Reiki Through Myth and Depth Psychology

By Jaclyn Kalkhurst,

November 18th, 2025

Ever since I began my PhD journey, students and clients alike have asked how I weave together my academic study of mythology and depth psychology with my practice of Reiki. At first glance, these worlds may seem distant from each other, one rooted in scholarship and the other in healing. Yet for me, these fields have never been separate. They are different ways of speaking about the same mystery of life, energy, and meaning. Each one explores the unseen forces that move through our lives, and each offers a path toward transformation through symbol, story, and presence. At the heart of all three is the archetypal movement toward wholeness. Myth calls this the hero’s journey, depth psychology calls it individuation, and Reiki expresses it through the living experience of energy and awakening. They are not competing worldviews but three dialects of a single language, three mirrors reflecting the same inner landscape, three invitations into the life of the soul.

Mythology gives us the oldest symbolic language for this inner journey. Long before psychology existed as a field, human beings expressed the movements of the psyche through stories of gods, heroes, ancestors, and creation. The ancient Greeks gave us the word mythos, which, as Jaan Puhvel (1932–2017) explains in his foundational work Comparative Mythology (1987), derives from an Indo European root meaning “to think,” “to imagine,” or “to speak,” and originally referred to an authoritative spoken utterance. Myths were never meant to record literal events. They were imaginative maps showing how the soul moves, suffers, descends, and rises again. As Puhvel writes, “in myth are expressed the thought patterns by which a group formulates self cognition and self realization, attains self knowledge and self confidence, explains its own source and being and that of its surroundings, and sometimes tries to chart its destinies” (p. 2–3). He continues that “myth operates by bringing a sacred (and hence essentially and paradoxically ‘timeless’) past to bear preemptively on the present and inferentially on the future (‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’)” (p. 3). Myth is therefore not entertainment but one of the earliest symbolic languages of individuation, revealing how communities and individuals alike navigate the timeless journey toward wholeness.

Across history, scholars have returned to myth to understand these symbolic foundations of human life. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) viewed myth as the expression of a people’s inner life, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) argued that myth must be understood on its own terms. Their insights prepared the way for the modern understanding of myth as a symbolic psychology. In the twentieth century, Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) articulated this most clearly. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he identifies the universal structure of the hero’s journey: departure from the known world, initiation into deeper realms, and return transformed. For Campbell, mythic stories reveal the inner movements of the psyche itself. Later, in The Power of Myth (1988), he writes that myths are “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (p. 3). Myths teach that individuation is not a modern invention but an ancient pattern of transformation lived by every soul. As Campbell observes in The Power of Myth, “what we are seeking is an experience of being alive…”, an experience that resonates through the deep structures of the psyche and animates the mythic journey” (p. 13). The hero’s journey offers that experience by guiding individuals through their own departures, descents, and returns.

Another key voice is Rollo May (1909-1994), who explains why myth remains essential in a world that often feels fragmented. In The Cry for Myth (1991), May writes that myth is “a way of making sense in a senseless world” (p. 15). Without the symbolic framework myth provides, individuals lose their orientation and become spiritually unmoored. May argues that many of the crises of modern life stem from “the unavailability of adequate myths” that once gave coherence, belonging, and purpose (p. 9). In this sense, mythology is not simply an academic subject but an existential necessity. It teaches that every life must follow the archetypal movement toward wholeness, a journey echoed in the psychological and spiritual traditions that followed.

Depth psychology brings this mythic pattern of individuation into the intimate realm of the individual psyche. Emergent through the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Alfred Adler (1870-1937), and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the field explores the unseen layers of the mind. Freud emphasized instinctual drives and repression, Adler focused on belonging and purpose, and Jung expanded these ideas into a symbolic psychology of the soul. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), Jung writes that “The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does" (p. 17). The psyche speaks through images, not logic, and those images guide the individual toward balance and self knowledge.

Central to Jung’s work is the concept of individuation, the process by which unconscious contents rise into consciousness so that the personality becomes more whole. Individuation mirrors Campbell’s departure, initiation, and return but describes that movement from within. In Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959), Jung defines individuation as “the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual, that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole’” (para. 490). Through encounters with symbolic material, including dreams, fantasies, crises, and archetypal images, the individual is drawn toward integration. Depth psychology therefore sees healing not as symptom removal but as symbolic transformation, a shift in the inner pattern that orients one toward greater wholeness. Individuation is thus the psychological expression of the same journey that mythology describes, a lived path of leaving the known, entering the depths, and returning with new insight.

