The Art of Healing

Bringing Reiki Into Hospitals: Pamela Miles on Self-Care, Science, and Spiritual Practice

• Charlyce Davis MD Reiki Practitioner

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What if the most radical shift in your health starts with five quiet minutes and the courage to feel your own body again? We sit down with Pamela Miles—internationally recognized Reiki master and pioneer of medical Reiki—to explore how a simple, daily self-practice can calm the nervous system, improve sleep, and restore presence in the middle of real life. 

Pamela has graciously share her valuable resource:

5 Tips to Unlock the Power of Reiki Practice

You can also join Pamela's Free Online Global Practice Sessions here:

Reiki Self-Practice Global Community


From a brief guided sequence you can try today to a candid look at bringing Reiki into hospitals during the AIDS crisis, this conversation blends lived experience with clear, careful language clinicians can trust.

Pamela traces her path from years of meditation and yoga in India to discovering Reiki in 1986, reframing it not as an external “energy” but as a spiritual practice that invites the system to reorganize toward balance. She shares how infectious disease specialists began noticing patients doing better than expected, and why she always opened medical talks with a hands-on experience rather than a pitch. We also unpack the translation traps that shaped Reiki’s Americanization and offer practical criteria for choosing qualified teachers amid today’s crowded marketplace.

If you’re a physician, nurse, therapist, caregiver, or simply someone who needs steadier ground, you’ll find a realistic path to daily self-care that fits a busy life. Learn why first-degree training is often enough, how to build a morning or evening habit you can keep, and what language helps bridge spirituality and science without hype. Stay to the end for resources, links to global self-practice sessions, and a preview of part two.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Art of Healing Podcast. I'm Dr. Charlise, and if we have not met before, nice to meet you. I would love to introduce you to today's Art of Healing Podcast guest, Pamela Miles. Pamela Miles is an internationally renowned Reiki master and the foremost medical Reiki pioneer bringing Reiki practice to conventional medicine in the 90s. Pamela guides people at all levels of health and wellness to sleep better, function better, be happier and healthier, and maintain healthy, compassionate borders. Over five decades of spiritual practice, she has collaborated on various projects with academic medical centers, including Yale, Harvard, and the National Institutes of Health. Pamela has published in peer-reviewed medical journals, including the preeminent Journal of American College of Cardiology. She's also brought her insight to corporate outlets such as Google and Unilever. Pamela's been featured on major networks, including NBC, CVS, CNN, and Fox News. Pamela is well known to those of us who study Reiki because she has created such a wonderful container system and approach to learning Reiki, making Reiki a daily part of your everyday practice, which is one of my favorite topics, is using Reiki on yourself, not always just thinking of others, as well as systems to help you make your Reiki practice easier. One of my favorite tools is she has an app called the Reiki Timer that gives you a timer that will ding whenever you want to switch positions while you're doing Reiki on yourself or on your client. Those of you that don't practice Reiki, that will sound a little foreign, but those of you that do practice Reiki know that, particularly when you're starting to work with others, that can be a little stressful because you don't have a timer or you have to do it internally. So Pamela's coming on today to share with us her expertise in bringing Reiki into healthcare systems. So I'm so excited about that. All right, let's get started. That's perfect. So, Art of Healing community and those that'll be joining us, thank you so much for joining us for this very special episode. As a podcast host, you always hope that there's certain guests that you will attract or will take your invitation. And for me, having our very special guest, Pamela Miles, join us today, warms my heart more than you can imagine. Pamela is an internationally renowned Reiki master and the foremost Reiki medical Reiki pioneer. She has brought Reiki practice to conventional medicine since the 1990s. She has worked with institutes such as Yale, Harvard, and she has been featured in major broadcast media, including the Dr. Otto, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, The Atlantic, Forbes, and many more. Her book, Reiki, a comprehensive guide, is the only Reiki book written for mainstream public healthcare practitioners, and I have read it. And then my own personal plug is Pamela provides so many tools and resources for wherever you are on your Reiki journey. The Reiki timer, one of my favorites for Reiki practitioners, no matter where you are in your practice, it is so helpful working on yourself or with clients. So Pamela's joining us today to share her wisdom and her insights on Reiki, spirituality, what it can do in the practice of medicine, which I'm particularly interested in because I'm a practicing physician. And Reiki, excuse me, Pamela has offered to help us enter into this time together with a brief practice. So I'm gonna go silent and I'm gonna let Pamela come on and guide us. Hi, Pamela.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, Charlese. Thank you so much for that very warm welcome. And I want you to know that I'm also fangirling here because there aren't that many physicians who are as actively engaged in spirituality and spiritual practice and traditional healing as you are. So one time way back in the 1990s, last century, I was about to walk on stage at a medical conference, and I realized I need to start with a practice because otherwise people get in their heads because they're trying to understand. And in fact, you don't have a pigeonhole for this practice experience. So we'll keep it short and I will keep my eyes open and watch the clock. Please make yourself comfortable. You can sit upright, you don't have to lie down, but feel both sits bones beneath you. And what I'm going to ask you to do is to start with your hands on the crown of your head. If that is uncomfortable for any reason, you can and you have a desk in front of you, you can rest your elbows there and do this, or you can bring your hands, start with your chest. What I'm going to do is the crown of my head, then the chest, and then hands on the abdomen. So it's very, very simple. So just put your mind out to pasture, let it think if it wants to, let it get all excited if it wants to. You just don't have to pay attention to it. And if you need something to pay attention to, because sometimes we're just like that, then you can lightly observe your breath. Lightly. So no concentrating and no focusing, no trying. Just be comfortable. Please close your eyes if you haven't already. And enjoy the next few minutes. Hence to your chest. Remain still with your eyes closed just a little longer. But you can let your hands relax to your lap. Take a moment to notice how you're feeling. Notice anything that's different now. Any little thing. And perhaps think of two or three words that describe how you're feeling. Then I encourage you to let the state that you're in now completely fill your physical form. As if you're gifting this state to your body in a very deliberate but graceful way. And wait until you feel really present and comfortable in your body. This is important. Especially if you're in a room where there's light. Wait until you feel your body and you're comfortable there before you let your eyes gently open. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00:

