For a long time, I thought Reiki was fake. This is a skeptic's guide to Reiki from someone who used to be one — an honest look at what changed my mind.
Not in a mean way. Not in a closed-off way. I've always been open to esoteric practices, to the parts of life that live a little outside of what science can neatly measure. Tarot. Crystals. Meditation. Energy. I have always felt things that can't always be named.
But reiki, specifically, I could not get behind.
The version of reiki I kept seeing
Everywhere I looked, it seemed to be the same thing. YouTube videos of people waving their hands over someone's body while a canned slideshow of mountains and waterfalls played behind them, spa music humming in the background. Certifications for ten dollars on Udemy. Weekend trainings that promised you could become a "Reiki Master" and start charging clients by Monday.
I have spent nearly twenty years working in the wellness and fitness industry. I've invested thousands of dollars in trainings, continuing education courses, mentorships, and specialized certifications. I have sat in trainings that were rigorous and long and expensive and demanding. So the idea that someone could pay ten bucks, watch a few videos, and call themselves a master of anything did not sit right with me. It felt scammy. It felt like a corner of the wellness industry that was taking advantage of people, and I wasn't interested.
I lived in Chicago for twenty-seven years. In all that time, I knew many people who practiced reiki. Friends offered me sessions. Trainings came across my path more than once. I nodded politely. I gave the side-eye when nobody was looking. I filed the whole thing under "not for me."
Turns out that I just wasn't ready.
The season that cracked me open
Life has a way of dismantling you when it's time.
In the span of about five weeks in late 2020, I lost my dad, my grandfather, and my grandmother. My grandmother was one of my biggest support systems, maybe the biggest outside of my husband. I had a way of talking with her, connecting with her, being known by her, that I have never had with anyone else in the world and probably never will. I still don't know how to describe it. It was just different, and it was just ours.
My dad and I often had a complicated relationship. He had many narcissistic traits and could be a very difficult person to deal with. The relationship we had in my adult life, however, was the result of many years of growth and healing and acceptance on my part. I was proud of what had been built between us. Yet still, in a quiet corner of my heart, I carried a small flame of hope that there were harder conversations we'd get to one day. Ones that would bring deeper closure and understanding. When he passed, I knew those conversations were never going to happen. I had to make peace with that on a level I hadn't had to before.
Losing my grandfather was just plain sad. He was a kind-hearted and wonderful man. I wish I'd spent more time with him. That's really all I can say about that.
Home and a life outside of the city had been calling for a while. The losses made that call even louder.
I wanted to be closer to my family. I wanted to be at the barbecues and the birthdays and the baby showers. I wanted to stop living with that low hum of anxiety that something could happen to someone I loved and I might not have seen them in six months or more.
But leaving Chicago was also a kind of grief of its own. That city held a whole version of me. A younger woman. A life I had built. An identity I had worn for a long time. Even though I no longer wanted the life I was living there, no longer wanted the work I was doing there, no longer wanted to be the person I was being there (and I was deeply unhappy, deeply unhealthy, and deeply hiding it), leaving still felt like giving up a piece of myself.
Once I got home, the strangest thing happened. Everything got quiet.
Covid was still hanging in the air. I was working virtually with my Chicago clients and hadn't yet found my footing here. For a stretch of time, I was mostly alone with my own thoughts, in a place that was familiar yet completely foreign at the same time. Living a life I hadn't fully settled into yet.
In some ways, it was healing. In others, it was terrifying. Everything I had been outrunning was now suddenly in the room with me. That's when I got open to everything.
The everything era
If you've ever been in one of these seasons, you know exactly what I mean.
I threw everything at the wall to see what would stick. Therapy. Meditation. New forms of movement. Somatic work. Long walks. Journaling. Books I would have rolled my eyes at five years earlier. Practices I would have called "woo." I stopped filtering. If it came across my path and it whispered "try me," I tried it.
Somewhere in that stretch, my cousin's wife offered me a reiki session. I said yes. Not because I finally believed. Because I was tired of not believing.
The moments that changed my mind
It was a distance session, which, if you'd asked me a year earlier, would have been the woo-est part of an already woo practice. Someone doing energy work on me from another location. Sure. Fine. Whatever.
Before the session started, I felt this overwhelming urge to put on an amethyst necklace I owned. I can't tell you why. I didn't overthink it. I just put it on and settled in.
