Understanding Energy Work Beyond the Myths
People often ask what Reiki feels like. The honest answer is: it varies. Some people feel warmth, tingling, or a deep sense of heaviness as the body lets go. Others feel very little during the session but notice significant shifts in the days that follow.
What’s consistent is what happens at the nervous system level. The body moves out of its stress response and into a state of deep rest — the kind that allows real repair and recalibration to take place.
The mystery problem
Reiki sits in an awkward space in modern wellness culture. On one side, it’s wrapped in language that can feel impenetrable to anyone who didn’t arrive through a spiritual door — talk of universal life force, energy fields, chakras, attunements. On the other, it’s dismissed as placebo by people who’ve never had a session and don’t quite know what they’re dismissing.
Both positions miss what the practice actually is, and what actually happens in the room.
Reiki is a Japanese hands-on healing practice developed by Mikao Usui in the early 1920s, rooted in two lineages I work within: Usui Ryoho (the original Japanese system) and Usui Shiki Ryoho (the Western adaptation refined by Hawayo Takata). The word itself is two characters — rei, meaning universal or spiritual, and ki, meaning life-force energy. The same concept appears as chi in Chinese medicine and prana in Ayurvedic tradition. It’s not a fringe idea. It’s one of the oldest organising principles in the medical traditions of the eastern world.
What I want to do here is take you inside a session — not metaphorically, but practically. What you see when you walk in. What I’m doing with my hands. What’s happening in your nervous system while it’s happening. Because once you understand the actual mechanics, the mystery becomes far less mysterious — and far more interesting.
Walking in
You arrive at my treatment room in Witney. There’s no ceremony. We talk for a few minutes — how you’re feeling, what’s been weighing on you, anything specific you’d like to focus on. You don’t have to disclose anything you’re not comfortable with. Some clients arrive with a clear issue. Others just know they need to switch off for an hour.
You stay fully clothed. You take off your shoes and lie on a treatment couch — face up, supported by cushions, covered with a soft blanket if you’d like one. The room is warm. The light is low. There may be quiet music; there may not. I ask what you prefer.
Then we begin. And the first thing that begins isn’t the energy work. It’s your nervous system letting go.
What your body does in the first ten minutes
Most adults walking through the door of a treatment room are running, to varying degrees, in sympathetic nervous system dominance. That’s the system associated with action, alertness, and threat response — sometimes called fight-or-flight, but it’s more accurately the system that keeps you switched on, scanning, and engaged with the demands of the world. Modern life keeps it running almost constantly.
The opposite system is the parasympathetic — the rest-and-digest state, governed largely by the vagus nerve. This is the state your body needs to repair tissue, regulate inflammation, consolidate memory, and digest food properly. It’s not optional. It’s the state in which healing actually happens.
For many people, the simple act of lying down in a quiet room with another person whose only job is to hold a calm presence is enough to begin the shift. Heart rate slows. Breathing deepens. The shoulders drop a fraction. The jaw releases. Within ten minutes, the body has begun to recognise that nothing is being demanded of it — and the parasympathetic system starts to take over.
This is measurable. Studies on Reiki and similar light-touch interventions have shown improvements in heart rate variability — a key marker of vagal tone and nervous system flexibility. Cortisol levels drop. Salivary amylase, another stress marker, decreases. None of this requires belief. It happens because the conditions for it have been created.
What I’m doing with my hands
Once you’re settled, I begin a series of hand positions — light contact on or just above the head, shoulders, torso, abdomen, knees, and feet. Each position is held for several minutes. There’s no manipulation, no pressure, no massage. The hands are still. What’s happening is that I’m working systematically through the major energy centres the Usui tradition identifies, allowing the body to receive what it needs in each.
Whether you understand this in traditional terms — channels of ki moving through the body’s energetic anatomy — or in modern physiological terms — sustained light touch from a regulated nervous system signalling safety to a dysregulated one — the effect on the recipient is largely the same. The body stops bracing.
You may feel warmth where my hands are. Many clients describe a distinct heat that builds over a position and then fades. Some feel cooling. Some feel a tingling, or a weighted sensation — like the body sinking deeper into the couch. Some see colours behind closed eyes. Some have unexpected emotional releases — tears arriving with no narrative attached, the body shedding something it had been holding without explanation.
And some feel almost nothing during the session itself. They simply rest. And they find, two days later, that they’ve slept better than they have in months.
All of these responses are normal. Reiki doesn’t have a “right” experience. It has the experience your body actually needs.
Why stillness changes the body
There’s a paradox at the heart of energy work that’s worth naming directly. We’re trained to think that healing requires effort — exercise, intervention, doing something. But the body’s repair systems work in the opposite direction. They activate when effort stops.
