Reiki is a Japanese healing art that is gaining worldwide popularity. What makes Reiki unique is that it incorporates elements of just about every other alternative healing practice, such as spiritual healing, auras, crystals, chakra balancing, meditation, aromatherapy, naturopathy, and homeopathy.

Reiki involves the transfer of energy from practitioner to patient and claims to enhance the body's natural ability to heal itself through the balancing of energy. Reiki utilizes specific techniques for restoring and balancing the natural life force energy within the body. It is a holistic, natural, hands-on energy healing system that touches on all levels: body, mind, and spirit.

Reiki (pronounced ray-key) is a Japanese word representing universal life energy, the energy which is all around us. It is derived from rei, meaning "free passage" or "transcendental spirit" and ki, meaning "vital life force energy" or " universal life energy."

Reiki energy has several basic effects: it brings about deep relaxation, destroys perceived energy blockages, tries to detoxify the system, provides new vitality in the form of healing energy, and increases the vibrational frequency of the body.

The laying of hands is used in Reiki therapy as in other spiritual healing. There is a difference though. In spiritual healing, a person with a strong energy field places his or her hands above a particular part of the recipient's body in order to release energy into it. The healer, in most forms of energy work is the one who is sending out the energy. In Reiki, however, the healer places the hands above the recipient.  It is the recipient that draws the energy as needed. The individual being healed has to take an active part in the healing process. The individual takes responsibility for his or her healing.

Reiki is believed to have begun in Tibet several thousand years ago. Seers in the Orient studied energies and developed a system of sounds and symbols for universal healing energies. Various healing systems, which crossed many different cultures, emerged from this single root system.

Dr. Mikao Usui, a Japanese Christian educator in Kyoto, Japan, rediscovered the root system in the mid- to late 1800s. He began an extensive twenty-one-year study of the healing phenomena of history's greatest spiritual leaders. He also studied ancient sutras (Buddhist teachings written in Sanskrit). He discovered ancient sounds and symbols that are linked directly to the human body and nervous system which activate the universal life energy for healing.  Usui then had a metaphysical experience and himself became empowered to use these sounds and symbols to heal. He called this form of healing Reiki. He taught the system throughout Japan until his death around 1893.

The Usui System of Natural Healing balances and strengthens the body's energy, promoting its ability to heal itself. 

Reiki was introduced to the Western world in the mid-1970s. Since then its use has spread dramatically worldwide.

See what Dr. Oz says about Reiki.