Do Online Reiki Attunements Really Work? AI, Embodiment, and the Future of Reiki

Online Reiki Attunements: What We Gain,

What We Lose

A few years back I wrote about how effective online Reiki is, and I stand by it. Now that I've been teaching Reiki both online and in person for almost 6 years of my 18 year professional practice, I have a lot more to say on the matter.

The pandemic of 2020 was a critical turning point for many of the world's most prominent Reiki teachers. We watched teachers who swore that Reiki could never be reasonably taught online, follow their inner wisdom into creating new forms of transmitting the Reiki healing modality by distance.

I've taken some amazing Reiki classes online myself, absolutely delighted by the power of healing energy to easily transmit through time and space.

But now, half a decade in, I feel firmly that for the majority of people (though not all), an online Reiki class should only be a first step in their dedicated learning process. I'll explain why, in just a minute.

What Online Reiki Does Well

Online Reiki classes are fantastic for creating a learning space that allows students to return multiple times to concepts as they learn and grow. This deepens spiritual understanding and helps cultivate a mindset for Reiki that's really quite essential.

Students who learn online often take their first steps in channeling the energy directly in their home or work environment, so the transition from classroom to real life isn't challenging in the same ways.

I think students should continue to seek online classes when they want to test out or engage a potential long term teacher. Being able to see how a teacher both teaches and navigates energy over longer windows of time can help create stability in the learning process.

I also feel that online classes are a great way to engage in extended or more advanced material with an existing teacher that students are already learning from. Because the energy of mentorship has already been established, the student is more likely to understand the teacher's style and receive a deeper transmission of the teachings.

The Psychic Risks No One Talks About

Attunements can also be given online to help students stabilize in the healing energy. However, over the past 5 years I've come to recognize that doing work online can open up psychic doorways in unexpected ways.

Online work needs to be held in a strong psychic container with clear intentions and a clear acknowledgement of the energies being invited.

Too often I've seen classes that were meant to be about Reiki, or angels, de-railed by conversations brought into the fold by students, wherein other less harmonic energies were discussed and accidentally invoked.

While this can happen anytime and anywhere, re-entraining the energy into loving consciousness while still holding the unique needs of individual students, is generally an easier task in person.

As light workers in an age of technology, we would do well to cultivate strong intentions and precision in our spoken words and energy transmissions, when doing online Reiki, and when passing attunements with wifi or internet involved.

Reiki in the Age of AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Right now I've been watching our world struggle with the balance between creating with new technologies, and being ethically responsible in those creations. I've often found myself thinking, "Just because we CAN create something, doesn't mean we SHOULD."

As we grow into our abilities as creators during this new millenium, I think we've got to really decide what the intent, or purpose, of our creations is. With AI (artificial intelligence), how do we really want to use these tools?

If an AI can write articles, give advice, and lead meditations, could we then expect AI to offer healing attunements and certifications as well?

Are the words that AI can generate for a Reiki class, an empty container for spirit and life force, or do these words and AI intentions also generate the energy of attunement?

After all, AI is electromagnetic in nature... If there is attunement, what precisely are we attuning to?

After all, AI is electromagnetic in nature... If there is attunement, what precisely are we attuning to? And if we are teaching classes in through the vehicle of an electromagnetic or wi-fi astral realm, how does the online aspect of this teaching affect our psyche?

As we continue to think about online Reiki, I think these are very real questions we need to explore.

Teachers ultimately have to decide for themselves whether attunements are something they want to adapt to a distance or online format.

Why Our Body Matters In Reiki

Personally, I still love both distance attunements as well as in person attunements, but there's something I've begun to ponder more carefully in this last year as dozens of new students have come through:

Online students don't know what my hands feel like. Their hearts have not beat in the same room with me. Honestly as a highly psychic woman I often feel the hearts of my students, and through clairalience I sometimes even have strong impressions of their physical energy field so I'm rarely surprised when I meet Reiki students in person.

That said, I don't find online Reiki to be a substitute for in-person learning; it is merely a different path! Ideally I'd love all of my students to learn through multimedia methods like our online learning portal, audio meditations, and videos as well as coming for an in-person class experience and attunement.

In the United States, ours has been a consumer culture. We have learned through acculturation to go shopping as a source of joy, comfort, and even love. Western society encourages a consumptive mindset around food, media, and many other products that can create an endorphin rush or dopamine hit in our brains.

The result is that we become hungry for more, and that hunger over-rides our patience for right timing and aligned connection.

Culturally speaking, there's essentially a hungry spirit that inhabits our collective mindset. In Buddhism, hungry spirits are vampiric entities with insatiable hunger who have developed that way due to greed, selfishness, envy, and through actions that have taken them out of karmic balance.

This hungry spirit causes people to purchase spiritual classes the same way they purchase clothing, wearing it for a season and discarding for the next shiny new topic, teacher, or offering.

While I think that Reiki offers much of the antidote to this mindset, helping us to entrain into lovingkindness, connection, safety, presence, generosity, and self embodiment, these types of teachings take time and real human relationships with friends, teachers, peers, and mentors. Many people simply don't let their guard down in the same way, unless they're sitting knee to knee with someone.

100 Years of Reiki Lineage On the Cusp of Change

As Reiki comes upon its 100 year anniversary, we're at a pivotal turning point. There are reasons Reiki attunements were done in person, and that teachings were often secret, but now times are changing. As we adapt, the decisions we make in how we choose to learn Reiki (as well as teach it!), will determine the effectiveness and the longevity of this practice.

This year I will continue to teach online and in person. However I find myself thinking, again, that "Just because I can, doesn't mean I should." In looking at the longer trajectory of both online and in person students,

I see that there is an embodied form of love that can only be offered when you look someone in the eye, give them a hug, hold their hand, wipe aware their real tears, or get a feel of their aura real-time.

While I don't think it's possible to meet every single person I teach, I'd like to offer this thought-- If you can you meet your teachers, do it. Book a flight, save the money, take a train, even if it's just for a little bit of time.

We humans need human contact, and there is a transmission that has no words, it lingers in between spaces, in the breath of surprise, in the light that catches on a cheekbone, and these gifts are also a part of the experience of learning about Reiki.

We can't let our bodies be the afterthought.

So in closing, yes I know that online classes really work, but they are just the beginning. I invite you to expand your thinking and weave both the liminal of the online experience with your everyday beloved earthly life.

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DAILEY LITTLE is a healing practitioner, transformational life coach, ordained Priestess, and teacher who founded Healing Heart Reiki to help others navigate life with joy. She offers private sessions, and teaches classes in healing and mindset from a magical peaceful corner of the world in Northern California. For more info see: www.SantaRosaReiki.com