What Does a Reiki Session Feel Like? An Honest Description from Both Sides

I'm Bronwyn Ayla, L.Ac. — a licensed acupuncturist and Reiki Master Teacher who has trained over 1,000 practitioners since 1998.

During a Reiki session, you may feel tingling, warmth, or cold moving through the body. You may see colors or swirls behind closed eyes, experience a profound mental stillness, or notice emotions rising to the surface. From the practitioner's side, the hands are listening rather than manipulating — tracking shifts in breath, temperature, and the quality of the energy beneath them. Neither experience is identical from session to session, and neither is wrong.

What the Receiver Typically Notices

The material I use in training, drawn in part from the Gillo School of Reiki, describes the following categories of experience during a session.

Physical sensations are the most commonly reported. These include energy moving through the body, a breeze felt on the outside of the body, and tingling warmth or cold. Light-headedness can occur, most often when the client has been lacking in Ki energy. Noting where and at what intensity these sensations occur can be useful information for future treatments.

Visual experiences include colors, areas of color, swirls, spirals, shapes, or mist — most commonly violet. Some people see scenes or images that may contain references outside normal perception: angels, guides, or experiences that feel as though they are being lived rather than observed. In most cases, the practitioner leaves the client to work through these without interference.

Mental experiences range widely: many thoughts, or a profound mental stillness.

Emotional experiences are common and deserve particular care. The practitioner's role here is not to comfort or redirect, but to be present to what is arising — both in the client and in themselves — and to ensure there is room for the client to ask that the session stop or that hands be removed. The client should be able to speak about what is happening without it turning into a mental analysis that takes them away from the feeling sense.

Psychic or altered states may also arise — alternative states of reality that are often personal and connected to things the person needs to address in their life.

It may be appropriate to explain some of these possible reactions before treatment in a gentle and reassuring way. Sometimes it is equally appropriate to let the client receive the healing without expectation.

What the Practitioner Notices and Does

From the practitioner's side, the session begins before the client arrives. The invocations, the offerings, tending the altar, calling in the ancestors, sealing the space — this is all part of the medicine. Equally important is how the practitioner has tended themselves: whether they have practiced, breathed, rested, and nourished their body. The quality of consciousness determines the quality of the session.

The practitioner's attention is continuously divided between their own internal state and the client's body. The practitioner treats their own body as a tuning fork, softening the eyes, jaw, and breath in order to maintain coherence. Without this internal regulation, it becomes difficult to support relaxation in another person.

Hands are placed with full, confident contact — not tentative or hovering. The practitioner tracks subtle changes: shifts in breath, temperature, muscle tone, swallowing, flushing. The work is less about directing and more about knowing when to direct and when to receive. Often, just noticing what is happening is more powerful than trying to make something happen.

The practitioner also tracks the quality of the energy beneath the hands. Areas that feel flaccid, empty, or like a hole are treated with light, listening hands — gentle, without pressure or energetic force. Areas that feel agitated, stuck, or resistant are engaged with steady focus and clarity. The goal throughout is to support the system in reorganizing around coherence rather than to impose an outcome.

Energy is guided deliberately from the head toward the heart center. When energy remains in the upper field, it may become congested or unstable. The goal of treatment is to support downward and inward integration.

Where Does Reiki Come From, and How Does It Move Through the Hands?

Traditionally, Reiki has been taught as being channeled from the heavens, through the crown of the head (DU 20), into the heart, and then out through the pericardium channel and through the minor chakras in the palms, or Pericardium 8.

This is not my experience of Reiki. My experience is that there is a flow from the earth and a flow from the heavens that mixes together at the heart and then flows out of the hands. The torus — the cosmic donut shape — is what I think the Reiki energy follows. This toroidal shape echoes what we know about the electromagnetic field of the heart as well as the shape of the universe. This further echoes Chinese medical theory, which places humans between heaven and earth.

Once the energy enters through the perineum and through the crown of the head, it mixes in the heart and begins to flow into the palms via the pericardium meridian. In Japanese meridian theory, the pericardium is responsible for distributing the energy of the heart. In acupuncture, Pericardium 8 is needled to release heart heat. This is the point where the Reiki comes out of the hands.

Does Reiki Feel Different Depending on the Practitioner's State?

Yes. The practitioner's state directly influences what unfolds. If the system is depleted, everything will feel more invasive. If self-care is strong — movement, breath, treatment, nourishment — it becomes very difficult for others to destabilize the practitioner. Capacity is built through how you live.

Reiki is not a technique taken out when needed. When practiced as a way of streaming consciousness through the system, it begins to impact everything — making food, soothing children, being in the grocery store at the checkout counter. It is a way of being that permeates all actions.

The practitioner's field transmits something beyond technique. Practitioners are channels, not isolated healers, and they do not operate without support — invoking helping forces and lineages is part of the work, which is why self-care must equal or exceed client-facing hours.

What Happens at the End of a Session?

The closing is not a formality. At the end, the practitioner steps into prayer — verbal or silent — just being there, honoring, loving, wishing the client well, calling in the light, showering them with blessings. This is the essential part of the process: whatever language resonates — God, universal intelligence, Reiki, love, consciousness — the intention is a real offering, not a procedural close.

After the session, the practitioner grounds by drinking water, washing hands, and touching the earth, and a final clearing brushes energy down the body and releases it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Reiki feel like for someone who has never had a session? The most common physical sensations are tingling warmth or cold, a sense of energy moving through the body, or light-headedness. Some people see colors or experience a profound mental stillness. Others notice emotions rising. None of these responses are required — the experience varies from person to person and session to session.

Can you feel Reiki even if you are skeptical? Reiki supports the system in self-organizing; it does not require belief to have an effect. The practitioner's role is to be present and allow the energy to flow to where it needs to go, not to produce a specific result. What arises in a session is the system's own response.

What does a Reiki practitioner feel in their hands during a session? Practitioners track shifts in temperature, density, and the quality of energy beneath the hands. Some areas feel flaccid or empty; others feel agitated or resistant. The hands are listening rather than manipulating — the practitioner notices these signals and adjusts their touch accordingly, using light hands in deficient areas and steady focus in areas of excess.

Does Reiki feel different when sent from a distance? Reiki can be sent to groups of people, to animals, to environments, into the future, or into the past. The transmission operates beyond time and space, in a realm where intention and prayer interface with subtle energies. The light is not stopped by distance or circumstance. Whether there are boundaries from illness, governance, or environmental disruption, the transmission continues.

I teach Reiki as something anyone can practice — you don't need to be chosen, gifted, or already "spiritual" to begin. If you'd like to learn it with me, my online Reiki class is open here: Learn Reiki online.