Where Reiki Actually Comes From

Most Reiki courses open with the same story: Mikao Usui, a Christian minister teaching at Doshisha University in Kyoto, fasted for twenty one days on Mount Kurama and received Reiki in a flash of light. Almost none of that is supported by the record, and I would rather teach you the real version.

What is documented

Mikao Usui was born in 1865 in Taniai, in what is now Gifu Prefecture, and died in 1926. The most reliable source we have is his memorial stone at Saihoji Temple in Tokyo, raised by his students in 1927. It describes a man who held many occupations, travelled, studied widely, and developed a practice he called Usui Reiki Ryoho. He taught it in Tokyo from 1922. He is said to have taught somewhere in the region of two thousand people in the few years before his death.

Chujiro Hayashi, a former naval officer, was one of his students. Hayashi ran a clinic and kept treatment records, and it was Hayashi who developed the set hand positions most of us are taught today. Usui's own society worked differently, feeling for where the hands were drawn rather than following a fixed sequence.

Hawayo Takata, a Japanese American woman from Hawaii, was treated at Hayashi's clinic and went on to train with him. She brought the practice to Hawaii and then the American mainland, and she is the reason Reiki exists in the West at all. She taught until her death in 1980. Almost every Western practitioner alive can trace their line back through her.

What is not documented

The Christian minister detail does not hold up. Neither does the Doshisha University connection. These appear to have entered the story in the West, and one reasonable reading is that a Christian framing made the practice easier to introduce to 1930s America.

The twenty one days on Mount Kurama is traditional teaching rather than documented history. It may be true. It is not evidenced, and it is not on the memorial stone in that form.

I am not saying this to debunk anything. I am saying it because a practice that asks you to trust your own experience should not need a founding myth propped up. The documented Usui is a serious man who built something careful and taught it widely in four years. That is a better story than the flash of light.

What changed on the way west

Three things worth knowing, because they explain why what you will be taught in Bali differs from what a Japanese practitioner might recognise.

• The hand positions are Hayashi's, formalised further by Takata in the 1940s. They were designed to cover the whole physical body, on the reasoning that the body is one unit and should be treated as one.
• The chakra system is not part of Japanese Reiki at all. It was grafted on in the West in the 1980s. There is a whole article on this, because the history is genuinely surprising.
• The fee structure. Takata set a very high price for Master training. After her death that restriction broke down, which is why Reiki spread so quickly in the 1980s and also why quality varies so much.

Why this matters when you choose a teacher

Reiki has no governing body. Nobody can stop anyone calling themselves a Master. The only real check available to you is lineage: who taught your teacher, and who taught them.

Mine: I trained as a Reiki practitioner in Aachen, Germany, in 2006, and completed Reiki Master Teacher training in 2019 with the Asian Healing Arts Center in Chiang Mai and with Vonny Stella in Ubud. You can ask any teacher this and you should. A teacher who is vague about it is telling you something.

If you want to train, the training page sets out how I teach it.