How Amilcar Escobar followed a question about Reiki into the water and found the work that was waiting for him there.
There is a tradition in our Reiki lineage that every Master Candidate undertakes a Master Project near the end of training. The subject is not assigned by the teacher. It grows out of a question or interest that keeps returning until the candidate realizes there is something there that needs to be understood more deeply.
John Harvey Gray, my Reiki instructor, offers an early example. Hawayo Takata taught John byosen scanning, and he struggled with it. Instead of treating that as a limitation, he became fascinated with other ways of assessing energy in the body. He followed that question until it developed into work that became important within his lineage. My own Master Project grew from my fascination with distance Reiki and the question of how Reiki could work across time and space.
So when I train a Master, I pay attention to the questions that keep returning. They often tell us something about where the person is going. I trained Amilcar Escobar, whom many of us know as Amilyo, for five years. During that time, two things about him were always clear: his love of Reiki and his love of water. I did not know exactly how those two parts of his life would eventually come together, but when they did, it felt completely natural.
The Water Was Already Part of Him
Amilcar’s relationship with water began long before his Master training. He swam competitively when he was young and later became deeply involved in scuba diving. The ocean was not simply another interest. It became one of the places where he felt most alive.
During his Master training, he spent significant time in Puerto Rico and entered increasingly demanding dive training while also moving through a healing journey of his own. During rescue diver exercises, the intensity sometimes triggered anxiety. At eighty feet below the surface, there were moments when his attention would move away from the task in front of him and toward fear.
His response was something no one had instructed him to do. He began giving himself Reiki underwater, placing his hands on his temples or over his heart and allowing Reiki to flow while the training continued around him.
“The anxiety eased,” he told me. “I came back into the present moment more easily than I ever had on land.”
At times he would close his eyes underwater and imagine returning to his mother’s womb, completely safe and protected. Surrounded by water, coral and marine life, he began to experience Reiki and the ocean as part of the same healing journey.
Amilcar did not begin this because he was looking for a Master Project. He was trying to help himself. “Looking back,” he told me, “I wasn’t building a project. I was following an experience that was healing me.”
That distinction matters. Some of the most meaningful work in Reiki does not begin with the thought, I am going to create something new. It begins with practice. Something happens, we notice it, and eventually we begin asking what it might be teaching us.
When His Own Experience Turned Toward Others
Over time, Amilcar began bringing that same quality of attention to people he worked with in the water. One of them was a woman in her late fifties who wanted to learn to snorkel but had nearly drowned as a child. The desire to experience the water was still there decades later, but so was the fear.
Amilcar did not try to convince her that there was nothing to be afraid of. He worked with the reality she brought with her. He taught her breathing and safety skills, entered the water slowly with her, held her hand and offered Reiki as the experience unfolded.
They worked together over three sessions. What stayed with Amilcar was not simply that she eventually snorkeled, but that she discovered an experience she had associated with fear for most of her life could also contain pleasure.
“What moved me most wasn’t the snorkeling,” he told me. “It was watching her feel something fear had kept from her for decades: the joy of being in the water.”
That experience helped clarify the direction his work was taking. Wet Hands was not going to be a swimming lesson with Reiki added to it. In his own manuals, Amilcar describes Reiki as the foundation of the program, while his aquatic training provides the technical structure and safety within which the work takes place.
Wet Hands Takes Form
Eventually the work acquired a name: Wet Hands.
What appeals to me about the name is the distinction Amilcar makes between wet hands and dry hands. You don’t need a complicated explanation of Reiki being practiced in water. The name itself tells you what has changed.
Wet Hands developed into an aquatic wellness program for swimmers and non-swimmers, including people who carry hesitation or fear around water. The participant is supported gradually, with attention to breath, flotation, safety, Reiki and the experience of being held by the water rather than fighting against it. His Participant Guide makes that approach clear from the beginning: people do not need to know how to swim and they do not need to arrive fearless. They are met where they are.
At the heart of Wet Hands is a Reiki treatment given while the recipient floats, supported in the water, with the practitioner beside them.
