Are you wondering what a Reiki treatment would be like or how you’d experience the energy? It’s different for everyone. Still, I’ve noticed commanalities in how my clients expereience Reiki healing sessions. These observations will give you the answers your looking for.

This Blog post focuses on how you’re likely sense the energy and precieve your healing process unfolding. While Reiki energy is subtle, it’s important to note feelings that are barely perceptible or difficult to describe can be indicative of a notable and significant healing outcome unfolding.

My post about a typical Reiki session can give you perpective on the format of a Reiki treatment. It gives you a good idea of what Reiki practitioners typically do during a session.

For an introduction to Reiki, see my Reiki webpage or search my abundant Reiki content on the Starchaser Mind Body Spirit Blog.

3 Key Attributes of Reiki Energy That Affect What You Experience

There are three key attributes of Reiki energy worth noting before diving into how you’re apt to feel and sense it.

1.  The Sublte Nature of Reiki

First, Reiki and your life-force energy are subtle and hence difficult to sense. You need to be curious, attentive, and open, and trust your nembulous and amorphous “felt senses” that arrise throughout your session.

These sensations tend to evolve from rudimentary notions which coalesce and clarify if you mainatain your attention and curiousity, embrace what you experience, and have faith the healing process.

2.  Holistic Nature

Second, subtle energy or the change it induces can be observed on any mind, body, or body-spirit level. You may experience Reiki as a physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual sensation or change.

If you’re new to Reiki, or any other energy healing modality for that matter, you’re likely to have limited knowledge or vocabulary to describe your experience, or articulate it clarily within your mind. Nevetheless, in time, you’ll develop sufficient techniques, self-awareness, and vocabulary to sharpen  your energy and body sensing acuity.

3.  Apparent Misalignment of Cause and Effect

Third, because Reiki is working holistically to encouage self healing, it can simultaneously enagage any number of areas on or within your the physical body and in your auric field.

Here, the use of the word “apparent” is intentional. It emphasizes how holistic and integrative healing is not always straight forward or intuitive.

Many interactions within the whole mind-body-spirit of a human being are not easily precieved or understood. Some are subconscious. Plus, healing takes place on many levels, sometimes sequentially and often simultaneously.

Ways You Could Experience the Energy During Your Reiki Healing Session

Here are some common ways clients detect Reiki energy and energetic shifts.

• Temperature change within the physical body or your surroundings
• Sense of flow, sometimes like electrical current but more often as gentle spreading movement
• Gentle pressure, pushing, or throbbing, which can sometimes feel more intense
• Tingles
• Twitches
• Snezzes, hiccups, coughs, burps, or flatulence
• Yawning and stretching
• Muscle relaxtion
• Deep relaxtion overall
• Tears, with or without emotions attached
• Emotions arrising or ebbing
• Ease on any mind, body, spirit level
• Internal spaceiousness
• Images and colors within your inner vision
• Wondering thoughts and recollections
• Internal music
• Soft or even harsh scents
• Vague notion or presence of helping guides or loved ones in spirit
• Sleepiness and falling asleep
• Feeling energized
• Mental clarity and lucidity
• Insights or a new prespective

Interpreation of these sensations or felt senses varies across people because everyone’s life experience and healing process differs. Yours will be unique to you.

I tend to offer curious clients some possibilities and allow then to discern what rings true for them in that moment. The connections you make between the Reiki healing session and the your life can reveal or elucidate your personal story. Or, it can highlight a promising path forward. I believe this galvanizes and increases the healing.

Sensing the Energy Field

You may sense when a Reiki practioner works with auric energy within the different layers of the aura.

For example, you could feel a release of tension in your physical body as the energy healer releases an energy block in the physical aura layer. Or, you might report a calming of your restless mind and greater mental clarity as the healer works on the mental layer of your auric field. These mental and physical responses are Reiki healing outcomes.

Sensing the Chakras

Reiki healers can treat one or more energy center (chakras) to address a specific intention and health condition.

For example, you may be expriencing a  great deal of grief due to loss of a loved one and you desire some relief. As the Reiki practitioner balances your chakras and gently releases trapped emotions. As a result, you may feel more spaciousness in your chest at the heart center or Heart Chakra, where grief prodominantely resides.

Three Tools to Improve Your Reiki Experience

There are three tools that will deepen and expand your awareness  what happens during your Reiki Healing Session. They are as follows.

1.  Stop Doubting and Rationalizing

This was touched on before. Reiki and life-force energy are subtle. Working with energy and spirit, in general, are in essence liminal, amporhous, and subtle.

To enhance your awareness you must pay attention, get curious, and stay open. If it seems like something or may be something, it is something. Don’t doublt it. Instead, become curious, not analytical. That something you became aware of will become very clear and even conspicuous if you let it.

Many of my students and clients new to energy healing tend to rationalize what they experience. For example, the room suddenly feels colder to them so they begin to look around for the draft, ask if the air conditioning is on, etc. In actuality, they’re likely it’s energy flow from releasing or drawing in energy. There could also be a spiritual guide present.

Rationalizing impedes the evolution and expansion of your sensing and spiritual acuity as well as the awakening and development of your intuition and clairsensiences.

2.  Know the Difference Between Sensation and Perception

Many people confuse sensation and preception. Although they’re closely related, their differences are significant, especially when doing inner work or energy healing.

Sensing is essentially somatic, derived from interoseption of bodily senses (e.g, touch, smell) and your fascia, the “sheath of stringy connective tissue that surrounds every part of your body.” Some, including myself, refer these senses as the embodied mind or body brain.

According to the Lumen Learning’ Introduction to Psychology: “… preception is a process by which the brain selects, organizes, and intreprets sensations. In other words, senses are the physicological basis of preception.” This is what some, myself included, refer to as the thinking-mind or head brain.

The Reiki healing session is more about your embodied experience, the sensations and impressions you get, rather than your head brain and what you think about the experience.

If you look back at the list of ways you could experience Reiki, you’ll that some of the items are related to sensations and some to perceptions. This gives you a hint to the source of your knowing and acknowledging the difference aspects of the Reiki experience.

Personal reflection is important, but not in the of form or rational analysis of the experience you’re having in the moment.

3.  Sort Out Your Thoughts, Beliefs, Feelings, and Emotions

Sorting out your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and emotions is a big task and requires a lot of personal refection, self-awareness, and life-long learning.

This sorting is extremely helpful for all kinds of self-healing, including Reiki and other forms of energy healing. In fact, it’s a must for living an authentic life.

The difference between your feelings and emotions is simple, although, sometimes extremely difficult to discern in practice.

Emotions are innate neurobiological reactions, not always consciously perceived. They provide information about the status of the body to all the different body systems. They’re closely associated with your embodied mind and discernable via interosception or inner sensing.

Your feelings are prodominantly the thoughts you have about your emotions and sensory information. Feelings reflect your upbringing, cultural and social environment, and your store of thoughts and beliefs accummulated throughout your life.

Thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are assoicated with the head brain.

Basically, what you sense is true and authentic for you. What you think and and feel is highly influenced by what is external to you. This is, in part, why the sense of subtle energy doesn’t necessarily correspond to what you ordinarily think.

For this reason, it’s important to learn to distinguish your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Do whatever personal growth and development you need to gain clarity.