Reiki, Palliative Care, and the Case for Healthcare Integration

From Ancient Wisdom to the Modern Ward: Reiki, Palliative Care, and the Case for Healthcare Integration

By Lainey Bowler | Usui Shiki Ryoho — 4th Degree Shinpiden Shihan | Reiki Master Teacher & Accredited Reiki Treatment Practitioner (ARTP) | Director, Reiki Australia Board of Directors
 
 
 
Rooted in History, Proven in Practice
Reiki is not a new idea. It is not a wellness trend. It is a healing system with deep historical roots, a lineage of medical minds, and a growing body of clinical evidence — and it is time it was recognised as such within the Australian healthcare system.
 
To understand where Reiki is going, it helps to understand where it came from.
 
 
 
The Origins: Usui, Hayashi, and the Medical Mind Behind the Method
Reiki was developed in Japan in the early 1920s by Mikao Usui (1865–1926) — a scholar, spiritual practitioner, and lifelong seeker who spent decades studying medicine, psychology, theology, and ancient healing traditions across Japan, China, and Europe. A lay Tendai Buddhist trained in Buddhist monasticism from childhood, Usui also studied kiko (the Japanese form of Chi Kung) and reached master level in Yagyu Ryu martial arts — disciplines that deepened his understanding of the relationship between breath, energy, and the body long before his healing system took form.
 
His breakthrough came in 1922 following an intensive 21-day period of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama — a sacred site near Kyoto where Buddhism and Shinto tradition converge — where he received the energetic awakening that became the foundation of modern Reiki practice.

He named the system Usui Reiki Ryo-Ho — the Usui Reiki Treatment Method for the Improvement of Mind and Body — establishing healing clinics in Tokyo and becoming widely known throughout Japan.

After the devastating 1923 Kanto earthquake, Usui and his practitioners treated thousands of injured and traumatised survivors, and in recognition of his extraordinary contribution the Japanese Government awarded him the Kun San — an imperial honour for distinguished service to others.
 
Before his death in 1926, Usui had trained more than 2,000 students and initiated 20 Reiki teachers — among them one whose contribution to clinical Reiki would prove particularly significant.
 
Dr. Chujiro Hayashi (1880–1940) was a medical doctor, naval physician, and retired naval captain — a man of science, discipline, and extraordinary compassion — who became one of Usui's most prominent students in the early 1920s. Graduating from the Japan Naval Academy in 1902, Hayashi served in the Russo-Japanese War and rose to become Director of Ominato Port Defence Station before retiring from military service and turning his full attention to Reiki. He became a Shihan (master teacher) under Usui in 1925 — possibly the last person to receive that transmission before Usui's death in 1926.
 
After Usui's passing, Hayashi established the Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai — the Hayashi Reiki Research Institute — in Tokyo, where he employed 20 practitioners working in pairs at ten treatment tables. He brought a clinician's discipline to the work: meticulously documenting every patient, every condition, every hand position, and every treatment response. From this systematic clinical observation, he developed the Reiki Ryoho Shinshin — the Guidelines for Reiki Healing Method — a codified treatment manual that revolutionised how Reiki could be taught, standardised, and applied across different medical presentations.
 
It was Hayashi who trained Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman who came to his Tokyo clinic seriously ill and left in full health — and who would go on to bring Reiki to Hawaii, the United States, and ultimately the world. Her grand daughter Phyllis Lei Furumoto would continue to share the legacy of Reiki, a ripple effect outwards, world-wide.
 
This is not incidental history. It is the foundation of everything. From its earliest clinical development, Reiki was shaped by a medical professional who understood that healing the body required far more than physical intervention alone — and who believed that a systematised, documented, teachable healing practice belonged in the hands of as many people as possible.
 
 
 
Ki, Breath, and the Japanese Understanding of Preventative Health
In Japanese culture and traditional medicine, the concept of ki — the vital life force energy that flows through all living things — is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a foundational understanding of health that has shaped Japanese medicine, martial arts, spiritual practice, and daily life for centuries.
 
The word Reiki itself translates as rei (universal, spiritual consciousness) and ki (life force energy) — and the cultivation, balance, and free flow of ki has long been understood as central to physical and emotional well-being. This understanding is embedded in the Japanese language itself: genki (health, vitality) literally means "original ki"; byoki (illness) translates as "sick ki." Disruption or stagnation of ki — whether through chronic stress, emotional suppression, trauma, or physical illness — is understood to precede and perpetuate disease.
 
Breathwork (kokyu in Japanese) is a cornerstone of this understanding. Conscious, intentional breathing is not an add-on to Japanese health and spiritual practice — it is woven into its very foundations. From Zen meditation to martial arts to traditional healing, the breath is the bridge between the conscious mind and the body's innate capacity for self-regulation, repair, and restoration.

