Pranic Healing: Method, Sessions and How It Differs From Reiki
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
Curious about a healer who never touches you? Here is how pranic healing works: Choa Kok Sui's no-touch method of scanning, sweeping and energizing eleven or twelve chakras, a session, and how it differs from reiki.
On this page
What is pranic healing and who was Choa Kok Sui?
Imagine you have been running on empty for months. You sleep, but you wake up tired. A friend mentions a healer who "cleans your energy" without ever laying a hand on you, and you are half curious, half ready to roll your eyes.
The short answer: Pranic healing is a no-touch energy therapy in which a practitioner cleanses and recharges your energy field. Choa Kok Sui developed and systematized it in the Philippines during the 1980s. He taught it as a step-by-step procedure, not a mysterious gift.
Choa Kok Sui was a chemical engineer and businessman of Chinese descent, born in Cebu in 1952. He spent years testing energy techniques from yogic, Chinese and esoteric sources before publishing The Ancient Science and Art of Pranic Healing in 1987.
The system rests on one working assumption. Your visible body is interpenetrated by an energy body, which he called the bioplasmic body, and illness is said to show there as congestion or depletion before it shows physically.
Prana, the life force that energy body runs on, is described as coming from three sources: solar prana from sunlight, air prana absorbed through the lungs and the spleen chakra, and ground prana drawn up through the soles of the feet.
His most repeated claim was that healing is not a gift. He argued that an ordinary person who follows the protocol correctly gets a result, the way an ordinary person who follows a laboratory procedure gets a reaction. Think of it less like a talent and more like a recipe.
Students call him Master Choa Kok Sui, abbreviated MCKS on his book covers. He founded the Institute for Inner Studies in Manila as the teaching body for pranic healing, and the World Pranic Healing Foundation now oversees certified instructors internationally. He died in 2007. His courses are still taught largely as he wrote them, which is why classes in different countries cover near-identical material in near-identical order.
He never hid his borrowings, and they are easy to trace. Prana and the chakras come from Indian yogic literature. Clearing stagnant energy before adding any echoes Chinese medical thinking. The term bioplasmic body comes from Soviet energy-field vocabulary that circulated in the 1970s. The layered aura with its protective webs comes from Theosophical writing on the etheric double.
What he contributed was standardization, not new metaphysics. He turned a loose body of ideas into numbered protocols: which chakra to sweep, how many times, and with what, for a named complaint. That recipe format is what most sets pranic healing apart from other hands-off practices.
What does prana mean in pranic healing?
Prana means life force, the same idea the Chinese call chi and the Japanese call ki. What is different here is that Choa Kok Sui treated prana as a quantity you can feel by hand, remove and replace in measured amounts. That is why the instructions count sweeps and specify how much to project.
What is the bioplasmic body in pranic healing?
It is the energy body that surrounds and permeates your physical body, extending several inches past the skin in a healthy adult. Choa Kok Sui divided it into the inner aura, the health aura with its projecting health rays, and the outer aura. Treatment is performed on this body, never on the physical one.
Is pranic healing the same as Filipino faith healing?
No. Pranic healing is not Filipino faith healing or psychic surgery, though both come from the Philippines. Choa Kok Sui built it as a taught technique with no conversion, no incisions, no theatrics, and no need for you to believe anything. You sit or stand fully clothed while the practitioner sweeps and energizes your aura.
Why is pranic healing a no touch healing method?
If the idea of a stranger's hands on you makes you tense, this part may come as a relief.
Pranic healing is a no touch healing method because its target sits outside your skin. Touching the body adds nothing to the work and creates problems of its own. The practitioner keeps their hands a few inches to a foot away, closer for scanning and further out for sweeping and energizing. You stay fully clothed throughout.
Choa Kok Sui gave three reasons for keeping contact out:
Sensing. Skin contact floods the hands with ordinary touch information and drowns the far fainter sensations scanning depends on. It is like trying to hear a whisper while someone taps your shoulder.
Contamination. The congested energy swept off a sick person is treated as real waste that can transfer to the practitioner, and direct contact is the easiest route. That is why hands are flicked into salt water, not wiped on a sleeve.