And it looks like Tway's words were relaxed.

SPEAKER_01:

Relaxed is a very common word, and it's a word that is undervalued in our culture. You know, we think that it's a luxury, perhaps, or you know, we get flippant about it, but relaxation is actually a medical necessity. It's a an emotional necessity, a spiritual necessity, a mental necessity, and it is the doorway to self-healing. So it's very, very important. And this practice that we did was just five minutes. If you haven't had Reiki training, you can't practice Reiki because that's the way the lineage was organized. But what you've been doing is a light touch self-care practice. And we know that appropriate human touch is very beneficial. It's healing. Our nervous systems respond. We respond spiritually to appropriate, safe human touch. And there's actually been quite a bit of research that documents that. So that's another conversation.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I will tell you just right off the bat, Pamela, as many times as you want to come back to the podcast, you are welcome. The Art of Healing podcast is an open door. If you're ever just bored or want to do a podcast, let me know.

SPEAKER_01:

I accept your invitation. I would because I'm looking at the questions you suggested, and I could usually talk about any one of them for half an hour.

SPEAKER_00:

It's so needed, especially in times like now where things feel so turbulent. To have you bring us into this moment with that practice. I truly felt it. So thank you so much. I did send you a list of questions, but Pamela, if you don't mind, if we could actually just start with your origin story with Reiki. It just occurred to me that it would benefit all of us with how you found Reiki, what led up to you becoming a Reiki master. Would you mind sharing with us just your origin story?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm happy to share that. What we just did is the most powerful political act you can make because revolution, evolution, you know, it's a matter of how gently it happens, starts when each one of us is willing to accept the responsibility for our self-care. You know, our self-care is not negotiable. We can't farm it out, we can't hire somebody, we can't phone it in. We have to actually do it. And being spiritually engaged is not metaphysical, it's not new age, it's self-care, it's spiritual hygiene. We don't magically come back to the present moment. We have to make an effort. And fortunately, with Reiki, which is a spiritual practice, the effort is as simple as placing a hand, you know, at the first degree level. It is that simple. You don't have to call in anything, you don't have to do anything special with your hands, you don't have to do anything with your mind. So it's it's really a spiritual practice for this time. It's very timely and very accessible. So I'll leave that there for now. And I was always more interested in the inner world than the outer world. You know, I must have been a very odd child because I liked to pray, you know, and there was a time when I thought I would be a nun, but I got over that. I went to live in Indian and Ashan for a couple of years and did intensive spiritual practices. I'd already been meditating and practicing yoga. I started when I was 10. And it was in India that things really changed for me because being in a situation, an environment like that, and with a real teacher, and to develop the discipline, that changed the trajectory of my life and made it possible everything that I've done since then. So I was a meditation teacher and a healer, working one-on-one, teaching classes, working with groups when I came upon Reiki practice in 1986. And it's important to kind of set that backstory because that experience that I had with spiritual practice and my commitment to it made the difference in how I recognize that Reiki is a spiritual practice, which we now have documentation of. But back in 1986, it was presented to me as energy medicine. That's the way people in the West saw it because Americans didn't know any better. You know, they were doing the best that they could. We don't have a that kind of spiritual tradition. And what made me go for it was that I was pregnant with I had a five-year-old about to turn six. I really much prefer myself and life in general when I have spiritual practice every day. And I know that I needed that to be the best mother that I possibly could be, not as an ideal, but moment to moment. And I was wondering, you know, because it's really it's hard, even for an avid meditator. It's hard to meditate when you're very hormonal and you're sleep-deprived. Your mind, your body triages sleep in over meditation. So I was really pondering how am I going to deal with this? And then a friend said she had just learned to practice Reiki. And she said to me, I think you'll like it. And she offered to give me a session. And I and I trusted her. You know, I'd heard of Reiki and I I was intrigued, but I'd seen signs on telephone posts. That's how last century this was. You know, I I there was no internet to go looking, and I wasn't about to call somebody from a telephone post, you know. So I was comfortable with her and she placed her hands on the crown of my head, and almost immediately I started having sensations that were very familiar to me. And this is important because for most Reiki practitioners, these were not familiar. And that's where this myth of the Reiki energy coming through happened. If I hadn't had a lot of experience with these sensations already, I might have thought the same thing. But I understood that this was my being reorganizing itself in the direction of greater health and wellness and balance. And I love that I became very deeply in drawn in meditation, but honestly, it doesn't take much for that to happen. So I was like, sign me up, you know, and I called her Reiki master and I pressured her to teach me one of when she said, Well, I just had a class, I said, I know I'm pregnant, you know. I pulled the pregnancy card on her. And it really made a huge difference because until then, despite all of my practices, I was getting sick about once a month. And once I would start to get sick, even though I was able to help a lot of other people, I just couldn't help myself. I knew that I was leaking my vitality in some subtle way that I couldn't literally get my hand on, you know, and then with Reiki practice, that turned around. And I think it was seven years before I had a cold again.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that, particularly when you share with us what it took and the routes you had to take to get the Reiki training and fast forward to now and what you provide for students. Isn't that amazing? Because through you, look how easy you make it to become a Reiki healer. But thinking back to 86, and you had to, is this sign, is this legit? Had to, you know, that's that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01:

Now people have the opposite problem. They have a glut. You go online, and there's a glut of offerings, and people don't know how to choose a qualified Reiki teacher or Reiki practitioner because they think everything Reiki is the same, but people don't know how to determine if a professional is really qualified in terms of having enough training, enough experience, having been mentored as a professional and able to create a healthy relationship with students or clients. You know, that kind of clinical training that healthcare professionals get. Well, most Reiki professionals are not getting anything like that. I mean, I do my best to provide, you know, to make up the gap for people who want to be professionals. But yes, to your point, Charlese, the first degree Reiki training for me, I give it in three sessions. I mostly do it online so people can learn in the comfort of their own home. And they start practicing about an hour after our class starts.

SPEAKER_00:

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01:

Practice together.

SPEAKER_00:

Wonderful. Listeners of the podcast, in your show notes, you'll find links to connect with Pamela's websites and her training in your resources. So my next question, Pamela, would be so then Reiki enters your life, helps you as a mother, as a healer. And then it evolves into you moving it into hospitals, clinics. Can you describe to us what was it like to first approach or be approached by hospitals and clinics about Reiki? Just share any insight. What was that experience like for you?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I don't think my knees have ever been the same because they started knocking so hard. You know, I mean, doctors are the authority figure in our culture, right? I was a single mother. So I knew that so many details of my life could be misrepresented, misconstrued, and that I, you know, there was a certain amount of danger involved in allowing myself to be that exposed. I thought I knew what the doctors thought. And I thought that they thought that there are two kinds of doctors. There are the real doctors and there are witch doctors. And I thought I knew which doctor they would brand me to be. And honestly, I think there were some doctors who probably felt that way, but they didn't come near me. No, what I found was that doctors were very interested in what I was doing. They found me because of a program that I had at the gay men's health crisis, in which I was training. At that point, it was still all gays, and training them to practice on themselves and to practicing formally with their friends and family because they were losing friends every month. There was at least one death. They were sick and in a state of constant bereavement, which is not good for your immunity. And that's how I got called into medicine. The infectious disease specialists in New York started hearing about me and about Reiki from patients of theirs, whom they told me later, were doing better than would be expected. And doctors noticed that. They want the best for their patients. This was before the protase inhibitors when conventional medicine really had nothing to offer, or what they did have to offer, like AZT. I mean, the guys were scared to death of it. Understandably.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01:

So, yeah, there have been moments. There certainly have been moments, and I have felt so exposed. I remember when I was at an NIH conference, I was a speaker, you know, and I opened the the program notes and saw that they had printed my home address. And I I remember sitting in the audience and like wondering if I was going to be able to take another breath. You know, I felt so unsafe. And nobody was trying to hurt me. You know, nobody there was trying to hurt me. I mean, there were wonderful people there. And yet that was the reality of my life and and the times.

