What is the difference between Reiki and energy healing?

Many friends who are new to the field of mind, body and soul tend to confuse these two concepts, and even treat them as two types of treatment methods in parallel. In fact, the essence of the two is the relationship between inclusion and being included - energy healing is the collective name for all healing systems that focus on regulating the imbalance of life energy, and what we often call Reiki (Reiki) is just a specific branch with the highest popularity and the widest audience in this category.

When I held an offline introductory experience camp two years ago, I met a young girl who had just learned the first level of Usui Reiki. She told everyone she knew how to do energy healing, and directly equated Reiki with the entire energy healing field, which caused a lot of misunderstandings. If you imagine energy healing as the entire tea drinking circuit, Reiki is probably the pearl milk tea with the most stores. The raw materials and operations have standardized processes, the threshold for copying is low, and the audience acceptance is the highest. In addition to it, the energy healing basket also contains many completely different "drinks": From the Guiding Rocks and Blessings passed down by our local ancestors to the popular Western crystal healing, flower essence healing, quantum touch therapy, and Akashic integrated healing, as long as the core logic is to improve the physical and mental state by adjusting blockages and imbalances in the human energy field, they can all be classified into the category of energy healing.

When it comes to actual operations, the standardization of Reiki is indeed ranked high among all energy healing schools. The most mainstream Usui Reiki has a very fixed attunement process. It does not require you to have a so-called "naturally sensitive constitution". As long as you complete the corresponding stages of attunement with a certified instructor, you can master the corresponding Reiki symbol usage. There are also agreed-upon hand position references when treating people. The error tolerance is very high, and novices are not prone to problems. I used to have a student who was an audit student. She was usually very sensitive to emotions and aura. Even her friends said that she was an "emotional insulator." After finishing the first level, she went back to do a week of pre-sleep Reiki therapy for her mother who had been suffering from insomnia all year round. It used to take her lying down for more than two hours to fall asleep. During that time, she could enter a deep sleep state in basically 20 minutes, and the effect was more stable than the melatonin she took before.

However, as for the boundary between the two, there is still no unified statement in the circle. Many energy healers who take the personalized route do not recognize Reiki as "orthodox" energy healing. They feel that this standardized process that relies on "empowerment" is essentially a plug-in for ordinary people who have no perception. The healing process does not consider the energy characteristics of the individual case at all, and the effect can only stay at the level of relieving superficial emotions and relaxing the body, without touching deeper stuck points. However, practitioners who support Reiki feel that it is precisely this low-threshold standardization that makes energy regulation no longer dependent on a few talented healers. Ordinary people can do daily conditioning for themselves and their families after learning it. On the contrary, it is the most practical way of energy healing.

Of course, whether it is Reiki or energy healing in a broad sense, its effectiveness has not yet been confirmed by quantitative experiments by the mainstream scientific community. It belongs to the category of alternative healing and can only be used as a supplement to regular medical treatment. It absolutely cannot replace medical treatment and medication. This is the bottom line that all practitioners should be aware of. If you just want to try to relieve minor problems such as daily anxiety and stiff shoulders and necks, choosing cost-effective Reiki healing is enough. If you have deeper emotional stucks that you want to sort out, you can also try other types of energy healing to find the one that suits you best.