How Can Reiki Help Your Nursing Practice ?

How Can Reiki Help Your Nursing Practice?

As an integrative practice, Reiki focuses on the client, not a specific illness. Reiki and Nursing go hand in hand because Reiki can help a patient become more receptive to traditional medical treatment. Reiki by itself often helps a patient not ready for a specific therapy to become calmer, more accepting, and better prepared.

What Exactly is Reiki?

Reiki is a non-invasive energy therapy with Japanese origins. Its practice balances the body’s biofield and boosts the body’s capability to heal itself.  During a Reiki session, energy flows through a practitioner’s hands into deficient or constrained areas in the biofield. It fills them with more positive energy and strengthens energy pathways so the individual can more easily heal in a naturally supported way. The nursing diagnosis appropriate for this situation is “Disturbed Energy Field.”

Can Reiki Help Your Nursing Practice

Although it has many spiritual aspects, Reiki is not a religion. A Reiki practitioner encourages a healthy flow of energy within a client during a Reiki session or treatment. This therapy forms an important part of self-care and is easy to include in a lifestyle. In short, Reiki can soothe, nurture, and restore individuals and help to reduce stress and tension.

Reiki benefits nurses and their patients. A 2010 National Institutes of Health study revealed that more than 1.2 million adults had utilized some type of energy therapy like Reiki the prior year. Other studies have revealed positive Reiki outcomes on patients with advanced AIDS cases, wounds, and pain.

How Reiki Benefits a Practice

When performed by a professional practitioner competent to perform it, Reiki that’s part of a nursing plan is appropriate within an RN, LPN, LNA scope of practice, some state boards of nursing state.  Nurses themselves receive positive benefits from Reiki, such as:

• Energy increase
• Stress reduction
• Avoidance of healing profession burnout
• Sense of well being

Many nurses are very intuitive and therefore well suited to become Reiki practitioners. All nurses are very compassionate and caring, desiring the best for the patients in their care. Reiki training can make a nurse even more aware of subtle energies affecting a patient’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs, particularly in-home care, labor and delivery, recovery room scenarios. For nurses in private practice, Reiki sessions may represent an additional source of income from a standalone Reiki practice.

The Professional Connection

Nurses interested in adding Reiki to their toolbox of added value patient offerings should join a professional Reiki association as the IARP, International Association of Reiki Professionals.  Membership includes access to business tools like liability insurance. It also provides the opportunity to become a Registered Reiki Professional meeting standards of professionalism, code of ethics, and staying progressive on all that is Reiki. Best of all, it includes access to referrals, community support, and great ideas for growing a Reiki practice.

Interested in adding Reiki to your nursing practice?
Have you taken a Reiki course? Start today with a Professional Membership that links you with great resources and to other successful Reiki Nurse professionals who are helping to heal the world, one patient at a time.

Would you like to add Reiki to your toolbox of compassionate skills? See the IARP website to find a Registered Reiki Teacher in your area, anywhere in the world.