Attunement

Initiation in Reiki lineages

A scholarly entry on Usui Reiki Ryoho places Mikao Usui's acquisition of healing powers around 1922, after twenty-one days of austerities on Mount Kurama, and dates the founding of his organization in Tokyo to April 1922. Usui died in 1926. The entry describes a ritual called reiju, performed at every meeting, which one scholar argues derives from esoteric Buddhist initiation rites. It also notes that the leadership wrote little about its practices and that many early records were lost in the 1945 bombing of Tokyo.

A second entry reports that Hawayo Takata (1900-1980) became the first Reiki master in the West in 1937 and trained twenty-three masters between 1975 and 1980. According to that entry, she replaced reiju with three separate initiations, one for each training level. A Reiki practitioner-historian describes the widely repeated account attributed to Takata as a teaching story rather than history, and notes that some of its details conflict with later findings.

Shaktipat in Siddha Yoga

A World Religions and Spirituality Project entry describes shaktipat as an initiation in which a guru is said to transmit divine energy, producing what the tradition calls a kundalini awakening. It reports that Swami Muktananda began offering shaktipat to Western audiences during his first world tour in 1970, and that by 1974-1975 two-day intensive programs, influenced by est workshops, had become the main route to initiation for newcomers.

The sources reviewed for this page did not document how the word attunement is used in Theta Healing, Kriya Yoga or other transmission traditions, so those lineages are not described here. The Reiki, Usui Reiki, Western Reiki and Theta Healing pages on this site cover those practices separately.

Psychological use of the term

In developmental psychology, Daniel Stern and colleagues described affective attunement in a 1987 paper. The abstract describes a pattern between mother and child that appears around 8 months: a cross-modal matching, not an imitation, in which the reference point is the partner's internal state rather than the outward act. A 1997 nursing review treats affect attunement and emotional availability as concepts within Stern's 1985 model of the developing self and Emde's model of early socioemotional organization.

Daniel Siegel and Chloe Drulis, writing in 2023, place attunement within interpersonal neurobiology, which they describe as a framework for understanding the mind and not a form of therapy. They link secure attachment to parents' attuned communication with children.

Three senses of the word

The sources reviewed use attunement in at least two technical senses. One is a ritual: a Reiki paper calls the initiation rite, or attunement, crucial to Reiki teaching, while the Usui Reiki Ryoho entry uses the Japanese term reiju for a ritual given at each meeting. The other is relational: Stern's abstract describes matching of internal states between mother and child. The third, general sense of tuning an instrument or aligning two things appears in everyday speech and is not covered by the research reviewed here.

Psychological terms and measures

Bolis, Dumas and Schilbach define interpersonal attunement as a set of multiscale processes through which people establish joint interaction patterns and expectations. They describe interpersonal misattunement as a mismatch located in the interaction, not only in one person. Researchers have also built specific measures: patient-rated experience of therapist attunement and responsiveness, video-based movement synchrony between patient and therapist, and observer ratings of how well a music therapist is musically and emotionally matched to a child.

These measures do not capture the same thing. A patient's felt sense of being understood, a pattern of synchronized movement and a rater's judgment of matching are different constructs that share a name, and findings about one should not be assumed to hold for the others.

In Reiki training

The Western Reiki entry describes three training levels, each accompanied by an initiation: Reiki 1 for beginners, Reiki 2 for advanced practice including distant treatments, and a master level for teaching. It adds that styles differ in initiation procedures, fees and symbol use. A 2025 study notes that remote initiation has become common in distance-learning courses. Practitioners describe these rites as part of how the practice is passed on.

In Usui Reiki Ryoho, as described by the Stein entry, reiju is given at every meeting and is said to connect to the cosmic source of reiki and to re-enact Usui's experience on Mount Kurama.

In shaktipat traditions

In Siddha Yoga, adherents describe shaktipat as the guru's transmission of divine energy that awakens kundalini. In the form described for Western audiences from the mid-1970s, it was given to newcomers during weekend intensive programs. The entry does not describe instructions or procedures, and none are given on this page.

