For my ten years in holistic therapy practice I was often asked this question. “What IS reiki?” they’d ask with a kind of baffled puzzlement at this almost ‘bizarre’ sounding therapy, whilst having a facial, massage or perhaps some reflexology with me. On being asked this, I’d often be totally stumped to sum it up for them in a sentence or two, to answer it satisfactorily. No way of explaining it ever seemed to do reiki justice, and it still doesn’t!

I’d use the classic line ‘Reiki is the transfer of universal energy’ which is true, but it just didn’t seem to convey what I wanted it to! I could waffle on about balancing chakras, using crystals and what a client may or may not feel or see during the treatment, but it still felt a bit vague when summing up the whole experience. When I first trained I had so little confidence with this therapy that I used to worry when someone asked me for a treatment! I knew my holistic therapies like the back of my hand and my confidence lay in delivering a fantastic back , neck and shoulder massage! I innately knew exactly how to help someone’s body through the therapies, and it showed! But the reiki….that was different! It felt so much deeper and on a non-physical level, that it challenged me. It was like I was touching base with an intrinsically profound part of the client that was not normally seen. I could feel not only their energy, but frequently their emotional body and any pain they may have been carrying. (Being an empath made this harder of course!) But it enabled me to sit with them and their pain or negative emotion, and hold space for them.

I’ll admit I spent many years fearing people’s emotional pain; what I could feel from others and particularly during Reiki healings. Although not everyone would feel as deeply as me perhaps, many people do with reiki, because empaths are often drawn to the healing arts. View my course on empaths.

Reiki can open the door to all that lies beyond the physical, particularly if you’re giving it. It allows you to feel, see and sense more than you could feel, see and sense with just the physical body. And that extends to both the giver and receiver of the energy flow. It takes you out of the incessant thinking ‘left brain’ beta brainwave state, and softly pushes you towards a calmer more meditative state of consciousness. Reiki can heighten your intuition and can bring in your ‘sixth sense!’

As a Reiki Master Teacher, and now nearly ten years down the line, I’ve learnt to answer the question by telling people, “It may be better if I show you”, as I’ve learnt words will never suffice to explain Reiki in its true sense. So instead, I choose to explain what reiki can do for them, and sometimes this is even mentioned within my readings. View my reading page.

During a reiki treatment, a client will normally lie on a massage couch to enable the practitioner to move around the body easily, although it can be comfortably done in a chair for shorter treatments.

A practitioner will then use various hand placements, resting on or over the body, and often working more deeply on specific chakra areas. The practitioner will be using symbols and mantras potentially, to connect to reiki source energy and to bring it through to the client via their hands. This will often feel like warmth to the recipient, coolness, pressure or even tingles or vibration over certain areas of the body. It has even been heard by various clients coming through my hands, as a kind of pulse or crackle!

But one thing is for sure, Reiki takes you to a place you need to go, and that is normally a deeply relaxed state. An alpha or theta brain wave state of deep relaxation from whence the emotional body, psyche and physical body can begin to restore balance and heal. Reiki heals from the inside out! View my Reiki page.

A good practitioner is trained (particularly the ones I teach), to be able to connect and feel more deeply into the energy of their client, and to act accordingly, using their intuition to better guide them. Reiki will bring about necessary balance for the client and it’s the practitioner’s job to be the conduit for the reiki and help facilitate what is needed for the highest and greatest healing of the client.

How does it work?

The fact is, I don’t really know how reiki works and I doubt anyone really does, other than perhaps those in spirit! I know that universal energy is energy that is always accessible to us and that it can be used to flood the energetic as well as the physical body. And I know that it DOES work as I’ve seen proof of it. I can feel it fill a room when I’m teaching my students and I can feel it flood my body when I practise it. I have witnessed the effects of it when I’ve treated multiple clients struggling to rouse following a session, and I see the difference it makes in people’s lives, whether they become a student of reiki or have regular treatments.

I believe reiki to be love energy of the highest calibre. I believe that love is the most powerful healer in the universe. When we flood the body, mind and spirit with this energy, and hold the space for people, it can deliver the most profoundly deep and relaxed state from which to heal, evolve and grow.

Reiki wants to help you heal and will bring about whatever changes needed for you to do that. If you need to have a good cry, it’ll bring that out for you. If you need to make life changes, it may bring these into being for you. Reiki energy (aka. prana/chi) comes directly from source,from the universe. We can therefore trust it to bring about the correct changes, the correct healing and the correct learning, inherently unique to us.

When I feel someone is emotionally struggling, in whatever capacity, I will often recommend reiki to them. Reiki will do what is needed through a slow and gentle process, bringing to the surface false beliefs, limitations and even trauma, like carefully peeling back layers of an onion. People go on the best and most soul-awakened journeys I believe, when they learn reiki. Reiki, I feel fast tracks the evolution of your soul journey!

Reiki One Shoden, teaches connection, but it also teaches self-love and compassion, which is fundamentally one of the most vital and difficult lessons we will ever have to learn here on earth. 

If you’ve always struggled to put yourself first in any capacity, if you struggle with low self-esteem, low-confidence and frequent anxiety, I really do recommend learning reiki! Or at least having it! Then see how your life begins to change for the better! View my Reiki page (For those that are on a deeper and more advanced journey of healing and growth, finding things regularly holding them back and preventing them for reaching their goals, I recommend EFT)

Mikao Usui, Reiki’s founder, believed in living by a set of principles throughout life. He taught his students not only to use reiki energy for their own healing and for the healing of others, but as a way of life. A way of being and living that could bring about health and happiness for the student and the world at large. He believed that if everyone could learn reiki, it would change the world. I think he was right!

I was inspired to write this blog because of my promotional reiki offer for March. Not only is it the month of my birth and spring, but also the month of Mother’s day, when we all come together to honour and love our mothers, Mother Earth or the ‘maternal energy.’ Remember too that If you ‘mother’ anything in life or even want to, know that you too must honour yourself! Love and light. Min