Reiki: The Real History, What I Actually Do, and Why I Still Believe in It

I have been practicing Reiki for years and I still find it difficult to describe. Not because I don't know what happens in the room — I do. But because the history is complicated, the word itself has been stretched and borrowed and changed almost beyond recognition, and I am a white woman practicing a Japanese healing art who uses an Indian chakra system and has certifications that vary so wildly from each other that I sometimes wonder what they actually certify. I want to tell you all of it. The history, the complications, what I actually do, and why after all of it I still walk into that room every day and mean every word I say there.

I have spent 25 years building a practice on evidence. Anatomy. Physiology. Peer-reviewed research. The mechanics of fascia and how it holds tension. The lymphatic system and how it moves. Hormones and bone density and metabolic health. I have certifications. I have clinical hours. I have spent decades alongside physicians and surgeons and physical therapists learning how the body actually works.

And then I go into my room, alone, before my first client arrives.

I turn on the diffuser. The air purifier. The table warmer. The galaxy lights. Music tuned to 432hz fills the space. I breathe. And then I say the words I say every single day — not because anyone taught me to, not because there is a certification for this part, but because something in me requires it.

With harm to none and love for all. With consent and an invitation for healing. Removing all that which does not serve the best and highest good — sending it back to the nothingness from which it came, to be transformed into healing and the highest vibration.

I welcome in the creator, ancestors, all beloved helpers and guides. May your wisdom and protection surround me. May I be an open vessel for healing, love, light, and magic. Connected to the highest frequency and the highest vibration. Anything or anyone not here for the best and highest good — leave now and do not come back.

May I be rooted, grounded, guided, protected, supported, and connected. With blessings, gratitude, and honor.

I am a scientist who prays. I have never quite known what to do with that. But to understand why I am standing in that room saying those words, you need to know where this practice actually comes from.

Reiki was developed in Japan in the early 1920s by a man named Mikao Usui — a scholar, martial artist, and spiritual seeker who spent decades studying ancient Buddhist and Shinto texts, medicine, psychology, and healing traditions from across the world. After an intense 21-day retreat on Mount Kurama, a mountain sacred to both Buddhism and Shinto, Usui experienced what he described as a profound spiritual awakening — a transmission of energy he came to call Reiki. The word itself is made of two Japanese characters: rei, meaning universal, and ki, meaning life force energy.

Usui spent the remaining years of his life traveling throughout Japan, teaching and healing. He trained over 2,000 students and initiated only a small number as teachers. One of those teachers, Chujiro Hayashi, later trained a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii named Hawayo Takata — and it is through Takata that Reiki came to the West.

Takata arrived in the United States in the late 1930s. She was a devoted and skilled practitioner, and we owe her an enormous debt for ensuring that this practice survived and spread. But she also made choices — deliberate ones — to make Reiki more palatable to Western, predominantly white audiences in a post-World War II America that held deep suspicion of anything Japanese. She simplified the teachings. She removed much of the Japanese energetic framework. She reportedly added Christian themes to Reiki's origin story to make it easier for her students to receive. She charged $10,000 for master-level training as a way of commanding respect in a culture that equates price with value.

And after her death in 1980, Western practitioners changed things further still — often without acknowledging they were doing so.

I focus my Reiki sessions on the chakras. I have built an entire system around them — crown to root, purple to red, each one with its own intention, its own element, its own mantra. And the chakras have nothing to do with Reiki. Not originally. Not historically. The chakra system comes from India — from Hindu and yogic traditions rooted in Sanskrit texts that are thousands of years old. Mikao Usui never mentioned chakras. His energy framework was Japanese and Daoist, centered on the dantien — three energy centers in the belly, heart, and head.

The chakras entered Western Reiki practice after Takata's death, most likely because Western practitioners already understood them from yoga and meditation, while the Daoist concept of the dantien was far less familiar. It was a substitution made for accessibility. And it has been repeated so many times that most people — including many certified Reiki practitioners — don't know it happened.

I am one of those practitioners. I have taken several Reiki courses and certifications, and I can tell you that they have been so varied in their content and philosophy that the word "Reiki" has become almost impossible to define with any precision. I hold a certification. I do not hold the pretense that this makes me an authority on a Japanese spiritual practice that was developed by someone from a culture that is not my own.

I am not channeling special gifts I was born with. I am not a master of anything. I am not trying to convince you of something I cannot prove.

What I am doing is creating a sacred space — with your consent, with your trust, with your invitation — and offering my full attention, my trained hands, and my genuine love to whatever your body and energy field need in that hour. I focus on the chakras not because they are part of the original Reiki system, but because they give my intuition a structure to work within. They give the energy somewhere to go. And I move through them with the same intention every time — release, let go, let it flow.

I begin at the crown. I place my hands on your head and I hold the intention of the purple sphere — the cosmos, the divine self, the place where we connect to something larger than this body. I stay until I feel the energy moving smoothly, or as smoothly as time will allow, before I move on. Third eye. Throat. Heart — the chakra that connects the divine spirit to this physical body, the one I spend the most time with. Solar plexus. Sacral. Root — red, this physical body, connected to the earth, grounded and safe, all physical needs met.

What do I feel beneath my hands? Sometimes stagnation — a thickness, a resistance. Sometimes intensity — energy that feels almost too alive, too active, scattered. Sometimes nothing I can name, only a knowing that it is time to move on. I cannot prove to you that what I am feeling is real in any measurable sense. Science cannot currently validate it. I am aware of this. I hold it with honesty.

And I am also aware of what I have witnessed.

Women who arrive wound tight and leave as though something has been put down that they have been carrying for years. Women who cry without knowing why. Women who fall into that deep, still place between waking and sleep and surface from it looking somehow younger, somehow lighter. Women who tell me afterward that they felt heat, or tingling, or a pressure that moved, or simply a peace they hadn't felt in a very long time.

I cannot tell you why this happens. I can tell you that I have stood in this room long enough to know that when two people create a sacred space together — when one person extends love and the other consents to receive it — something genuinely remarkable becomes possible. Something that sometimes exists beyond what language can hold.

You have to be brave enough to be vulnerable for that to happen. Both of us do.

I have spent a long time being afraid of this part of my work. Afraid of being seen as the white woman appropriating a tradition she has no right to. Afraid of being dismissed as unscientific by the clinical world I came from. Afraid of being misunderstood by the spiritual community I was moving toward. I have hidden behind my certifications and my research and my evidence-based language because it felt safer there.

I am not hiding anymore.

What I offer is not traditional Reiki. It is not a perfectly authentic transmission of Usui's original teachings. It is something that grew out of years of study and practice and deep listening — to my clients, to my own hands, to something I can only call grace. I have taken liberties and I name them openly. I have borrowed from traditions that are not mine and I hold that with humility and with reverence for where they came from.

What I know — without data, without proof, without the ability to defend it in a clinical setting — is that love is the most powerful healing force available to us. That a woman who is truly seen, truly cared for, truly held in a space of safety and intention, will often experience something that no supplement or protocol could replicate. That the body knows how to heal when we finally give it permission.

That is what I am doing in that room. Every single day.

That is what I have always been doing.