Writing & wisdom
The Journal
What a session involves, what the training is like, and where this practice actually comes from.
The symbols are where Reiki training turns mysterious: an oath, a sense of stepping into something bigger. Here is what the symbols do, where the secrecy came from, and why mine come with none of it.
August 2026 · 3 min read
A look at why most of my students and clients arrive between forty five and fifty five, what a session actually offers, and why so many of them end up training instead.
August 2026 · 4 min read
I cap Reiki training at six people. A single teacher cannot watch every face during an attunement in a room of twenty, and watching is most of the job.
August 2026 · 4 min read
The five Reiki principles look simple on a card. After twenty years of practice, I still miss most of them by lunchtime, and that turns out to be closer to the point than getting them right.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Most students who train with me arrive doubtful, arms crossed, unconvinced. I've come to think that's the best possible way to start, and here's what I tell them before we begin.
August 2026 · 3 min read
What burnout actually looks like on my table, why doing nothing feels so uncomfortable at first, and why I think one honest hour of rest matters more than people expect.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Vanessa on why fifty is a good age to start Reiki training, not a late one, and what changes when a student already knows what keeping a commitment costs.
August 2026 · 4 min read
What Reiki actually is turns out to matter more once you know what it is not: not a cure, not a secret science, not an ancient tradition, and not something you need to believe in first.
August 2026 · 3 min read
My Reiki lineage is four names long: Usui, Hayashi, Takata, and the two teachers who trained me as a Master Teacher in 2019. Short, checkable, and I have not added a thing to it.
August 2026 · 4 min read
I don't quote statistics about Reiki because most of the ones I've seen have no source behind them. I'd rather tell you what people actually report, plainly, than dress a feeling up as a fact.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Reiki does not cure illness, and claiming it does is a story I have decided not to tell. Here is what I actually offer someone who arrives hoping for a miracle, and why it still matters.
August 2026 · 4 min read
I don't tell dying people or their families that Reiki gives them control over how death unfolds. What I offer instead is calm presence, and I think families deserve that honesty at the hardest possible moment.
August 2026 · 4 min read
My rooms and photos skew female, but men ask about Reiki too. Here is what I tell them, and what actually shifts for the ones who show up: less about gender, more about curiosity.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Bali's street dogs have a habit of wandering into my treatment room and falling asleep. It says nothing about Reiki and quite a lot about what a still room does to a restless creature.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Most of my Level 2 and Master students never practise again, and that is not a failure. Here is what actually separates the ones who build a practice from the ones whose manual quietly closes.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Students sometimes ask to repeat an attunement, hoping it adds something new. I explain why I don't offer that, and what I recommend instead when someone wants to go deeper.
August 2026 · 3 min read
What a Tuesday actually looks like at Playground Soul, a plain room, a school run either side, and sessions that fit into an ordinary week rather than escape one.
August 2026 · 3 min read
In the last ten minutes of a session, the overthinking in the room slows down in a way I can watch happen: the breath drops, the fidgeting stops, the loop runs out of lines.
August 2026 · 3 min read
I did not become a teacher because I had healing figured out. I teach the same permission to stop that took me thirteen years of training to find for myself.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Visitors arrive carrying something different from local clients: jet lag, a compressed trip, and whatever they'd been outrunning at home before the itinerary slowed down enough to catch up with them.
August 2026 · 4 min read
The post I hear about most says it's safe to stop. I learned that lesson properly after I had my baby, when stopping felt like the one thing I couldn't afford to do.
September 2026 · 3 min read
I do not generate what happens in a session, and I never have. This is what it means to be a channel rather than a healer, and why it changes what I actually do with my hands.
September 2026 · 4 min read
What a Reiki session actually gives you is permission to stop moving for an hour. That pause, not a hidden mechanism, is where the reported changes people describe afterwards seem to come from.
September 2026 · 4 min read
Years of treating and teaching people mid move, mid divorce and mid decision in Canggu taught me how to hold a room for someone whose story I will never hear in full.
September 2026 · 4 min read
I used to say I balance your energy because it sounded finished. Here's why I stopped, and what I tell people instead about what actually happens in a session.
September 2026 · 4 min read
Grieving clients don't need me to fix anything. What I notice, session after session, is how much effort it takes just to keep holding themselves together, and how the hour changes when they finally don't have to.
September 2026 · 4 min read
Most people on my table are not in crisis. They are mid-transition: an empty nest, a career ending, a marriage ending or starting. A session does not hand them a decision. It gives them an hour where they do not have to make one.
September 2026 · 4 min read
The exact things I tell someone who arrives at their first Reiki session sceptical or ready to bolt: what to expect and why not believing anything is fine.
September 2026 · 4 min read
By a second session, the shift is quiet: how quickly a woman lies down, and how her breathing changes before I've even begun. An observation, not a promise.
September 2026 · 3 min read
The Instagram version of my work is flowing linen and ocean light. The real version happens between school runs and laundry loads. Here is the honest picture.
September 2026 · 3 min read
Most women who train with me in Canggu are mothers who have spent years giving to everyone else first. What they are really learning here is how to receive.
September 2026 · 4 min read
The hardest part of a session isn't the hour on the table. It's what happens in the ten minutes after, when life doesn't pause to let you land. Here's what I actually tell people.
