Reiki Principles encourage you to be present (in the present moment) and to open the channel.

First, they take you out of your head and open you to sensing both the energy and inside yourself.

Second, they create the best frame of mind and body to access your intuition and clairsenses (clairaudience, clairvoyance, claircognizance, etc).

Both of these conditions greatly facilitate energy channeling and enhance Reiki healing. They help transform you into an open channel much like a hollow bone, facilitating the flow of life force, without manipulation of any kind. Clear and easy life-force energy flow means greater healing.

Reiki principles also offer practitioners and others who haven’t been Reiki-attuned cogent guidance on how to nurture a healthy mind frame for a better quality of life.

What Are the Reiki Principles

Reiki Principles are also called Reiki Blessings. The term blessings alludes to the benefits derived and the recipients’ gratitude for their gifts. You can use whichever term resonates with you.

Many Reiki practitioners and authors on the subject recognize five principles. The wording of the principles may differ across sources, but the meaning is quite similar. However, I learned and I teach six principles. They are as follows:

Reiki Principles:

Just for today…..

• Do not anger
• Do not worry
• Do not fear

Just for today…..

• Do good works
• Be grateful
• Be kind to all living things

Reiki healers typically recite the principles at least once, and sometimes several times with their hands in gassho or prayer position, centered on the heart chakra.

Five Reiki Principles Plus One

The often absent principle is “do not fear.” I maintain both worry and fear because while they’re related, their dissimilarity is significant.

Worry is a product of the mind and results when it dwells on a current or future real or imagined potential danger or trouble. Worry derives from thoughts and beliefs.

The Difference Between Worry and Fear

On the other hand, fear is an energetic, chemical, and physical state (an emotion) resulting from the perception of danger or uncertainty. It alerts you to conscious and unconscious body attunements and dysregulation related to external and internal signals to unexplained changes. Fear tells you something has changed, possibly in a threatening way, and you need to investigate and respond.

Both worry and fear can limit your focus, become a preoccupation, and create dysfunction and destabilization (imbalance). They distort your perception, block your channel, and inhibit healing and your life moving forward. Therefore, you’ll want to release then.

What the Reiki Principles Do

The Blessings are divided into two sets of three principles. Each set of three principles collectively exerts its distinct influence over your frame of mind. The first set opens and clears while the second awakens, attunes, and enlivens. Together, they encourage unfettered and inspired will to achieve greater presence, ease, and well-being.

As a Reiki practitioner, they galvanize your capacities as a healer.

Personal Perspective of a Reiki Master

As a Reiki practitioner and proponent of perpetual personal and spiritual growth,  the Reiki Blessing is a practice to calm my mind, ground and center me, and draw me into a more present, calmer, and focused healing mind and body space.

The Blessing also reminds me of the need to let go of certain thoughts and behaviors that distract me and lower my vibration and to embrace others that raise my vibration and are healing. It reawakens the notice that life is a series of choices that create my life experience.

The First Three Reiki Principles

The first three principles focus on a state of mind that narrows your focus on objects of discomfort, threats, and boundary violations. While they’re designed to protect you and contribute to your health and well-being when they persist unattended and infiltrate more and more of your psyche, they and their symptoms can become debilitating.

From the viewpoint of an energy healer anger, worry, and fear are energetic sludge that inhibits and diminishes your subtle energy flow and can create significant energy blockages. Hence, they are the primary impediments energy healers attempt to clear or release.

In this way, the first three principles are about clearing (releasing) blockages to healing and living your best life. The clearing establishes important preconditions to open the channel.

The Second Set of Reiki Principles

The second set of principles focuses on inspiration and action.

Do Good Works

The phrase  “do good works” means placing your attention and energy on the greater good and betterment in general. For you, this means engaging in what’s meaningful and worthwhile and what contributes to the betterment of yourself, others, humanity, and other living beings. The word “work” suggests you rally your resources toward fulfilling this aim.

Be Grateful

Being and expressing gratitude offers a whole series of benefits. First, it reminds you that when you channel Reiki, you work with the energy and co-create the change you seek for yourself and your client. The only person who you can heal is you because Reiki is self-healing, as is ultimately all healing. As a practitioner, you facilitate the healing that your client consciously or subconsciously is willing to bring about.

Another benefit of regularly expressing gratitude is its ability to generate optimism and feelings of self-worth. The feeling of gratitude can reduce stress, reactivity, and anxious rumination, releasing toxic emotional states such as anger, worry, and fear.

Finally, gratitude cultivates a sense of connectedness and improves relationships. Research has shown that over time, your brain becomes more prone to experience gratitude (Positive Psychology, Forbes, Healthline).

Respect and Be Kind

Compassion is an act of kindness. It’s a strength. Having respect and compassion for others including other nonhuman living beings is anything but submissive and weak. They don’t require you to acquiesce to others. Respect and compassion involve being curious, listening, allowing, appreciating, and finding shared solutions to conflicts. This is the definition of a heart-centered approach.

Many philosophical and spiritual schools of thought and more recent scientific research support the notion that kindness, respect, compassion, curiosity, listening, allowing, and mutual problem-solving not only promote peace and harmony but also create chemistry within humans that supports health, well-being, growth, and fulfillment.

In sum, Reiki principles foster a frame of mind that can facilitate healing as well as personal and spiritual growth. Reciting the principles once or several times (I prefer three times) offers a perceptible shift.

For More on Reiki and the Reiki Principles, See:

• My detailed and informative Reiki Levels I, II, and III digital manuals.
• Blog posts on my Mind Body Spirit Blog
• My page on What is Reiki