Is it wrong to charge for Reiki since the energy is not mine?
Charging for Reiki feels spiritually wrong to many practitioners. Here's what behavioural science says is actually happening in your head.
If you’ve ever typed that question into Google, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re also not alone. Reiki practitioners, sound healers, and energy workers ask some version of it constantly: can I really charge for something that flows through me, not from me?
The question feels spiritual. The discomfort feels spiritual. But what’s happening underneath it is, at least in part, psychological, and there’s a name for it.
What Brad Klontz Found (and Why It Matters Here)
Dr Brad Klontz is a financial psychologist who spent years studying the unconscious beliefs people carry about money. He called them money scripts: the stories we absorb in childhood, from community, from culture, that run quietly in the background and shape every financial decision we make as adults.
One of the most common money script clusters he identified is money avoidance. The core belief: money is bad, corrupting, or spiritually incompatible with goodness. People who carry this script don’t just feel uncomfortable asking for payment. They feel, at some level, that wanting money signals something wrong about their character.
For wellness practitioners, that script gets a specific shape. It sounds like: “The energy isn’t mine to sell.” Or: “Charging too much will block my practice.” Or: “Healers should serve, not profit.”
These beliefs feel like ethics. They behave like ethics. But they can work as financial avoidance. And avoidance has consequences.
The Identity Threat Running Alongside It
There’s a second mechanism at work, and it sits right next to the money script.
When your professional identity is built around service, receiving money can feel like a category error. You’re a healer. Healers give. Charging introduces a transaction, and transactions feel commercial, and commercial feels like the opposite of sacred.
This is what psychologists call identity threat: the sense that a behaviour is incompatible with who you are. It’s not laziness, and it’s not greed-phobia. It’s the brain flagging a perceived mismatch between your self-concept and the act you’re about to perform.
The threat response is real. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s convincing, because it arrives dressed in your values.
The discomfort you feel about charging is not evidence that charging is wrong. It’s evidence that your identity is doing exactly what identities do: protecting themselves.
Why Standard Business Advice Misses This
Most pricing guides for wellness practitioners go straight to the practical layer: “research your market rate, calculate your hours, value your expertise.” That advice is not wrong. But it skips the reason the practical layer never sticks.
If your unconscious money script says charging feels spiritually corrupt, and your identity says you are a healer not a business owner, then no amount of market-rate research will get you to raise your prices with confidence. You’ll do the research, set a rate, and then feel a wash of guilt every time someone pays it.
The practical advice sits on top of the psychological problem. It doesn’t touch the foundation.
What’s Actually True About the Energy
Here’s where it helps to take the spiritual question seriously, because you asked it seriously.
If the energy that moves through you in a session is not “yours,” then what is yours? Your training. Your years of practice. Your ability to hold a safe space for someone in real distress. Your time, which you are removing from every other possible use of that day. Your presence, which you have spent years learning to cultivate and offer.
None of that is free to produce. None of it arrived without cost to you.
And consider this: a GP does not own the pharmacological knowledge that sits in every prescription they write. A structural engineer does not own the laws of physics. A midwife does not own the biological process of birth. They charge for their training, their skill, their judgement, their time.
Charging for Reiki is the same logic. The energy being universal does not make your delivery of it free.
The Specific Belief Worth Examining
Money scripts don’t respond well to argument. You can’t logic your way out of them, because they’re not logical structures. They’re emotional ones.
What does work, slowly, is exposure with reflection. You notice the belief (“charging this much feels wrong”), you name it as a script rather than a truth, and you act anyway, at a small enough scale that the anxiety stays manageable.
So here’s the one concrete thing worth trying this week.
Write down the belief that makes charging feel wrong. The exact sentence. Not the polished version, the raw one. Something like: “Taking money for healing means I’m exploiting people’s pain.” Or: “If I charge too much, the energy will stop flowing.”
Then ask: where did I first hear this? Not to blame anyone, and not to “heal the story” (that kind of language isn’t what I trade in). Just to locate it. Scripts feel like universal truths until you see they arrived from somewhere specific, in a specific context, at a specific point in your life.
Seeing the origin doesn’t dissolve the script. But it creates a small gap between the belief and you. And that gap is where your actual financial decisions can start to be made.
What Undercharging Actually Does to Your Practice
This part is uncomfortable but worth saying plainly.
When you undercharge, you create an unsustainable business. An unsustainable business closes, or burns you out, or forces you to take on so many clients at a low rate that you have nothing left to give by Thursday afternoon.
None of those outcomes serve your clients.
Charging a rate that supports your life is not a compromise of your values. It’s the structural condition that allows you to keep showing up for people with full presence, proper rest, and continued professional development. The practitioner who charges fairly and takes Fridays off is, in most cases, a better practitioner than the one running on empty who charges less than cost.
Your clients deserve a practitioner who can sustain themselves. Sustainable requires financial.
One More Thing on the Identity Piece
The money avoidance script and the identity threat tend to reinforce each other in wellness contexts, because the culture around energy work often romanticises financial struggle. The practitioner who “does it for love, not money” can carry a kind of quiet status in some communities.
That’s worth naming, because it means you may be getting social rewards for undercharging. Which makes the behaviour stickier than it looks from outside.
This is not a judgement. It’s a mechanism.
Seeing the system doesn’t mean exiting it overnight. But it means you’re responding to reality rather than running on a script that was written before you were running a business.
Where to Go from Here
If you’ve read this and recognised yourself, the next practical step is not to double your prices on Monday. That’s too much activation, too fast, and the identity threat will fire hard enough to bring you straight back to where you started.
The step is smaller: write the belief down, locate its origin, and sit with the gap.
If you want to go further, my 12-week 1:1 programme The Money Story Method works through exactly this kind of financial psychology with self-employed practitioners. Not to make you more “business-minded” in some hollow corporate sense, but to help you build a practice that can actually last.
And if you’re not ready for that yet, my Finance Fridays newsletter is where I write about money psychology for self-employed people every week. No agenda, just the stuff that’s useful.
You asked a genuine question. The answer is no: it’s not wrong to charge. But the feeling that it’s wrong is real, it has a name, and it’s workable.
Joel
MSc Behavioural Economics | Qualified Financial Planner