Holistic healing out for delivery on Long Island

Equipped with bare hands and a mobile massage table, 32-year-old reiki practitioner Nicholas Ryerson delivers the holistic art of energy healing to Long Island homes.

Based in his hometown of Rockville Centre, Ryerson’s budding business, Nassau Reiki, aims to keep up with skyrocketing consumer obsessions for personal wellness with a vital touch.

Grand View Research valued the U.S. complementary and alternative medicine market to increase 23 percent from 2024 to 2030, and valued at $22 billion in 2022. Ryerson’s business dedication, however, leans less towards dollars and more towards divinity, providing personalized at-home reiki sessions to restore the internal energy of his clients.

“Reiki rests on the idea that energy imbalance is the root cause of most ailments and addresses it at its core,” Ryerson said.

Reiki practitioners balance the energy of others with light hand-to-body contact, or by hovering their hands in close body proximity. Contact is made over areas of the body where a client experiences pain, illness, or discomfort, providing supplemental relief to aid one’s healing process. However, issuing reiki only accounts for half of the work. The rest of the job comes from within the receiver.

“A reiki practitioner doesn’t heal,” Ryerson added. “They channel universal energy, so the patient is able to rebalance their own energy. The work being done is by the patient themself.”

Long Island is growing as a hub for alternative wellness and medicine with more than 20 different businesses offering reiki sessions. Ryerson attributes the growing desire for alternative medicine to lingering dissatisfaction with traditional healthcare systems.

“Modern medicine very often offers ineffective treatment causing patients to look elsewhere for help,” Ryerson said. “Reiki can treat things modern medicine fails to or struggles with.”

A 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Report found that 65 percent of people in the U.S. trust “the healthcare sector as a whole”. This outlying sector is fueling the alternative healthcare business, encouraging individuals to seek out holistic forms of supplementary treatment like reiki.

Ryerson’s practice means more to him, however, than the shifting market and brings him an inner sense of peace.

“The experience of reiki is the experience of love as a state of being,” he said. “Channeling the energy of the universe to relieve the suffering of others brings me closer to my divine state of being, which is love.”

He currently dedicates himself to helping others, but Ryerson describes himself as a “wounded healer.” The routes of his mission began with a personal expedition for self-wellness, overcoming addiction, and mental health setbacks that paralyzed his youth.

“It’s the whole reason I’m doing reiki in the first place,” Ryerson said. “I went through a period of intense suffering, so I can understand and treat the suffering of others.”

Ryerson earned his certification for reiki in the second degree from Reiki Healing Brooklyn under the “Usui Tibetan” reiki lineage founded by senior reiki master, William Lee Rand.

Michael DeMarco is a reporter with The SBU Media Group, part of Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism’s Working Newsroom program for students and local media.