Amilcar continued refining the work until it became considerably more than I had required for a Master Project. He created a Participant Guide and then a full Instructor Manual so that the method would not depend entirely upon him. The Instructor Manual addresses preparation, aquatic safety, participant assessment, pool and open-water work, session structure, documentation and the Reiki practices that support the method.
When I saw how far he had taken the documentation, I understood something about his intention. He was not merely trying to complete his Master training. He wanted Wet Hands to have a life beyond the project, and he wanted other qualified people to be able to learn it. That was beyond what I asked of him, and I was proud of him for it.
What the Project Was Teaching Amilcar
A Master Project matters not only because of what the candidate creates, but because of what the process does to the candidate.
Earlier in his Reiki practice, Amilcar believed he needed to understand what was wrong with a recipient and in some way direct Reiki toward the problem. His experience with Wet Hands changed that relationship.
“There’s no ‘me’ standing between the energy and the person receiving it,” he told me. “I’m an instrument, nothing more. I don’t decide what needs healing.” Then he said something even simpler: “I stopped trying to direct it. I just trust it now.”
For me, that is more important than any particular technique he developed. A Master Project should deepen the Master’s relationship with Reiki. It should leave the person standing somewhere different from where they began. I could see that happening in Amilcar, but there was still one moment when everything became unmistakably clear to me.
The Call From Puerto Rico
For a long time, Amilcar talked about Wet Hands. He talked through ideas, possibilities, experiences and questions. That is part of Master training too. Sometimes the teacher’s job is simply to keep listening while the student works toward the thing they are not quite able to name yet.
Then he led his first group Wet Hands experience in Puerto Rico and called me afterward. I had heard him talk about Wet Hands many times by then, but this call was different. I could hear something in his voice that had not been there before, and as he described what had happened with the group, I felt a rush of energy moving with his words.
He was no longer telling me about something he hoped Wet Hands might become. He had experienced it working through him with other people. The project had moved from possibility into embodiment, and after five years of training him, I recognized the moment immediately. Amilcar had come into his own, and I knew he could complete his Master training.
As a teacher, those moments are difficult to describe because pride is only part of what one feels. There is also recognition. You spend years giving someone what was given to you, answering questions, correcting misunderstandings, watching them struggle and practice, and wondering what form their own Mastery will eventually take. Then something happens that you could not have manufactured for them, and you realize the student is no longer simply carrying your teaching.
They are carrying Reiki in their own way. That is what I heard in Amilcar’s voice that day
Dry Hands, Wet Hands
Today I think of Amilcar’s specialization very simply. He can practice Reiki with dry hands on land and with wet hands in water.
That may sound playful, but I mean it seriously. His years of aquatic training give him a degree of competence in water that most Reiki practitioners do not have, while his years of Reiki training allow him to bring something into that environment that most aquatic instructors cannot offer. Wet Hands arose precisely where those two parts of his life met.
It also gives him a particular community to serve: people who love the ocean, people who are afraid of it, and people who already sense that water is somehow connected to their own healing.
Amilcar is now expanding Wet Hands within a larger vision he calls the ReikiDoes Water Experience, bringing together Reiki, aquatic practice, snorkeling, diving, movement and
exploration. His hope is to offer the work in the New York City area, train other Reiki practitioners in his method, and eventually bring groups into ocean environments in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
I am pleased to see that vision developing, but what matters most to me has already happened. I trained a Reiki student for five years, and along the way he found a question that belonged to him. He followed it into the ocean, allowed it to help heal something in himself, learned how to share what he was discovering with others, and worked hard enough to turn the experience into something another practitioner could learn.
That is what a Master Project is supposed to do.
John Gray followed his question about scanning. I followed mine about Reiki across time and space. Amilcar followed his underwater. I could never have given him Wet Hands, because if I could have, it would not have been his Master Project. What I could do was teach him Reiki, stay beside him while he searched, and recognize the moment when the answer became his own.
That is one of the great privileges of being a Reiki Master Teacher, and in Amilcar’s case, I could not be prouder of where the current carried him.
Experience Wet Hands
Amilcar Escobar is beginning to offer Wet Hands experiences and develop training for Reiki practitioners and instructors who want to learn the method. To learn more about Wet Hands, the ReikiDoes Water Experience, upcoming sessions or instructor training, visit ReikiDoes.com.