Bessel van der Kolk’s work on trauma — and the broader research into polyvagal theory developed by Stephen Porges — has shifted how we understand the role of the nervous system in chronic illness, anxiety, and emotional patterning. The body holds what the mind hasn’t processed. Trauma, stress, and chronic worry leave the autonomic nervous system stuck in defensive states long after the original trigger has passed. Talking about it doesn’t always reach those states. Sometimes the body needs to be met directly.
This is what Reiki does, regardless of what framework you use to describe it. It creates the conditions under which the nervous system can finally drop into the parasympathetic state long enough for genuine recalibration to occur. The body remembers how to settle. The breath remembers how to deepen. The vagus nerve, which has been holding the brake-line of regulation, finally engages.
This isn’t placebo, and it isn’t magic. It’s the simple, profound fact that human beings need sustained, safe, attuned presence to regulate — and modern life provides almost none of it.
The energy question
I want to address the bit most people actually want to ask but don’t, because they’re worried it’ll sound naive: is the energy real?
Here’s my honest answer. Something is happening that the mechanistic model of “your nervous system is calming down because you’re lying still in a quiet room” doesn’t fully account for. Practitioners report consistent, repeatable phenomena — sensations of heat in the hands, intuitive pulls toward specific areas of the body, perceptions that align with what the client is later able to articulate. Clients report consistent, repeatable experiences that mirror the practitioner’s. Distance Reiki — sessions conducted with the client and practitioner in different locations — produces effects that are difficult to explain through proximity alone.
I’m not interested in convincing anyone of a metaphysical position. The Usui lineages I trained in don’t require belief, and I won’t ask you to adopt one. What I’d say is that the practice has been refined and transmitted through generations of practitioners because it produces results — and the results are what matter. If you’d like to think of what happens as profound parasympathetic activation through structured, intentional touch, that’s a perfectly accurate description. If you’d like to think of it as the movement of life-force energy through the body’s subtle channels, that’s also a perfectly accurate description. Both can be true. The body doesn’t care which language you use.
What I will say with more confidence is this: over many years of working with clients across hypnotherapy and energy work, I have never seen a modality work as gently or as consistently for people who can’t be reached by talking therapies. For trauma survivors who can’t bear to revisit their stories. For grief that hasn’t found words. For chronic pain with no clear medical cause. For the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch. Reiki meets all of these without asking the body to perform.
Closing the session
After roughly fifty minutes of hands-on work, I begin to bring the session to a close. The final positions are usually at the feet — grounding, returning your awareness to the body, anchoring the work back into the physical. I’ll let you know we’re finishing. You’ll have a few minutes to come back to yourself before sitting up.
Most people are noticeably altered when they open their eyes. The face has softened. The shoulders sit lower. The voice, when they first speak, comes from somewhere quieter. Some clients are tearful. Some are giddy with relief. Some can’t quite articulate what they feel — they just know it’s different.
I’ll share briefly what I noticed during the session — areas where the energy felt particularly active or particularly held, anything that emerged in the work — and offer aftercare suggestions. Drink water. Rest if you can. Don’t make any major decisions for a few hours. Notice what shifts over the next two or three days.
That last point matters. The session itself is the catalyst, but the work continues afterwards. Sleep often deepens that night. Patterns that had felt stuck can begin to move. Emotions you’d been carrying without knowing it sometimes surface and clear in the days that follow. The body uses what it received.
Who this is for
Reiki is for anyone whose nervous system has been running too hot for too long. That covers more people than you’d think. It’s also for anyone who finds talking therapy difficult or has tried it and found it didn’t reach the layer they needed reaching. It’s for grief that’s settled into the body. For chronic pain that no scan has explained. For the period after a major loss, illness, or transition when you simply need to be held by something other than the demands of your own life.
It is not a replacement for medical treatment, and I’ll always encourage you to maintain your relationships with your GP and any specialists involved in your care. What it is, alongside conventional treatment, is one of the most consistent ways I know to give the nervous system permission to drop the brace.
What you really need to know
If you’re thinking about booking a session and you’re not sure whether it’s for you, here’s the only thing that really matters: you don’t need to believe in anything. You don’t need to be spiritual. You don’t need to have a clear issue you’re working on. You don’t need to feel anything specific during the session for it to work.
You just need to be willing to lie down, be still, and let your body do what it’s been trying to do for a long time.
That’s the practice. That’s the whole of it.
The mystery clears once you’ve actually experienced it. What’s left is something quieter, and more useful, than the language around it has ever quite captured.