperwork. I checked in with all the Reiki associations on the CNHC list and was fortunate that The Complementary Health Professionals had a fair and sensible approach and were super helpful in getting me accredited based on my previous experience. I would highly recommend this organisation and their Reiki accreditor, Dan Stephens.