The Art of Healing

Part 2 of Pamela Miles Interview: Self-Care, Skepticism, And Bringing Spiritual Presence Back To Medicine

• Charlyce Davis MD Reiki Practitioner

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What if feeling calmer wasn’t a luxury, but the catalyst that makes everything else work? Our conversation with medical Reiki pioneer Pamela Miles gets practical about self-care for caregivers and clinicians: how brief, consistent self-Reiki lowers baseline stress, improves sleep, and restores the kind of presence that actually helps people heal. We dig into real-world obstacles—no time, night shifts, caregiver guilt—and share small routines that fit into crowded mornings, call nights, and hectic wards.

Connect with Pamela and access her resources here:

https://reikiinmedicine.org/

Pamela pulls back the curtain on bringing Reiki into hospitals without hype. She explains how to engage skeptical colleagues by offering useful, relevant pieces of information and inviting them to test the practice rather than “believe.” We look at the neuroscience of safety, vagal tone, and why parasympathetic balance unlocks better decisions, clearer thinking, and steadier bedside manner. Nurses who fear “losing their edge” discover they finish earlier and make fewer errors; physicians see how a strong ego can serve, not steer, when presence leads the room.

You’ll hear why you don’t need medical training to contribute meaningfully, just clarity about your role and respect for clinical teams. If you took a Reiki class years ago and stopped, you haven’t “lost it”—you can start again today with simple hand placements and supportive structure. Pamela also shares free resources: a monthly guided global self-practice session and a concise guide to finding credible practitioners and teachers, so you know what to look for and what to avoid.

If better sleep, calmer conversations, and more effective care sound good, try a short self-practice this week and notice what changes. Subscribe, share this with a caregiver or colleague who needs it, and leave a review to help more people find these tools.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome back to the Art of Healing Podcast. This is Dr. Charlise, and thank you for joining me for today's episode. Today's episode is part two of my interview with Medical Reiki pioneer Pamela Miles. If you missed part one in your player, you should be able to easily navigate and go back to listen to and experience part one. In particular, Pamela shares with us a powerful and simple self-care practice that we launched the episode with, so I would suggest you go back and listen if you miss that. Pamela is an internationally renowned Reiki master and the foremost medical Reiki pioneer, bringing Reiki practice to conventional medicine in the 1990s. She has worked at esteemed institutes including Yale, Harvard, and the National Institutes of Health. And she's been featured in major mainstream media, including NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and more. Today's episode is a continuation of our interview in which Pamela answers some difficult questions about Reiki and also reminds us of how easy and simple your Reiki practice can be, and how that can simply be a self-care practice if you are not part of the Reiki lineage. So thank you for tuning in. Enjoy and make sure before you're done listening, leave a review for this episode. This is a great interview. It's worth sharing. So make sure you leave your input to let others know how much you enjoyed the episode. So one objection or doubt I can feel that might come from someone that knows that they need to take the next step and they're hearing your beautiful voice. So now they've got in access. Is well, I don't have time. I don't want to take time away from my caregiving role, whatever that is. I cannot take the time away from my children, or I can't take the time away from my father who's sick, or I can't. So help us work out how we can find that time to take care of ourselves when it might feel selfish. It might feel sure.

SPEAKER_01:

