On being an openly Queer, Trans, Asian Reiki Master

Would you like to receive a Reiki session, or learn how to share Reiki with your family and friends? 🥰

In my About page, I’ve alluded to how I had two “false starts” with learning Reiki before meeting my current Master. I had taken both level 1 and 2 twice, with 2 different teachers, in 2 different countries. None of the things that people typically report experiencing after receiving an attunement happened to me. I didn’t sleep better or worse, have unusual sensations or new insights, feel like anything was healed or released. I simply went home, woke up the next day with less money in my bank account in exchange for a piece of paper that didn’t really mean anything, and a few techniques that I could have read about and tried out on my own for free.

For some reason, I just couldn’t seem to get it. Still, I would repeatedly encounter people telling me that I seemed like a “Reiki person”, which is why I kept trying.

Is Reiki just “not for me”?

Around the time of my third attempt, I was going through an intense period of working on understanding my own inherited patterns on a spiritual and energetic level. So much of it was tied up with racism, passport privilege, and what it means to have origins in the Global South. To complicate things further, the fact that it took me so long to feel ready to look at my ethnicity and ancestry had everything to do with how, when I first came out as trans, I lost all of my Asian friends — and have mostly hung out with white people ever since.

If I was going to successfully receive teachings from anyone in that stage of life, about anything spirituality or healing related, it had to be someone with lived experience of queerness, migration, and lineage connections outside the Global North. The latter might be harder to find outright, but the former I could google: queer reiki class, queer reiki master, queer reiki teacher.

After days of searching, I only managed to find ONE person in all of Europe who openly identified as queer and was actively teaching Reiki courses. Surprisingly, they also matched my other 2 criteria. They were in another country — but there were no other alternatives, so it was worth a try.

I asked for an intro call to explain my situation. I’ve done level 1 and 2 before, multiple times, but it just didn’t stick. They suggested that I could join the next “in-person” level 2 class remotely for a reduced fee. I had no expectations at all by this point. After all, studying and practicing healing modalities has always been my #1 hobby in life; and I couldn’t think of anything better to try learning at that time.

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This time, it finally clicked. Like most mystical experiences, it can’t really be explained with words. I knew that I had “gotten it”, and this “getting it” deepened over time, revealing increasingly new and complex aspects of itself. The attunement or initiation ceremony is only the beginning — the first step through the door into an entire way of life and being in the world.

The calling to Reiki Mastership

Over the next year, as the gifts of the path continued to unfold, a nagging feeling grew in me: was it actually my master’s embodied experience of queerness, migration and racialisation that made this energetic transmission successful? Did it have something to do with my perception of previous teachers as representing dominant or majority body types in “wellness and healing” practices in the west, and how that had me subconsciously more guarded around them when we interact in the master-student dynamic?

I am very used to being in courses, workshops and event spaces where no other bodies look anything like mine, where I visibly stand out like a sore thumb in group photos. I have accepted this as being the reality, that most of the things I am interested in, seem to attract people whose embodied experiences of moving through the world are unlike mine, often in specific and viscerally obvious ways. I go for the activity, regardless of the people. I will usually try any wellness or healing practice several times before I write it off as not for me.

How many people have felt hesitant to try Reiki because — whether they are consciously aware of it or not — they’ve never seen an example of a Reiki Master who looked like them? Whose bio statements mentioned personal challenges that they could relate to in a deeper way? How many people may have come to the conclusion that Reiki is “just not for them” when — just like in my case, it was actually an issue of diversity in the teaching community?

I became a Reiki Master in order to contribute to this diversity — to help this beautiful, gently transformative practice be able to reach more people, especially those who have questioned their own belonging to wellness and healing communities in western societies due to body type, gender identity, racial or ethnic origin, migration background (and more).

Are you curious about working with me?

I love working with everyone, not just queers and migrants. My style of teaching and practice is highly inspired by Zen Buddhist and Daoist philosophies. I am committed to explaining what I do and how it works in a way that is as grounded and accessible as possible, in service of supporting the practice to reach more people who could benefit from it.

If you’ve been curious about Reiki but have hesitation or skepticism about its efficacy, or have gone to other practitioners / teachers and the resonance was lacking, I would love to explore the practice with you and see what we discover together.

What we can do:

In-Person Sessions in Utrecht with the option of combining with sound healing 💆🏻

Distance Healing sessions on Zoom, no matter where you are in the world 🌍

Reiki 1 Training in person or online, 1:1 or in small groups — learn to give Reiki to yourself, family & friends 🌟