John Veltheim

opening a chink in the armour

In this episode of the Received Wisdom series, I'm going to say a few words about John Veltheim.

This name takes me right back to the start of my spiritual journey, some 24 years ago. I had bumped into Elaine Harris in the south island of New Zealand, and she had introduced me to John, who was teaching a reiki 1 course the following weekend. And I jumped in. I took the reiki 1 course. And that really, looking back, was where everything changed.

Until that point, my outlook, my perspective on life, had been very mainstream, scientific: if something wasn't proven, it didn't exist. And then along came John Veltheim. He was a charismatic teacher, and probably still is, I haven't seen him for years. And he was passionate about reiki.

I think I needed, in that moment, to be face to face with someone with that sort of passion and charisma. It opened a tiny chink in my armour. And I was prepared to give it a try, to try something new, at least for a weekend, to step out of the mainstream. And ever since, that bold step has been paying dividends in my life.

But coming back to John, one thing I remember, very strongly, was that he used parables. He used little stories in his teachings. I suspect most of them were made up, or perhaps altered to convey the appropriate message. That doesn't matter. These parables somehow touched me emotionally. They got under my skin. They got through my rational mind and into that emotional part of me. I think without that, I would have stayed closed forever. John's style of teaching, though, opened up that crack in me. And it allowed the energy of reiki to come through.

The reiki initiations, especially, had a profound impact. And immediately afterwards, I could feel such strong energy sensations in my body and in my hands in particular – sensations like nothing I had felt before. John was a great reiki master. And a great reiki master is not only a great storyteller, a great teacher in that sense, but he is one who can carry that energy of transformation through into a reiki initiation.

So that's for me, where it all began: a weekend reiki 1 course in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the beginning of 1993. I took some more courses with John. A couple of years later, I did the second level of reiki with him. And at the time, he also taught something he called life management, more psychological work. And the combination of that and the reiki really laid a foundation for me. It's been carrying me ever since, as I've delved ever deeper into spirituality and psychology.

I'm very thankful to John Veltheim. He was just the right teacher at just the right time. A few years later, he shifted his focus to something else, a system called Body Talk that he had created. It didn't call to me, but as far as I know, he's still involved with that work.

[John Veltheim died in November 2022.]