James Hillman’s (1926-2011) work expands this symbolic understanding into the wider world. While Jung described individuation as an inner movement toward wholeness, Hillman argued that modern psychology has become too narrowly focused on the interior life of the individual. In City & Soul (2006), he emphasizes that psyche is not limited to the personal unconscious but is expressed through the images, atmospheres, and presences that animate the world around us. He critiques the tendency of contemporary culture to interiorize psychology at the expense of seeing soul in the environment, suggesting that the health of the psyche is inseparable from the state of the world. For Hillman, individuation is not a withdrawal inward but a widening of perception, a capacity to sense soul in places, cities, stories, and the larger field of life. His work reminds us that psychological transformation requires reanimating imagination not only within ourselves but also in the world we inhabit.

Yet even within a disenchanted modern landscape, new languages of reconnection have emerged. Practices within the New Age revivals of the 1960s, 1980s, and early 2000s, respond to the cultural longing for meaning. Far from being escapist, these traditions attempt to restore the relationship between psyche and cosmos. In this context, Reiki offers a contemporary ritual for the reanimation Hillman describes. It teaches us to sense energy not as abstraction but as presence, a way of listening to the invisible life that flows through both city and soul.

As traditional religious frameworks lose cultural dominance, new forms of spiritual expression have emerged. Margrethe Løøv, in The New Age Movement (2024), describes this phenomenon as a “transcultural network” of yoga, mediumship, and energy healing practices, including Reiki. It is not a doctrine but “a network which includes several subnetworks, groups, or clusters” united by the pursuit of self development and holistic wellbeing (p. 44-46). Reiki, therefore, stands not at the margins but at the center of this spiritual shift.

Reiki began in Japan as a spiritual discipline rooted in Zen Buddhism and Shintoism, traditions emphasizing purification, presence, and harmony with unseen forces. In its original context, Reiki was a method of cultivating ki, the subtle life energy flowing through all beings. The term combines rei meaning “spiritual” or “universal” (霊) and ki meaning “life energy” (氣). In The Inner Heart of Reiki (2016), Master Frans Stiene describes the system as “a Way of Self-Cultivation which is primarily focused on refinement of self which happens to include a method of helping and healing others that is a secondary feature of The Way.” (p. 4). Master Penelope Quest echoes this in Reiki for Life (2002), defining Reiki as “a holistic system for balancing, healing and harmonizing all aspects of the person—body, mind, emotions and spirit—and it can also be used to encourage personal and spiritual awareness and growth.” (p. 4). As Reiki spread beyond Japan, particularly in the West and within the Spiritual But Not Religious movement of today, the practice adapted to new cultural landscapes. Removed from its explicitly Buddhist and Shinto roots, Reiki evolved into a universal, accessible method of cultivating presence, compassion, and awareness. In its modern form, it functions as a spiritual practice without dogma, offering individuals a way to reconnect with the invisible life moving through the body and the world.

When viewed through the lenses of mythology and depth psychology, Reiki reveals itself as a living enactment of the archetypal journey of transformation. Campbell’s pattern of departure, initiation, and return, along with Jung’s theory of individuation, provides a symbolic framework for understanding the path of the Reiki practitioner. The training of a Reiki student begins with a departure from ordinary life into a sacred learning space where transformation becomes possible. The attunement ritual serves as the moment of initiation, a spiritual empowerment that shifts the practitioner into a deeper mode of knowing, one that requires learning how to feel rather than think and echoes Jung’s conviction that intuition is the essential gateway to the unconscious. As the student deepens in practice and returns to their everyday life, they embody Campbell’s stage of return and Jung’s movement toward integration and wholeness. Reiki becomes a lived process of individuation, a journey of awakening in which the practitioner grows toward greater alignment, authenticity, and presence. Through ritual, energy awareness, and the cultivation of intuitive perception, Reiki expresses the same archetypal rhythm that myths narrate and that depth psychology interprets, giving bodily sensation to what myth gives story and what psychology gives symbol, allowing the timeless process of individuation to unfold as a lived and embodied experience.

Taken together, mythology, depth psychology, and Reiki offer a unified understanding of the soul. They affirm that human beings are meaning making creatures, that symbols and energies shape our inner and outer lives, and that healing is a journey of reconnection with the deeper ground of our being. Whether expressed in ancient myths, in dreams and archetypes, or in the gentle movement of energy through the hands, the same truth is revealed: the soul seeks wholeness. Individuation is the core of this movement, the timeless journey of remembering our spirit and returning to the larger field of life that sustains us.