Meet Frans Stiene of Haarlem Holland

Today we’d like to introduce you to Frans Stiene. 

Hi Frans, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
When I was 30, I was in a bad shape, drank too much and I had a back problem since I was about 16 years old. They had even put my whole torso for 9 weeks in plaster when I was 17. So here I was, 30 years old, and not feeling happy. I was born in Holland and when I was 21, I went to Australia for a year. After a year I moved back to Haarlem in Holland and worked there for 8 years. After these 8 years, I had enough and wanted to travel through Asia. I started in India and there I was, 30, with a bad back and my mind confused sitting in the Himalayan town Ladakh. 

I made the decision there to heal myself, I had enough… 

One day an American guy told me that there was a local healer going to do some healing on people. So off we went. I think there were only a hand full of foreigners and the rest were all locals. We were all huddled up in this small dark room in a house. The healer started to do some chanting and called the locals forward one by one. We were told we could just watch from the back. But suddenly they said one of the foreigners had to come, so I went. 

When she touched my back, I felt I was gone, tears running over my face, a heat going through my whole body, my mind so expanded. If you would have asked me how long it took, I would not have known, in reality, it was only a few minutes but, in my mind, it felt like hours even days. 

After this experience I started to buy books on healing, yoga, ayurveda, reiki, etc… and that is really where it all started. 

It has been an interesting journey, full of ups and downs. In the end, I stayed in India and Nepal for 2 years, in which I became a Reiki teacher and started doing volunteer treatments and teachings on the local community in Darjeeling for a year. 

After 2 years in India, I went to live in Sydney where I started a Reiki business. We had this for about 18 years, including a retreat center in the Blue Mountains. 

Now I am back in Holland again. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There have been many challenges. First of all, when you start to heal yourself through meditation practices etc… you stir up old stuff which comes to the surface and which you have to deal with. Not just emotional but also physical issues. But I was lucky enough to have found some wonderful teachers. One was a Chinese Taoist teacher living in Sydney, she became one of my most important teachers. Unfortunately, she passed away many years ago now but I still feel her close by guiding me in all I do. 

I also divorced from my partner, we wrote Reiki books together, had a retreat center in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, etc… We met very early on in life and suddenly it felt like we were going into a different direction. I still love her a lot but it was not meant to be. 

In the beginning when we started the retreat center we had no money, but we wanted to do something we liked and enjoyed, and therefore we just went for it. There were months in which we had to struggle to pay the mortgage, but we had also decided that we just would live a simple life so that we could run this retreat center. 

In the end, it all worked out well, we wrote some Reiki books together and that helped us to start to teach all over the world. 

And that is also how I ended up teaching in Ohio. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I teach the system of Reiki from a traditional Japanese perspective. The first time I went to Japan was in 2001 to train there with Japanese Reiki teachers. That was wonderful but I felt there was still something missing in my training. I kept going back to Japan to see if I could find the right teacher for me. In 2012 I started my training with a Japanese priest who is very strict and traditional. I had found what I was looking for. 

Through this training, I began to understand the background of the system of Reiki more and more, not just intellectually but also in a direct experimental way. 

For example, you train in the mountains of Japan, stand under ice-cold waterfalls, they hang you of cliffs with your head first and two people holding a leg so that you do not fall to your death. All of these trainings help you to release your fears and worries so that you can let your true nature shine forward. 

These practices not easy and not for the fainthearted but highly worth it for me. 

Through these kind of teachings, I am where I am now, an international Reiki teacher traveling the world. I have co-written 4 books and written 3 books myself. My new book The Way of Reiki will be out in October this year. 

For me practicing the system of Reiki is an art and I feel I am an artist. My art form is really my own mind, body, and energy through which I can express my innermost artwork, my great bright light of love and compassion. I am not always successful and therefore it is an ongoing practice which never ends. 

Through these trainings in Japan, I am a very different teacher than most other Reiki teacher, and one of my qualities is that what I teach is not just an intellectual expression rather it is a direct expression from my mind, body, and energy. This is why many students can really feel the Reiki in a very profound way during the classes. 

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
When I was a small kid I was very shy. But something happened, can’t remember what, and I became more outgoing. In my teens and twenties, I was a big party animal. Loved to go out, socialize, meet different people, drink a lot and I loved dancing. My biggest interested was meeting people and making them laugh. Laughter has always been a very important element in my life. I can see this so much these days, we have become such a serious society but laughter helps us to open up, to let go of our small-mindedness. Even laughing about our own confusion is a great way of letting go and opening up our own mind. Being more open-minded is also one of my interested. During covid, when I could not travel, I walked the streets of Haarlem, trying to communicate with people in the street, make the laugh, and hopefully that would make them feel better within themselves. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ihreiki.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stienefrans/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frans.stiene/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/FransStiene
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/internationalhouseofreiki 

Image Credits
Frans Stiene