Using Reiki To Shift From The Stress Response Into Balance & Creativity

When was the last time you walked away from a friend, co-worker, client, or family member, wishing you'd been a little less reactive and a bit more creative in your response? 

When you feel threatened, your body reads that feeling as if there were an actual physical threat. While you might not like being second-guessed by your partner or questioned by your boss, you consciously know there's no imminent danger.

You find yourself immediately in defensive, lifesaving mode—prepped for fight or flight. Your bloodstream is flooded with stress hormones, your blood flow is shunted away from your core to your extremities, nonessential functions like digestion are put on hold, and your nervous system becomes focused on detecting the next threat and reacting decisively, with no conscious override.

If you're a reiki practitioner—meaning you've had even the most basic reiki training—you know whenever you find yourself in survival mode with no imminent threat, placing a hand to self-practice will soon have you sliding back to the safety of your inner home base. (Placing a hand simply means to use touch for reiki—here's how to do it.)

Medical science doesn't know why that shift from fear to safety happens, but preliminary evidence shows the response to reiki practice is pretty predictable. If you feel stressed, your state will quickly improve1, and your body will respond by easing itself out of the stress response.

Interestingly, the improvement is more noticeable the more stressed you are (think of hospital patients). And reiki has also shown measurable physiological improvements in breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and heart-rate variability (HRV) in some research. Improving HRV is huge because HRV is a primary indicator of balance. When you're balanced, your system is resilient, which means you can take a hit and recover—and maybe even be stronger for it. 

We documented improvement in HRV after reiki practice when I was teaching at Yale Medical School when we researched reiki practice for patients in the cardiac ICU2. The study looked at the short-term autonomic effects of reiki in immediate post-acute coronary syndrome inpatients, with reiki administered by nurses found to significantly increase vagal activity compared with resting and music control conditions.

Improving HRV is critical to surviving another heart attack when people have had one in the past 72 hours. Our research correspondence, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American College of Cardiology, showed improvement in HRV comparable to beta-blockers, without any unwanted side effects or complications.

Surely, part of the response to reiki practice is the benefit of light, non-manipulative touch. Decades of studies at the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School have documented what we all know instinctively: Appropriate human touch can be healing, and it can help soothe key neural pathways3. 

But 30-plus years of experience tells me that reiki amplifies this natural response to touch in ways science is not yet able to capture. Researchers say, "Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack." The impact of your microbiome on mood has only recently been studied, for example, and scientists discovered glymphatics4 less than 10 years ago.

While medical science has not (yet) plumbed the depths of subtle reality, the data from 70 years of studying the negative effects of stress are irrefutable. We don't yet know much about how or why, but in my practice, I've seen reiki help people refind balance and resilience, let go of stress, and move out of hypervigilance.

As a spiritual practice, it's notable that the benefits of reiki practice start with improvements in how you feel. That sense of feeling better is a hallmark of spiritual healing.

It doesn't always make sense to expect science to explain what happens spiritually, because spirituality is the realm of mystery. Cultivating our relationship to the mystery of being alive, and particularly being alive during challenging times, is why we reach for spiritual practices such as reiki.