You’ve heard about the benefits of Reiki and decided to try it. But, before you book your first Reiki treatment, you want to know how to prepare for a Reiki session.
This way, you’ll be able to relax, remain open to receive, and have the best healing treatment possible.
All you need to know is covered in the following seven tips for how to prepare for your Reiki session. These suggestions refer to an in-person treatment.
If you’re interested in a distance Reiki session, see my blog posts on Reiki. In particular, see: how distance Reiki works and how to choose between in-person Reiki and virtual sessions.
How to Prepare For a Reiki Sessions: 7 Tips
1. Be Familiar With Your Reiki Healing Modality
This tip refers to all healing modalities, including Reiki. As a client or patient, you benefit greatly when you know as much as possible about your treatment choice, whether it’s a conventional or unconventional healing modality.
With knowledge, you reduce uncertainty and stress, increase your power and control over your healing journey, contribute more to the design and quality of your treatment, personalize the approach, and increase the overall efficacy of your treatment.
Some important pieces of information you’ll want to gather about Reiki and potential Reiki practitioners include:
- How does it work?
- What are the benefits of Reiki?
- Can it address your specific goals and concerns?
- Are there any side effects, how long might they last, and are there ways you can prevent, mitigate, or alleviate them?
- What is a Reiki session or treatment like, and what does the Reiki healer do during the session?
- What is the duration of a session?
- Will my goals require more than one healing?
- What are the certifications and qualities to look for in a practitioner?
- What are the qualifications of your prospective Reiki practitioner or Reiki Master practitioner?
- Does the practitioner combine modalities? What other modalities are used and why? And, can you opt in or out of them?
- What is the price of a session?
Be sure to check different sources of information on Reiki. Consider various practitioners, even if someone recommends one. Talk with your practitioner beforehand, especially if you have questions.
2. Reflect On What You Want From Your Session
Healing intentions guide the healing power of Reiki, hence they’re a critical way to prepare for your Reiki session. Therefore, allocate time before your session to reflect and set specific healing goals. If you don’t specify goals, your practitioner will likely set the general healing goal for the session such that it’s in your best and highest healing.
How to Set Healing Goals
How you craft your intentions is important. Focus on how you would like to feel or what you want to achieve with the healing you receive. Use positive language such as “I want to feel great and be able to run again” rather than “I don’t want my knee to hurt so much.”
How to Encourage Reflection
Meditation, journaling, or speaking to a recording device can help you express, clarify, and sort out your thoughts and feelings about your issues and the upcoming healing session.
As you reflect on your concerns, consider the emotional and mental content of physical problems. For example, stress and disappointment can arise from pain, discomfort, constraints, or embarrassing symptoms.
Similarly, determine if physical symptoms are associated with cognitive and emotional issues. For example, limiting beliefs and entangled emotions can cause or contribute to physical problems.
Consider your whole mind, body, and spirit experience and interconnectedness. Reiki can and will holistically work on all these levels and related issues. So, prepare for a holistic Reiki session.
Reflection After the Session
These methods to encourage reflection will also assist with post-session reflection and integration. Journaling can be exceptionally impactful. It can also illuminate how energy healing and Reiki, in particular, contribute to fulfilling your healing goals.
3. Detox and Consume Light Natural and Healthy Food
Modern diets are generally highly refined and heavy in artificial ingredients, carbohydrates, sugars, dense proteins (particularly beef), and unhealthy fats. These types of foods tend to produce toxins, create energy blocks, and congest bodily systems.
This is problematic because energy moves more freely when the body is less congested.
To reduce your toxicity level and support the best energy flow during your session and integration period, follow the best practices for detoxing your mind, body, and spirit. To prepare for a Reiki session, eat lightly for about 12 -24 hours before and after the session, at a minimum.
Refrain from alcohol, recreational drugs, and unnecessary medications during this timeframe. Finally, drink plenty of water to dissolve and eliminate waste from the body.
4. Energy Clearing
Regularly cleansing and clearing your energy is good practice. Moreover, if you smudge or clear your energy within hours of your session, you’ll facilitate the energy flow during the session, and enhance your healing capacity.
Consider one or more of these practices.
Energy-Clearing Practices:
- Smudging
- Alternative and smoke-free smudging techniques
- Rattling or drumming
- Breathwork techniques that move and direct energy flow
- Mediations to clear and expand your energy field
- Five-minute energy-clearing meditation
- Dry brushing, with or without aromatherapy
- Salt baths
- Food baths
- Adequate water consumption (at least eight glasses per day). However, don’t drink shortly before your session to avoid the urge or need to urinate during the session.
6. Comfort During The Reiki Sessions
You want to wear comfortable clothes. This doesn’t mean sloppy, dirty, unkept, or revealing clothes. You’d be surprised by what some clients wear.
When you make clothing choices, consider your healer’s comfort as well. Make sure your clothes, hair, and feet are clean.
Bring a pair of warm socks and an extra shirt or sweater in case the treatment room is too cold for preference. In addition, energy work can alter your temperature. Some people tend to get warm, others cold. Your temperature could also fluctuate during the session depending on how much energy you take in or release.
You’ll want to bring tissues with you as well. Practitioners don’t always have them handy. Tears and sneezing are normal signs of release. You may have the urge to burp, cough, or fart. Practitioners are aware that all these are good signs of healing.
Remember not to drink too much fluid before your session to avoid the need or urge to urinate. Instead, you can bring a water bottle, and drink water after the session. Drinking will facilitate the cleansing of toxins.
Your Reiki session will likely last for 50 or 80 minutes based on the session you booked. Be sure you use the restroom beforehand to be free from distraction and open to the subtle healing energy and any sensations that arise throughout the session.
Don’t plan to go to work immediately after the session. Nor should you get involved in some hyper-focused or stress-inducing activity or distraction. Reiki energy will continue working for a while after the session ends. You want to allow yourself to integrate your healing.
For at least several hours after the session, allocate time to practice self-care, journal, spend time in nature, listen to soft music, or rest.
7. Timeliness
Arrive on time for your session. Most Reiki practitioners can’t or won’t extend your session beyond the prearranged timeframe. Leave for the session a bit early to give yourself a chance to center and ground once you arrive. Make sure to account for potential travel issues. You want to be relaxed and open for your session.
To Conclude
These seven tips will give you plenty of ideas on how to prepare for a Reiki session. Obviously, the first tip isn’t relevant to every Reiki session, just the first one. You only need to do your research once. But, it’s important to become well-informed about Reiki, what to expect during a session, and how to select the right practitioner for you.
Also, you don’t need to do any or all of the suggested practices. If healing is in your best and highest interest at the time of your session, you’ll receive Reiki healing no matter what you do beforehand. The idea here is to use the practices to enhance your experience and the efficacy of your treatment. Select only those practices that resonate with you.
After receiving Reiki several times and trying out different types of preparation, you’ll know what preparation works best for you. But, for now, it’s just good to know what to expect from a Reiki session so you can relax and surrender to the healing process.
Just a final note. These tips are relevant to all types of healing you might receive. Consider them to be best practices for any healing journey.
