The hand placements are difficult to describe. They are much easier to demonstrate. A true practitioner does not like to show people exactly what they are because they may attempt the moves even though they have never taken a Reiki class. They will assume they are doing Reiki but they are not. They may falsely charge people for a Reiki treatment when they are not actually receiving any Reiki. I can give you a general idea of what the hand placements are. There is actually some dispute over the traditional hand placement. After one hundred years people change and adapt but traditionally there are between ten and twelve hand placements for degree one ranking. You learn extra in degree two ranking. For degree one, hands are palms down on the person and never the other way, the practitioner should never be looking at the palm of their hands with fingers closed so that when the Reiki comes out it is not escaping through the gaps in your fingers but being held down and concentrated on that particular spot on the person's body. You start with your hands over the person's face; there is a spot on the neck, a place on the person's chest, and on a person's stomach. If the person turns over, you start on the back of the head and then the upper back, move down their lower back, keeping your palms flat as you go. Make sure your hand is actually on the person and not hovering above. A couple of hand positions that are in dispute by certain people as to whether or not they are traditional, there is a hand position where you put your hands on the outside of a persons hips and there is a position where you place your hands at an angle, one position is you put your hands on the outside of someone's hip. Your hands are on basically their leg and on the outside of their upper thighs or you can be on the inside by the inside of the hip and pelvic bone and sort of have you hands at a diagonal angle to where your ringer tips would almost be touching and the part of your hand up toward your wrist would be spread apart at an angle that way at a persons pelvic area. Those are the two that people argue back and forth as to which is the original. Those two hand positions are for when a person is lying on their back facing up. When a person is lying on their stomach, there is one position when your hands are sort of like a T to each other over the person's rear end and that one a lot of people use on men who have prostate cancer. That is also in dispute as to whether it is an original hand position. That is how a client can expect to be touched and in the different areas that they can expect to be touched during a treatment.
