How reiki taps into our sense of connection with the world around us

This story was originally published in Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter answering questions sent by readers about what’s been weighing on their hearts and minds. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

In Western culure, psychotherapy and psychiatry have become the standard ways we care for our mental and emotional well-being.

Group Therapy is very often dedicated to those forms of care because they represent the predominant paradigm for healing in the U.S. (and they really do help many people).

Over the past few decades, though, Americans have increasingly sought non-Western forms of healing — chief among them acupuncture, meditation and yoga — either because the prevailing medical model hasn’t worked for them (or has actively harmed them), or because they want their bodies and spirits to be acknowledged in the healing process along with their minds.

Laurie Collister, a counselor living in Los Angeles, asked about these methods of care: “Considering factors such as the shortage of mental health providers, increasingly pinched pocketbooks and previous failed attempts to gain from traditional talk therapy, what alternatives are people turning to for healing? Examples might include reiki and other energy-healing modalities. How well do they work in comparison to traditional talk therapy?”

Curious about reiki myself, I was jazzed to get this question. This week, we’ll look at reiki’s origins, what research says so far about reiki’s effectiveness and what it’s like to be on the receiving end of energy healing.

All about reiki

Energy healing, otherwise known as energy medicine, is based on the belief that a subtle energy flows through the human body. Practitioners aim to remove blocks to this flow of energy (similar to acupuncture or acupressure) with the goal of increasing relaxation, relieving pain and reducing other symptoms of both mental and physical ailments by bringing the body back to homeostasis.

Reiki is the most well-known form of energy healing in the West. The practice as we know it today dates to the teachings of Japanese scholar Mikao Usui in the early 1920s. “Usui studied, fasted and meditated to seek an understanding of life,” write Ellen Zambo Anderson and Cindy Wolk-Weiss in their book “Complementary Therapies for Physical Therapy.” “At some point during this quest … Usui dramatically received a powerful form of energy now known as reiki. He realized that this energy gave him a remarkable ability to heal and that he could easily transfer the ability to access and use this energy to anyone.”

A Japanese American woman named Hawayo Takata brought Usui’s form of reiki to the West in the 1930s. She had traveled to her native Japan to seek healing for a lung condition, asthma and an emotional breakdown after the death of her husband, and her experience with reiki was so profound that she brought the practice home to Hawaii, becoming the first person to teach reiki in the West.

The word reiki comes from the Japanese word rei, which means “universal life,” and ki, which means “energy.” Reiki focuses on seven main energy centers, called chakras, in the body.

“This subtle energy, known as ki in Japanese, chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit, is the essence that underlies vitality and intelligence of the universe and everything in it,” write Zambo Anderson and Wolk-Weiss. “As a pervasive and infinite energy, ki is organized into energy systems and fields that are penetrable and interactive with each other within individuals and between individuals and the environment, which allows universal energy to be received and exchanged.”

I spoke with Akiko Hoshihara, a reiki practitioner based in Santa Monica, to learn more about the practice. Like many people who provide energy medicine, Hoshihara began studying reiki because of how it helped her.

“I was in my early 30s, and I was going through a very tough time in my life. I was really lost,” she told me. “None of the traditional therapy work made sense to me. I know it helps a lot of people, but it didn’t work for me.”

Hoshihara went home to Japan to see family, and seeing the state she was in, they sent her to a reiki healer. “There were a lot of things I was suppressing at that time,” she said, “and I felt this immediate release, relaxation and a lot of tears.”

When Hoshihara works with clients, she gently moves her hands just above or on the client’s clothed body, intuitively sensing which areas need attention. Unlike some other forms of energy healing, where practitioners are consciously using the technique to clear negative energy, reiki is noninvasive. “In some ways, practitioners aren’t doing anything” other than attuning to the client, Hoshihara explained. “Practitioners guide clients’ life force energy to naturally do its own healing.”

She likens the practice to what many of us experience when we hold a baby. “We may feel immediately relaxed, because babies emanate this healing, warm touch by just being,” she said.

Why people are turning to reiki

In a 2020 article for the Atlantic, writer Jordan Kisner writes that reiki and other touch-based healing therapies simulate “the most archetypal care.”

“Several scientists I interviewed about their work on reiki mentioned the way their mother would lay a hand on their head when they had a fever or kiss a scraped knee and make the pain go away,” Kisner said. “It is not hard to imagine that a hospital patient awaiting surgery or chemotherapy might feel relieved, in that hectic and stressful setting, to have someone place a hand gently and unhurriedly where the hurt or fear is with the intention of alleviating any suffering.”

One explanation for the growing popularity of energy healing is that many modern-day adults don’t receive this sort of attention or care. We can be witnessed in attuned talk therapy, certainly. However, many forms of psychotherapy and other Western interventions target what ails our minds, and neglect to acknowledge our bodies and spirits, said Kenneth Cohen, a renowned practitioner and scholar of Qigong, a method of Chinese energy healing developed thousands of years ago.

Qigong is primarily used as a self-regulation practice, incorporating postures, exercises and breathing techniques, and meditation “to enhance the clarity and supply of Qi, or healing energy, but it can also be performed by a practitioner in service to others.

