The History of Reiki

From Mikao Usui to the World

Reiki is practised today in clinics, spas and homes all over the world, but its story begins just a century ago, with one man’s search on a Japanese mountainside.

It is a history that travels from the temples of Kyoto to the islands of Hawaii and out across the globe, carried by a small handful of devoted teachers. Here is how Reiki came to be, and how it found its way to us.

Mikao Usui and the Mountain

Reiki was founded by Mikao Usui, a Japanese spiritual seeker born in 1865. A student of many disciplines, Usui spent years searching for a method of healing that anyone could learn.

According to the tradition, the breakthrough came in 1922, during a twenty-one-day retreat of meditation and fasting on Mount Kurama, near Kyoto, where he is said to have received both a profound spiritual awakening and the ability to heal through his hands. Whatever one makes of that account, what followed is a matter of record.

The First Reiki Clinic

Soon after, Usui founded a school and healing society in Tokyo, the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, and opened a clinic where he treated the sick and trained students in his method. His reputation grew, and it is said he gave treatment to many in the aftermath of the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923.

By the time of his death in 1926, Usui had taught a number of students who would carry the practice forward, and laid down the gentle principles and methods that define Reiki to this day.

Chujiro Hayashi Refines the System

Among Usui’s students was Chujiro Hayashi, a former naval officer with a medical background, who became one of the most important figures in Reiki’s development. Hayashi opened his own clinic in Tokyo and refined the practice into a more structured form, developing the systematic sequences of hand positions that many practitioners still use. It was at Hayashi’s clinic that Reiki would meet the woman who carried it to the West.

Hawayo Takata Brings Reiki West

Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii, came to Hayashi’s clinic in the 1930s seeking healing for her own ill health. Moved by what she experienced, she stayed to train, became a practitioner and then a master, and returned home to Hawaii to practise.

Over the following decades she introduced Reiki across the United States and beyond, and before her death in 1980 she had trained twenty-two masters of her own. It is very largely thanks to Takata that Reiki spread through the Western world at all.

Reiki Today

From those twenty-two masters, and the many teachers who followed, Reiki branched into a wealth of lineages and styles, some staying close to the Western form Takata taught, others returning to study the older Japanese roots of the practice.

Today Reiki is practised in countless variations on every continent, offered in hospitals and hospices as well as wellness centres, and taught to hundreds of thousands of people. Yet for all its branches, every form traces back to that same source: one seeker, one mountain, and a wish to bring gentle healing within everyone’s reach.

Listen on Spotify

Our Reiki Relaxation album was composed in honour of this tradition and its sacred concepts. Press play and let it carry you into the same stillness Reiki has offered for a hundred years.

To receive or offer Reiki today is to take part in a living tradition only a century old, yet already woven across the world. From Mikao Usui’s mountain retreat to this present moment, it has been passed hand to hand, teacher to student, as a simple, gentle gift, one that continues, quietly, to spread.

Sources

NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health – Reiki: What You Need To Know, nccih.nih.gov
The Usui Reiki tradition (the documented Usui → Hayashi → Takata lineage)