Most introductions to Reiki come down to hand positions. Where the hands go, in what order, how long to stay. It’s a good map, and it’s the one most of us learn from.

Japanese-style Reiki keeps a bigger one. Alongside the hand placements, they preserve a set of short practices for clearing and settling yourself — one lasting barely half a minute, one involving no hands at all, and one where you simply let your body move however it wants to.

None of them need any special equipment, and most require no symbols at all. Here are five — plus a sixth for the curious — as they’re commonly taught today.

Kenyoku-ho: the thirty-second brush-off

The name translates as dry bathing, and that’s exactly what it looks like — washing without water.

Rest the fingers of your right hand where your left collarbone ends at the shoulder. Breathe in, and as you breathe out, sweep your hand diagonally down across your body to your right hip and off. Then mirror it — left hand at the right shoulder, sweeping down to your left hip. Finish the torso with the first sweep once more.

Now hold your left arm out in front of you, palm up. Place your right hand at the top of that arm and sweep all the way down, across the palm and off the fingertips. Repeat on the right arm, then once more on the left. Six sweeps in all — three across the body, three down the arms. Three rather than four because in Japan the number four sounds uncomfortably like the word for death.

Traditionally it’s done before practice and again afterwards. Sources vary on the arm stroke — some teach it down the outside of the arm, some the inside — but the diagonal sweep across the torso is the same everywhere.

Joshin Kokyu-ho: breathing down to your centre

Sit with your back straight and let your gaze soften toward the floor. Rest your hands in your lap, palms open and facing up, and let your breathing find its own steady rhythm.

As you breathe in, let the breath travel all the way down to a point just below your navel — the hara, the body’s centre of gravity in Japanese practice. As you breathe out, let it spread from there through the whole of you and out past your skin into the room.

Five minutes is a normal starting point, and with practice people extend it considerably. Breathe naturally rather than holding anything, and if you ever feel light-headed, simply stop for the day.

The Reiki Shower: a three-minute rinse

This one is usually credited to the modern Japanese teacher Hiroshi Doi, and it’s the easiest of the five to do.

Bring your palms together for a moment. Then lift both hands as high above your head as you comfortably can, keeping them about 20 to 30 centimetres apart — eight to twelve inches — and wait there a few seconds. Turn your palms down toward the top of your head, and let the sense of it fall over you.

Now draw your hands slowly down, palms still facing you and held a little away from your body — past your face, down your chest, all the way to your feet. Turn your palms toward the floor and let whatever you gathered run out through your feet into the ground. Three passes is plenty.

Reiki Undo: when the body moves on its own

This is the one nobody expects. Undo simply means motion, and the practice is credited to Kimiko Koyama, the sixth president of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Japan.

Clear a space where you won’t knock into anything. Sit or stand comfortably, bring your palms together, then rest your hands in your lap with the palms open. Breathe deeply, and on each out-breath let go as completely as you can.

After several breaths, your body may start to move by itself — a slow roll of the head, a drift of the arms, sometimes more. The instruction is simply to allow it, without steering. If nothing happens, that’s fine; you keep breathing and stay easy about it. When the movement settles by itself, bring your hands back together to close.

Gyoshi-ho: you don’t only use your hands

Usui reportedly wrote that energy radiates from the whole body, and most of all from the hands, the eyes and the breath. The fifth practice follows from that — and so does the promised sixth.

Gyoshi-ho works with the eyes, though not by staring — the teaching is that a hard stare intrudes. You relax your eyes and let them unfocus, so your vision widens, and let what you’re looking at come to you rather than sending your attention out at it. A common way to learn it is with a flower placed at eye level, ten minutes a day until it feels natural.

The sixth, Koki-ho, works on the out-breath. The teachers who include them generally place both in Okuden — second-level study — and details vary from school to school. The flower exercise is just the doorway: a gentle, preliminary way to get a feel for the territory at any stage.

You don’t need either one to have a good practice. They’re simply a sign that the tradition is wider than the version most of us were handed.

Where to go from here

Pick one. Kenyoku-ho is the easiest to fold into what you already do — thirty seconds before you sit down, thirty seconds after you finish. The Reiki Shower is the one to reach for when you walk in the door carrying the day.

If you’d like the foundation underneath all of these, the gassho posture is where most of them begin and end, and we’ve written about it separately. And if you’re building a practice from scratch, the seven-day starting plan is a gentler place to begin than any of this.

None of these replace time spent with your hands resting on your own body — that’s still the heart of self-Reiki, and it’s what the app is built around. Use the ReikiAll timer for the five-minute breathing practice, and let the day settle.

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Download ReikiAll, available on the App Store and Google Play, and let your practice begin.