Access. No undressing, no table, no contact. A practitioner can work on a burn, an open surgical site, a fracture in a cast, a stranger in a waiting room, or a frightened child, where any hands-on therapy would be painful or inappropriate.
Watch a session from across the room and what stands out is movement. The practitioner circles you, hands raised and slightly cupped, making slow downward strokes through empty air, pausing to flick both hands into a bowl of salt water on the floor.
The posture is deliberate: feet apart, knees soft, tongue resting against the roof of the mouth. Pranic healing teaches this as the way to keep the practitioner's own circuit closed while drawing prana from air and ground. Energizing happens with one hand receiving and the other projecting, so the healer works as a conduit, not a battery. This is where beginners get tired, because they forget to draw in and push out their own energy instead.
The no-contact design also makes distance work a small step, not a leap. If treatment already happens several inches off the body, working through a photograph or a surrogate is a change of degree, not of method.
How far from the body do pranic healing practitioners hold their hands?
Practitioners scan with the palms roughly three to five inches from you, since that is where the inner aura of a healthy adult ends and changes in density are easiest to feel. Sweeping is done a little further out, and energizing further still, sometimes at arm's length, because prana is understood to be directable rather than dependent on closeness.
Can pranic healing be done through clothing?
Yes. It is always done through clothing, and no part of the protocol needs skin exposure, which is one reason it travels well into hospital rooms and offices. You will usually be asked to remove watches and jewelry before scanning, since metal objects can muddy what the hands read over a chakra.
Why does no touch healing matter for burns and wounds?
Because the hands never make contact and nothing needs uncovering, a practitioner can work directly over a burn, a fresh surgical incision, a skin graft or a break that cannot bear pressure. This is the practical advantage most often cited for pranic healing in clinical settings, where hands-on bodywork over the same site would be unusable.
What are the core pranic healing techniques?
If you like knowing exactly what someone is doing to you and why, pranic healing will feel reassuringly orderly.
The techniques come down to five steps in a fixed order:
Scanning. Reading your energy body by hand to find which chakras and areas are congested or depleted.
Sweeping. Removing congested energy with a cupped or claw-shaped hand, scooping it away from the body, then flicking it into a bowl of salt water.
Energizing. Projecting fresh prana into the cleaned area. The practitioner draws prana in through one hand or through the crown and directs it out through the palm chakra of the other.
Stabilizing. Locking the projected energy in place so it does not leak straight back out, done in the Advanced course with light whitish blue prana.
Releasing. Cutting the cord of energy connecting practitioner to patient at the end, which pranic healing treats as required, not a nicety.
The order is not flexible. Choa Kok Sui was emphatic that energizing a congested area without sweeping it first makes the condition worse. His image: you are pumping fresh energy into a blocked pipe.
The unglamorous parts of the method carry more weight than newcomers expect. Hand sensitivity has to be activated before every session, not assumed. Waste energy has to go somewhere specific, not be shaken into the room. And the amount projected really matters. Pranic healing warns constantly against overenergizing, described as producing agitation, restlessness or a pounding head, and corrected by sweeping the excess back off rather than waiting it out.
At the Advanced level there is also localized sweeping with color prana. The practitioner uses light whitish green to loosen congested energy and light whitish orange to expel it, applied over a specific organ. Beginners work only with ordinary white prana, and Choa Kok Sui was firm about that order.
The whole toolkit is built to be checkable: sweep, rescan, energize, rescan, and let the hands tell you whether the last move did anything.
How do you sensitize your hands for pranic healing?
You activate the palm chakras before each session. The standard method is small circular motions in the center of one palm with a fingertip or pen tip, roughly fifteen rotations, then the same on the other hand. Then you hold both palms facing each other and slowly compress the space between them until you feel a springy resistance.
What is the salt water bowl in pranic healing for?
It is where practitioners dispose of the congested energy they sweep off you. A basin of water with a generous handful of salt sits within reach, hands are flicked into it after each set of sweeps, and the contents are flushed away, never reused. Salt is treated as an energy disinfectant, which is also why practitioners take salt baths.
