Pamela Miles, the author of “Reiki: A Comprehensive Guide” is founding president of the Institute for the Advancement of Complementary Therapies and has 35 years experience as a clinician, educator and lecturer in natural healing. She has been a student of meditation and yoga for 45 years. The author began practicing Reiki in 1986 and was initiated as a Reiki master in 1990. She has developed Reiki programs for implementation in prominent New York City hospitals, published numerous articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, and presented and taught Reiki at medical schools and conferences.

This is a thoughtful, informative, enlightening book, written in an engaging and conversational style, peppered with anecdotes, that let’s its readers know that here the author is opening up her heart. It is a book that is useful to seasoned Reiki practitioners, the newly-minted Reiki practitioner and the individual for whom Reiki is a new experience as practitioner or as recipient. For anyone who is interested in bringing Reiki into their lives and are without a clue as to where and how to begin, “Reiki: A Comprehensive Guide” offers an excellent starting point.

The book is divided into fourteen very well-organized chapters, moving from a description of what Reiki is and what it does, its history, the components of Reiki training, and formulating a Reiki practice, to the last few sections devoted to the role of Reiki in integrative medicine and the science and research methodology underpinning that role.

The author deals fairly but squarely with the unhappy reality that much of what most of us were taught about the origins of Reiki from Hawayo Takata, who brought the practice to the West, was simply untrue: a useful myth, perhaps, but without historicity or any factual basis. Miles addresses this without hesitation, but always reminds us of what really matters: the unassailable fact that Reiki works. Even in the absence of an explanation as to how it works, in the absence of a clinically demonstrable therapeutic mechanism, it does what it says it does. While honoring and clarifying the history and traditions of her own Reiki lineage, Miles is respectful of and offers recognition to the many different styles of practice which have developed since the time when Hawayo Takata first brought Reiki out of Japan.

As a practitioner and teacher of Reiki and other healing modalities (I integrate Reiki and the Bach flower remedies into my practice of traditional Ayurveda), I am profoundly grateful to Pamela Miles for all she has done for both Reiki as well as for complimentary and integrative medicine. The author, considered to be one of the senior-most Reiki Masters now practicing, has forged a strong and graceful link between Eastern and Western medicine, and I hope that we see more of her writing in the near future.

Here, at long last, we have an insightful, straightforward and intelligent book appropriate for seasoned Reiki practitioners and medical professionals as well as individuals who are simply looking for objective explanations.

Then I came across Pamela Miles’s book and I was instantly drawn to it. It is sincere and honest. I read it whenever I feel self-doubt in my daily practice and my hands will instantly become activated and I can feel energy run through my body. It’s an inspiration to all reiki practitioners.

I own more than 80 Reiki books (e.g., Haberly, Petter, Gray, Rand, etc.) –but I regard this Reiki book, highly–amongst the “top 3″. (The others: Bronwen & Frans Stiene: Reiki Sourcebook and Japanese Art of Reiki.)

Pamela Miles is a “purist” and I value her book because of its’ honest, integrous and insightfull approach to Reiki!

With this outstanding reference work, everyone in the Reiki community has benefitted!

Pamela, I have you to thank (I mean this most sincerely) for my re-connection with SELF-Reiki! And, it has extended to my Reiki students, also!