Gassho and the Breath: The Two Things I Teach Before Any Hand Position

Key Takeaways

Almost every new student wants the hand positions immediately, and almost every new student does better when they wait a little.
合掌(Gasshō) — placing the palms together — is a posture, not a gesture of worship, and getting it physically right changes how the rest of the session feels.
Breathing is the part students most often skip and most often come back to years later, saying it was the part that mattered.

Key Terms Explained

合掌(Gasshō) / Palms Together — The posture of placing both palms together at the centre of the chest, used in Japanese Reiki to begin and end practice.
呼吸(Kokyū) / Breath, Breathing — In Japanese the word combines the characters for breathing out and breathing in, in that order.
手当て(Teate) / Hands-On — The ordinary Japanese word for placing a hand on someone, and the root of how Reiki is given.
五戒(Gokai) / The Five Precepts — Usui's daily principles, traditionally recited morning and evening.
靈氣(Reiki) / Universal Energy — The traditional Japanese practice of connecting with universal energy so that life settles.

The Question Every New Student Asks in the First Hour

"When do we learn where to put the hands?"

I have heard some version of this from nearly every student I have taught here in the Philippines, usually within the first hour, and usually with a slight impatience underneath it. They have come to learn Reiki. The hand positions are the visible part. Everything else looks like preamble.

I understand it completely, because I asked the same thing. When I first learned, I remember sitting through the opening of a class thinking: yes, fine, but when do we get to the actual practice.

What I say now is that we will get to the hand positions today, and that we are going to spend the first part of the class on two things instead: how to put the palms together, and how to breathe.

The impatience usually holds for about twenty minutes. Then something shifts, and I stop seeing it.

I am not being mysterious for effect. There is a practical reason, and it is not a spiritual one. A student who has not settled their posture and their breathing tends to hold tension in the shoulders and forearms without noticing. When they then place their hands on someone, they press. Not hard — but enough that the person receiving spends the session aware of the weight rather than relaxing under it.

Fixing that afterwards is difficult, because by then it has become how they practise. Getting it right at the start costs twenty minutes.

Related: Hand Positions for Self-Reiki: A Beginner's Map, Not a Rulebook explains this in detail.

What I Actually Teach in Those Twenty Minutes

Gasshō Is a Posture, Not a Prayer

The first thing I have to clear up, especially with students who are not Japanese, is that 合掌(Gasshō) is not an act of worship.

The posture appears across many contexts in Japan. People do it before meals. It is used as a greeting and as a way of saying thank you or please. It carries respect and attention, and in Japanese Reiki it marks the boundary between ordinary time and practice time. But nobody in a Reiki class is being asked to pray to anything, and Reiki is not a religion.

I say this plainly because students from Christian, Muslim and secular backgrounds all end up in my classes, and some of them are quietly uneasy in that first minute. Naming it removes the problem entirely.

Physically, what I ask for is specific:

Palms flat against each other, fingers together and pointing up. Not interlaced, not cupped, not sagging apart at the base.

Hands at the centre of the chest, roughly at the level of the heart. Not up at the face, not down at the stomach.

A small gap between the hands and the body. A hand's width, roughly. Pressed against the chest, the shoulders start to round forward.

Shoulders down and back wide. This is the one that needs correcting most. Almost everyone lifts their shoulders when they bring their hands together, and almost nobody notices they are doing it.

Elbows away from the ribs, but not held out. The arms should feel supported rather than clamped.

The whole thing should be able to hold for several minutes without effort. If it cannot, something is being gripped that does not need to be.

The Breath Is Slower Than Students Expect

Once the posture is settled, I ask for the breathing, and here is where I have to correct almost everyone.

New students, when told to breathe deeply, take enormous chest breaths. Shoulders rise. The stomach pulls in. Within four or five breaths they feel slightly dizzy and assume the dizziness is meaningful.

What I want is the opposite:

Breathe out first. The Japanese word 呼吸(Kokyū) puts exhalation before inhalation, and that order is the right instruction. Empty first, and the in-breath takes care of itself.

Let the belly move, not the shoulders. If the shoulders are rising, the breath is too high.