SPEAKER_00:

When it came time for you to present, such as at the NIH, I think you shared with us at the very beginning, but that brief practice we did, would you use something like that before you present it to these doctors and researches, researchers for yourself as well? You would do that too. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

And that was what I understood that it was in Philadelphia at a medical conference. It was like the only way I can get these people who are critical thinkers. And even though I'm a natural-born mystic, I'm also a very strong critical thinker. You know, critical thinking and spiritual practice are not antithetical, they actually go hand in hand. That's how you avoid fooling yourself. You know, that's how you can really come to an experience of truth. And so I knew that Charlie's I knew that there was nothing that the Reiki master could say that was going to impress any of the doctors. What I could do to make a difference is to give them an experience that could change their lives.

unknown:

Nice.

SPEAKER_01:

Nice. So it took a lot of balls. It really did, you know. And it worked like a charm. And so I would do with them exactly what we just did. And if I had 300 people, 300 doctors in a room, I would either bring in students to help me or contact Reiki professionals in the area who were thrilled to be able to watch me present in a medical environment, you know, and see how it can be done. Because I've always presented Reiki as a spiritual practice.

unknown:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

That is, as I'm thinking about what that would feel like, just trying to imagine because my path has been, of course, different from yours. I started in medicine. So, you know, as a baby doctor, it was all science, all numbers, all heartage, just all of that. Reiki came to me purely by accident. It was a joke. A friend was telling a joke and being kind of snarky. And to prove it wrong, I went to the Reiki class. I didn't even know where Reiki was. It was nuts. I found out about the class the night before the class and they had an opening. And I went and I got that. I was like, oh my gosh, I can't, I can't do this. What is this? Oh my gosh, I don't have, you know, but I was in a class I paid for and I'm gonna see it through. So I, you know, I went ahead and did it. So, you know, when I think about now, because my friends, colleagues all know that I practice Reiki, and it's so funny. Because on one hand, they'll tell me something medical and then they'll flip and they'll bring up something Reiki related. And I wish you could almost hear some of my conversation. Because it's so matter-of-fact and almost blunt.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and that medicalization of the practice. You know, like when I say Reiki, I'm talking about Reiki practice. I'm not talking about Reiki a thing. There is no thing, there is no object that is Reiki. And this is really radical to say, but to my understanding, there's no energy that is Reiki because there's no Japanese word for energy. Mrs. Kata did the best she could to translate from a language that has words for things that we don't have words for, because those concepts, those values are not part of our culture. But that began the Americanization of Reiki practice. I had the benefit of years of Asian spiritual practice. And I, you know, so many things that I would see about Reiki, I knew that wasn't, that's not it. You know, this is somebody's best guess. But I felt the practice. I knew the practice was authentic and was effective. And so I went with the practice. And then, you know, I was able to sort the rest out over time. And some of it has only been sorted recently now that we have some scholars who are familiar with the practice and are fluent in Japanese, you know, have degrees in Japanese language and culture.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's been very rewarding for me. Oh my goodness. So my next question. For individuals working one-on-one with patients, and I like to include any person working with any living being, so doctors, nurses, medical assistants, physical therapists, veterinarians, vet techs, just anyone that is caring or even caretakers, if they are seeking something to help them, be it spirituality or self-help or something like that. I hope this isn't too vague of a question. Can you guide us on what steps they can take? If they know that they need to care for themselves in order to care for their client, their patient, their crops just as a caretaker, can you guide us in what their first steps would be?

SPEAKER_01:

I always suggest Reiki practice first. Yeah, learn to self-practice. It doesn't matter if you want to be a Reiki professional or whatever you envision in your future, start here now with yourself. And so, you know, find a teacher that you feel drawn to, that you feel safe with, that is also qualified because it's not enough to be qualified and nasty, and it's not enough to be nice and unqualified, you know. So you've got to find both together and then learn the first degree. Don't become a Reiki master. You don't need to become a Reiki master. First degree Reiki is all that most people need. And then if you start practicing on yourself every day, and this was something as a meditation teacher, I knew to do. You know, I'd been meditating for decades, and so I worked out that really I have to do this every day. I understood, yes, that's how I get the best return on my investment. I wake up in the morning, and as I'm beginning to experience myself as an individual, my hands are coming to my body to practice. That's the timing that works for me. Now, other people practice at night. I find most of my students practice either in bed in the morning or at night, but sometimes for moms, maybe they have to get their kids out to school and then they practice later. So the morning time is very special for spiritual practice. You know, morning time I mean like any time after 3:30 or 4. But you don't have to practice Reiki at any specific time. But you do need to practice every day if you want to transform.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for joining us for part one of my interview with Reiki Pioneer Pamela Miles, the person responsible for bringing the practice of Reiki to major hospitals and healthcare in the United States. Part two will be out next week. If you'd like to make sure you don't miss the episode, make sure you sign up for my weekly newsletter. Also check the show notes for Pamela's free online global self practice sessions, as well as her other valuable tools. Thank you so much.

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