What is the difference between general and localized sweeping in pranic healing?
General sweeping covers the whole body from head to feet, usually six to twelve passes, to clear the field broadly and lift your overall vitality. Localized sweeping targets one chakra or organ that scanning has flagged, and gets far more repetitions. Most sessions do general sweeping first, then localized sweeping on the problem area.
How does scanning work in pranic healing?
If you have ever wondered how a healer decides where to work without asking you a dozen questions, scanning is the answer.
Scanning is a hand survey of your energy body that gives each area one of two verdicts: congested or depleted. The practitioner holds sensitized palms three to five inches from your body and moves in a fixed sequence, usually chakra by chakra from crown to basic, comparing each area with the ones around it.
Congestion registers as thickness, heat, pressure pushing back against the hand, a springy bulge or a prickly density.
Depletion feels like the opposite: a hollow, a cold patch, a thinning, or a slight suction that seems to draw the hand inward.
Practitioners also scan the size of each chakra. A healthy adult chakra reads as a few inches across. An inflamed or overactivated one reads noticeably larger, and an underactive one reads small and flat.
Scanning happens at least twice: once at the start to build the plan, and again after sweeping and energizing to check whether the reading changed. That rescan is the feedback loop, like a mechanic rechecking the pressure after fixing a leak. It is what stops pranic healing from being one routine applied blindly to everyone.
Interpretation is where scanning becomes clinical rather than mystical. A depleted solar plexus in a client who reports fatigue points somewhere different from a congested one in a client reporting anger. Training spends real time on these pairings: congestion in the throat chakra with unexpressed frustration, congestion at the meng mein with blood pressure complaints, a shrunken basic chakra with low physical energy and poor recovery.
Practitioners scan the health rays as well. These are described as fine lines of energy projecting straight out from the skin, like the nap of a fabric. In this tradition they should stand upright and even. Drooping, tangled or matted health rays over an area are read as disorder there, sometimes before anything is felt at the chakra itself.
None of this is a medical diagnosis. Choa Kok Sui was direct that scanning tells the practitioner where to work and nothing more, and that naming diseases from a scan is outside the practitioner's competence.
What does congested energy feel like when scanning in pranic healing?
Usually a thickening or pressure pushing back against the palm, often described as warmth, a spongy bulge or a prickly resistance where the surrounding field feels smooth. The reliable signal is contrast, not the sensation itself. The area reads as denser than the region a few inches to either side.
What are health rays in pranic healing?
Health rays are the fine energy filaments described as projecting straight out from the skin, forming the layer Choa Kok Sui called the health aura. Upright and evenly spaced, they read as healthy. When they droop, tangle or mat down over a region, pranic healing reads that as disorder in the tissue underneath.
Can a beginner actually feel anything when scanning in pranic healing?
Most people feel something on their first try, though it is faint and easy to confuse with hand fatigue or imagination. You will notice it when one patch feels a little warmer or thicker than the patch next to it. Classes have students scan several people in a row and have instructors confirm findings, because the skill is comparison between areas, not raw sensitivity.
What are the twelve major chakras used in pranic healing?
If you only know the seven chakras from yoga class, this map may surprise you.
Pranic healing counts eleven or twelve major chakras, depending on whether the front and back of the solar plexus are treated as one center or two. The full roster:
Basic chakra at the base of the spine. Sex chakra at the pubic area. Meng mein at the back of the navel, on the spine. Navel chakra. Spleen chakra under the left ribs, with a front and back aspect. Solar plexus chakra, front and back. Heart chakra, front and back. Throat chakra. Ajna between the eyebrows. Forehead chakra. Crown chakra.
Each is assigned physical responsibilities in this tradition. The basic chakra governs blood production, bones, muscles and overall vitality. The navel governs intestinal function and general energy level. The solar plexus covers liver, pancreas, stomach and emotional processing. The throat covers thyroid and lymphatics. The ajna covers the endocrine system as a whole.
Treatments are written in terms of these centers, so a protocol reads like a recipe: sweep and energize these named chakras, in this order.
Two centers make the pranic healing map distinctive, and both come with cautions, not just functions.