One thing realize that when you feel better to go back to, and anybody who's with the replay who fast-forwarded through the practice, go back and do the practice because everything's going to make so much more sense to you. When you practice self-reiki, you very quickly start to feel better and function better, and then you make better choices. I was a single mother, I had two children that I had to get off to school. My choice, what worked for me, because I'm a morning person, was that I got up around four o'clock in the morning. But I also don't need to sleep eight hours because I was doing spiritual practice, which at least replaces sleep. People find that because you sleep better for having practiced Reiki. No matter how much you think, oh no, I can't practice Reiki in the morning, I need that extra hour of sleep. No, you don't. You don't actually, I would bet you money on this. You don't. But you've got to be willing to give it a try, and you have to be willing to give it a decent try. And that's why in my classes, we meet once, twice, and then there's five days to a week before we meet the last time because you've been practicing at home then. Nice. So I really help people establish their self-practice. Plus, I'm available to my students after work, and it you have to trust your own experience. I tell my students at the end of this class, you're not going to know what Reiki is. I don't know what Reiki is. I've been at this 40 years. But what you can know is this is good. This is good for me. This is helping me. And it's not hurting me. And then for my students, I help them troubleshoot like when's a good time for you to practice? When is it easy? Because people are like, oh, I have to practice at night because I have trouble falling asleep. No, you don't have to practice at night if you have trouble falling asleep because you can practice anytime that works in your schedule, and your baseline stress is going to drop and your sleep is going to improve. Your nervous system is going to remember it can self-regulate. So instead of spinning your wheels, you're going to get things done. And I hear this from for a few years, I had a program at New York Presbyterian Columbia training staff in the perioperative department. So that's before, during, and after surgery. It was mostly nurses, but I always like to open it up to as many people as they'll let me. And so I taught the same way always teach. And in the second session, so people have been practicing for 24 hours and they've they've been to work. And one nurse would always say something like, I'm afraid I'm losing my edge. And I'd say, Okay, well, that's really important to look at. Let's take a deep dive. How'd work go? Are are you getting your work done? And most of them were women, so she would say, Oh, yeah, I actually finished early. And then I'm like, Do you think you need that edge? Is that edge helping you? And because we think we can't function unless we're hyper-vigilant. But the reality is, and there's neuroscience to support this finally, that we function better when we're in our parasympathetic mode. In most situations, if we're running a race or something, yeah, we want to get a little higher sympathetic tone. But once nurses get it, and honestly, you're a doctor, right? Doctors are very practical. I find doctors easier to train. Medical students are the hardest to train. Once they've been on the floor, once they've been residents and they've experienced suffering like they've never seen in their lives before, they're much more open. And doctors get it. It's like, oh yeah, take care of myself and I take better care of everybody else. Like you know, that that switch flips for them. Nurses tend to be, and I have to say, my grandmother, my mother, and my sister all nurses. All right. So I love nurses, I appreciate them, and I know nurses. And they tend to be helpaholics, like a lot of Reiki professionals are helpaholics. Their instinct is to take care of others, their instinct is to fix. And spiritual practice is not fixing. Spiritual practice is about experiencing your innate wholeness and wellness, your timelessness, who you are beyond the suffering. So that you recontextualize your life automatically. You can't do it by thinking about it. You have to actually practice, and then it all falls into place. Am I addressing your question, Sharon?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely, absolutely. And something you just said, Pamela, because my mother is a registered nurse, she's retired. And I've told her that you actually just describe because I joke with her, and when I take care of patients that are retired nurses, they are helpaholics. To me, sometimes they're very difficult patients. I will walk into the room when my patient is a nurse and she is turning the room over, or he is turning the room over, and I have to remind them and orient them to being a patient. It's always a thing because they are they are helpaholics. That was that was a perfect definition. We've been on for a little bit, so I want to check in with you, Pamela, as far as your time, if you are still okay to hang around for a few minutes.

SPEAKER_01:

I am, yeah, I am. I have things I need to do this afternoon, but nothing with the line.

unknown:

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00:

And then for those that have joined us, if you have a question or a comment for Pamela, if you want to put it in the chat, I'll let her know if they want to unmute to ask questions of you because I have been telling my community that they need to come on. This is an opportunity. You don't want to miss meeting and hearing this wisdom from Pamela. But if anyone wants to unmute or ask a question, and while they are composing their thoughts, I'll go ahead with my next question. So I can't imagine. I can sort of imagine the skepticism you've encountered on your path. I could, you know what, I really don't want to imagine, to be honest, because I live in this wonderful Reiki Phil world as a physician, and I just like it. So I like the unicorns. I can just sort of fill in what you have encountered as far as skepticism in the medical and scientific communities. And although you've described us very well, how do you engage critics or people that say no, that doesn't work, that's made up? What sort of language do you use to approach that kind of resistance? Or I don't know if you may not even meet that much resistance anymore, but well, I'm a critical thinker myself.

