Can Energy Healing Be Done Remotely? What is Distance Healing?

One of the great joys of teaching Reiki classes online is seeing the moment when a student first experiences offering healing to someone who is not physically in the same room. There is often a sense of surprise, curiosity and sometimes even disbelief. How can you possibly offer an energy healing treatment to someone who is hundreds of miles away? Do they need to be visible on a screen? Do they need to be lying down somewhere at the exact same time? And how does it actually work?

The answer, within the practice of Reiki and many other forms of energy healing, is that distance is not considered a barrier to the flow of energy. We call this distance healing, or remote healing, and it is a practice that has formed part of Reiki training for many years. A practitioner can offer a healing session to someone in another town, another country, or even on the other side of the world. The person receiving the treatment does not need to be visible on a screen, and they do not necessarily need to be consciously doing anything at all while the session is taking place.

In fact, within Reiki practice, distance healing can be taken even further. Practitioners may work with an intention directed towards a particular time, including the past or the future. This can be one of the aspects of Reiki that is most difficult to understand intellectually, because our everyday experience tells us that distance and time are very real and very fixed things. Yet distance healing invites us to consider another way of understanding our experience.

What is distance healing?

At its simplest, distance healing is the practice of offering energy healing when the practitioner and recipient are not physically together. Instead of placing hands directly on the body, the practitioner works with intention, visualisation, energy and connection. The person receiving the healing might be resting at home or sitting quietly in another room. Some people choose to arrange a specific time to receive their session, or work live over a computer or phone call.

For many people, the experiences can be surprisingly tangible. They may notice sensations of warmth or tingling, a feeling of deep relaxation, emotional release, vivid imagery, changes in their breathing, or simply a profound sense of peace. Others may not experience anything particularly dramatic during the session, but find that they feel calmer, clearer or more grounded afterwards. Of course, everyone's experience of energy healing is different, and there is no single right way to experience a treatment.

Distance healing is not something exclusive to Reiki either. Many different energy medicine practices can be approached remotely, including my work with crystals.

When the world went remote

When COVID changed the way we lived and worked, many practitioners had to rethink how they offered their services. Treatments that had traditionally taken place in person suddenly could not happen in the same way. For those of us already familiar with distance healing, this was an interesting reminder that the physical presence of another person is not always considered essential within energy work.

Reiki practitioners had, in many cases, already been taught how to offer distance treatments. It is one of the skills that forms part of the core curriculum of Reiki training, yet it is also one of the aspects of Reiki that students often find hardest to get their heads around.

We are so accustomed to thinking about healing in physical terms. If someone has a sore shoulder, for example, we might imagine that the practitioner needs to physically place their hands near that shoulder. If someone is sitting in another country, our logical mind immediately says, "But how can you possibly reach them?" This is where Reiki asks us to think beyond the physical.

Beyond the idea of separation

One of the reasons I find distance healing so fascinating is that it offers us an experiential doorway into the spiritual concept of non-duality. Non-duality literally points towards "not two". It describes a philosophical and spiritual understanding in which reality is not ultimately divided into separate, independent parts. Instead, existence is understood as a single, interconnected whole.

We normally experience ourselves as separate individuals. I am here, you are there. I have my body, you have yours. I am in my home, you are in yours. There is a road, a country, perhaps an entire ocean between us. On the physical level, these distinctions are obviously useful. We need to understand where our bodies begin and end. We need maps, clocks and measurements. We need to know the difference between here and there, now and then. But many spiritual traditions suggest that there is another level of reality beneath this apparent separation.

You might imagine it as a vast field of energy, or perhaps as an enormous web in which everything is connected. Each individual person appears to be a separate point within that web, but no point actually exists independently of the whole. From this perspective, separation is something we experience, rather than the ultimate truth of what we are.

And this is where distance healing becomes particularly interesting. When we consciously work at this energetic level, we are not necessarily approaching healing as though we are physically reaching across a geographical distance. Instead, we are working with connection.

