Why I Don't Quote Statistics About Reiki
August 2026 · 4 min read · By Vanessa Chugani
A while back, someone in a Reiki group I follow shared that Level 2 attunement increases "energy strength" by fifty percent. No source. No explanation of what was even measured. It had the shape of a fact, and it was not one.
Where a number like that comes from
I don't think whoever wrote it was lying. I think it started as a feeling, someone's honest sense that something in them had shifted after an attunement, and somewhere between one retelling and the next it picked up a decimal point it never earned. That happens often in this field. A vague truth gets dressed in a precise number because a precise number sounds like it came from a lab rather than a hunch. Once it's out there, nobody wants to be the one who asks where it actually came from.
I can't measure energy strength. Nobody can, not with an instrument I'd trust, and I'm not going to borrow the language of measurement for something I haven't measured. If I don't know a number, I say I don't know it.
There are plenty of things about my practice I can tell you exactly, because I set them and I know them. A private session in Canggu is EUR 188. A distance session is EUR 138. Training runs EUR 488 a level, the same whether you're sitting across from me or joining live online. Those are real numbers. A price I set is not the same thing as a statistic nobody measured, and I'd rather you could tell the two apart on this site than have to guess.
What I will tell you instead
What I can tell you is what people report, and I try to write it as reporting, not as proof. People often tell me they finally slept through a night after weeks of not managing it. People often mention a shoulder that had been up near the ears for a long time coming down and staying there. Some people say their appetite came back after a stretch of barely eating, or that a low hum of dread they'd been carrying got quieter. None of that is a statistic. It's what people say to me, and I'd rather write it down plainly than convert it into a number that would sound more impressive and mean less.
The same is true of training. I've taught people through every level, up to Master Teacher, and what I watch happen is a craft settling into someone's hands over real weeks and months. That's not a chart I can show you. It's something I see happen, session by session.
The research I do trust, and how I use it
There is real research on Reiki, and I read it, and I'll reference it here when it belongs. A 2022 review of fourteen randomised, placebo-controlled trials rated the evidence high for stress and depression, and moderate to high for anxiety, in people who were genuinely struggling rather than people who were already fine. A 2025 review of eleven trials found a real improvement in quality of life, and longer sessions taken as a course did better than a single visit.
I can tell you exactly where both of those numbers came from: the journal, and how many trials sit underneath them. That's what makes them worth citing. A number with an address behind it is information. A number with no address is decoration wearing information's clothes.
The honest picture has a limit too, and I'd rather give you that than leave it out. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in the US says Reiki hasn't been shown to cause harm, and in the same breath says it hasn't been clearly shown to work for any specific health condition, and that there's no evidence for the energy field it's said to work through. Both halves of that belong on the page together, or neither does.
Why I'd rather undersell than oversell
A practice that needs a fake number to sound credible is telling you something about itself. What I teach and what I offer in a session don't need that. A nervous system that's been running hot for months, settling during an hour where nothing is asked of you, is real whether or not I attach a percentage to it. If you're weighing up what that hour actually involves, I've written honestly about how Reiki compares with massage for that kind of tension. And if you're thinking about learning this yourself, I'd rather you arrived at training with accurate expectations than romantic ones. That's the whole reason I write this way.