Reiki Meditation Techniques: Gassho, Joshin Kokyu Ho & Hatsurei Ho Guide

What Is Gassho Meditation and How Do You Practice It?

Imagine you finally sit down to meditate after a long day. Within ten seconds your mind is replaying an email, planning dinner, and wondering if you locked the car. You open your eyes feeling like you failed at sitting still.

The short answer: Gassho meditation is the foundational Reiki meditation Mikao Usui taught all his students, and it was built for exactly that restless mind. You press your palms together at your heart and rest all your attention on the point where the two middle fingers meet. When your mind wanders, you simply come back. The coming back is the practice.

Gassho means "two hands coming together" in Japanese: palms pressed together in front of the heart, fingers pointing up. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and rest your attention on the fingertip contact point. It works like watching the breath in Vipassana or a repeated word in mantra practice: a small anchor dropped in choppy water.

Practitioners often notice warmth, tingling or a pulse at the point of contact as Reiki is said to begin moving in the hands. Usui recommended it for 20 to 30 minutes morning and evening, making it the most repeated technique in the system: simple enough for your first week, and still the backbone of experienced practice.

Gassho comes from Japanese Buddhist practice, where it is a gesture of reverence, gratitude and centering. In Usui's system it became a meditation method, not just a ceremonial gesture. The Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Tokyo still opens meetings with group Gassho, following the pattern Usui set.

Hiroshi Doi, a Gakkai member and author of Modern Reiki Method for Healing, describes how meditation stayed central in Japan while Western Reiki drifted toward a therapy model built around treating others. That is why you could finish a Western Level 1 class without hearing the word Gassho.

If you already sit in another tradition, keep it. Most people just add five minutes of Gassho at the front, bringing in the Reiki element without disturbing what works.

What Is Joshin Kokyu Ho and How Does It Build Reiki Energy?

If your energy seems to leak out all day with nothing filling it back up, this is the breathing practice practitioners turn to.

Joshin Kokyu Ho means "focusing the mind with the breath." It is the Reiki breathing technique said to draw energy in through the crown on the inhale and store it in the hara, roughly two inches below the navel, on the exhale.

How to do it:

Sit comfortably with your hands on your thighs, palms up.

Inhale through the nose and picture white light entering through the crown of your head, flowing down the central channel, and collecting in the hara.

Exhale and let that light expand from the hara outward in every direction, filling your body and the space just around it.

With each cycle, feel the hara grow brighter and denser.

Continue for 10 to 15 minutes.

It is used to build reserves in the hara, which Japanese tradition treats as the body's power center, like a well filling with each breath, and to settle you into the centered state that steadies the rest of a session.

The hara, also called the tanden, is treated as the body's energetic center across Japanese martial arts, healing and spiritual practice. In aikido and kendo, developing hara is inseparable from developing power and stability. Mikao Usui trained in martial disciplines before he developed Reiki, and Joshin Kokyu Ho sits comfortably inside that lineage.

The idea parallels the lower dantian in Chinese qigong, where practitioners spend years gathering qi through breathing sets.

Slow abdominal breathing also shifts your nervous system toward rest-and-digest, which is why this is the step most often lifted out of Hatsurei Ho and used alone during a working day.

What Is Hatsurei Ho and How Do You Practice the Complete Technique?

If you want one daily practice instead of a pile of separate techniques, Hatsurei Ho is the complete sequence Usui taught his students.

It takes 20 to 30 minutes and runs in a fixed order:

1. Kenyoku Ho (dry bathing). Sit in seiza or another comfortable position. Sweep your hands diagonally across the chest and down the arms, three times each side, to clear stagnant energy from the aura.

2. Gassho. Rest in Gassho meditation for several minutes to quiet the mind.

3. Joshin Kokyu Ho. Breathe energy in through the crown and down into the hara.

4. Mokunen. Set a clear intention, such as "I begin Hatsurei Ho now."

5. Seishin Toitsu. Breathe Reiki out from the hara through the palms on each exhale.

6. Gokai Sansho. Recite the five Reiki precepts three times.

Finish in Gassho with gratitude.

Why keep the order? Each step prepares the next, like rinsing a cup before you fill it: clearing, then settling, then filling, then directing, then dedicating.

Hatsurei Ho was largely unknown in Western Reiki until the late 1990s, when Hiroshi Doi and Frank Arjava Petter separately brought Japanese material to an international audience.

