u/AyushGuptaReiki

Something I didn’t expect when I got deeper into this work was how much harder it made my relationships at home, at least for a while.

The sensitivity you build up doesn’t switch off when you leave a session. I’d walk into my parents’ place and feel my mother’s worry before she’d said a word. My partner would come home quiet and I’d already be “reading” what was going on. And because I’d spent the whole day helping people, I just kept doing it. Offering a session for my dad’s back. Suggesting my sister should get some energy work done after her breakup. Picking up on everyone’s stuff and trying to fix it.

I genuinely thought I was being loving. What I was actually doing was turning every relationship into a client relationship. Nobody said it to me directly, but I could feel people getting a bit guarded around me. My sister once laughed and said “please don’t scan me, I just want to have dinner.” It was a joke, but it stuck with me for weeks.

The other side of it was that I was exhausted. I’d be careful about grounding and closing sessions with clients, and then come home and soak up three hours of family tension with zero protection. I’d be short with my partner by nine at night and couldn’t figure out why.

What changed things was honestly pretty unglamorous. I started doing my own self-healing every morning again instead of only when I felt bad. I stopped offering Reiki to family unless they asked, and if they did, fine, but I’d offer once and leave it. I started talking like a normal person at home. “I’m wiped out, I need ten minutes” instead of going silent or saying something about someone’s energy, which, I’ll admit, does not land well with a partner who’s sceptical about all this to begin with.

One thing I had to be careful about, though, was overcorrecting. For a while I tried to just shut the sensitivity off around family, and that didn’t work either. I went flat. I stopped noticing when I was running low, and I stopped noticing when someone I loved actually needed me. What helped was staying receptive to my own energy first. Checking in with how I’m actually feeling before I walk into a room, noticing when I’m getting heavy or irritable, and treating that as information rather than something to push through. When I’m tuned into my own state, I’m much less likely to absorb everyone else’s, and I’m still open enough to be there for them properly.

And the big one for me was realising I’d been using the work to dodge conversations. It’s easier to quietly “send healing” to a tense relationship than to actually sit down and say the uncomfortable thing. Reiki helped me get calm enough to have those talks, but it couldn’t have them for me.

These days I think the most useful thing I bring home isn’t a technique at all. It’s just being steady, present, and not trying to fix anyone. People seem to relax around me again. My sister actually asked me for a session last month, completely on her own, and I think that only happened because I’d stopped pushing.

I’ve started writing more about this side of the practice on my profile, the grounding, closing sessions properly, not running on your own energy, mostly because nobody explained any of it to me early on. If that’s useful to anyone, you’re welcome to follow along.

But mostly I’m curious about the rest of you who do any kind of healing or caring work. How do you stop being “the healer” with your own family and friends? And has anyone else had to unlearn the urge to fix everyone at home?

I've been doing Reiki for years now, and the most common thing people say when they first sit down with me is some version of "I don't even know what I'm anxious about anymore. It's just always there."

I get it. A lot of you reading this probably feel the same way. You're not panicking about one specific thing. It's more like a hum that never switches off. Racing thoughts at 2am, a chest that won't loosen, a stomach that's always a little clenched even on good days.

The way I've come to understand it, anxiety almost never starts with one big worry. It builds up. Every fear you didn't get to finish feeling, every emotion you swallowed because it wasn't the right time, every day you spent bracing for something to go wrong leaves a small trace of heavy energy behind. One of those passes on its own. But when they keep piling up for months or years with nowhere to go, the energy in your body starts to slow down and get stuck. That stuck, congested feeling is what you're living with when you say you're "just anxious."

When I work with people carrying anxiety, I notice the heaviness sits in pretty much the same places every time. There's the root chakra, at the base, which is all about feeling safe. When it's drained, you feel unsteady in the world even when nothing's actually wrong. There's the solar plexus, right around the stomach, which is where that knot and the constant self doubt come from. The heart chakra is where grief and emotional weight collect, and it's why so many anxious people describe their chest as tight or heavy. And the third eye, between the brows, is behind the looping mind that replays the same fears over and over, especially when you're trying to sleep. These all feed into each other. When one gets blocked, the rest work overtime to make up for it, and your whole system ends up stuck on high alert.

