What Actually Happens in a Distance Reiki Session

Your session is not the first thing I do that day.

I begin every working day with Hatsurei Ho, a traditional Japanese energy cultivation practice, for twenty to thirty minutes. From there I move into self-healing Reiki. Only then do I move into the window I am holding for you.

That order is deliberate and it is not something I do only when I have a booking. It is my daily practice and it was there before anyone paid me for anything. By the time your window begins I have already spent the better part of an hour settling.

I write your name on a plain piece of paper and place it in front of me. If you have sent a photograph, I use that instead. Neither is more powerful than the other, and the photo is optional.

I set an intention that Reiki be available to you for your highest good. Then I use the method taught at Okuden level for working at a distance. I will not describe the specifics of it here, because those are held as sacred within the tradition and are taught rather than published, but there is nothing dramatic in it and it takes moments.

After that I stop doing and start being still.

I place my hands over your name or your photo and I stay there for the length of the session. I am not sending anything. I am not directing it anywhere. I am not visualising outcomes for you or deciding what you need. I am surrendering and holding you in intention, and that is the entirety of what I am doing.

Thoughts arrive, because I am a person with a life and two young children. When they do, I return to why I am sitting there and let them settle. My eyes do what they want. If something pulls them open I look at your name. If not, they stay closed.

I do this in a quiet part of my house. The office, the bedroom, or the backyard if the day is good for it.

Stillness is the most accurate word for the whole of it.

The close is the same as the rest. Stillness, with the intention still there.

Near the end of the allotted time I wish you peace and your highest good. I bring my hands into gassho, the traditional prayer position, and offer gratitude for the Reiki. Then I might say a closing line, and I stop the recording.

Occasionally I feel a pull to finish before the time is up. When that happens I sit with whether it is restlessness in me or something else, and most of the time it is simply time that decides. The window you booked is the window you get.

I am in a state of observation for most of a session. Sometimes there is a deep stillness and a sense of calming. Sometimes visions arrive, or a name, or a moment of unusual clarity. Sometimes there is nothing at all, and nothing is a perfectly ordinary outcome.

I generally do not report these things to you, and I want to explain why rather than seem withholding.

I cannot tell you whether something that came up belongs to me or to you. If I hand you an image or a name and call it yours, you may spend a week trying to make it mean something. Symbolic material is easy to misread and I think it creates more friction than help. So unless something feels genuinely worth passing on, I keep it.

I will also say plainly that whether my own session felt scattered or settled does not seem to me to change what you receive. I am not giving you my energy and I am not the source of anything. I am giving you my time, my stillness, and my intention. A distracted hour of mine is not a lesser session for you.

Whatever you like.

Some people lie down for it. Others carry on with their day and think back afterwards to what they noticed around that time. Neither is more correct.

I would gently say that setting aside time specifically to feel something can create an expectation, and expectation shapes what you notice. Traditionally people did set the time aside, because hands-on Reiki requires you to be on a table. Distance work does not, and it can be received whether you are aware of it or not.

So sit for it if that appeals. If it does not, get on with your day.

Some notice nothing. That is a real outcome and it happens.

Others have described feeling energised, a wash of calm, a sharper sense of what is going on inside them, visuals behind closed eyes, tingling or buzzing, and occasionally visions.

I do not promise any of these and I do not direct anything toward producing them. Your own system takes from a session what it will.

The honest position is to arrive with none.

An expectation primes you. Either you get the thing you were waiting for, or you do not and the session feels like a failure. Both readings say more about the expectation than about what happened.

The only thing you can reasonably expect, whether the session is hands-on or at a distance, is that somebody set aside real time and held you in their intention for your highest good. Anything beyond that gets in the way of whatever might actually arrive.

That is a fair position and I hold some of it myself.

I have a background in exercise science and I have gone looking for a mechanism. I have not found a repeatable, solid answer, and I am not going to invent one to make this sound more credible than it is.

What I can say is that the tradition holds Reiki as something already present rather than something I generate and transmit to you. There is no harm in it on that understanding, and I have never encountered any. If you are curious, the honest way to settle it is to try it and see what you notice, including if that turns out to be nothing.

I offer a free session for exactly this reason. You should not have to pay to find out whether it does anything for you.

Not really. Reiki is universal in the way the tradition understands it, and it would be strange to gatekeep something described that way.

The people who tend not to want it are those whose religious position holds it as incompatible with their faith. I would not try to talk anyone out of that. If it does not sit right with you, do not book.

Reiki is not a substitute for medical or psychological care and I will never suggest otherwise. If something is going on for you, please speak to your doctor. Reiki sits alongside that, never in place of it.