What is the difference between Reiki and energy healing?

To put it in the most straightforward terms, energy healing is a large category covering dozens or hundreds of different schools, and Reiki is the branch with the widest audience and clearest inheritance rules in this category. It is essentially a subordinate relationship and is not at all two parallel and opposing concepts as everyone thinks.

Many friends who are new to the field of mind, body and soul will confuse the two. I have been practicing healing myself for almost 6 years. At the beginning, I made a joke of calling all practitioners who do energy balancing as Reiki masters. It was not until I took the first level class with the master of Usui Reiki in Japan that I really understood where the boundary between the two is.

The scope of energy healing is actually very wide. Singing bowl sound therapy, crystal arrangement healing, energy cleansing after shamanic rituals, and even essential oil balancing done by some senior aromatherapists based on chakra characteristics that you usually see on social platforms can all be included in the category of energy healing as long as the core logic is to improve the physical and mental state by regulating the subtle energy field around the human body. There is almost no uniform entry threshold in this field. As long as you think you can sense subtle energy, you can say that you are doing energy healing even if you have discovered a set of adjustment and balancing methods by yourself. I once met a girl who studied acupuncture. She combined the Meridian Flow theory of traditional Chinese medicine with her own perception of the energy movement patterns of meridians to treat chronic insomnia. The feedback was particularly good. However, this method was integrated by herself and cannot be classified into any existing mature school. Generally speaking, what she does is collectively referred to as energy healing.

The rules of Reiki are much clearer. It has very clear origins and inheritance requirements. The current mainstream Usui Reiki was founded by Mr. Usui Onao in Japan at the end of the 19th century. The branches of Shambhala Reiki and Karuna Reiki that were developed later also have strict initiation processes - If you want to become a Reiki master who can officially accept cases, you must have a teacher corresponding to the line of inheritance to give you different levels of enlightenment and open up the channels connecting you to the high-frequency energy of Reiki, so that you can stably use pure Reiki energy. You cannot get started by just reading two books and watching a few teaching videos. I once received a referral from a client who had a negative energy cleansing done by a person who claimed to know Reiki. After doing it, he had a headache for three days. Later, when I asked him, I found out that the person had not received any inheritance at all. He just followed the Reiki symbols on the Internet and was essentially using his own personal low-frequency energy mixed with anxiety to randomly adjust people. This is a complete lack of access to Reiki.

There are ongoing debates in the circle about the boundary between the two. One group of practitioners believes that as long as the high-frequency cosmic energy can be used to balance the client, it does not matter whether there is attunement from the Reiki inheritance. The so-called attunement is more of a sense of ritual. Many self-created energy healing methods are no worse than orthodox Reiki.； However, another group of reiki masters who insist on inheritance believe that the energy used by people without orthodox enlightenment is essentially their own personal energy, which can easily be mixed with their own negative thoughts and judgments, but will cause unnecessary energy burden to the client. This debate has not yet reached a unified conclusion.

In fact, to put it bluntly, this relationship is very easy to understand, just like the difference between milk tea and pearl milk tea. You can say that pearl milk tea is a type of milk tea, but you cannot call all milk teas pearl milk tea. Reiki is like this classic model with pearls, which has a fixed formula and production standards, while energy healing is the entire milk tea category. You can add taro balls, coconut fruit, sugar-free or full sugar, as long as the core is based on the logic of subtle energy regulation.

When I usually do cases, I usually use Reiki as the core balancing tool, and occasionally use it with other energy healing methods such as crystals and singing bowls to assist. For those of us who practice on the front line, the two are not an either-or relationship. Being able to actually help clients solve their emotional and physical problems is much more important than being entangled in conceptual classifications.