When I look back on my own journey with Reiki today, I recognise something I was not yet aware of at the beginning. For a long time, I believed I was searching for a special force, for deeper access to the energy and perhaps also for a part of myself that I had somehow lost along the way. This search felt serious and necessary. It led me to teachings, initiations, symbols, conversations and experiences that shaped me in different ways. Yet the longer I worked with Reiki, the more strongly I sensed that the real answer was not waiting for me at the end of that search. Something within me began to realise that I did not need to find what was already present.
At the time, I could not yet put this feeling into clear words. I had learnt to think of Reiki as something that came to me from outside. It seemed to be an energy I had to be opened to, something another person could give me access to. Without noticing it, this created the idea that there was a distance between me and universal life energy. I believed I had to fulfil certain conditions before I could truly connect with it. The more I wanted to learn, the more my attention turned outwards. I searched for the right knowledge, the right teacher and the right method without realising that the search itself continually reinforced the sense of separation.
For a long time, this attitude felt completely natural to me. If something is valuable, I thought, then it must be worked for, understood or earned. Spirituality too seemed to me like a path along which I had to progress step by step. Each new experience promised to bring me a little closer to what I longed for. Yet beneath all these experiences, a quiet restlessness remained. There were moments of deep connection, but at the same time the question kept returning: did I already know enough, had I received enough, had I gone far enough? Today, I recognise that this restlessness did not arise from any lack of Reiki. It arose from my belief that Reiki existed somewhere beyond me.
Over time, something in my perception began to change. It did not happen through an extraordinary experience or another step within a system. The change came in quiet moments when, for a while, I stopped trying to achieve anything. When I was not attempting to generate, direct or understand energy, I sometimes became aware of a presence that required no effort. It was not spectacular and did not try to impress me. It was simply there. In my breath, in my hands, in my body and in the stillness that arose when my thoughts became quieter for a moment.
These experiences led me to a realisation that fundamentally changed the way I understood Reiki. Perhaps Reiki had never been something I lacked. Perhaps I had not searched for it because it was hidden, but because I had forgotten how close it was. The energy did not first have to come to me, because I had never been separate from it. What I had experienced as a search was, in truth, an attempt to remember a connection that existed before every method and every idea. At first, this thought felt unfamiliar because it called into question so much of what I had assumed until then. At the same time, it brought with it a deep sense of calm.
I began to understand that remembrance in this context has nothing to do with recalling knowledge from the past. It is not about remembering a particular teaching or an earlier spiritual experience. This remembrance goes deeper. It is an inner recognition that does not arise from the mind. It is the moment when I stop trying to connect with the energy and instead perceive that the connection has never ceased. Reiki then no longer becomes something I do. It becomes a reality that reveals itself when I stop trying to hold on to it or force it into a particular form.
For me, this is where the true source of Reiki lies today. Not in a technique that has to be performed as correctly as possible, but in a presence that is accessible to every human being. Techniques can support us and symbols can carry meaning, but they are not the source of the energy. They can direct our attention, but they do not create what is already there. This distinction became increasingly important to me. For as long as I believed Reiki was bound to a particular external form, my attention remained with the form. Only when I began to look beyond the form could I recognise the simplicity of what it had originally been pointing towards.
This simplicity does not mean that Reiki becomes superficial or arbitrary. Quite the opposite. When external certainties grow quieter, a deeper responsibility begins. I can no longer rely solely on a method to decide for me what is right. I have to learn to perceive more honestly, become stiller and trust my own inner awareness again. This requires patience, because many of us learn very early to trust external guidance more than our own perception. I too had to recognise how often I looked for confirmation even though something within me already knew the answer.
The more I allowed myself to trust this inner perception, the more clearly I sensed that energy is not present only during a treatment or a conscious practice. It showed itself in everyday encounters, in my mood, in my language and in the way I entered a room. I could sense it in nature just as much as in the stillness of a room. It appeared in an honest conversation, in a touch and sometimes even in the courage to do nothing. In this way, Reiki began to leave behind its limited place within a treatment. It became a way of perceiving life.
