About
LA Reiki Center
A Home for Centered Living
The LA Reiki Center was created as a sanctuary for modern life—where energy work becomes a lived experience, and people come home to themselves. Our mission is to support that return by helping people regulate their nervous system, reconnect to their inner clarity, and access a steadier way of being in a world that often moves faster than the body can process.
We believe that when energy is clear, choices become easier, relationships shift, creativity returns, and life feels more aligned. Whether you're here for a treatment, a class, a clinic session, or community support, LA Reiki Center exists as a space to heal, uplift, and awaken — the pillars that anchor all our work.
This is more than a place to receive Reiki.
It’s a place to exhale, remember who you are, and move forward from center.
Founder Story
Founder & Principal Practitioner
Ritu Akakansha Mahindru
I’m a Master-level candidate in the Usui Shiki Ryoho lineage, and I steward the LA Reiki Center with one mission:
To make energy medicine accessible, grounded, and part of everyday life—so people can reconnect with themselves and live from a centered place.
My path here wasn’t linear. Before Reiki was my vocation, it was a whisper—a pull toward something I couldn’t yet name. From the outside, I was thriving: I led teams, hit milestones, and built a career I was proud of. But internally, something felt muted. I was achieving without alignment, producing without purpose, and speaking without self-expression.
Reiki entered my life in 2014 while I was living in San Francisco. What I assumed would be a calming practice became an initiation. It didn’t just soothe me—it revealed me. Reiki surfaced emotions I had bypassed, grief I didn’t know I was carrying, and the parts of myself I had abandoned to fit into systems that no longer matched who I was becoming. My body understood what my mind wasn’t yet ready to admit: I was meant to live differently.
From there, Reiki shifted from something I received to something I inhabited. My life moved from boardrooms to meditation halls, from strategy decks to silence. I supported clinics, deepened my lineage-based study, and learned to bridge my outer achievements with my inner truth. Reiki stopped being a modality—it became an orientation.
During my time in New York, I co-led a women’s Reiki circle and volunteered at Ronald McDonald House, offering care to caregivers navigating unimaginable moments. I witnessed something profound: energy can do what language sometimes cannot. My board roles with Reiki Centers of America and Kota Alliance strengthened my commitment to consciousness, equity, and community.
Still, there was more to uncover. Training in self-expression leadership showed me that I wasn’t meant to help people perform better—I was meant to help them come home to themselves. A 10-day Vipassana retreat didn’t give me answers; it cleared away everything that wasn’t true. In that silence, the next chapter revealed itself.
I continued my studies—clairvoyant practices, somatic work, and trauma-informed approaches—not to collect modalities, but to deepen my capacity to listen: to energy, to the body, and to what is ready to emerge in others.
In 2025, the LA Reiki Center was born.
Not as a business plan, but as a response to the same energy that awakened me. This work is an invitation—for people to slow down, get honest, and remember who they are beneath the noise.
Reiki is not something I do — it’s who I am.
Our Lineage
LA Reiki Center stands in the lineage of Usui Shiki Ryoho — The Usui System of Natural Healing — a practice rooted in direct transmission from teacher to student.
This lineage began with Mikao Usui in Japan in the early 1900s. Usui’s teachings were passed to Chujiro Hayashi, a former naval officer who refined the system and emphasized hands-on treatment protocols. Hayashi later trained Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman whose devotion carried Reiki to the West. Through her commitment, Reiki moved from a little-known Japanese practice into a global healing art.
Our role is simple:
To honor the lineage.
To practice with integrity.
To ensure that Reiki remains what it has always been — a direct pathway back to one’s true nature.
From Takata’s teachings emerged a generation of masters dedicated to maintaining the integrity, simplicity, and spirit of the system — including John Harvey Gray, one of Takata’s earliest students and one of the longest-practicing Reiki Masters in the West. His teaching helped ensure that Reiki remained grounded in discipline, lineage, and lived experience.
From Takata and Gray’s line emerged masters who upheld the depth, integrity, and humanity of the system — including my teachers, Brian Brunius of NYC Reiki Center and Christopher Tellez of SF Reiki Center. Both studied within this direct lineage through years of apprenticeship, oral transmission, hands-on practice, and thousands of client sessions. Their teaching emphasized discipline, presence, and the responsibility of carrying a living lineage.
It is through their instruction — and through the blessings passed down from each teacher before them — that LA Reiki Center became possible.
LA Reiki Center exists because of this lineage.
Because of the teachers who carried it forward.
Because of the communities that held space for healing.
Because of the transmission that moves through hands, hearts, and generations.
What we offer here is not a reinvention of Reiki — it is a continuation. It is not a reinterpretation, but a living tradition carried forward as it has been for generations, by practitioners devoted to healing, awakening, and remembering.
