The First Two Minutes of a Reiki Session
October 2026 · 4 min read · By Vanessa Chugani
The first part of a session is not dramatic. Nothing lifts, nothing buzzes, no one gasps. What happens is quieter, and if you are the one on the table, almost embarrassing to notice once it is pointed out: a breath that catches, a jaw clenched without you knowing it, shoulders sitting an inch higher than they think they are.
Most sessions start with a few ordinary sentences: how the drive over was, whether she would like water, where she would like to lie. None of that is small talk for its own sake. It gives the body a minute to arrive in the room before it is asked to settle, and it gives me a minute to watch how someone moves before she is lying down. Someone who sits on the edge of the table first, rather than lying straight back, is usually telling me something too.
What I'm actually looking for
I do not start by doing something. I start by looking and listening. Most people arrive mid-exhale already, carrying the drive over, the day they left behind, the list still running somewhere in the back of the head. The body gets there before the mind does, and it tends to show in three places every time: the breath, the shoulders, and the hands.
A breath that stays high in the chest and never quite reaches the stomach usually means someone has been bracing for a while, maybe for years, without noticing. Shoulders pulled up toward the ears, even slightly, tell a version of the same story. Hands that stay closed, or fingers that keep finding each other and interlocking, often mean the same thing again, from a third direction: a nervous system that has not been given permission to stop yet.
Noticing is not diagnosis
None of this is a reading and none of it is a diagnosis. It is attention, the kind you would pay a friend who has clearly had a long week before she has said a word. This is rest and support, not treatment for a medical condition, and I say that plainly because accuracy matters to me more than mystique.
What those two minutes give me is a starting point. If the breath is shallow, the first thing that often changes, before anything else, is that it drops lower. The shoulders usually follow. Not because I have forced anything, but because a body finally allowed to stop scanning the room tends to let go of whatever it was holding first.
What changes first
People sometimes expect a session to open with a sensation: warmth, tingling, something they can point to and describe afterwards. Occasionally that happens early. More often the first real change is smaller than that. The exhale gets longer. That is the whole event. No one would call a longer exhale impressive on its own, but a jaw unclenches a little after it. A stomach that was pulled tight softens by a few millimetres.
I would rather someone arrive expecting this, the ordinary and the unremarkable, than expecting a jolt that may never come. Feeling very little during a session is normal and does not mean nothing is happening. The nervous system often does its most useful work exactly when it feels, from the outside, like nothing is happening at all.
What this is actually for
This is where the work is really aimed: at a body that has been running hot, whether from stress, exhaustion, grief or a long stretch of simply not stopping. A tight jaw, shoulders near the ears, a stomach that will not settle at night, none of this sits apart from what Reiki does here. It is usually the first thing to answer. Noticing before doing matters in training too.
If the problem is a pulled muscle or an old injury, a massage is still the better first call, and I will say so if that is what someone describes to me. But for the kind of tension that comes from carrying too much for too long, the first two minutes are already doing something. Someone is being looked at without an agenda, before a single thing has been asked to change.
If you want to know what a private Reiki session actually involves from arrival to the end, it is worth reading before you book one. And if you are not sure whether this is the right point in your life for it, this piece on when people tend to come might answer that faster than I can in one sitting.