During the session, my cousin's wife told me she'd felt drawn to work with amethyst for part of our time together. She had not asked me what I was wearing. She had not even seen me. She simply named it, on her own, from wherever she was.
Later, when she reached my throat chakra, she told me it felt like a jolt of energy pushed her hands back. At that exact moment, I started coughing. Not a polite throat-clear. A full, uncontrollable coughing spell that I could not stop.
And here's the thing. In that season of my life, my throat was where everything was stuck.
All the things I hadn't said. All the grief I hadn't named. All the truths I had been hiding, from Chicago, from myself, from the versions of me I'd outgrown but hadn't yet buried. All the words I hadn't spoken to my dad and now never would. All the ways I had been quietly unwell and quietly performing wellness. It was all sitting right there in my throat.
Something moved through me in that session. I don't have a cleaner way to say it. Something moved, and I could not deny that it had.
I sat with it afterward for a long time.
My skeptic self tried to explain it away. Coincidence. Suggestion. Placebo. My body wanting a story. Sure. Maybe. But the amethyst. The timing of the cough. The specificity of what my body released and where. There was too much of it, all at once, to hand-wave away. I had been wrong. Reiki was real. Or at least, something was real, and it had just moved through me.
What I want to say about the wellness industry, gently
Here's where I want to hold two things at the same time.
The version of reiki I first pushed back against does exist. There are people selling ten-dollar master certifications. There are practitioners who don't take the work seriously. There are corners of the wellness industry, and the reiki world in particular, that get treated more loosely than they should. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because that would be dishonest. I'm sure you can see that too.
But. I now believe that true reiki, from a trusted practitioner, is real.
I also believe that choosing a reiki practitioner is like choosing anything else that involves allowing someone else's energy into your life. You wouldn't let just anyone cut your hair. You wouldn't let just anyone teach your kid. You wouldn't hire just anyone to put a new roof on your home. Reiki is no different. Trust matters. Referrals matter. How someone holds space matters.
If you're curious about reiki and you've been burned or left disillusioned by a surface-level version of it, I understand. That was me too. But please don't let the inauthentic version of something convince you that the real thing doesn't exist. That's true for reiki and many other things.
Where I am now
After my first session, I saw my cousin's wife for reiki several more times. Later that year, I completed my own Level 1 training and attunement. In the years that have followed since receiving my very first reiki session in the winter of 2021, I have completed Level 2 and eventually also finished my master training.
I want to be careful how I say this, because it still feels a little tender to say out loud. Reiki is something I now practice on myself, offer to others, and plan to teach.
It's also my hope to launch my own Level 1 reiki training and attunement program by the end of this year. I am still building it. It's not going to be ready for a while, but I wanted to name it here because saying something out loud has a way of making it real.
And here's the part I want you to hear. When I offer this Level 1 training, it will be completely free.
I don't believe self-healing should sit behind a paywall. Level 1 reiki is about the self. It's about learning to channel this energy for your own body, your own nervous system, your own quiet Tuesday afternoons.
The 21-day self-reiki practice that follows a Level 1 attunement was one of the most transformative disciplines I've ever taken on. If even the smallest part of you feels a pull toward this work, I want you to have access to it, regardless of what's in your bank account at the time.
Level 2 and beyond will be a different conversation, because that work involves offering reiki to others, and there's a professional layer to that. But Level 1 belongs to you and it should be yours.
To my fellow (former?) skeptics
If you're reading this and you're side-eyeing the whole thing, I get it. I really do. I was you not that long ago.
I'm not trying to change your mind. I don't think anyone can be talked into believing in energy work. You either have an experience that shifts something in you, or you don't, and no amount of blog posts is going to do that for you.
I'm just telling you what happened to me. A skeptic who spent decades in this industry, who had strong opinions about how the reiki world was showing up. Though I had every reason to stay closed off to it, I opened myself up to it during one of the hardest seasons of my life and found something on the other side that I still can't explain or deny.
Maybe that resonates. Maybe it doesn't. Either way, thanks for reading this far. It means a lot to me that you did.
If you now (or ever) feel the pull toward this work, follow it. If you don't, don't. Both are truth.
And if you want to know when the free Level 1 training goes live, stay in touch ♥