Doi, who trained with Western Reiki Masters and the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, calls Hatsurei Ho the single most important daily practice. He notes the Gakkai treats spiritual development as Reiki's main purpose, with hands-on healing as an application, close to the reverse of the Western emphasis. Petter's research in Japan agreed: Usui's students practised it daily as what kept the channel clear.

Practitioners who sit through a large group version often notice Seishin Toitsu feels markedly stronger in a room of people doing it together.

How Should You Sit for Reiki Meditation, and What Helps With Knee or Shoulder Pain?

If your knees ache or your arms burn before you have settled, you just need a better setup. Seiza, kneeling with shins on the floor and buttocks on the heels, is traditional, but position matters far less than an upright spine you can hold still for 20 minutes.

Four setups cover most people:

Seiza over a low kneeling bench that takes weight off the ankles.

Cross-legged on a firm cushion, hips clearly higher than knees.

A straight-backed chair, sitting on the front third, both feet flat, spine holding itself up.

If injury rules out sitting, a reclined position with head and knees propped.

Every step of Hatsurei Ho, including the Kenyoku Ho sweeps, works unchanged in a chair.

Stack the spine so ears sit over shoulders and shoulders over hips. Tuck the chin very slightly and let your eyes close.

Knee pain in seiza: put a rolled towel under the ankles and a folded blanket behind the knees, or switch to the bench.

Shoulder fatigue in Gassho: drop the hands from heart level to the base of the sternum, keep elbows close to the ribs, or rest your forearms on a cushion across your lap so the palms stay together without the deltoids working.

Seiza became the default in Japanese Reiki for a practical reason, not a mystical one. The practice grew up in rooms with tatami floors, where kneeling was simply how people sat. Nothing in Hatsurei Ho depends on your knees.

What the tradition does insist on is the vertical line. All of Joshin Kokyu Ho is built on a felt channel running from crown to hara. A slumped spine collapses that line, like a kinked hose, so the breath stops reaching the lower abdomen.

In chairs, people lose the effect by sliding back and rounding the lower back; sitting on the front third with the pelvis tipped slightly forward restores it. Twenty minutes is also near the limit of most untrained knees, one reason the classic schedule is two moderate sessions a day.

What Other Japanese Reiki Meditation Techniques Are There Besides Hatsurei Ho?

Once the daily sequence feels familiar, you may want smaller tools for specific moments, and the Japanese repertoire has several.

Gassho Kokyu Ho. Breathing while holding Gassho, drawing Reiki in through the palms on the inhale and letting it fill the body on the exhale. You'll reach for it when you only have five minutes, since practitioners use it as a compressed version of the daily practice.

Hikari no Kokyu Ho, the breath of light. It expands the Joshin Kokyu Ho visualization so the light gathered at the hara is breathed out to fill the whole aura. It is often used before working on a group.

Reiji Ho. The three-step intuition practice: hands in Gassho at the heart, a request that Reiki flow where it is needed, then hands raised to the third eye while you wait to be moved to a position.

Nentatsu Ho. One hand on the forehead and one on the back of the head while you repeat a single clear intention. It is the technique traditionally used for habit change, the one you might turn to when you keep falling into the same pattern.

Byosen Reikan Ho. The scanning technique for sensing where energy is disturbed, covered in Reiki & Chakras: Hand Positions per Chakra, Byosen Scanning & Japanese vs Western Approaches.

These techniques reached the West late and unevenly. Most were not part of what Hawayo Takata taught in Hawaii and North America. So Western Reiki grew up around hand positions, symbols and client treatment, while the Japanese line kept breath and intuition at the center.

When Japanese teachers shared them internationally in the 1990s, many long-practising Western Masters met Reiji Ho and Hikari no Kokyu Ho for the first time.

Japanese-influenced curricula tend to teach Reiji Ho before fixed hand positions, reasoning that someone who can wait for guidance will not need a chart. Western curricula teach the chart first. It is like cooking by taste versus by recipe.

How Do You Meditate on the Gokai, the Five Reiki Precepts?

If you have ever promised to be calmer or kinder and broken it by lunch, the precepts were made for you. You meditate on the Gokai through Gokai Sansho, reciting them three times with hands in Gassho, the closing step of Hatsurei Ho.