SPEAKER_01:

I make a point of welcoming people's skepticism. Also, there's such a power differential. There are the doctors, and then there's the Reiki Master. So I walked into medicine knowing this was my opportunity to lose, that I needed to be really present and an edited version of myself, and give these critical thinkers a few pieces of information that were salient to them, and then let them string those pieces of information together, use their skepticism in our favor. Because first of all, just my nature is I don't like to convince people, I don't like to persuade people because you're building an unequal relationship, and then Reiki practice is empowering. So if you start out like this, and your student or client is going to get stronger, at some point they're gonna have to break away from you, and that's not what I like. I like to meet people and then we can grow together. So I met the doctors where they were, and I didn't try to give them more than they wanted. To me, it would have been a sign of disrespect to try to talk a doctor into anything. These are people who make life and death recommendations, sometimes decisions. What kind of nerve, what kind of insanity would it take for me to think they would take me seriously? So the way if you want somebody to take you seriously, behave yourself and be of value, help them with something that they need help with by showing them the possibilities and then letting them reach for it. So spirituality is very critical to healing, which is no longer part of medicine, but it used to be. So right now, doctors are stuck in many ways between a rock and a hard place. The doctor, you cannot tell me what you think of it. Now that we've we give doctors what seven minutes with a patient at most, unless you're in a special kind of situation where you buy the situation. So it used to be that the clinical manner, the doctor-patient relationship carried the healing. But now doctors don't get to do that, they don't have time to do that. So they're practicing medicine with one hand at least tied behind their back, right?

SPEAKER_00:

So that does Reiki on herself sometimes a few times a day, depending on what my day will look like. And then practicing medicine. I honestly don't know what other doctors are doing to survive. I don't get how they get through their day. Even talking, it's like you just walk in there just like that, and you don't check yourself. Me, my Reiki practice is key to making sure I'm centered so that my patient's story and my patient's healing journey is the star.

SPEAKER_01:

And the if I may interrupt, Charlise, so that your presence is a big part of the medicine. That's how you're bringing spirituality in back into medicine by being spiritually responsible, practicing so you're centered, you're present, and then your presence alone is healing to your patients.

SPEAKER_00:

What I've learned practicing Reiki on myself, and then making sure I practice on myself before I approach a patient is that the medical school is a training for many things, and the biggest training it is, is for your ego. You need some of that, you do need some of that because your role as a physician is you will have to stretch your limits for someone else, but then you can also, it's very much ego. So, what Reiki is really helped me with, especially times when it's uh situation, it's big, it's serious. We may be talking about an end-of-life situation, and having done Reiki on myself allows me, to me, it feels like I can move myself out of the way and create the space for this person and their family for whatever news they're about to hear, whatever they're about to experience. I've got to create that space I can move myself out of the way. But I don't know if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01:

I think another way of saying that is that you're there in service, you're not there in a performative way. And yes, sometimes in service we have to perform. We have to say, okay, this, because that's our job, right? But even when we're performing, it's from a place of service rather than a need to perform, which is what you were saying about ego. Yeah, because we've got to have strong egos, Charlize. Nobody's gonna get anything accomplished in this world without a strong ego. It's just, do you think you are your ego? Well, that's a problem. If you think your ego is something that is your psychospiritual backbone that helps you in a certain way that you make use of, great, but in service.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, yes, that's a beautiful way to say it. Thank you. You can probably tell evenly that's been an internal struggle for me, practicing medicine, figuring out where I fit in. Now I have this beautiful practice, it helps me very much. So I have a question, Pamela. So the question we have from Jennifer. She would like to know, in your opinion, what is the minimal medical background a Reiki practitioner needs in order to be welcomed into a healthcare setting? That's a great question, Jennifer.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so this much. None. It's not about knowing medicine, it's about knowing your place, knowing how to serve, being an expert in the area of expertise. So the amount of experience you have. For example, I can put my hands on anyone, and I know something good is going to happen. I know that. I don't need the person to say, oh, you know, and I may have to help them notice what their experience is, and they may still not be sure, although I don't know when that happened last. But it's like the experience builds your authority, and your authority has its limits. So I'm here as a colleague. You teach me what I need to know about your environment so that I know how to work with you, how to collaborate, and I'm bringing spiritual support to your patients, which means they're going to do better and that makes you look good. So, like, what's not to love? But it's more about understanding the medical perspective and understanding how healthcare works in this culture. And I actually I give a 20-something hour master class on that, Reiki and medicine, because understanding the interface, the interplay of conventional medicine and Reiki practice broadly spirituality and traditional medical systems, pre-scientific medical systems, it's a game changer, you know. And I've had doctors say that it was the best integrative medicine class that they ever took.