The recipient is not truly separate from the field in which the practitioner is also participating. There is no road to travel, no physical distance to cross. The intention simply follows the connection.

The ocean and the drop

One of my favourite ways of imagining this is to think about the ocean. Imagine the entire field of consciousness as a vast, limitless ocean. Within that ocean, we experience ourselves as individual drops of water. A drop might appear to be separate from the ocean if we look at it in isolation, and we can point to it and say, "There is the drop, and there is the rest of the ocean." But the drop is made of the ocean. It contains the same essential nature.

It has never truly been outside of it.

This is perhaps one way of understanding the spiritual principle behind distance healing. We may experience ourselves as individual people living separate lives, but at a deeper level there is an underlying connection between us. Distance healing becomes a practical way of exploring that idea. Rather than simply thinking, "Everything is connected", we have the opportunity to experience what that might actually mean.

And... people can feel it

Perhaps the most fascinating part of distance healing is hearing what people experience when they receive it. Someone might tell me afterwards that they felt a wave of warmth move through their body. Someone else might describe a feeling of being held or supported, despite being completely alone in their home. Another person might fall deeply asleep, experience vivid colours or images, or feel an emotional shift that they weren't expecting.

And sometimes the experience is much quieter, with simply a feeling of deep peace.

This is one of the reasons I love reading the feedback from people who have experienced remote healing. Their experiences are deeply personal, and they can vary enormously from one person to another. If you'd like to explore some of those experiences for yourself, you can read the testimonials on my healing page.

The practical beauty of remote healing

Of course, there is also a wonderfully practical side to having a distance healing session. You can receive your treatment from the comfort of your own home. There is no travelling to an appointment, sitting in traffic, finding somewhere to park, or rushing home afterwards.

And this can be particularly valuable because healing sessions can leave you feeling deeply relaxed. You might feel sleepy, peaceful, emotional, light headed or simply as though you need some quiet time afterwards.

Being able to stay exactly where you are can be a real blessing. You can make yourself comfortable, perhaps light a candle, put on some relaxing music, have a blanket nearby and allow yourself to properly settle into the experience. When the session is finished, you can stay there for as long as you need. But for me, the convenience is only the surface of what makes remote healing so beautiful. Beneath it lies a much deeper spiritual teaching.

What distance healing can teach us

Distance healing invites us to question the boundaries we have placed around ourselves. It asks us to consider whether we really are as separate as we think we are. We spend so much of our lives moving through the world from the perspective of "me": my body, my home, my thoughts, my life, my problems, my experiences. Energy healing can offer another perspective. Perhaps there is a greater field in which all of these individual experiences are taking place, and perhaps our apparent separateness is only one aspect of reality, rather than the whole story. Perhaps this is why distance healing can feel so profound.

It is not simply a way of receiving a healing treatment without travelling to a practitioner. It can become an embodied experience of interconnectedness, and that is what I find so beautiful about it. The experience itself becomes a reminder that connection does not always require physical proximity. You don't have to be in the same room to be connected, and you don't have to be able to see someone to hold them in your awareness. Within the spiritual understanding of non-duality, there is ultimately no separation to overcome in the first place.

There is the field, there is the ocean, and we are already part of it.

Experience remote healing for yourself

If you're curious about distance healing, you don't need to understand exactly how it works before experiencing it. In many ways, that is part of the invitation. My remote healing sessions combine energy work with crystals to create a bespoke treatment, tailored to the individual and what they are working through at the time. You can receive the session from wherever you are, allowing yourself the space to relax and simply notice what unfolds. And if you're drawn to go deeper, distance healing is also something you can learn for yourself as part of my six-week online Reiki course.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing Reiki can teach us is that connection is not always as complicated as our minds make it. Sometimes, we simply have to become quiet enough to experience it, because ultimately, we are never alone.