In Japanese: kyo dake wa, ikaru na, shinpai suna, kansha shite, gyo o hageme, hito ni shinsetsu ni.

In English: just for today, do not anger, do not worry, be grateful, work diligently, be kind to others.

The traditional instruction is to recite them morning and evening, aloud and in the heart, with hands in Gassho. Three repetitions is standard. Practitioners describe the first as reading, the second as hearing, and the third as meaning it.

For a deeper version, take one precept per day. Recite all five, then hold that day's precept alone in the hara for five minutes. Let your mind bring up real moments from the past day when it held or broke, and do not argue with what shows up. Which one keeps surfacing for you?

The phrase kyo dake wa, just for today, is the working part of the set. It shrinks an impossible lifetime standard to a single day you can actually attempt.

The precepts predate Reiki as a genre. Short moral maxims like these circulated widely in Meiji-era Japan as material for self-cultivation, and Usui's set reads as a Reiki-specific member of that family rather than something invented from nothing.

The order matters. Anger and worry come first because both pull you out of the present, which is exactly the state Gassho trains. Gratitude follows as the corrective, then diligence, then kindness, moving from inward to outward.

If you log the precepts as one line each morning, the same one often keeps coming back after a few months. That is usually the useful information.

Where the precepts are being used against persistent anxiety or low mood rather than as daily practice, Reiki for Anxiety & Depression: Calming Positions, Research & When to Seek Therapy covers that ground and the point at which professional support belongs alongside it.

What Is a Complete Guided Reiki Meditation Script You Can Follow?

If remembering the steps is what keeps stopping you, here is a complete 20-minute guided Reiki meditation you can follow tonight.

Sit with your spine upright and feet flat on the floor. Close your eyes and take three slow breaths, letting tension go on each exhale.

Bring your hands into Gassho at heart center. Rest your attention where the middle fingers meet. Hold that focus for three minutes, letting thoughts pass without following them.

Lower your hands to your thighs, palms up. Picture a column of white light coming down from above and entering through the crown of your head.

On each inhale, draw that light down into the hara, two inches below the navel. On each exhale, let it expand outward until it fills your whole body. Continue for five minutes.

Now move your attention through the energy centers from root to crown, one minute each, letting the light clear and settle each one.

Bring your hands back to Gassho. Recite the five precepts three times. Sit still for a final minute in gratitude for what moved through you.

This follows the shape of Hatsurei Ho, compressed for practising alone. Remembering the order is the main obstacle in the first month, so a guided format frees your attention for the practice.

Experienced practitioners change it in predictable ways: stretching the silent Gassho to ten minutes, adding a symbol at each energy center, or replacing the center-by-center pass with a single long Joshin Kokyu Ho. For that portion, hand placements and correspondences are set out in Reiki & Chakras: Hand Positions per Chakra, Byosen Scanning & Japanese vs Western Approaches.

Group practice of the same script is common in Reiki circles, on the belief that practising together amplifies what each person generates alone.

What Do You Do When Emotions Surface During Reiki Meditation?

If you have ever sat down to relax and found tears arriving out of nowhere, you are far from alone, and nothing has gone wrong.

In this tradition, emotions surfacing during meditation are treated as material moving, not a problem to fix. Let them come without pushing them down or analyzing them, while your breath and hand position stay as they are.

They tend to rise in the long silent Gassho and the storing phase of Joshin Kokyu Ho, when mental noise drops far enough for older material to surface, like silt lifting when water goes still.

People report waves of grief, unexpected relief, laughter, trembling in the hands or jaw, or an old memory arriving with unusual clarity. A settled lightness usually follows.

If the feeling is strong, move your hands from Gassho onto your heart or hara, which most people find steadying, and keep breathing. Do not stop to think about what came up. Write it down afterward, since the pattern across weeks tells you more than any single sitting.

Where difficult material keeps returning at the same intensity, working with a practitioner or therapist alongside the daily practice is the sensible course rather than sitting harder alone.

The five precepts at the close of Hatsurei Ho are doing quiet work here. Anger and worry are named first. Meeting the precepts every morning keeps asking you to notice which of the two is running right now.

Over months that noticing tends to arrive earlier in a reaction, which practitioners call the practice's real fruit more often than any dramatic experience.

The stance is deliberately gentle: nothing that arises is fought, and nothing is chased.

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