I have fallen asleep. Again. It is my second energy healing session with reiki master and multi-disciplinary “joyraiser” Sama Trinder, and it is the second time that I have spent the hour succumbing, repeatedly, to the irresistible land of nod.
“Did you feel anything?” Trinder asks me afterwards as I peel myself off the massage table. We are in a cosy treatment room overlooking the Thames at Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond, a boutique hotel and private members’ club that Trinder took over from her parents in 2001, and that since 2023 has also been the base for Bhuti, her “eco wellbeing escape”. “Or maybe you saw something? Some people see colours, some people have visions…”
“Er, I’m not sure,” I reply, a little guilty that I’m unable to give her more. After confessing to being out for the count for most of it, Trinder tells me not to worry. “The mind doesn’t need to ‘know’ the story in order for the healing to take place,” she explains.
Sama Trinder with a client © Flow Visual Studio
Trinder says she had spent the session hovering her hands above my body and allowing herself to be guided to various chakras, or “energy centres”. She was drawn to my heart and throat chakras in particular. “It’s not really me doing the healing, but energy coming through me,” says Trinder, who describes herself as a “conduit” more than anything else. “You can feel energy and it’s like a magnetic force… I stay in a position until that force begins to soften, then move on to another area. It’s very intuitive and quite difficult to explain.”
Reiki, which was developed in early-20th-century Japan – the name is a combination of the Japanese words rei, meaning “universal”, and ki, meaning “vital energy” or “life force” – is just one practice in the broader and rather amorphous field of energy healing, which aims to bring both emotional and physical relief to the body and soul.
I’m a healer but my lens is really guiding people how to master the energy they hold
Nieve Tierney, energy coach
Some studies – such as one published earlier this year in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management – have suggested reiki might be effective in areas like the relief of chemotherapy symptoms. Participants in that study said they “experienced relaxation, symptom reduction… gratitude, and wanted another reiki session”. While encouraging, the evidence is mixed, and researchers say more robust, placebo-controlled studies are still needed.
Trinder, who mixes her reiki with sound healing, likes to think she brings the client closer to something like God. Or at least to love or joy – hence “joyraiser”, in contrast with the “hellraiser” she was in her 20s. At times during our session she had made contact with my skin, and she held my feet for a couple of minutes at the end to “ground” me. I had also been vaguely aware of her playing, at various points, a couple of instruments – a shamanic drum and a crystal bowl, which she explains help to bring balance and healing to my body and make me “receive the reiki energy more effectively”.
With a Book on My Own, 2025, by Martyn Cross © Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen
I come away from both sessions feeling relaxed, calm and somewhat emotionally unburdened. I’m not sure that I feel a major energetic shift – at least not one that feels meaningfully different from a good massage – but I certainly feel very nicely looked after.
Nieve Tierney is another reiki master, who spent the first 15 years of her career as an art director and graphic designer in the fashion industry, working with brands such as Max Mara and Anya Hindmarch. These days she describes herself as a “modern-day energy coach” who wants to give you a “vibe check that changes your frequency”. She recently had a sold-out reiki residency at Soho House and her high-profile clients include Olympic athletes, Hollywood actors and international musicians.
In a kind of ‘energy cafetière’ I am to imagine myself plunging any negative energy from my body
I am feeling pretty sceptical ahead of our first session, not least because it is to take place over Zoom, a platform that I feel might create a technological barrier for my vital life force. But apparently quantum theory suggests energy can transcend space and time, so I’ve decided to give it a go. Furthermore, she recently had a Zoom client on the other side of the world who, having not menstruated for 17 years, not only had a period but six months later, following another reiki session, became pregnant with her first child. “She calls it her reiki baby,” Tierney tells me.
Tierney’s approach is different to Trinder’s – not only is it largely Zoom-based, but it is also more DIY. “I’m an energy healer but my lens is really guiding people how to look after and master the energy that they hold,” says Tierney, whose floaty soft voice matches her floaty soft cotton blouse. She works from a stylish, softly lit north-east London home office.
Energy guide and coach Nieve Tierney
During our session she does get me to lie down and close my eyes, but most of the time is spent talking about the ways in which I am both allowing other people’s negative energy to affect my own and the ways in which I am blocking the flow of energy from my heart. My energy hygiene, it seems, needs some cleaning up.
The virtual energy healing, like the IRL version, doesn’t feel like it is doing a huge amount, but Tierney says this work is subtle, cumulative and slow. She says she can feel that my energy is already shifting, which makes me feel good even if I’m not sure I really feel it for myself.
She also gives me some visualisation techniques that I find genuinely helpful. One is that before I leave the house – particularly when I am going to be around draining or negative people – I imagine myself stepping into a giant disco ball. The idea is that, while I can still be open and available to others, their energy cannot overpower mine; it just bounces right back. It helps me to “create space” (excuse the cliché) for other people to air negative emotions without feeling like I need to be dragged down by them myself, which feels positive for all of us.
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The other is a kind of energy cafetière – at the end of each day, I am to imagine myself plunging any negative or foreign energy from my body, pushing down my hand in front of me from my head to my toes as I say: “I release any energy that doesn’t belong to me and I give it to the earth beneath me.” It’s a nice ritual, and a nice way of lifting your mood. Am I really unblocking my ki, though? I am honestly not sure if I would know.
Painting from Martyn Cross: Gods Shaped of Mud at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, New York, until December 20