September 2026 · 5 min read
Motherhood brings many women to Reiki as clients. Quite often, the same thing that brought them in is what makes them want to learn it themselves: they want something steady to give, not just something to receive.
September 2026 · 5 min read
Before a woman tells me she needed this, her shoulders already have. On the dropped shoulder, the slower breath, and the other quiet signs a body gives before she is ready to say it out loud.
September 2026 · 4 min read
People often arrive ready to fix themselves, holding their breath without noticing. The real shift tends to start the moment they stop trying and simply let the breath go on its own.
October 2026 · 3 min read
Describing yourself as "a stressed person" turns a physiological state into a fixed trait. This looks at why the difference matters, and what actually helps a nervous system that will not come back down.
October 2026 · 4 min read
Why the women who hold everything together are often the last to notice they've gone quiet in their own life, and what it looks like to come back into it.
October 2026 · 4 min read
No mechanism claims, no curative promises, no chakra antiquity myths: a plain account of what I will not tell you, written for sharp, sceptical women who skip spiritual pages that talk down to them.
October 2026 · 4 min read
The nightly ritual with candles is not what makes self-practice last. The version that actually holds up is two unglamorous minutes, hands on the chest, wherever you happen to be.
October 2026 · 3 min read
Caregiving rarely ends in a single dramatic moment. This is about the quiet slide when your own needs stop registering, and why noticing early matters more than waiting for a crisis.
October 2026 · 4 min read
What actually makes a session or a teacher trustworthy: not spiritual vocabulary or performance, but whether someone is paying real attention to the person in front of them.
October 2026 · 4 min read
A phrase used so often in this field that it stopped meaning anything. What it actually means to her: noticing a breath, being spoken to gently, sitting still for an hour. Nothing more mystical than that.
October 2026 · 4 min read
The people who carry the heaviest loneliness in Canggu often have the lives everyone else wants: the villa, the freedom, the sunset. Here is what that looks like on the table, and why it rarely matches the picture.
October 2026 · 4 min read
Students often ask what they should feel. This is what happens on the teacher’s side: the ordinary physical signals in my palms and fingers while I attune someone in Usui Shiki Ryoho.
October 2026 · 4 min read
I trained in Ubud and I am grateful for it. But I teach in Canggu, because the women who find me here are not shopping for a spiritual identity. They are fitting something real into a working life that exists.
October 2026 · 4 min read
Most people expect a room full of mystics. In practice, the table is often ordinary women who are tired, curious, and not sure they believe yet, and that is exactly who the training is for.
October 2026 · 5 min read
What a first enquiry about training usually leaves out, why people under-share before they book, and the questions about Reiki training I would honestly rather hear.
October 2026 · 4 min read
What actually happens before anything you'd call a shift: a breath that catches, shoulders sitting higher than they realise. The quiet start to a session, and why it matters more than people expect.
October 2026 · 4 min read
What actually crosses a student's face during a first attunement, and why years of teaching have taught me to trust it less than it looks like I should.
October 2026 · 3 min read
Teaching Usui Shiki Ryoho to other people made my own self-treatment simpler, not grander. Here is what changed, and why smaller turned out to be the more honest version of the practice.
November 2026 · 3 min read
The ten minutes before six students arrive are chairs, a tested video link and a manual at every seat, not incense or mood music. Here is what that preparation actually looks like, and why the group stays small.
November 2026 · 4 min read
On what it means when a session doesn't produce a dramatic shift, and why feeling ordinary again a day or two later is information, not proof that nothing worked.
November 2026 · 4 min read
The people who come to my treatment room in Canggu are not on retreat. They are mid-career and mid-work, laptop still open, nervous system still bracing. What a session actually meets, and what it does not promise.
November 2026 · 4 min read
The intake before a pregnancy Reiki session decides more than the hour that follows: how far along she is, what she has been told, and who else is in the room.
November 2026 · 3 min read
Training groups stop at six, and most are smaller. Here is the teaching reason behind that ceiling: what an attunement asks of me, and what integration asks of each student.
November 2026 · 4 min read
The phrase is everywhere in wellness. I use it too, and I want to be honest about when it means something and when it is just noise filling a gap where a real sentence should be.
November 2026 · 4 min read
What actually happens on the day, what people commonly feel, why feeling nothing is normal, and an honest answer about attunements given online.
August 2026 · 4 min read
How a distance session actually runs, what people report, what it costs, and why I won't tell you the mechanism.
August 2026 · 3 min read
Four very different things get filed under healing in Bali. What each one is, what each is good for, and how to choose without wasting your money.
August 2026 · 3 min read
The seven rainbow chakras are not ancient, and they were not part of Reiki until the 1980s. The real history, and why I still teach them.
August 2026 · 3 min read
How the wellness scene here actually works, what the different areas are like, what things cost, and how to avoid wasting your time.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Not a diagnostic checklist. Just the seven things people most often say when they write to me, and what a session does about each.
August 2026 · 3 min read
One simple breathing practice, written out properly, with honest expectations about what it will and will not do.
August 2026 · 2 min read
Crystals are everywhere in Western Reiki and appear nowhere in the original practice. What that means, and how to think about them honestly.
August 2026 · 3 min read