SPEAKER_00:

I have another question for you, Pamela, if you don't mind. Something that I've heard and had mentioned, like emails for individuals that did their Reiki training like years ago, like five years ago and 10 years ago, and they've stopped practicing. What should they do? What's your advice to them? Because I've had emails and things where they will often say, Well, I trained 10 years ago and I never used it, so it's gone. I I don't have my Reiki, I don't know how to do it anymore. So can you advise those individuals on the first steps if they took the step to get trained and then sort of just forgot to ever use it?

SPEAKER_01:

I always like to advise an individual as an individual, but I can paint some broad strokes here. The first thing is get your hands on your body. Just because if you have had a real Reiki initiation, then you don't ever need it again. It's fine to take more initiation if you feel drawn to a teacher and it will expand for sure, but it's a personal choice, it's not something that you need. What people most often need is some encouragement and some support, maybe some structure. So on my website, I have articles in my blog about how to practice self-reiki. And I also the first Tuesday of every month, I lead an online guided global self-practice session. So nobody is on camera, everybody is, they can be in their pajamas, they can be in their hospital beds, they could be on their coffee break, and they're practicing. Share with them how I practice because some people, it's all new to them, but everybody is welcome to practice the way that they do practice. And I talk a little bit and then we practice for about 25 minutes, and then I close it. And so that everybody's welcome, whether they've had Reiki training or not. I started it as the pandemic was descending on New York City March 10th. I think it was the day before WHO declared the pandemic and and led this twice a week for about three years. And now it's once a month, which is a little more manageable. But in the first few months, we had more than 20,000 people registered.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that is amazing.

SPEAKER_01:

That is amazing. And many people are still practicing. Some of them have gone on to learn to practice Reiki, and others are quite content with what they're doing, and they've never taken a class. Oh, that's wild. That's what matters, that people are in a relationship with a practice that is meaningful to them. That's what's important.

SPEAKER_00:

So I have another question for you, Pamela. So Twei is saying your insight about Reiki substituting for physical sleep really resonated with him. Twee and his wife are caring for their one and a half-year-old son. That's my godson, by the way. And they've been searching for ways to stay balanced despite the sleep deprivation. Could you share more on how Reiki replenishes and restores energy in place of sleep? That's that is a powerful question. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So Reiki practice, this was something that I was noticing back in the 90s, and particularly with the HIV patients. I was observing them and asking doctors about what I was seeing and trying to get some answers. Little did I know that there was an emerging medical field of psychoneuroimmunology, which has and other approaches to neuroscience, have since documented what I was seeing. And so we tend to think that Reiki restores energy and stuff like that. No, it back up from that and we practice Reiki, and our response to the practice is that self-healing response that arises from deep within the system. Generally speaking, I mean, self-healing response is always going to be a balancing response, right? So, generally speaking, in this culture, and certainly in the situation that you're talking about with an 18-month-old, that's going to involve relaxation because you're upregulated, because you're pushing yourselves. That's the best you could do. So, what happens is that your system down regulates, you get more into your parasympathetic, your your vagus nerve, vagus tone increases, and your body starts to self-heal. It's so it's restorative, but it's restorative because you're actually healing rather than the way people often talk about it because they just haven't thought it through. They're thinking of the gas tank. I'm pouring Reiki into my gas tank.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

How can I help somebody else when my gas tank is empty? No, that's dualistic thinking. So this is a non-dualist spiritual practice, which means that when I take care of myself, that is the first step in taking care of everybody else. And that's something that I really have to drive home to the nurses is that the care of the patient begins with the care of the caregiver and to families too. The care of the family begins with the care of the caregiver. So it's not that I'm taking care of myself instead of taking care of you, I'm taking care of all of us, and it starts with my self-care because then I function better. So you sleep better because your nervous system is in better shape. All forms of insomnia are linked to nervous system dysfunction. And again, I'm speaking in broad strokes here, but no doctor has questioned me about that. Broadly speaking, your nervous system is out, your hormones are out, everything's out, right? Your circadian rhythm is out. So you're out of balance.