Cohen considers Qigong and other energy work as a “complement rather than an alternative” to talk therapy.

“Many of these energy healing methods involve spirituality. This isn’t the same as religion or religious dogma,” Cohen told me. “Spirituality is our sense of connection to other people, to the universe and that also has a positive influence on health.”

What research says about reiki

Scientists have so far been unable to explain how reiki works — “much less confirmed the existence of a healing energy that passes between bodies on command,” Kisner wrote.

And yet many respected hospitals in the U.S., including the Yale Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan Kettering, now offer reiki treatment, training and education as a complement to Western medicine.

How is it that a treatment that remains so mysterious to researchers is being adopted by members of the notoriously skeptical medical establishment?

For one, reiki has shown a lot of promise in eliciting a relaxation response, easing pain and boosting mood and sleep for those who receive it. However, it should be noted that while dozens of published studies indicate reiki’s benefits, many of those studies used relatively small sample sizes, experts said. More high-quality research is needed to understand the practice’s benefits and limitations.

Here are two notable studies that point to reiki’s healing potential:

• Yale School of Medicine researchers measured the activity of the autonomic nervous systems of 37 patients who had just experienced heart attacks and found that those who who received reiki had a higher heart rate variability (HRV) and improved emotional state. Higher HRV is associated with better recovery after heart attacks.

• A Harvard Medical School study followed 99 people to determine the effects of one 45- to 90-minute reiki session. The study found significant improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms, as well as pain and nausea.

Some argue that reiki’s effectiveness is a function of placebo. Harvard Medical School professor Ted Kaptchuk theorizes that the placebo effect is, as he told the New York Times Magazine, “a biological response to an act of caring; that somehow the encounter itself calls forth healing and that the more intense and focused it is, the more healing it evokes.”

The same argument has been made about antidepressants, which also work for many people for largely unknown reasons. Conditions including depression, pain, fatigue, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, Parkinson’s disease and osteoarthritis have been found to respond positively to placebos.

Placebo effect or not, multiple studies report no negative effects of reiki, though some people may feel emotionally drained or tired after a session.

If you’re reiki-curious like me and are thinking of trying it out, you should know that there’s a wide range of training and expertise among practitioners. Reiki is not a standardized practice, and there are no licensing boards for reiki healers. Experts recommend asking your prospective practitioner about their training and credentials.

You can find local practitioners with robust training through the websites of professional associations, including the International Assn. of Reiki Practitioners, the International Reiki Assn., and The Reiki Alliance.

Reiki is typically not covered by insurance and costs about $100 per session, similar to what you’d pay for a massage. When I reached out to a reiki practitioner in L.A. recently, I was quoted $175 for a two-hour session that integrated both coaching and energy healing.

. . .

As a journalist and a chronic questioner, I get why some people may raise an eyebrow at reiki, because it appears to diverge so significantly from the medical model. But I also think that — for me, at least — it’s important to remain open to that which we don’t yet understand through the lens of Western science.

If you’ve had your own experiences with reiki, drop us a line and we might include your comments in a future newsletter.

Until next time,

Laura

P.S. This will be our last edition of the newsletter before the July 4 holiday. We’ll be back on July 12!

If what you learned today from these experts spoke to you or you’d like to tell us about your own experiences, please email us and let us know if it is OK to share your thoughts with the larger Group Therapy community. The email GroupTherapy@latimes.com gets right to our team. As always, find us on Instagram at @latimesforyourmind, where we’ll continue this conversation.

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More perspectives on today’s topic & other resources

Reiki’s growing popularity in the U.S. has placed it at the nexus of large, uneasy shifts in American attitudes toward our own healthcare, according to Jordan Kisner of the Atlantic. “Various non-Western practices have become popular complements to conventional medicine in the past few decades, chief among them yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all of which have been the subject of rigorous scientific studies that have established and explained their effectiveness,” Kisner writes. “Reiki is the latest entrant into the suite of common additional treatments. Its presence is particularly vexing to naysayers because Reiki delivers demonstrable salutary effects without a proven cause.”

Reiki can be hard to describe — so reiki practitioner Lisa Biagetti made a short film to illustrate what energy work can look like. In this video, people who have received reiki talk about their experiences, including feeling “rushes of energy” and “practically melting into the table with a wonderful relaxation.”

Other interesting stuff

A few blocks from the Watts Towers is a garden that serves as a “healing altar” for survivors of violent crime, writes my colleague Lisa Boone. “I’ve seen people in the street having mental health crises, and when they come into the garden, their mood changes,” said Oya Sherrills, project director of the Reverence Project. “When we make clear that nature needs to be a part of our healing journeys, we are making a new stand about how we are all connected, not just as people but to the Earth as well.”

After losing her son to suicide in 2021, Deneen Vaughn’s physical and mental health has a whole new meaning and purpose now, writes Times photographer Jason Armond in this lovely article. In the last 19 months, the Vaughns have seen their family dynamics shift, and with Deneen leading the charge, they’ve found a way to speak out about what, for many Black families, is the unspeakable.