The practice of kokyu-ho — breath energy work — is integral to both Reiki and many of Japan's ancient wellness traditions, activating the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the mind, and drawing the practitioner and recipient into a shared state of healing presence.
 
In this context, Reiki is not alternative medicine. It is an expression of one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated preventative health traditions — one that Western medicine is only now beginning to confirm through neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, and stress-response research.
 
 
 
My Qualifications: What Professional Reiki Actually Looks Like
Reiki is not merely something that I do, it is a deeply spiritual practice, woven with intention, carried upon each breath, every single day. I returned to study reiki, and in 2023 completed training to be initiated into 4th Degree level of Usui Shiki Ryoho — Shinpiden Shihan — the Master Teacher level. This is the highest level of Reiki practice and teaching within the Usui tradition, representing not only technical proficiency but a responsibility to uphold and transmit the integrity of the system with precision, ethics, and humility. With direct unbroken lineage directly traceable to Mikao Usui himself. 
 
Current professional membership with Reiki Australia — the peak national body for Reiki in Australia — is held at the Combined Reiki Master Teacher and Accredited Reiki Treatment Practitioner (ARTP) membership level. This combined category recognises both my teaching and my clinical treatment practice, and it is not easily obtained.

To hold ARTP status, I am required to meet and maintain the following standards:
 

• Current First Aid certification and current CPR certification — ensuring I am equipped to respond to any health event in a treatment setting
• Current Professional Indemnity Insurance — providing protection for both clients and practitioner
  
• Minimum of 10 documented treatment logs submitted in the first year — demonstrating active, accountable clinical practice from the outset
• Completion of Unit 1 of the Reiki Australia Professional Development for Reiki Treatment — a structured course addressing knowledge and professional responsibilities aligned with health care worker standards
  
  
• Ongoing continuing professional development — because ethical practice is not a destination but a commitment renewed every year
  
  
• Full adherence to the Reiki Australia Code of Ethics and Code of Professional Conduct
  
• Full compliance with the National Code of Conduct for Non-Registered Health Care Workers — the statutory framework agreed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Health Council, setting minimum standards of safe, ethical, and accountable practice for all unregistered health practitioners across Australia
   
  This last point deserves particular emphasis. The National Code of Conduct is a legal requirement in most Australian states and territories for all non-registered health care workers — including Reiki practitioners. It mandates that practitioners provide safe and ethical healthcare, obtain informed consent, protect client privacy, minimise harm, maintain appropriate records, carry current insurance and First Aid qualifications, and never mislead clients about their qualifications or make false claims about curing serious illness.
   
  These are not aspirational guidelines. They are the professional floor — and they are the standards I hold myself to in every single treatment, whether I am working at a hospital bedside, visiting a client at home, working with an animal, or sitting with someone across the country via distance Reiki.
   
  This is what professional Reiki practice looks like. And it is the standard Reiki Australia is working to establish and protect across the entire profession.
   
   
   
  Reiki in Palliative and Hospice Care: Where It Matters Most
  Of all the settings in which Reiki can make a difference, perhaps none is more profound — or more necessary — than palliative and hospice care.
   
  When curative medicine reaches its limit, the human being does not stop needing care. If anything, the need deepens. People facing the end of life need more than symptom management. They need to feel safe. To feel seen. To have their fear met with compassion rather than clinical distance. To be held, gently and completely, as whole persons — not as diagnoses.
   
  This is precisely what Reiki offers.
   
  My three months volunteering at the BRICC Wellness Centre at Grampians Health Ballarat in 2023 — providing weekly Reiki treatments to oncology patients — gave me a front-row view of what ethical, professionally delivered Reiki looks like within a hospital setting, and what it gives patients that nothing else quite can. Clients arrived exhausted from treatment, frightened, sometimes in significant pain, carrying the emotional weight of a diagnosis that had changed everything. Within a single session, I watched their breathing slow, their shoulders drop, their faces soften. The fear did not disappear — but it became manageable. The pain did not vanish — but it eased. And in that ease, something opened: conversations about meaning, fear, family, and the approach of death that might not have happened anywhere else.
   
  Inspired by those experiences, a number of BRICC clients sought me out for continuing Reiki treatment in my private practice. What unfolded in those sessions has shaped my deepest understanding of what Reiki is capable of at the intersection of serious illness, spiritual need, and the approach of death. With their permission, I share two of those stories in my longer blog piece, Reiki as Integrative Self-Care — a man in palliative care who found spiritual peace and preparation for his passing through regular Reiki sessions, and a woman who moved from a terminal breast cancer diagnosis into remission, crediting Reiki as part of the profound inner shift that made that possible.
   
  These stories are shared with profound respect and gratitude. And they are the reason I show up to this work every day.
   
