What It Was Like Getting a Reiki Attunement
Written By Brandi Fleck
Photo by Hannah Bethel of Hifi Healing. Edited by Brandi Fleck to protect client identity.
This is a personal recount of what I experienced before, during, and after my attunement to Reiki levels 1 and 2.
Thinking about becoming a Reiki practitioner? I just did and I love it.
Or, maybe you want to have a Reiki healing session but wonder what your practitioner might experience and how they learned to administer Reiki. It can be different for every practitioner, but I’m sharing my personal experience here to help.
I won’t give away all of the secret sauce, but I go really deep into sensations, psychic visions, and preparing myself for attunement.
I was attuned in October 2024 to Reiki levels 1 and 2 as provided by Hannah Bethel of Hifi Healing. She’s a Reiki Master Teacher in the Usui Tibetan lineage. She was attuned by the Nashville Shaman, Jeff Crawford. The founder of this lineage is Mikao Usui.
And now, I’m part of the lineage.
Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents:
If you’re not familiar with Reiki, it’s important to know that Reiki is the life force energy that animates all of life, including you. Everyone has it. Being a practitioner enables me to channel it for others to help it flow better and in a more balanced way.
Reiki attunement is a sacred, ceremonial process where the Reiki Master you’ve trained under adjusts or upgrades (attunes) your energy so that you can harness the strength of the Reiki lineage before you to focus Reiki energy through your hands for treatments to heal yourself, bless or infuse objects (like moon water, food, art, talismans, and more) with the energy, and help heal others.
It’s like a right of passage into and reconnection with ancient ancestors, mother Gaia, and Source. While we’re all already connected to each other, ancestors, Gaia, and Source, the attunement process calibrates your body to be able to receive and give massive amounts of energy.
Everyone experiences attunement differently.
One you become attuned, you are then able to practice Reiki in different ways depending on what level you were attuned to.
I’ve been working on deepening my spirituality and strengthening my intuitive and psychic abilities for many years now. Psychism, the esoteric, mysticism, ancient healing practices, and mediumship, among many topics, is always something I’ve been interested in.
I felt called to learn more about Reiki a couple years ago but then decided to become certified as a trauma-informed certified coach instead. As the years have gone on, I felt more and more called to Reiki even though I didn’t know how it would complement or even expand my healing practice for myself and those to whom I offer healing support.
Then, I had a past life regression where the hypnotherapist and Reiki Master Teacher, Hannah Bethel, used Reiki to start the session. During my past life regression, it was evident that I needed to “upgrade the hardware,” or calibrate my body further to handle the massive amounts of energy that download when I’m tuning into my intuition and working with my spirit guides. The energy was flowing so fast, I felt like I was spiraling through space and that I might fly away. It was extremely disorienting. We had to stop the session, I grounded, and then we resumed.
For the last three years, I’ve been working on strengthening my body and becoming healthier through diet, supplements, exercise, and cutting out as much alcohol, caffeine, processed foods, and sugar as possible. After my past life regression, I even decided to cut out meat and animal products for three months. All these lifestyle changes still weren’t enough, and it became clear that “upgrading the hardware” meant that I needed to be attuned so I could better understand how to harness Reiki and have the capacity to work with healing spirit guides and ancestors.
Now that I’ve been attuned, I find that I can still work with massive amounts of energy even if I decide to eat meat every now and then. I remain plant-based about 95% of the time and do occasionally eat eggs, chicken, or fish to stay grounded.
There are still many lifestyle changes I plan to make to support this work, but I’m extremely grateful for the fact that the lifestyle and self healing work I had done prior to becoming attuned actually helped make the process enjoyable rather than a difficult emotional or physical healing, like it can prompt for some.
Before I decided to train as a Reiki practitioner and be attuned, I had worked for about three years raising my vibration and calibrating my body to be able to receive attunement as smoothly as possible. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, even though prioritizing my health and spirituality were a top priority and I was being guided to focus on them, but once I reached the attunement, I knew that’s what all my effort had been leading up to.
I knew this because giving and receiving Reiki at this point, while I was about to be attuned, became a physical activity for me. Sensations in my body were more pronounced, and even more so after I was attuned. My nervous system would have been overloaded with that type of information before.
I took a seated position after having gone through a guided meditation with my instructor and then remaining in the meditative state while I waited for my turn.
While in the meditative state, I saw my spirit self. I don’t mean my higher self, because she’s different, although she was part of this larger whole too. My spirit self was large and unique looking — if you saw her instead of me in my normal physical manifestation, she might be a bit intimidating or scary because you wouldn’t know what she is unless you’d met her before.
She was tall and muscular, yet feminine. She had three eyes. Two were brown like mine, and the third eye changed colors, but it was open and blinking. Her hair was made of the violet flame, so flaming purple locks. Protruding from her shoulder blades are massive white-feathered wings, like an Angel’s. They glow. They ensconce her when folded down, because they’re taller than her on both ends and massive when she spreads them. She floats above the ground.
During my meditative state, she grew roots from her feet to Mother Gaia and also ephemeral flowing, misty roots reached up from shoulders to the heavens. She looked like a tree of life, connected to both Earth and Source energy.
As I was being attuned, the palms of her hands lit up and shot light beams outward. The violet flame blazed in her third eye.
All my ancestors, including those in the Usui Tibetan Reiki lineage that I was being attuned to, circled around her, in a large circle. There must have been thousands of them. They were clapping and congratulating me. They were witnessing my initiation into an ancient healing tradition and I had all their support in bringing it into the physical world.
