When You Don’t Feel Anything During Reiki

A client came to see me recently because her regular Reiki Practitioner wasn't available. After her session, she mentioned something that really got me thinking about how much people compare one Reiki experience to another. She told me that during her last session with her regular Practitioner, she had actually felt her leg move. She described it as though the energy had shifted through her leg and created a physical response. This time, she hadn't experienced anything like that, and I think she was wondering what that difference meant.

I told her that her experience didn't have to be the same for the session to be valuable. From where I was sitting, I could feel a lot of movement and release during her session, particularly around her solar plexus and shoulder. She wasn't necessarily feeling what I was noticing, and that isn't unusual. As a Practitioner, I may sense movement or a shift in an area without the person receiving Reiki having a physical sensation that tells them the same thing is happening.

This is something I think gets misunderstood about Reiki. People naturally want to know what they're supposed to feel, especially when they hear other people's stories. One person feels heat, another feels tingling, someone else sees colors or feels their body move, and another person falls asleep for the entire session. It can make you wonder if you're having the "right" experience, especially when your own sessions don't always feel the same.

One of the most important things I want people to understand is that, as the Practitioner, I am not doing something to you. I'm not pushing energy into your body, moving energy around inside you, or deciding that your shoulder needs to release and then making that happen. I'm sharing Reiki with you, and your body has its own relationship with that energy. What happens from there isn't something I control.

That also means your experience can change depending on the Practitioner, the day, and what is going on with you at the time. You aren't walking into each Reiki session as exactly the same person you were the week before. Your body may be carrying something different. Your emotions may be different. You may be more tired, more relaxed, more stressed, or simply in a different place in your life. All of those things can affect how you experience a session.

Sometimes you notice a physical response. You might feel heat, tingling, pulsing, a deep breath, a sensation moving through part of your body, or an involuntary movement like my client's leg movement during her previous session. You might have an emotional response or find that something comes to mind that you weren't expecting. Other times, the experience is much quieter. You may become deeply relaxed or fall asleep, and there may not be one particular moment that stands out to you afterward.

I also think it's important for practitioners not to tell people what they should be feeling. If I sense a lot of activity around someone's shoulder or solar plexus, that's my experience of what I'm noticing while I'm working with them. It doesn't mean I need to convince them something happened there, and it certainly doesn't mean they need to feel it for me to consider the session meaningful. Their experience belongs to them, and mine belongs to me. They don't have to match.

The same goes for comparing one practitioner with another. It's easy to think, "I felt so much with my regular practitioner, but I didn't feel that with you," and assume that one person must be doing Reiki better or more strongly. I don't see it that way. Different practitioners have different ways of working and different sensitivities, but ultimately we are sharing Reiki. We aren't controlling what someone's body does with it.

I think sometimes the best thing you can do during a Reiki session is stop watching for something to happen. If you're lying there wondering whether you're feeling the energy, comparing this session to the last one, or waiting for your leg to move again, you're spending part of the session trying to evaluate the experience instead of simply having it. You don't need to figure it out while you're on the table.

Reiki doesn't have to be dramatic to be worth your time. Sometimes you'll notice something very clearly, and sometimes the experience will be subtle enough that you don't think much about it until later. And sometimes you may not be able to identify anything specific at all. That doesn't give me a reason to tell you what you experienced. I'd rather leave room for your body and your experience to speak for themselves.

For me, that's one of the things I appreciate most about Reiki. I don't have to make something happen. I don't have to decide what your body needs to release or try to create a particular response. My job is to share Reiki and pay attention to what I notice, while giving you the space to have your own experience with it.

So if your last Reiki session felt completely different from this one, that's okay. Maybe your leg moved last time. Maybe this time your shoulder felt heavy, you took a deep breath, you fell asleep, or you didn't notice anything in particular. There isn't a formula that says every session should feel the same. Your body isn't a machine running the same program every time you lie down on the Reiki table.

Come in, get comfortable, and let the session be what it is that day. You don't need to recreate the last experience or decide ahead of time what should happen. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is simply receive and let your body do what it knows how to do.