This is the part I wish more people knew. In a Reiki session, the healer isn't pouring their own energy into you. They're more like an open passage, letting universal life force energy flow through them to you. That energy goes where it's needed, into the places where things have been sitting stagnant, and it gets them moving again. People feel it differently. Some feel warmth or tingling, some feel a heaviness physically lifting off them, some just feel a kind of stillness they honestly can't remember the last time they felt. A lot of people cry, and that's usually old stuff finally leaving.

What really changes things, though, is what happens over time. With regular sessions, your body starts to remember how to let go of heavy energy by itself instead of storing all of it. Feelings come up, you feel them, and they pass through instead of settling in. The people I've worked with don't describe it as "I felt calm for an afternoon." They describe feeling lighter as a person. Steadier. Like the hum finally went quiet.

And if you want that for yourself long term, learning Reiki is honestly one of the best things you can do. Once you're attuned, you can work on your own energy whenever the anxiety starts building. In your bed, on your commute, at whatever hour it hits.

One thing I'll always say: if your anxiety is really weighing on your day to day life, lean on every bit of support you have around you. Reiki works beautifully alongside that and helps everything go deeper.

For those of you who live with anxiety, where do you feel it most in your body? And has anyone here tried energy work for it? I'm curious what it was like for you.

"Be honest with me. Is there any actual proof this works, or am I paying you to make me feel better?"

A man asked me that on his first visit, arms folded, before he'd even taken his shoes off. He was an engineer in his fifties, and his wife had booked the session for him. He'd been sleeping maybe four hours a night for most of a year, had a jaw so tight his dentist had started asking questions, and had already been through the doctor, the blood tests, the sleep hygiene lectures. Everything came back normal. He did not want to be there, and he told me so.

I liked him immediately, because it's a fair question and most people are too polite to ask it.

So I gave him the honest answer. If you mean proof the way a new medicine gets proven, big trials, a mechanism you can draw on a whiteboard, then no. The research is small and mixed, and plenty of scientists will call it placebo. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

He looked a bit thrown. I think he was expecting a sales pitch.

"But I'll tell you what I do know," I said. "And it's not something I read."

I've had my hands over someone's chest and felt heat pour out of it like an open oven door, while the person underneath swore they felt cold. I've felt a spot go completely dead under my palms, and then had the client tell me that's exactly where they've been carrying their father's death for six years. Every tradition that's ever worked with healing has had a name for that current running through us. Prana. Chi. Ki. The "ki" in Reiki. When fear or grief or pressure sits in it long enough, it gets heavy. Stuck.

And that's exactly what placebo is. People throw the word around like it means fake, but think about what it actually describes. A person believes they're going to heal, and their body heals. That belief isn't just a thought sitting in the head. It's energy. It moves through the body, and the body answers it. The breath deepens, the muscles let go, the current that was stuck starts flowing again. A sugar pill never eased anyone's pain. The belief did, by shifting the energy, and the energy shifted the body. Medicine has been measuring that for decades and still treats it as noise to subtract out of the results. In Reiki, it's the work itself.

So when someone says "it's just placebo," I want to ask: just? You're telling me what a person believes can change what happens inside their body, and that's supposed to be the argument against this work?

He didn't buy it. Said, fine, but he'd come for one session so his wife would stop asking.

That first session he barely relaxed at all. I could feel him monitoring everything, waiting to catch me out. Around the second session, something shifted. His jaw unclenched, his breathing slowed right down, and he fell asleep on the table. Properly asleep, snoring and everything. When he woke up he was almost annoyed about it.

Over the next few weeks his sleep came back in stages. Five hours, then six, then a couple of nights straight through, which he called "suspicious." He still saw his doctor, and I made sure he knew I wasn't a replacement for that. He never once said Reiki works. What he said, at our last session, was, "I still don't know what you're doing. But I know I'm sleeping."