I was wearing feathers and crystals.
In the “real” world, or the 3-D, where I was receiving the attunement, my body felt a rush of flowing energy. I tingled all over and was overwhelmed with excitement and gratitude. I felt honored. I also got hot and became nauseated for a few minutes, then it subsided. A couple of times, I thought I might be washed away by the massive amounts of energy that was flowing, but I tuned into my spirit self who was grounded as the bridge between worlds, and I stayed put and was able to hold space for the energy.
When I “awoke” from a meditative state, my head was swimming. I felt very spacey, and it took me a couple hours to feel like my normal self again.
Right now, at the beginning of my Reiki practitioner journey, I experience a massive amount of physical sensation that guides me in where and how to administer Reiki.
I have a sense that this will evolve over time and as I work more with my spirit guides and the guides of my clients, other psychic senses will come into play. This will happen in divine timing, when my nervous system will be able to handle it. I already get glimpses of additional assistance and visions in coaching sessions sometimes, so it’ll only be a matter of time and practice before this strengthens.
Regarding the physical sensations, before I was attuned and gave Reiki to my classmate for the first time, I could feel it in my hands. I felt tingles through my entire body. However, after I was attuned, the bodily sensations while administering Reiki felt amplified times ten.
The sensations I felt with my classmate were tingles flowing throughout my entire body at initial connection and a flushing heat in my throat.
After the session, when I asked her what she experienced, she said it was an itch that she could not scratch going down her leg. Being in an educational setting, I went with my gut and proceeded as I would as if I were with my own client. I asked what in her life was creating an itch that she could not scratch. This resulted in an angry confrontation and emotional release that I held space for. I learned that day, however, the need for directing energy flow and not just going with it as fast as it flows through me if that’s not what the best and highest good of the client is. At the same time, I trust that what was meant to happen for the highest good, happened.
Other sensations that I experience during Reiki sessions have been temperature changes. Sometimes when I’m at one area of the body, my top half will heat up and I’ll start sweating, even though I’m simply standing and placing my hands gently on or above the client. At other areas, I’ll start to cool down.
With those with big energy, my heart often races as I connect to it and then calms as I co-regulate with the client.
Sometimes, my hands get hot, pulse, burn and itch, or I’ll feel a pain in my wrists.
My stomach has started gurgling and I’ve started burping in some sessions even though I wasn’t hungry or hadn’t done anything before session to prompt my own digestive system to kick into gear.
I’ve gotten feelings of gratitude, releasing emotions, relief, and of lifetimes of no support or attachments to certain personality types that molded my clients into who they are. Sometimes words will repeat in my mind, like, “receiver, receiver, receiver” or “release, release, release,” for example.
At times, I’ve had a knowing that my hands needed to go to a certain place. I put them there, and after the session, my client has told me that was exactly where I needed to go.
I’ve also seen physical twitching in clients while other clients, I’ve actually seen their energetic bodies convulse even though their physical bodies haven’t moved an inch. For example, I saw an image of one clients right foot kick about a foot into the air, but her actual foot didn’t move.
I’m currently developing an index of what all these sensations actually mean — as I’m practicing, I’m learning what each sensation or energetic communication means to help me navigate future sessions. It’s a lot of fun. It’s also a lot of fun hearing what my clients experienced compared to what I was experiencing at certain moments.
They’ve already shared some wild stories with me, from memories popping up in new perspectives to feeling like the sun was shining down on them at the beach to seeing colors and visions of their third eye blinking at them and feeling like other hands were on them even when I wasn’t touching them!
After my attunement, I immediately started practicing Reiki with clients. Luckily, I work at a spa that values mysticism and holistic wellness like I do, so I was able to use the rooms and massage tables we have there.
The sensations I get when practicing on different clients so far have been similar but different from each person. I’m honing how I want to start and end sessions and what tools, like breathwork, oracle cards, crystals, and aura sprays I want to bring in to assist with gauging and clearing energies.
Aside from learning what different sensations mean for me when I practice, there are also things to be healed bubbling up in my physical body. Several years ago when I started heavily focusing on my physical health like I mentioned earlier in this article, I was in a healing crisis. Symptoms were occurring that doctors had no answers for. I searched and searched and tried different healing modalities to bring my mind, body, and spirit into equilibrium.
I thought I was on the other side of those symptoms, but, unsurprisingly, symptoms from several years ago are now popping up again. Asthma flare ups, spells of dizziness, and more are back. I’m here for it and to get to the bottom of it. I apparently still had more detoxing to do and Reiki is helping me do that. Every time I practice Reiki on a client, Reiki heals me a little bit too.
The most profound thing that’s happened though, is that now what free-flowing Reiki feels like, I’ve realized that I’ve been using it all along for my whole life. Now, I have a name for it and structure to put around it so it can be harnessed and used for more good than I ever imagined possible.
I’m excited to see how my practice with Reiki evolves and how my own unique gifts combine with Reiki to create a beautiful experience for those seeking rest, relaxation, healing, and balance.
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If you’d like to experience a Reiki session with me, schedule a free consultation. There, we’ll talk about what you’re wanting to accomplish and even if it would be helpful to combine it with trauma-informed coaching or life coaching.
Join the conversation!
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions in the comments.
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Hi, I’m the founder of Human Amplified. I’m Brandi Fleck, a recognized communications and interviewing expert, a writer, an artist, and a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and trauma recovery coach. No matter how you interact with me, I help you tell and change your story so you can feel more like yourself. So welcome!
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