a Living Well essay
I sit in two worlds. I am a Registered Nurse, trained in evidence and hard outcomes. I am also a Reiki Master. So I am going to teach you Reiki the way I wish someone had taught me. We start with what is real and measurable, then I tell you honestly where the science is strong and where it is still young.
Let me begin where almost no one argues.
This essay is one of four practices in the Living Well pillar at The Gracewell Studio. If you want the full guide to healthspan over lifespan, mind, body, and spirit held as one whole, start at the pillar here.
You are, measurably, electric
Your body runs on electricity.
Every heartbeat is an electrical event, which is exactly why a hospital can read your heart with an ECG. We have measured the heart’s electrical signal for more than a century, and the man who built the first ECG won a Nobel Prize for it in 1924. Your brain shows up the same way on an EEG. Your nerves fire through tiny electrical currents. Even your bones release a small charge when you move and bear weight.
At the frontier of biology, it runs deeper still. Researchers like Michael Levin at Tufts have shown that cells use bioelectric signals, real voltage patterns across their membranes, to decide how a body grows and repairs itself (Zhang & Levin, 2025). This work appears in journals like Cell and Nature.
So when someone says you are made of energy, they are not being poetic. They are being literal.
Einstein, and the bigger picture
Now zoom all the way out.
At the smallest scale, the line between matter and energy disappears completely. Einstein’s most famous equation, E equals mc squared, says that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing. Everything that feels solid, your hand, the chair beneath you, is energy held in a particular shape. Modern physics describes the whole universe, at its base, as fields.
I felt this truth long before I could explain it. I was twelve, in a prep school classroom in Connecticut, when it first moved through me. I wrote about that moment in The Dance Between, over on the Believe Path, if you want the whole story.
This is the part I want you to sit with. Energy is life. It is what we are, and it runs through us. The air we breathe, the water we drink and swim in, the stars, the cosmos. It runs seamlessly through all that is. Energy is the fabric of all reality.
Once you see that, working with your own energy stops sounding strange. It starts sounding obvious.
So, what is Reiki?
Reiki (say it “RAY-key”) is a gentle practice for rebalancing the body’s energy. The practitioner rests their hands lightly on or just above your body, while you stay fully clothed, and moves through a series of positions as you rest.
Here are the principles that matter most to me.
A practitioner is not a magician. We are trained to be a conduit for energy that already exists all around us, and to help you open to your own capacity to heal. The healing is yours. I simply hold the space and guide the session toward your highest good.
Reiki belongs to no religion. Energy and love are universal, so Reiki is too. People of every faith and no faith give and receive it.
It is a complement, never a substitute. Reiki works beautifully alongside medicine, surgery, therapy, and medication. It never replaces them, and I will always want your doctor in the room.
And you have to be open to receive it. There are sessions where I sit down and the gate simply does not open, because healing is a partnership. That is not a failure. It is an honest picture of what this is.
Does it actually work?
Here is where I put my nurse hat firmly back on, because feeling true and being proven are not the same thing.
The honest truth is that Reiki has not been studied heavily yet, and the research that exists varies in quality. But the signal that keeps showing up is consistent, and it points in one direction: calm.
A 2024 analysis pooling 824 people found that Reiki significantly lowered anxiety (Fan, 2024). A 2025 analysis across 661 people found it improved quality of life (Liu et al., 2025). Smaller trials have found it eased anxiety before surgery (Gomes & Püschel, 2024).
And now the honesty that I believe earns your trust. In 2026, Cleveland Clinic published one of the most rigorous Reiki studies to date, 272 open heart surgery patients, led by a Reiki-certified nurse. On the hard outcomes they measured, anxiety, depression, sleep, and pain, Reiki was no better than simple quiet time (Zampino et al., 2026).
So here is my fair summary, as a nurse and a Master both. Reiki’s clearest and most consistent gift is relaxation and reduced anxiety. What I offer you is real rest, real calm, and a partner in your own healing. That is enough. That is, in fact, a lot. And the research is still young. There is more we will learn before we can speak with certainty about everything Reiki touches.
A word on knowing, and on light switches
Think about the light in your bedroom.
You flip the switch. The light comes on. You probably could not draw the wiring diagram, explain the voltage, or trace the current from the power plant to your bulb. And yet you flip that switch with complete confidence, because you have seen it work a thousand times.
WiFi is even better. We trust it daily. We rely on it for work, for connection, for the safety of our families. Almost none of us could explain how electromagnetic waves carry data through walls. But we feel safe trusting it because we have experienced what it does.
Energy work is a little like that, for me. I cannot draw you the full diagram of why a quiet hour with intentional touch settles a nervous system the way it does. The research is still catching up to what practitioners and patients have been reporting for nearly a century. But I have seen the lights come on. I have watched people exhale in a way they had not in months. I have felt my own breath slow on the receiving end. The experience is real, the outcomes are increasingly measurable, and the explanation will sharpen as the science matures.
That is honest. That is also enough to be a believer.
A word on distance
I offer distance sessions, and I want to be straight about what that means.
Quantum entanglement is real and genuinely strange, strange enough to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022. But physicists are clear that entanglement cannot, on its own, send messages or energy across space. So I will not lean on physics terms I have not earned.
What I will say is this. Focused intention is real. Compassion crosses miles in ways we already accept in prayer and meditation, and in the way mothers know their child needs them from rooms away. Distance Reiki, the way I practice it, is intention and connection offered in good faith, always beside your medical care, never instead of it. Some receive deep benefit. Some do not. I tell you both, and I let you choose.
Keep going
If you want the human side of all this, read how I learned it the hard way in Why Do I Absorb Other People’s Energy?. Then wander into the Wellness Path to see how mind, body, and energy fit together.
I am building a Reiki offering at The Gracewell Studio, and I would love to walk it with you. Sign up for the newsletter and I will let you know the moment sessions are available, in person and at a distance, so you can come exactly as you are.
a blessing before you go
May you trust both your sharp mind and your quiet knowing.
May you ask the hard questions and stay open at the same time.
May you honor the science and the mystery, without forcing either to bow.
And may you remember that you are, in every single cell, a being of energy and light.
Go gracefully. 🤍
Rev. Kristina Soto, RN, BSN
References
Fan, Y. (2024). Therapeutic effects of Reiki on interventions for anxiety: A meta-analysis. BMC Palliative Care, 23(1), Article 147. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12904-024-01439-x
Gomes, E. T., & Püschel, V. A. A. (2024). Effectiveness of Reiki therapy for preoperative anxiety in cardiac surgery: A randomized clinical trial. Acta Paulista de Enfermagem, 37, Article eAPE00082. https://acta-ape.org/en/article/effectiveness-of-reiki-therapy-for-preoperative-anxiety-in-cardiac-surgery-a-randomized-clinical-trial/
Liu, K., Qin, Z., Qin, Y., et al. (2025). Effects of Reiki therapy on quality of life: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Systematic Reviews, 14, Article 72. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-025-02811-5
Zampino, S., Hosler, R., Brown, K., Hamm, A., Deran, B., Bena, J. F., Morrison, S. L., Murray, T., Vandenbossche, R., Bakaeen, F., & Albert, N. M. (2026). Randomized controlled trial of the psychological and clinical outcomes of Reiki plus manual therapy after open heart surgery. Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/JCN.0000000000001334
Zhang, G., & Levin, M. (2025). Bioelectricity is a universal multifaceted signaling cue in living organisms. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 36(2). https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E23-08-0312