SPEAKER_00:

So that advice, I am personally going to take that to heart for the nights that I'm on call, because that's a real have to wake up from sleep and I take a call. And for myself, I often can't get back to sleep. So thank you, Pamela, because you have gently reminded me that I can practice Reiki during those times. And just knowing that even lowers my stress level because I know when I'm on call, I'm going to get woken up. So that I love that I can do that rather than trying to force my because I don't, I really don't go back to sleep. So that's much more. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And then even if you don't go back to sleep, Charlize, you will still be in better shape. You'll be functioning better than if you've been lying there not falling asleep. Just practice. And chances are you'll fall asleep, but even if you don't, you're at least not escalating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So I have another question. Janelle's asking if you are familiar with cell danger theory that inhibits healing. And is Reiki a solution to this? So, Pamela, please educate us on what cell danger theory is, because I do not know what that is. And is Reiki a solution to this?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's basically the perspective that health begins at the cellular level, and I would say it begins even before that, but from a materialist scientific perspective, where the cell is kind of the basic building block, you can improve overall health by improving the health of the cells. This is what people do red light therapy for mitochondrial function, for example. So cell danger is basically each cell has PTS. Like if we're traumatized, we're traumatized at a cellular level. Like, where do people think PTS is? It's got to be located in the body somewhere, right? It's not just psycho-spiritual, it is the spirituality is the remedy because we're only safe in our spiritual selves. We're only safe in our timelessness. Every other part of us is has a shelf life, right? So this is why spiritual practice returning, dropping inside of ourselves, letting ourselves be renewed naturally makes such a difference. And in my experience, and I know of no science to measure this, but in my experience, it makes a difference. And I certainly have seen people with post. Traumatic stress, very serious post-traumatic stress, sleep even on the first night that they started self-pracing Reiki or received a Reiki treatment. Fell asleep during this session with a stranger practicing Reiki on them, people who are hyper-vigilant. They don't let go like that.

SPEAKER_00:

No.

SPEAKER_01:

So safety, this is something to really contemplate like for the rest of your life. Safety is a spiritual challenge. It's not a medical challenge. Right? We have no guarantees. But if we can help people feel safe, if we can help them bring their awareness into their spiritual selves, their timelessness, they feel safe. And what happens? There are physiologic responses to that. The nervous system self-regulation being the most obvious. But then that's like the first domino, right? And from there, everything improves to the degree that it can improve. We're not talking about regrowing limbs here. We're talking about bringing optimal health, even as people are dying.

SPEAKER_00:

That is thank you for that question, Jenna. I have never heard of that. Thank you so much, Pamela. That's really, I've never heard of self-danger theory. So thank you so much. So, listeners, if you are listening to this podcast after we've taped in your show notes, I'm going to give you the links to Pamela's website and her social media. Pamela, I know that you have a free resource, which is the five strategies I use to enhance my self-Reiki practice. I know you have many. Is that one of your resources that we would be looking out for? And I know there were some others. I'm sorry you sent me that list, Pamela, and I'm not looking at it right now.

SPEAKER_01:

But the one I would suggest is I think it's called Unlock the Power of Reiki Practice.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

And it is for people who want to either find a professional so they can receive Reiki sessions, or they want to find a teacher so that they can learn to self-practice. And it's really in a nutshell in a short PDF what you need to know to look for, because you probably don't know what to look for. And people can make claims and you have no way of knowing the difference. And I created this because I've had people take my training who have taken up to four other Reiki trainings, and so haven't found something that they intuited was meaningful, uh and what Reiki practice really can be. And fortunately, they were determined and they kept taking classes. But I would like people's first class to be the only class that they need. So there's that. And then the other resource that I can offer is the monthly guided. That's a free session too. And other than that, if you want to learn to practice Reiki and this approach feels comfortable to you, I would love to train you to share this practice with you.

SPEAKER_00:

So for the listeners that are joining us later in your show notes, I will make sure you have all the ways to contact Pamela, including her invaluable resources. And for those of us that have joined us live, thank you all so much. I think you all would agree that you got to experience something rare and precious. I try to tell my email community, I'm not saying you missed out, guys, but you missed out. And Pamela, thank you so much. It's again, as having been a student and following you for years, to practice with you today, to have you on this podcast today, to be able to share your message with my community. It's just beyond description. So I just thank you so much for being here with us.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you, Charlie. It's really been such a pleasure to connect with you. And I appreciate the work that you're doing. And I would like to offer something take care of your state, and your state takes care of everything else. The one thing you need to take care of is your state of mind, your state of being. And for that, you need spiritual practice, and you take care of that, and then you're equipped for whatever life throws at you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much, Pamela. It's been amazing having you on. I really feel like, as a podcaster, this was a goal I didn't even know I had and I achieved. So thank you. Thank you, Pamela.

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