What Twenty Years of Daily Practice Did — and Did Not

Key Takeaways

The changes I can honestly attribute to twenty years of daily Reiki practice are smaller and duller than most accounts you will read, and I think that is the most useful thing I can tell you about them.
Nothing about my circumstances improved because of the practice. What changed was the gap between something happening and my reacting to it.
The list of things it did not do is longer than the list of things it did, and a teacher who cannot produce that second list is not being straight with you.

Key Terms Explained

靈氣 (Reiki) / Universal Energy — The practice of working with universal energy through quiet, attentive hands.
師範 (Shihan) / Master-Teacher — A teaching rank in the traditional lineage, carrying responsibility for how the practice is passed on.
五戒 (Gokai) / The Five Precepts — Usui's daily principles: for today only, do not anger, do not worry, be grateful, work diligently, be kind to others.
靈授 (Reiju) / Attunement — The transmission a teacher offers a student, traditionally in person and repeated over time.

The Morning I Noticed Nothing Was Happening

About four months into daily practice, I sat down one morning, put my hands where they go, and felt precisely nothing.

This had happened before, but that morning it registered differently, because I had just realised I had been sitting there every day for a third of a year on the strength of a recommendation from a businessman I respected and very little else. No lights. No warmth. No sensation I could not have produced by sitting still with my eyes closed.

I remember thinking, with an engineer's clarity: I have no evidence. I am doing this on somebody else's word.

I kept going anyway, and I want to be honest about why, because the reason was not faith. It was that ten minutes is a very small price, and I had noticed one thing — not during the practice, but outside it. I had stopped snapping at a particular colleague. Not decided to stop. Just stopped.

That is the entire quality of evidence I had at four months, and after twenty years it is still, broadly, the kind of evidence I have. It arrives sideways, outside the practice, in the form of something you did not do.

What Actually Changed

Let me be as precise as I can, and separate what I observed from what I can attribute.

The gap got longer

The clearest change, and the one I would defend most confidently, is that the interval between something happening and my reacting to it grew.

Somebody says something irritating in a meeting. Twenty years ago, my response formed instantly and my face had already delivered it before I had decided anything. Now there is a gap — not a long one, perhaps a second — in which the response is available but not yet compulsory.

I have no idea what mechanism produces this. I notice it is the thing every long-term practitioner I know describes when pressed, and I notice it is also what people who meditate describe, and people who have done twenty years of any deliberate attention practice. That similarity is worth taking seriously rather than explaining away.

Sleep got more reliable, not better

I sleep about as well as I did. What changed is the variance. The catastrophic nights — the ones where you watch the ceiling from two until five — became rarer. The good nights are not better than they were.

I would put low confidence on this one. Twenty years is long enough for age, work, and where I live to explain a great deal.

Related: From Quick-Tempered to Calmer: What One of My Students Noticed After Level 1 explains this in detail.

The precepts did more than the technique

This is the part that surprises students, and it is the part I most believe.

五戒 (Gokai: the Five Precepts) — for today only, do not anger, do not worry, be grateful, work diligently, be kind to others — sound like the sort of thing printed on a calendar. Read once, they are unremarkable. Read every morning for twenty years, before doing anything else, they turn out to be a slow structural intervention.

Not because the words are profound. Because "for today only" removes the impossibility. You are not being asked to conquer anger. You are being asked to skip it until this evening. That is a manageable request, and making a manageable request of yourself seven thousand times has an effect that making an unmanageable one does not.

If I could only keep one part of this tradition, I would keep the precepts and let the rest go.

What It Did Not Do

Here is the list I think matters more, and the one you will not often see.

It did not make me calm. I am not a calm person. I am a person with a slightly longer fuse than I had, which is a different and much smaller claim. Students sometimes arrive expecting the practice to change their temperament, and I tell them early that mine did not change.

It did not fix anything medical. Nothing. I have had the ordinary run of ailments over twenty years and they behaved exactly as ailments behave, resolving when treated and persisting when not. Reiki does not diagnose, treat, or remove illness, and my own two decades are consistent with that rather than an exception to it.

It did not make me wiser about people. I have misjudged people throughout, including recently. Whatever the practice does, it does not improve your model of other human beings.

It did not produce experiences. No visions, no revelations, no moments of unity. Twenty years of largely uneventful ten-minute sittings. If you are drawn to this practice hoping for experiences, I would gently suggest the odds are poor.

It did not survive being skipped without cost. There have been stretches — travel, deadlines, one long difficult period — where I stopped for weeks. The gap I described closed up again fairly quickly. Whatever this is, it appears to be maintenance rather than accumulation, which is disappointing and worth knowing.

An Honest Accounting

So: twenty years, roughly ten minutes a day. Call it 1,200 hours.

For that I got a slightly longer pause before reacting, somewhat fewer terrible nights, and a set of five sentences that quietly reorganised how I approach a day. That is the whole return, stated without inflation.

Is that worth 1,200 hours? I think so, but I want to be careful about the reasoning, because there is a trap here. The obvious defence — "it must be worth it, I have done it for twenty years" — is exactly the argument a person makes when they have sunk a great deal into something. I am not immune to that, and neither is any teacher telling you what their practice has done for them.

The better defence is smaller: the cost was ten minutes. At that price, a modest and uncertain return is still a good trade. If it had cost me an hour a day, I would want much better evidence than I have.

That is the honest position, and I would rather a student adopt this practice on those terms than on inflated ones. People who begin expecting transformation tend to quit in month three when transformation does not arrive. People who begin expecting ten quiet minutes tend to still be practising in year twenty, which is, as far as I can tell, where whatever value exists actually accumulates.

FAQ

Q: If the effects are that small, why teach it at all? A: Because small and reliable beats large and imaginary, and because ten minutes a day is an unusually low price for any durable change in how you meet a difficult morning. I teach it in exactly the terms above, which loses me some students and keeps the ones who stay.

Q: Did you ever consider stopping? A: Several times, and I did stop for weeks on more than one occasion. What brought me back was not conviction but noticing, each time, that the gap before reacting had quietly closed again. That is a weaker reason than certainty and a more honest one.

Q: Do the effects keep growing with more years? A: Not in my experience, and I would be suspicious of anyone claiming otherwise. Most of what I described was in place within the first two or three years. The remaining seventeen have been maintenance, which is the unglamorous truth about most daily practices.

Q: Should I expect the same results? A: I have no idea, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. What I can say is that the students whose practice lasted were the ones who expected very little and showed up anyway.

Key Insights to Remember

The most defensible benefit of a long practice is often the least dramatic one. Twenty years bought me a one-second pause before reacting — which sounds like nothing until you consider how many conversations, decisions, and relationships turn on what happens in that second.
A practice that is maintenance rather than accumulation is still worth doing, but you should know which one you have signed up for. Mine faded within weeks of stopping and returned within weeks of resuming. That reframes the daily ten minutes as upkeep, not investment, and upkeep is a perfectly respectable thing to spend ten minutes on.
The list of things a practice did not do is the more informative half of any account, and its absence should make you cautious. Anyone describing twenty years of anything without a substantial list of failures and non-effects is either not paying attention or not telling you everything.