   
   
  A Vision for Healthcare: Reiki as Allied Health, and Every Nurse Who Could Change a Life
  Here is my vision, stated plainly: I want every nurse, every doctor, and every healthcare worker in Australia to have access to Reiki training, and for Reiki to be formally recognised within the allied health framework.
   
  This is not idealism. It is a logical next step that leading health systems overseas have already taken.
•  In the United Kingdom, hospices have trained staff nurses as Reiki practitioners so that Reiki can be available at the point of need — day or night — without requiring a separate appointment.
• Research published in BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care documented a UK hospice programme in which nurses trained to Reiki Level II were able to integrate Reiki directly into routine ward care, reaching an additional 70 patients, carers, and staff in just two months.
• The Footprints Day Centre at St John of God Murdoch Community Hospice — which just received Australia's inaugural Professor Con Michael Clinical Excellence Award for Patient Experience in March 2026 — runs a model built on exactly this philosophy: that complementary therapies, including Reiki, belong within the care team, not outside it. 
  
• Imagine a future where an Australian nurse, completing a Reiki training programme supported by their own health service, pauses at the bedside of a frightened patient and offers five minutes of gentle Reiki before their next procedure.
• Where a palliative care practitioner is equipped not only to manage pain medication but to sit in healing presence with a patient who is afraid of dying, and help them find peace.
• Where Reiki is not a referral to an external provider — but a living skill within the ward, offered freely at the point of need.
   
  That future requires that Reiki be taken seriously as a professional discipline — with rigorous training, documented practice, clear ethical standards, legal accountability, and formal recognition within the health system. That is precisely what Reiki Australia's ARTP framework, the National Code of Conduct, and the broader integrative medicine movement are building towards.
   
   
   
  The Standard We Are Working Towards
  Dr. Chujiro Hayashi — the naval physician who brought a scientist's discipline to Usui's spiritual system nearly a century ago — understood something that still holds true today: Reiki's greatest contribution is made not in isolation, but in partnership with medical care. He documented. He standardised. He trained. He built the foundations for a healing system to be taken seriously as a clinical discipline.
   
  That is exactly what we are doing now — in Australia, within Reiki Australia, and within every clinical relationship I hold as a practitioner. The work of legitimisation is ongoing. The standards are being built, session by session, clinical placement by clinical placement, research paper by research paper, and patient story by patient story.
   
  And one day — perhaps sooner than we think — an Australian nurse will complete their Reiki training through a programme supported by their own health service, walk into a palliative care room, and offer a patient something that no medication can: the quiet, certain knowledge that they are not alone, and that healing — in all its forms — is still available to them.
   
  That is the future I am working towards. I hope you will join me.
  
• Lainey Bowler - Elaine Bowler Reiki
   
   
   
  About Lainey Bowler
• Certificate IV Pathology Collection - 17 Yrs experience in the medical & healthcare industry as a qualified Phlebotomist.
• serves as a Director with Reiki Australia --Board of Directors
• Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki Practitioner — Shinpiden & Shihan
• Reiki Master Teacher and Accredited Reiki Treatment Practitioner (ARTP) combined membership with Reiki Australia
• ETAA certified Equine & Animal Reiki Practitioner
• IICT, International Institute of Complementary Therapists.
• Shelter Animal Reiki Association - Community Supporter
• Elaine Bowler Reiki  offers home-visits, and distance Reiki sessions for people and animals across the City of Ballarat and surrounding regions, and regular monthly Reiki Meditation & Well-Being workshops
   
  Contact: [email protected] | 0425 778 292
   
   

  

  
   
  Key references:
   
  
• Usui, M. (1922). Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai. Tokyo. Historical records and memorial.
  
• Streich, M. (2009). The Story of Dr. Chujiro Hayashi. Reiki News Magazine, Fall 2009. reiki.org
  
• Reiki Australia. Accredited Reiki Treatment Practitioner (ARTP) Membership Requirements. reikiaustralia.com.au/accredited-reiki-treatment-practice/
  
• Reiki Australia. Reiki Precepts and the National Code of Conduct. reikiaustralia.com.au
  
• Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Health Council (2015). National Code of Conduct for Health Care Workers.
  
• BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care (2018). Reiki Trained Nurses: Integrating Energy Therapy into Palliative Care. Eden Valley Hospice, Cumbria, UK.
  
• St John of God Health Care (March 2026). Murdoch Team Recognised for Outstanding Patient Experience. sjog.org.au
  
• BMC Palliative Care (2024). Therapeutic Effects of Reiki on Interventions for Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis. Vol. 23, Article 147.
  
• Systematic Reviews / Springer Nature (2025). Effects of Reiki Therapy on Quality of Life: A Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials. Vol. 14, Article 72.