Slow, not deep. Slowing the rate matters more than increasing the volume. Deep and fast makes people light-headed.

Through the nose, mouth closed and jaw loose. The jaw is the second place tension hides after the shoulders.

Do not count. Counting turns it into a task to perform correctly. I want the attention on the sensation, not on hitting a number.

I usually ask for two or three minutes of this. Long enough to settle, short enough that nobody starts wondering how long is left.

Why This Order and Not the Other

Someone always asks why this cannot come after the hand positions, and it is a fair question.

The honest answer is that it can. Nothing breaks if you learn the hand positions first. But I have watched enough students go both ways to have a view.

Students who learn the settling first tend to describe their early sessions as calm. Students who learn the hand positions first tend to describe theirs as effortful — they are concentrating on remembering the sequence, checking the clock, wondering whether they are doing it right.

Reiki works better when you are relaxed than when you are trying hard. That is not a mystical claim; it is a straightforwardly practical one. A tense practitioner presses, fidgets, and transmits their own restlessness to the person on the table. Twenty minutes at the start prevents that.

What I Was Wrong About for Years

I want to be honest about something, because it is easy to teach a thing as though you always understood it.

For a long time I treated the opening posture and breathing as the warm-up. Necessary, in the way that stretching before exercise is necessary — a preparation for the real thing that comes after. I taught it that way, and I practised it that way.

My background before Reiki was in IT, and I think that shaped the error. In engineering you set up the environment and then you do the work. Setup is not the work. So I imported that structure without examining it.

What changed my mind was noticing, over years of daily practice, that the settling was often the part I remembered. Not the session. The two minutes before it.

I still do not have a grand explanation for this and I am not going to invent one. What I can say is what I observe: on days when I rush the opening, the whole practice feels like something I am performing. On days when I do not, it does not.

The 五戒(Gokai) / The Five Precepts begin with 今日だけは — "just for today". I have come to hear those two minutes as the same instruction in physical form. Not a preparation for today. Today, briefly, being all there is.

A student of mine once told me, about a year after her first level, that she had almost entirely stopped doing formal sessions but had never stopped doing the opening. She used it in traffic, before difficult conversations, in the two minutes before a meeting. She apologised for this, as though it were a lapse.

I told her it was not a lapse. It might be the most sensible thing anyone had ever done with what I taught them.

FAQ

Q: Do I have to use Gassho if it feels religious to me? A: The posture is not an act of worship, and Reiki is not a religion. That said, if the gesture carries a meaning for you personally that makes you uncomfortable, you can rest your hands on your knees, palms up or down, and get the same settling effect. The point is the posture of the shoulders and the attention, not the specific position of the hands. Nothing in the practice depends on it.

Q: How long should I hold the breathing before I start? A: Two or three minutes is plenty, and there is no benefit I can identify in doing much more before a session. What matters more is that you actually stop and do it rather than skipping straight to the hands. A settled thirty seconds is better than a rushed five minutes.

Q: I feel nothing during this part. Am I doing it wrong? A: No. Most people feel very little at first beyond a slight physical easing, and some feel nothing at all for a long time. I felt very little myself early on. The purpose here is not to produce a sensation, it is to reduce the tension you carry into the session. That happens whether or not you notice it happening.

Key Insights to Remember

The parts of a practice that look like preamble are often where the practice actually lives. I taught the opening posture and breath as a warm-up for years, and it took daily repetition over a long period to notice that it was frequently the part I remembered afterwards. It is worth asking, of anything you do regularly, whether the thing you have labelled as setup is quietly doing more work than the thing you labelled as the main event.
Physical instructions beat atmospheric ones. Telling a student to be calm produces almost nothing. Telling them to drop their shoulders, leave a hand's width between the palms and the chest, and breathe out before breathing in produces the calm as a side effect. When something needs to change in how a person practises, the reliable lever is usually a specific, checkable, physical detail.
A student who takes only two minutes of this into the rest of their life has not failed the training. Formal sessions are the visible form of Reiki, but the settling is portable in a way the sessions are not — it fits into traffic, into the pause before a hard conversation, into the minute before a meeting. If that is what someone keeps, that is a good outcome, not a diminished one.