Where Reiki Comes From

Reiki as we know it today was born in Japan in the early 20th century, through the experience of one man: Mikao Usui.

Usui was a Japanese Buddhist teacher and spiritual seeker who, after years of study and practice, undertook a 21-day meditation and fasting retreat on Mount Kurama in 1922. It was there, according to his account, that he received a profound spiritual awakening and with it the ability to channel healing energy. He called this energy Reiki, and he spent the rest of his life teaching and practicing it.

Usui founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, a healing society in Tokyo, and began training students. One of those students was Dr. Chujiro Hayashi, a naval officer and physician who went on to open a Reiki clinic in Tokyo and develop the hand positions still used in practice today. Hayashi in turn taught Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii who became the first person to bring Reiki to the Western world in the late 1930s. It was largely through Takata's teaching and determination over the following decades that Reiki spread across the United States and eventually around the globe.

Lineage and Why It Matters

In Reiki, lineage refers to the unbroken line of teacher-to-student transmission stretching back to Usui himself. Every Reiki practitioner can trace their attunements through their teacher, and their teacher's teacher, all the way back to the source. This is not a formality. It is a reflection of Reiki's nature as a living, transmitted practice rather than something learned only from books.

My own lineage traces directly through the International Center for Reiki Training, founded by William Lee Rand, one of the most respected Reiki educators in the world. The ICRT curriculum, which forms the foundation of all Warho Healing classes, is rooted in both the traditional Usui lineage and the Holy Fire® energy introduced by Rand in 2014, a refined and deeply powerful evolution of the practice.

When you learn Reiki through Warho Healing, you are receiving a living transmission that connects you to Mikao Usui, to every teacher in that line, and to a global community of practitioners. That lineage is yours the moment you receive your attunement.