Shima Chayvet, owner of Universal Healing Arts, in Cortlandt Manor, will offer a Reiki I and II certification course October 16-17, from 12:30 to 6 p.m. both days. Chayvet has been teaching Reiki since 2006.

“There are no prerequisites to be able to become a certified Reiki practitioner except the desire to help yourself—Reiki is also a self-healing technique—and a desire to help others,” she says. “The class I teach goes through the history of Reiki, how to feel energy, and how to use the symbols to dial up universal life-force energy and bring it into the human energy field.”

The class also explores the chakra and meridian systems and includes a practical component where students work on each other. 

“Through my own Reiki journey, I’ve witnessed miracles with the understanding that I’m only the conduit of this energy—that Reiki is not just something you do, but who you become,” Chayvet says. Her journey involved taking Reiki I and II to mitigate stress from a high-powered executive job. Her teacher had studied under one of the first 22 Reiki masters taught in the United States by Hawayo Takata.

“Because of this close connection to the original Reiki masters and the founder of Reiki, Mikao Usui, I learned the importance of maintaining the integrity of this ancient Japanese hands-on healing technique,” she says.