Energy healing isn’t one single thing — it’s an umbrella over several quite different practices, and Reiki is only one of them. I work across a few different modalities in my own practice, and one of the most common questions I get is how they differ, and how to know which one actually fits what you’re going through. Here’s an honest comparison.
Reiki
Reiki channels a general life force energy through light touch or hands held above the body, moving toward wherever the body or mind needs balancing. It’s gentle, broadly applicable, and doesn’t require you to know what’s “wrong” going in — it’s a good fit when you know you feel depleted, stressed, or unsettled, but can’t necessarily name why.
Access Bars
Access Bars involves lightly touching 32 points on the head that are said to store the electromagnetic charge of thoughts, beliefs, and judgments we’ve accumulated over a lifetime. Where Reiki works with energy more broadly, Bars is more targeted at mental clutter specifically — it’s often what I recommend to clients who describe their mind as “noisy” or stuck in repetitive thought patterns, rather than those dealing with a physical or emotional crisis.
Past Life Regression
This is a guided therapeutic process rather than a hands-on energy treatment. It’s suited to clients dealing with a fear, pattern, or block that feels disproportionate to anything in their current life — the kind of thing that resists ordinary explanation. It asks more of you as a participant than Reiki does, since you’re actively engaging with what comes up during the regression.
Akashic Records Reading
This is less a healing technique and more a form of guidance — I access what’s described as the energetic record of your soul’s journey to offer clarity on a specific question or decision. Clients usually come to this one with something concrete they’re trying to understand, rather than a general sense of imbalance.
So which one is right for you?
As a rough guide: if you feel generally depleted or stressed without a clear cause, start with Reiki. If your mind feels stuck or overly critical, Access Bars is worth trying. If there’s a specific fear or pattern that doesn’t make sense given your current life, Past Life Regression may get to the root of it faster. And if you have a defined question you need clarity on, an Akashic Records reading is the more direct route.
None of these are mutually exclusive, and a lot of my clients end up combining more than one over time as different things come up. If you’re genuinely unsure, that’s not a problem you need to solve on your own — a short consultation is exactly the space to talk through what you’re experiencing and land on the modality that actually fits, rather than guessing.
