What I Say to First-Time Visitors Who Are Nervous

Most people who ring the bell for their first Reiki session have already made up their mind about how it will go. It will be silly, or nothing will happen, or somehow both. I usually know within the first minute, before they have even taken their shoes off.

What nerves look like at the door

Nervous rarely announces itself directly. It looks like an apology before anyone has sat down: "I should say up front, I'm not really a spiritual person." It looks like a hand checking a phone every few seconds, as though there is an exit plan in place. Some arrive already armed with a counter-argument, ready to tell me what a forum thread said about Reiki being nonsense, as if they need permission to keep their doubts once they are already through the door. A few just ask, quietly, whether they need to do anything. Almost nobody says outright "I'm anxious about this", though that is usually what is happening.

What I tell them before we start

I say the same handful of things to everyone, because nervous people need facts more than they need warmth in the first five minutes. You keep your clothes on. You lie on the table the way you would for a nap, and I work with my hands resting lightly on you or just above you, wherever you are comfortable. You can stop at any point just by saying so, and I will not think anything of it. I also tell you what I am doing as I go, so you are never lying there with your eyes closed wondering what happens next: I say when I am starting at your head, and when I am moving to your shoulders. Nothing is expected of you. You do not need to believe anything for the hour to be worth your time. If you fall asleep, that is ordinary and I will not wake you. If you feel nothing at all, that is ordinary too, and it does not mean the hour was wasted.

I also say plainly what this is not. Reiki here is rest and support. It is not a treatment for any medical condition, and it does not diagnose anything or replace medical care. I say it once, people nod, and we move on, because the hour ahead is not about that sentence.

The question under the question

What most nervous visitors actually want to know is whether I believe this is real, or whether I am asking them to switch off their judgement for an hour. So I answer that directly. I do not know the mechanism and I am not going to claim one: no energy fields, no frequencies, because nothing has been measured. What I can point to is the research that does exist. A 2022 review of fourteen randomised, placebo controlled trials in Frontiers in Psychology rated the evidence high for stress and depression, and moderate to high for anxiety, in people who were genuinely struggling rather than already well. A 2025 review of eleven trials, 661 people in total, found a real improvement in quality of life, and the sessions that did best ran an hour or longer, eight times or more. That is the honest reason to come back more than once, not a sales line.

The same honesty runs the other way. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says plainly that no scientific evidence supports the energy field Reiki is said to work through, and that it has not been clearly shown effective for any health purpose. I would rather someone hear that from me before we start than feel misled after they have paid.

If you are still not sure

Some people spend the whole first hour with one eye open, and that is fine. What tends to settle a nervous visitor is not a speech, it is watching me be ordinary about the whole thing: no lowered voice, no candles I don't need. My training goes back to Usui Shiki Ryoho: Mikao Usui, who trained Chujiro Hayashi, who trained Hawayo Takata, who brought it west. None of that history requires you to believe anything on your way in. Most people who arrive braced for something strange leave saying it felt like a proper rest, which is exactly what I told them going in.

If an hour still feels like a leap, there are smaller steps first. You can read what a session actually involves on the sessions page, or see how other people describe the point where they decided to come in at all, in when people tend to come. If neither answers the question you are actually holding, get in touch and ask me directly. I would rather answer one honest question by email than have you spend an hour still carrying it.