In parenting and psychotherapy

Siegel and Drulis describe attunement as focusing attention on another person's inner subjective experience, not only visible behavior, and give the phrase presence, attunement, resonance and trust as a clinician-oriented sequence. They report a patient's description of feeling felt by a therapist. Researchers in parent-infant studies observe moments of shared positive affect and responsiveness during play, while psychotherapy researchers ask patients to rate how attuned and responsive a therapist felt after sessions.

Spiritual claims

Within Reiki, the Western entry describes the first initiation as the entry point to practice, the second as enabling distant treatments and the master initiation as enabling teaching. The Usui Reiki Ryoho entry reports that reiju is understood as linked to the source of reiki. These are statements of what practitioners and their lineages hold, not findings that an initiation confers an ability.

The Siddha Yoga entry describes shaktipat as the awakening of spiritual energy by the guru's grace. The sources reviewed do not report outcomes measured against a comparison group for any spiritual attunement or initiation.

Psychological claims

Stern's abstract suggests that the quality of attunement between mother and child probably shapes the later capacity for shared, intersubjective relatedness. Siegel and Drulis propose that attuned connection supports neural integration and inner regulation, and describe therapist attunement as a component of effective care. These are theoretical claims offered by the authors, and the reviewed abstracts and entries frame them as hypotheses to be tested.

Spiritual attunement: what has and has not been studied

PubMed searches for Reiki with attunement or initiation returned one record, and a search for shaktipat returned none. No controlled study of whether a spiritual attunement or initiation changes health outcomes was found. The one study located surveyed 94 people who were told to expect a remote initiation in an online Reiki course but did not receive it. Using a 58-question questionnaire and descriptive statistics, the authors report that participants described warmth, tingling and emotional responses, and conclude that expectations and beliefs shaped these experiences. The abstract does not describe a comparison group, so it cannot show whether a real initiation differs from none.

For Reiki as a whole, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states that it has not been clearly shown effective for any health-related purpose, that most research has been of low quality with inconsistent results, and that there is no scientific evidence for the energy field thought to be involved. That statement concerns Reiki treatment, not the initiation rite.

Psychological attunement in therapy

In a naturalistic study of 161 outpatients, Schwartz and colleagues measured movement synchrony from one early session. Among the most impaired patients, higher attunement was associated with early response, with the authors acknowledging that the design cannot show causation and that only about a quarter of the sample was highly impaired. In a study of 40 patient-therapist pairs in 16 weekly sessions, patients' ratings of therapist attunement and responsiveness were associated with the therapist's own feelings before and after sessions.

Results are not uniform. In an outpatient sample, within-patient changes in working alliance predicted functioning in the following month, while the attunement and responsiveness measure did not reach significance, and the authors call for more work on that construct. In 101 children with autism in music therapy, observer-rated attunement was not significantly associated with change in autism severity, which did not replicate an earlier pilot.

Caregiver-child attunement and theory

In a study of 100 mother-toddler pairs, 38 with maternal depression, greater maternal positive affect responsivity was associated with fewer internalizing problems a year later in the depression group but not the comparison group. The design is observational and the abstract describes the finding as an association. Bolis and colleagues present interpersonal attunement as a theoretical framework and state that new empirical methods are needed to study it.

Spiritual attunement

The sources reviewed do not report harms specific to a Reiki attunement or initiation, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states that Reiki treatment has not been shown to have harmful effects. Because the one initiation study relies on self-report and expectation, it does not show how common unwanted reactions are. Absence of reports is not evidence of absence.

The Siddha Yoga entry records allegations of sexual abuse of authority within the movement from the early 1980s. That material concerns the conduct of a community's leadership, not shaktipat as a practice, and it is not evidence about other initiation traditions. The sources reviewed do not document coercion in Reiki initiations.

Psychological attunement and care boundaries

Psychological attunement is a research construct and a clinical concept, not a treatment on its own. In the music therapy trial, therapists found attunement harder to achieve with children who had more severe symptoms, which the authors present as a possible limit of the measure and not a fault of the child or caregiver. Misattunement, as Bolis and colleagues frame it, is a mismatch in an interaction and should not be read as blame placed on one person.

None of the reviewed sources supports using an initiation rite or an attunement measure as a replacement for medical or mental health care. A person with a health concern or distress is generally best served by not delaying or replacing necessary care with spiritual or relational approaches.