That's the only measure I've ever really trusted. Not whether I can explain the mechanism to a sceptic's satisfaction. Whether the person in front of me is actually getting better.

I know this topic splits this sub pretty hard, and I'm still working out exactly where I sit. So I'm curious. How do you answer this when a sceptical client asks you directly? And for those of you who came in as sceptics yourselves, what actually changed your mind?

"Can you just clear whatever's making me put up with him? I don't want to keep having the same fight."

A client asked me something close to that, maybe four sessions in. She'd been coming for weeks about a marriage that was, by every account she gave me, quietly grinding her down. And each session did help. She'd leave calmer, sleep better that night, tell me the knot in her chest had loosened. I felt good about that. Any practitioner would.

But here's the part that took me a while to admit to myself: every single time, within a week, she was back to the same anxious, drained state, asking for another session. Not because the Reiki had stopped working. Because the thing actually causing the exhaustion was still sitting in her house every evening, and no amount of energy work was going to have that conversation for her.

I want to be honest about how tempting it was to just keep going. She was a regular, the sessions clearly gave her relief, and there's a version of this work where you just keep providing the relief and never say the harder thing. Nobody complains. The calendar stays full.

What made me stop and actually say something was realising I'd started to feel like a painkiller instead of a healer. She wasn't getting better. She was getting managed. And there's a real difference between holding space for someone while they do difficult work, and quietly becoming the thing that lets them keep avoiding it.

So in one session, after she'd settled, I told her plainly. That I could keep helping her carry this, gladly, for as long as she needed. But that the exhaustion wasn't an energetic blockage I could dissolve for her, it was her body correctly telling her something needed to change, and every session was, in a strange way, making that message easier to ignore rather than harder.

She did not love hearing that. She went quiet, said an "okay" that clearly meant she was hurt, and I genuinely thought I'd lost a client and possibly upset her for good.

She came back about six weeks later. Told me she'd finally had the conversation with her husband she'd been avoiding for over a year. Not that everything was fixed, it wasn't, but she'd stopped outsourcing the decision to Tuesday afternoons with me. She thanked me for the honest push, which honestly surprised me more than anything else that's happened in this work.

I think about that a lot now. The technical side of Reiki, hand positions, sensing where the energy's stuck, all of that I can teach in an afternoon. The harder skill, the one nobody really trains you for, is knowing when the most helpful thing you can offer someone is not another session, but the sentence "this isn't something I can fix for you, and you don't actually need me to."

I don't think this is unique to energy work either. I imagine it happens in therapy, in tarot and astrology readings, in prayer, in anything that offers real comfort. Comfort is not the same thing as change, and it's easy, even with good intentions, to let one quietly replace the other.

So I'm curious how the rest of you handle this. Where do you draw the line between holding space for someone and becoming part of what's letting them avoid the harder thing? And has anyone else had a client push back hard when you named it, the way mine did?

Something nobody warned me about when I started doing Reiki was how wrecked I'd feel after certain sessions.

Not all of them. But there'd be days where I'd finish with someone, walk them to the door, come back and just... sit there**. Foggy. Heavy. Weirdly irritable over nothing. I'd get home and be short with people I love for no reason at all.** And I remember thinking, if I'm supposed to be the one helping people feel lighter, why do I feel like I've been hauling bricks around?

There's one session I still think about. Early days for me. A woman came in going through a brutal divorce, and I could feel how much she was holding before she even sat down. I wanted so badly to help that I basically threw everything I had at it. Leaned in, pushed, stayed way past the time, the whole thing. She left looking a bit lighter and I felt great about that for maybe an hour. Then it hit me like a truck. I went home and cried at something on TV that did not warrant crying. Couldn't sleep. I genuinely thought I was coming down with something. It took me days to connect it back to that session, that I'd basically absorbed her whole afternoon and carried it home in my chest.

For a long time I blamed myself. Figured I wasn't good enough yet, or I was messing up something technical. I'd read more, practice more, try harder. Which, looking back, was exactly the wrong instinct. Trying harder was part of the problem.

