What is the difference between Reiki and energy healing?

Simply put, the core difference between the two is their affiliation - energy healing is the collective name for all mind-body and soul healing techniques centered on "adjustment of life energy", while Reiki is a subdivision of energy healing under the general category, with a clear origin, fixed operating specifications and inheritance lineage.

Speaking of this issue, I was also confused about this issue when I first came into contact with the mind-body-spirit community. Many friends who are just starting out would even directly equate the two. No wonder there are often disputes. Old-school Reiki practitioners tend to emphasize the boundary between the two. They feel that the core threshold of Reiki is inheritance attunement, which is the attunement process passed down from Mr. Usui Onao. You must have a certified teacher of the corresponding level to complete the attunement for you before you can use Reiki energy. Without this process, even if you follow the Reiki hand position a hundred times, it is not considered serious Reiki healing. But other energy healing methods do not have this limitation. If you want to learn how to arrange golden crystals, you can buy a few professional books on your own and follow the tutorials to arrange the arrangements for your friends. Even if you don't follow the teacher to learn systematically, as long as your perception of the energy of the crystals is accurate enough, you can still get results. Not to mention that there are various techniques such as singing bowls, sound therapy, and ether cleansing, all of which are included in the category of energy healing. However, some practitioners of new schools of Reiki do not agree with this statement. Nowadays, many new Reiki, such as Karuna Reiki and Purple Fire Reiki, have long weakened the requirements for offline attunement. There are even remote attunement and self-help attunement courses. You can buy a class for tens of dollars and complete the attunement process at home. At this time, the boundary between Reiki and other energy healing without inheritance is actually very blurred.

I encountered this situation before when I went to the Shanghai Body and Mind Exhibition. There was a stall that had both "Reiki Healing" and "Energy Integrated Healing" signs. I asked the stall owner the difference between the two, and she gave me a very straightforward example: If you make an appointment for a Reiki case, I will only rely on my hands throughout the process, pressing 12 fixed hand positions to transmit energy to you. At most, I will give you some daily precautions at the end.； If your appointment is for energy integration, I might first use a pendulum to measure your chakra blockages, then bang a singing bowl for a while to clear them, and finally use Reiki to replenish your energy, which is equivalent to using several energy healing techniques together. I've been in a trap before. I didn't understand the details of the project clearly when I made an appointment for therapy. When I arrived, I realized that I had an appointment for integrated energy therapy, not Reiki. That time, the whole process involved laying crystal arrays and spraying flower essences. The physical sensation was completely different from when I did Reiki - When doing formal Reiki, your body feels warm, as if there is a thin stream of warmth running along the healer's palms and drilling into the seams of the bones. During that integrated treatment, I felt a numbness on the back of my neck throughout the treatment. I was so tired that I slept all afternoon after the treatment. The difference between the two experiences is quite big.

To put it bluntly, you can understand by using an analogy. Energy healing is equivalent to the category of "tea", which includes white tea, black tea, Pu'er, and rock tea. Reiki is the Wuyi rock tea among them. It has a fixed origin, technology, and evaluation standards. The threshold for serious rock tea is not low, but now there are also many foreign mountain teas sold under the name of rock tea. Laymen can't tell the difference, and naturally it is easy to confuse Reiki with all energy healing. Now there is actually no need to be too entangled in the boundary between the two. Many healers will combine Reiki with other energy healing techniques. As long as it can help the patient relieve emotions and adjust the state, it is not that important whether it is "pure" Reiki, right?