The meng mein sits on the spine directly behind the navel and is described as controlling the kidneys, the adrenals and blood pressure. That is why Choa Kok Sui's rule against energizing it in a hypertensive person is one of the first contraindications a student memorizes.
The spleen chakra is described as the body's main intake point for air prana, distributing it to the other chakras like a pump. Pranic healing treats it as easily overloaded, so it is energized sparingly and skipped altogether in certain conditions.
Front and back aspects matter too. The back solar plexus and back heart are used as entry points for energizing, because the front aspects are considered more prone to overenergizing. You cannot read a pranic healing protocol without this anatomy. An instruction to energize the back heart and the ajna alternately means nothing in a seven-chakra model that has neither.
What is the meng mein chakra in pranic healing?
The meng mein sits on the spine at the back of the navel and governs the kidneys, the adrenal glands and blood pressure. It carries the strictest warning. Pranic healing teaches that energizing the meng mein of someone with high blood pressure can raise it further, so in hypertensive clients it is cleaned but not charged.
What does the spleen chakra do in pranic healing?
Located under the left ribs with a front and back aspect, the spleen chakra is described as the main intake and distribution point for air prana, feeding the other major chakras. Because of that role it is treated as easy to overload. It is energized lightly and briefly, and not at all in a severely weakened or seriously ill client.
Why does pranic healing use more than seven chakras?
Choa Kok Sui built the map around physical treatment, not symbolic or meditative correspondences. Centers like the meng mein, the spleen chakra and the separate forehead chakra were included because his protocols needed a place to address blood pressure, prana intake and the nervous system specifically.
What happens in a pranic healing session?
If you are nervous about booking your first session, knowing the steps ahead of time takes most of the mystery out.
A session follows a set sequence that rarely varies, and it is short:
Opening. The practitioner says an invocation for divine blessing, sensitizes the hands, and sets a bowl of salt water within reach.
Scanning. You sit or stand fully clothed while they scan your whole energy body chakra by chakra, noting congestion and depletion.
Sweeping. General sweeping comes first, whole-body passes from head downward, then localized sweeping over whatever scanning flagged.
Energizing. One hand draws prana in, the other projects it into the cleaned chakras, stopping when the area feels full.
Closing. The energy is stabilized, the cord between you is cut, and your whole field is rescanned to confirm the reading changed. The session ends with thanksgiving, the practitioner washes their hands, and the salt water is flushed away.
Most sessions run twenty to forty-five minutes, with much of the work packed into a few minutes of focused sweeping. Sessions for acute complaints can be as brief as ten minutes and are repeated more often, sometimes daily, rather than made longer. Nothing is played, nothing is burned, and you are never asked to lie down or be touched.
What clients report tends to be modest and physical, not dramatic: warmth over a treated chakra, a cold draft as an area is swept, tingling in the hands and feet, a heaviness that arrives around the ten minute mark. A few feel a distinct release as a congested spot clears. A few feel nothing at all, which is not treated as a failed session, because the working evidence is the rescan.
Afterward, the standard advice is to drink water and wait a few hours before bathing so the projected energy settles.
Practitioners follow their own aftercare, which the system calls energetic hygiene: washing hands and forearms, taking a salt bath after a heavy day of healing, and not treating anyone straight after a large meal or while badly depleted or ill. If congested energy is real waste that can transfer, the practitioner's cleanup is basic procedure, on the same footing as the salt water bowl. Think of a nurse washing up between patients.
Does the client do anything during a pranic healing session?
Almost nothing. You sit or stand still and breathe normally. There is no visualization to perform, no belief required, and no instruction to relax on cue. Practitioners usually ask you to keep your arms uncrossed and feet flat, and to say if you feel unusually agitated, which is the signal to sweep off excess energy.
How does pranic healing differ from reiki?
If you have tried reiki and are wondering whether pranic healing is just the same thing with a new name, it is not, and the differences are concrete.
Initiation. Reiki requires an attunement from a master to open the channel. Pranic healing requires none and is taught as a skill anyone can learn in a weekend.
