What you, a Reiki Practitioner, should be doing before & after sessions
1. Cleanse your space:
You can do this any number of ways including:
Draw Cho Ku Rei along each wall and the ceiling and floor, coating the room in healing energy and warding against outside energies. If you are Reiki Level 1 simply direct reiki to these areas, visualizing it covering the walls, ceiling, and floor; I visualize this as a grid over everything.
Burn incense, dried herbs, or resins. Please make sure this is safe to do and your client has no allergies or sensitivities to what you use.
Crystal grid around the room and bed, using any crystals of your choosing to boost the healing or hematite or quartz programed to cleanse the space and facilitate healing.
Enchanted or reiki infused essential oil diffusers. Again, please check your clients allergies before putting any blend in them and diffusing it.
Any other way you or other traditions you follow cleanse a space of harmful or unhelpful energies.
2. Cleanse yourself:
If you don't do reiki everyday/regularly (all of us should be doing this. All of us) make sure to do more than just a Reiki Shower, take time to go through each center and especially your hands and feet. Your hands because this is the main way reiki travels into your client and your feet to remain grounded.
A Reiki Shower is when you start with your hands in prayer, taking a few breaths to calm your mind and focus, bring your hands up to your 3rd eye energy center and ask Reiki to guide your hands, then place you hands above you visualizing the reiki symbols (or just reiki energy if level 1) flowing out of your hands and showering over you. Slowly move from your head down to your feet.
Smoke cleanse yourself with incense or dried herbs
Wear crystals specifically programmed or enchanted for cleansing and protecting before you start your session and through out your session till you break the connection to your client.
3. Have a set of filters, sheild wards, and energetic tools that if not actively employed from the beginning of the session, can be implemented as needed during your reiki session. This is for your protection from outside energies that could harmfully effect you and parasites and spirits that can come with your client. It is also for your client's protection so if you do have some issue you are unaware of it doesn't harm or spread to your client (another reason for daily cleansing and reiki).
I have one filter that specifically allows me to tap into my empathic abilities but keeps my energy to my self and keeps me from picking up things in other people's energy I'm feeling from physical empathy, etc.
For particularly traumatic emotional situations, chemo side effects (physical empathy), death, etc. I suggest having a heavy duty sheild ward that allows you to channel but not feel these adverse energies or allow them to latch onto you.
Use Cho Ku Rei and Sei He Ki (boxed counterclockwise) as protections and filters.
Energetic tools such as my Black Box, can help with removing harmful energies, parasites, and spirits. Having something like this or other energetic tools can help protect you and your clients.
4. Stop your session if needed:
Make sure you express this to your client too. If at any time either of you needs to, stop the session.
If for any reason you start to feel uncomfortable, drained, or overwhelmed, DO NOT POWER THROUGH IT.
Stop your session and come back to it at another time after grounding and centering or take a quick break. It will do neither you or your client any good if you become ungrounded, start channeling your own energy into them instead of reiki, or become burnt out. If you are tired, your wards are slipping, your filters are more permeable and you are most likely no longer channeling reiki (as reiki should NEVER make the practitioner feel drained).
If your hands start shaking and it feels like energy is bouncing back at you, end the session early, making sure you actively ground your client. Usually that bouncing back after a good session is an indication your client needs no more reiki and it is bouncing off them because it has no where else to go.
5. Break your connection after your session ends:
DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CONNECTION TO YOUR CLIENTS OPEN AFTER YOUR SESSION ENDS
We make enough connections through out our day-to-day lives as it is, you do not need to leave these connections open and you do not need to move from reiki client to reiki client with them open either!
Break them by washing your hands up to your elbows in cold water. COLD WATER!
Pop their energy off your fingers and throw it at the ground. (Take a finger between your forefinger and middle finger of the opposite hand, squeeze and pull up. Pulling the energy up and out and popping it off. Throw it behind you at the ground.)
Shake the connections loose and ground them into the earth; adding an additional grounding element to your client's energy.
Reiki can sometimes bring emotional or traumatic energies to the surface. If someone has suppressed something they need to process, reiki can bring this up and emotional outbursts can happen on the table. Usually these are harmelss but sometimes they can unground or overwhelm a practitioner. Sometimes clients will come in and be covered in parasites or have one really nasty one. Sometimes clients will have infected energies or energy cords you need to remove safely.
Wards, sheilds, filters, energetic tools, and regular cleansing can all help you deal with any situation you have come up.
PSA for Reiki Clients:
If you ever feel uncomfortable, in any way, with a practitioner or session do not feel embarrassed about ending it early and/or leaving (please pay them for their time but leave if you need to).
You should never leave a reiki session with parasites, holes in your aura/energy, damage to your energy centers, etc.. Yes sometimes practitioners miss parasties that are good at hiding and camouflage, but you should never leave energetically worse off than you came in as.
Everyone practices differently and has different skill sets and talents. If you don't like one reiki practitioner, try another. Every single student I've taught, and my Master says the same, works and does the same Reiki in different ways. We all have our own styles.
If you don't resonate with someone but want to do Reiki again, try a new practitioner; maybe even try out distance reiki if no practitioners around you interest you.