This change also meant that I had to look again at my understanding of healing. In the past, I often associated healing with the desire to change, release or improve something. But if Reiki is remembrance, healing does not begin only when a particular result occurs. It begins in the moment when I meet another person or myself without inner resistance. In this presence, nothing has to be forced. I do not give the energy an instruction it has to fulfil. Instead, I open a space in which what is already present can be seen, felt and allowed.
For me, this realisation also meant letting go of the idea that I am merely a channel through which an external force flows. The image of a channel can be helpful because it reminds us that we do not have to control or force the energy personally. At the same time, however, it can reinforce the idea that we are separate from the source. Today, I do not experience myself as an empty vessel that first has to be filled. I see myself as part of the same energy that moves through all living things. I do not receive it only from outside. I encounter it within myself, around me and in everything with which I come into contact.
This perspective has made the way I work with Reiki quieter. I feel less pressure to perceive or produce something special. There are days when the energy seems strongly present and others when it feels almost indistinguishable from my ordinary experience. In the past, I might have seen this as a lack or doubted my connection. Today, I know that stillness does not mean absence. Energy does not always have to feel strong, warm or clearly perceptible in order to be present. Sometimes it reveals itself precisely in the fact that nothing extraordinary happens and I remain completely present all the same.
Looking back, I can see that my long search was not meaningless. Every step showed me something, even those experiences that temporarily took me further away from myself. Perhaps I had to experience the search itself in order to understand its inner mechanism. As long as I believed that I would finally arrive through the next place, the next method or the next initiation, I could not see that this arrival was already possible. The search did not lead me to the energy, but eventually it revealed why I had felt separate from it.
Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of many spiritual paths. At first, they give us a direction until we recognise that the direction points inward. They give us words and forms until we become still enough to perceive what those words are pointing towards. A path can accompany us, but it cannot replace immediate experience. At some point, a moment comes when we must stop merely speaking about connection and become willing to recognise it within ourselves.
Today, I understand the words “You never really searched for me” differently. They do not mean that my longing was false or that my path was wrong. For me, they mean that what I was searching for was carrying me throughout the entire search. Reiki was not the goal waiting for me at the end. It was the quiet presence within every single step. It was present in my doubts just as much as in my realisations. It did not disappear when I could not feel it, and it did not come closer when I learnt another method.
What changed was not the energy itself. It was my willingness to stop searching for it outside myself. I began to let go of the ideas that stood between me and this simple experience. In doing so, I recognised that many of these ideas had grown out of fear. The fear of not being enough, not being ready or not having access. But universal life energy does not ask for a title, a degree or a particular achievement. It is not something granted to us after we have passed a test. It is an expression of life itself.
For me, there is nothing exclusive about this recognition. It takes nothing away from another person’s experience and it does not devalue any tradition. Every path can offer valuable insights, and every form can support us for a certain time. What matters to me is simply whether a form leads us closer to our own perception or leaves us permanently believing that without it we are incomplete. Today, Reiki does not remind me that I have to become something special. It reminds me that I am already part of what I spent so long trying to reach.
Perhaps the deepest experience of Reiki therefore begins not with a search, but with a pause. With a breath in which nothing has to happen. With hands that do not need to prove they can heal. With an awareness that, for a moment, stops trying to explain itself. Within this simplicity, something can become perceptible that was never gone. Not as a spectacular answer, but as a quiet certainty.
Today, I no longer believe that we have to find Reiki. Rather, we are invited to recognise which thoughts, expectations and old ideas made us believe we had lost it. When these veils become quieter for a moment, what remains is not emptiness. What remains is a presence that has always carried us. And perhaps this is the remembrance that truly matters. Not the remembrance of a method, but the remembrance that there has never been any real distance between us and the source.