How Reiki Can Help Relationships

We’re often called to seek out Reiki when we’re craving a healing experience, be it for our spiritual side, our physical body, or our overactive mind. Received one-on-one from a practitioner who channels spiritually guided energy that flows to the recipient to promote healing, it’s easy to assume that the benefits of Reiki exist on an individual basis only. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

How Reiki Helps Shift Energy

When we engage in energy healing work for ourselves, we put an energetic change into motion that will touch lives other than our own. As deeply relational beings, our energy influences (and is influenced by) the energy of others. When we turn to Reiki to soften the grip of emotional wounds or reduce stress or physical pain, we are taking action to restore our balance and return to a more peaceful state that reflects our core essence. Operating from this balanced state can change the way we relate to others, bringing about more compassion, kindness, love, and goodwill.

While simply receiving Reiki can be a catalyst for such changes, its power is amplified when we pair it with the intention that the energy work we engage in strengthens and serves our connection to others.

How Reiki Positively Affects Relationships

In her two decades of experience administering Reiki, Reiki Master Gina Lynn Clemente has witnessed this process unfold firsthand.

“What happens is, people become better people. They become better friends and moms and dads and kids because they're calmer. They're more peaceful. They can forgive, they can understand, they can have more compassion as they start to receive Reiki,” she says. “Maybe they can't put their finger on it all the time, but those are the kind of outcomes that maybe can't be measured but can be certainly observed.”

The Five Reiki Principles for Relationships

These changes that Clemente describes—changes that happen at the seat of the soul—unfold at their own pace for each person. However, Reiki does give us specific tools to help us cultivate this new way of being. These tools are known as the Five Reiki Principles.

Outlined by Mikao Usui, the founder of the Reiki tradition, the Five Reiki Principles are as follows:

Just for today, I will not be angry.
I will not worry.
I will be filled with gratitude.
I will devote myself to my work.
I will be kind to others.

When we hear the principles for the first time, different emotions might arise: We might feel resistance rear its head and tighten somewhere in our body as we consider a principle that we’re struggling with, or we might smile with recognition as we realize we’re already putting one of these principles into action. Observing our body, emotions, and thoughts as we go through the principles gives us useful information on what we need to work on—where our journey can begin.

To start working with the principles, Clemente recommends reciting them in the morning and at night. You can think of them as a mantra, prayer, intention, or affirmation—whatever aligns with your spiritual identity. Reiki isn’t connected to any religion and instead serves as a complement to each individual’s existing practices.

“Reiki is just going back to our innate state, which is love,” says Clemente. “Our pure state is love.” When we live our lives in alignment with the Five Reiki Principles, we are acting from that pure state.

Reiki to Support Relationship Vulnerability

Clemente emphasizes the importance of taking one’s practice moment by moment and day by day: We’re human, and it’s natural for conflicts and obstacles to present themselves. It’s also natural for us to experience discomfort as we transition out of reactivity and into intentionality. Doing so requires more vulnerability, and choosing vulnerability isn’t always easy. The phrase “Just for today” is just as important as any one principle. It reminds us to be in the present moment, and that every moment is a new opportunity to practice.

In challenging moments with others, Clemente reminds herself, “Just stay here in your light. Blast out love. Stay in your truth.”

Being able to project love even when we’re in conflict is a practiced skill that becomes easier for us to tap into when we’re regularly receiving Reiki or regularly participating in practices that help us connect with and nourish our spiritual centers.

Putting Love into Action with Reiki

Clemente offers another exercise that makes the process more tangible. “The question that people can ask themselves is, ‘What do I want to see for humanity? For a friend? For a loved one?’ Most likely it's going to be peace, love, joy; all of those things are at a higher vibration.”

Then, with that wish in mind, we can take it upon ourselves to be a vessel that facilitates those things for others. The point, however, isn’t to overwhelm ourselves. “Take it one day at a time,” says Clemente. “Even a half a day at a time.”

All of these intentions, principles, and practices hold power. Over time, even the half-days add up—as do the minutes carved out for yourself to do nothing other than lay on the Reiki table and receive.

“People will say, ‘Well, my family is wondering when my next Reiki session is,” says Clemente. “They observe.” It’s through these small graces and observations that changes occur—that Reiki energy is invited in and, in the process, creates more room for love and tenderness.

Learn more about Reiki and the power of distance healing.