Contact. Most reiki uses light hands-on placements. Pranic healing is strictly no touch healing.
Assessment. Pranic healing scans by hand first and builds the session around the findings. Reiki more commonly runs a standard sequence of hand positions.
Cleansing. Pranic healing insists congested energy be swept out before fresh prana goes in. Reiki generally holds that the energy is intelligent and goes where it is needed without anything being removed.
Waste. Pranic healing has a disposal step and a salt water bowl. Reiki has no equivalent.
Mapping. Pranic healing uses eleven or twelve major chakras, including the meng mein and spleen chakra. Reiki is usually organized around the seven-chakra model or Japanese hand positions.
The two also disagree about where the energy comes from and whether the practitioner can run out.
Reiki is framed as channeled universal energy passing through a practitioner who was permanently opened by attunement, so giving a treatment is not supposed to drain them. Pranic healing describes the healer as actively drawing prana from air, ground and sun and pushing it out. That is exactly why it teaches breathing, posture, tongue placement and energetic hygiene. A careless pranic healing practitioner can deplete themselves or pick up what they swept off.
Their histories differ as much as their methods. Reiki was developed by Mikao Usui in Japan in the 1920s and passed down through lineages that trace back to him personally, and reiki practitioners can usually recite theirs. Pranic healing was assembled by Choa Kok Sui in the 1980s from yogic, Chinese and esoteric material, and its authority sits in a curriculum and a certifying foundation, not a chain of teachers. One system is transmitted, like a family recipe passed by hand. The other is documented, like a printed cookbook.
Does pranic healing require an attunement like reiki?
No. Pranic healing requires no attunement, no initiation and no transmission from a teacher, which is the sharpest structural difference between the two. Choa Kok Sui built the system so ability comes from correctly applied technique, and a student who finishes the basic course can treat immediately without anyone opening a channel for them.
Can you practice pranic healing and reiki together?
Many practitioners hold both certifications, and the procedures do not clash. A reiki practitioner can scan and sweep before laying on hands. Purists in each camp object, since pranic healing considers uncleansed energizing counterproductive while reiki considers removal unnecessary, so most people who do both keep the sessions separate rather than blending them mid-treatment.
Is pranic healing or reiki easier to learn?
Reiki has the lower entry barrier, because attunement does the qualifying work and the hand positions are few and fixed. Pranic healing asks more up front: learning to scan reliably, memorizing eleven or twelve chakras with their functions and contraindications, and following per-condition protocols. In return, you get a checkable procedure rather than an internal state you have to trust.
How do you learn pranic healing and what do the course levels cover?
If you are thinking of learning this yourself, it helps to know the path is clearly laid out and taken one step at a time.
Pranic healing is taught as a graded course sequence under certified instructors, and each level has to be taken in order:
Basic Pranic Healing. Usually two days. It covers the eleven major chakras and their functions, sensitizing the hands, scanning, general and localized sweeping, energizing with ordinary white prana, self-healing, distant healing with a photograph or surrogate, the Meditation on Twin Hearts, and protocols for common complaints such as headaches, fevers, coughs and minor injuries. It is the prerequisite for every other course.
Advanced Pranic Healing. Introduces color prana, described as far more potent than white prana and correspondingly less forgiving.
Pranic Psychotherapy. Applies the same scanning and sweeping to emotional and psychological material, working with what Choa Kok Sui called negative thought forms and elementals. This is where cord cutting between people is formally taught.
Specialist courses. These include Pranic Crystal Healing, Pranic Face Lift and Body Sculpting, and Advanced Pranic Psychotherapy.
Arhatic Yoga sits apart as Choa Kok Sui's spiritual training path, not a healing course. The books print the protocols in full, so classes exist to supervise your practice, not to guard secrets.
The Meditation on Twin Hearts is the practice most closely tied to pranic healing outside its clinical technique, and it is taught in the basic course, not saved for advanced students. It activates the heart chakra and then the crown chakra, blessing the earth with loving-kindness. It opens with the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, which Choa Kok Sui chose as a non-denominational text most people could say without conflict.