The thing that eventually clicked, and it took me embarrassingly long, was that on my bad days I wasn't letting anything flow through me. I was pushing. Reaching into my own tank and pouring it out because I wanted so badly for the person in front of me to feel better. Which sounds noble but it just leaves you running on empty. You're not a channel at that point, you're the source, and the source burns out.

The other half of it was way less mystical than I expected. I basically had no boundaries around my own state. I'd sit down to work when I was already anxious or exhausted, skip anything resembling grounding, and this is the big one, I'd never actually close the session. I'd just move on to the next thing with everything still switched on. No wonder I felt like I was carrying the whole day home with me.

What changed things wasn't some advanced technique. It was boring stuff. Taking two minutes before I start to actually land in my own body. Reminding myself I'm not there to fix anyone, just to hold space. And deliberately ending a session, washing my hands, a breath, quietly telling myself it's done and whatever came up isn't mine to keep. Honestly some of that is probably just good psychological hygiene dressed in nicer language, and I'm fine with that. It works either way.

I'm way more careful now about not doing this stuff when my own cup is empty. If I've got nothing in me, the kindest thing I can do for a client is reschedule. That woman, by the way, I still see her occasionally, and these days I can sit with someone in that much pain without absorbing it. That took years, not weeks.

Anyway, that "drained after helping people" feeling isn't unique to Reiki. Therapists get it, nurses get it, honestly anyone who does emotional labour for a living. So I'm curious: for those of you in caring or healing work, what actually helps you leave it at the door? Because I'm still figuring it out.

“I Was Working Hard, But Nothing Was Moving.”

A client came to me after months of professional frustration.

He was capable, experienced and putting in the hours. Yet whenever something important was about to materialise—a new opportunity, a business discussion, a better position—something would suddenly create a delay.

What concerned him most wasn't one failed opportunity.

It was the pattern.

He told me, “I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I'm working harder than before, but my life feels completely stuck.”

Before beginning the Reiki work, I spent considerable time understanding his situation. I don't believe in simply putting my hands on someone and calling everything a blockage. The person's emotional state, recurring patterns and intention matter.

During the first session, we worked on grounding before moving into the deeper energy work.

As I progressed through the session, I noticed considerable tension around the upper abdomen and chest area. His breathing was shallow initially. When I stayed longer in that area, his breathing gradually changed and his body became noticeably more relaxed.

At one point, he became emotional.

He started speaking about the pressure he had been carrying for months—the fear of failing again, the constant comparison with people around him and the feeling that he had to keep proving himself.

That became an important part of his healing.

Energy work isn't always about experiencing something dramatic during a session. Sometimes the first sign is that the mind finally stops fighting for a few minutes.

We continued with a structured series of Reiki sessions rather than expecting one session to change everything.

Over the following weeks, he began noticing changes in himself first. His anxiety around professional decisions reduced. He became more decisive. He stopped obsessively checking whether every opportunity was going to work out.

And then something important happened.

An opportunity that had been repeatedly delayed finally moved forward.

He called me and said, “Something has changed. I don't feel like I'm pushing everything anymore.”

That is where I give Reiki the credit it deserves.

The purpose of the healing was not simply to make an opportunity appear. It was to work on the energetic and emotional patterns that were keeping him in a repetitive state of resistance, fear and exhaustion.

And there is something I would tell anyone going through a similar situation:

Don't immediately assume that working harder is the answer.

If you have been putting in genuine effort for months or years and keep encountering the same pattern—repeated delays, opportunities collapsing at the final stage, constant mental exhaustion or the feeling that you're moving but not progressing—it may be worth looking beyond the obvious external problem.

That doesn't mean abandoning practical action.

It means working on both.

Keep applying. Keep improving your skills. Keep making the calls.

But also ask yourself:

“What inside me keeps returning me to the same pattern?”

That is often where deeper healing work begins.

And this is precisely why I don't treat Reiki as a quick 30-minute relaxation session.

When someone invests in a serious healing process, they deserve attention, assessment, intention and consistent work—not a generic session that is identical for everyone.