Keeping a Practice Journal: The Habit That Changed How I Teach

I did not start keeping a practice journal because I thought it would make me a better teacher. I started because a student asked me a question I could not answer.

She wanted to know how long it had taken me, in the early years, before the daily practice stopped feeling like an obligation. I gave her a confident number. Later that evening I realised I had no idea whether it was true.

Key Takeaways

A practice journal is not a record of experiences. It is a record of what I actually did — date, duration, and whether I did it at all — and that is the part that turns out to be useful.
Keeping one changed my teaching more than my practice. It replaced remembered timelines with recorded ones, and the recorded ones were less flattering and far more useful to students.
The entries that help most are the ones about missed days. A student who has stopped practising needs to hear from someone who has a written record of stopping too.

Key Terms Explained

日課 (Nikka) / Daily Practice — the practice done every day, which is the thing a journal actually measures.

手当て (Teate) / Hand Placement — laying hands on oneself or another, the physical act recorded in each entry.

五戒 (Gokai) / The Five Precepts — Usui's daily principles, recited in practice and, in my journal, noted simply as done or not done.

自己浄化 (Jiko Jōka) / Self-Practice — practice done on oneself, which is the bulk of what any long-term practitioner actually does and the part least often discussed.

The Number I Made Up

The question was reasonable and I answered it the way teachers answer things: fluently.

I said it had taken about three months before the daily practice stopped requiring effort. It sounded right. It matched the story I tell about my own beginning, and the student seemed reassured.

Walking home, I tried to reconstruct where the number came from and found nothing underneath it. I could not remember the first year in any detail at all. What I had was a smoothed-over account, assembled at some point and repeated since, and I had just handed it to someone who was going to measure herself against it.

That bothered me more than it probably should have. I write elsewhere about being careful with claims — about not stating as fact things I cannot support. And here I had done exactly that, about my own life, without noticing.

I bought a notebook the next week. Not to record insights. To record whether I practised.

What Goes In and What Stays Out

The journal I keep is almost aggressively boring, and that is deliberate.

Each entry has four things: the date, roughly how long I practised, whether I did the precepts, and one line about anything unusual. Most entries are one sentence. Many are four words.

What I deliberately do not record is how the practice felt.

I tried it, early on, and stopped within a fortnight. Writing down sensations changed what I noticed during practice — I found myself watching for something to report. That is not the same as practising. It also produced a document full of adjectives that told me nothing when I read it back a year later.

What the boring version gives me is a fact I cannot argue with: how often I actually practise. It turns out that I had been overestimating. Not dramatically, but consistently. My sense of "every day" included a fair number of days that were not every day.

There is a second thing I record, in a separate section: questions students ask that I answer badly. Not the difficult ones. The ones where I hear myself being fluent and unsure at the same time. That section is short and it is the most useful page in the book.

What It Changed About Teaching

The change in my teaching came from a single realisation: I had been giving students a timeline that did not exist.

Now, when someone asks how long the early period takes, I can say something true. I can say that my own records show irregular practice for considerably longer than I used to claim, that the gaps in the first year were frequent, and that the practice becoming steady was not a threshold I crossed on a particular date but something that happened so gradually I could not have told you when.

That is a less satisfying answer than "about three months." It is also the answer that helps.

Students who are told a clean timeline measure themselves against it and conclude, at week ten, that something is wrong with them. Students who are told the honest version — that it was uneven, that days were missed, that there was no moment of transition — have nothing to fail at.

There is a second effect I did not anticipate. Having a written record of my own missed days makes it very difficult to be quietly disappointed in a student who misses theirs. I can look up the year I practised least. It was not a year of poor discipline; it was a year with a great deal happening in it. Knowing that specifically, rather than in general, changes the tone of the conversation.

Living outside Japan for a long time has made this kind of record more valuable rather than less. When you are the only person from your tradition in the room, there is nobody to correct your account of it. A notebook is a poor substitute for a teacher who remembers what you were like ten years ago, but it is better than memory alone, and memory alone is what most of us are working from.

After more than twenty years of daily practice, what Reiki is to me remains simple: connecting with the energy of the universe and letting it turn my life in a better direction. The journal has not changed that. It has changed how much of it I am willing to state as fact about the process, and that turns out to be a different thing.

FAQ

Q: Should students keep a practice journal too? A: I suggest it, with one condition: record what you did, not what you felt. The felt version becomes a performance for the page and stops being an accurate record. Date, duration, and whether you practised at all is enough. If you want a second column, use it for questions you want to ask your teacher, not for sensations.

Q: Doesn't recording turn practice into a task to be ticked off? A: It can, and that is a real risk. What has kept it from happening for me is that the entries are written afterwards and take about ten seconds. If keeping the record starts to shape the practice — if you find yourself practising to have something to write — stop for a month. The journal is a measuring instrument, and an instrument that changes what it measures has stopped being useful.

Q: What do you do with old entries? A: Mostly nothing. I look back when a student asks a question about timelines, or when I catch myself about to state something confidently about my own history. Perhaps four or five times a year. The value is not in rereading; it is in knowing that a check is available, which quietly makes me more careful about what I claim in the first place.

Key Insights to Remember

A remembered timeline is a story, not a record. Mine had been smoothed into something tidy and encouraging, and I had been handing it to students as fact for years without ever checking it. Anyone who teaches from their own experience is doing this to some degree, and the only cure I know of is writing things down at the time.
Record the doing, not the feeling. Sensations recorded on the page turn into things you go looking for during practice, which changes the practice and produces a document that says nothing. Date, duration, done or not done — the boring version is the one that will still be useful in ten years.
The missed days are the valuable entries. A student who has stopped practising is not helped by a teacher with an unbroken record; they are helped by one who can point to their own gaps and say when and roughly why. Keeping the record honest means keeping the failures in it, and those are the pages I actually use.