He taught it as both spiritual practice and practical maintenance, reasoning that a practitioner who meditates has more prana to give away. Like a well that refills overnight.
It carries the system's usual cautions. It is not recommended for young children, for people with severe heart conditions, or for anyone with serious psychological illness, and it should be followed by exercise or self-sweeping to disperse excess energy.
That pattern runs through all of pranic healing training. Every technique comes with a stated dosage and a list of people it should not be used on, one of the clearest fingerprints Choa Kok Sui left on the field.
What is color prana in Advanced Pranic Healing?
Color prana means projecting specific tinted energies instead of plain white prana, each with an assigned effect: light whitish green to loosen and dissolve congestion, light whitish orange to expel it, light whitish blue to soothe, localize and stabilize, light whitish yellow for cohesion and repair, and light whitish red to activate, used with the most caution.
Questions people ask
Is pranic healing safe?
Pranic healing is physically non-invasive. Nothing is touched, swallowed or inserted, so the real safety questions are about judgment, not procedure. Choa Kok Sui was blunt that pranic healing complements medical treatment and does not replace it. His courses teach clear contraindications, such as never energizing the meng mein chakra of a person with high blood pressure. The genuine risk is a client delaying diagnosis or stopping prescribed medication because a session felt good, and a competent pranic healing practitioner will tell you to keep the appointment.
What does a pranic healing session feel like?
Most people report warmth, coolness, tingling or light pressure over the area being worked on, and a heavy, relaxed feeling by the end. Because it is a no touch healing method, there is no massage sensation competing with that. Some people feel a distinct pull as a congested area is swept. Others feel nothing during the session and notice a shift hours later. Feeling nothing is not treated as a failure, because the practitioner works from what scanning shows, not from what you sense.
How many pranic healing sessions do you need?
Pranic healing is usually given in short, frequent sessions rather than long, occasional ones. For an acute complaint, practitioners commonly treat daily or every other day for the first week, then taper as scanning shows the area holding its charge. Chronic conditions are usually scheduled two or three times a week over several weeks. The deciding moment is the rescan. If the treated chakra reads normal at the next session, the gap gets longer. If it has gone congested again, the practitioner treats more often.
Can pranic healing be used on children, animals and plants?
Yes, and pranic healing courses cover all three. Children and infants get much less energy and shorter sweeping, on the reasoning that their chakras are smaller and take a charge quickly. Animals get the same method with the chakra map adapted to a four-legged body, and no touch healing is practical with an injured animal that will not tolerate handling. Plants are a standard beginner exercise, since two trays of seedlings make an easy side-by-side comparison.
Can you learn pranic healing from a book?
You can learn the theory from Choa Kok Sui's books, which he wrote as manuals with the protocols printed in full, not as teasers for his courses. What a book cannot give you is calibration. Scanning is a skill of comparison, knowing this patch feels denser than the patch six inches over, and beginners often mistake their own hand tension for congestion. Classes spend most of their time on partner drills where an instructor corrects what you think you felt.
Is pranic healing a religion?
No. Pranic healing does not ask anyone to change faith. Sessions open with an invocation for divine blessing and close with thanksgiving, but Choa Kok Sui kept the wording non-denominational so people of any religion could say it. The invocation is a courtesy, not the working mechanism. Scanning, sweeping, energizing and stabilizing are taught as procedures that do not depend on the patient's belief. The devotional material sits in Arhatic Yoga, which Choa Kok Sui taught as a separate path.
Does pranic healing work at a distance?
Distant healing is taught in the first pranic healing course, not saved for advanced students. The practitioner works on a stand-in for the absent person, such as a photograph, a written name, or a doll or pillow used as a surrogate, and scans, sweeps and energizes it as if the person were present. Choa Kok Sui called this the principle of correspondence. Scanning feedback is weaker at a distance, so practitioners lean more on the fixed protocol for the complaint and less on what their hands read.
What does today hold for you?
Pop in your birthday. Your reading shows up right here. No email, no account.
Try it for yourself, free
Related topics: pranic healing, pranic healing techniques, pranic healing vs reiki, choa kok sui, no touch healing, pranic healing session, pranic healing chakras
