Get reiki certified

The Significance of Hara in Animal Reiki Practices

Hara is a foundational concept in Japanese meditation teachings and in Animal Reiki as taught through Kathleen Prasad’s Let Animals Lead© method. More than a physical energy centre in the body, hara points to one’s true nature, the essential self that exists beneath conditioning, trauma, and story. In Animal Reiki practice, connecting with your own hara is what makes genuine connection with an animal’s hara possible, and that connection is where profound healing becomes available.

— Indrani Das (Idee), Artemis Animal Healing

The hara translates from Japanese simply as belly. And yet, like so many words that carry the weight of centuries of practice, the translation barely scratches the surface of what the word actually holds.

At its deeper level, hara means one’s true nature: who one truly is as a living being, beneath the layers of history and habit and defensive patterning that accumulate over a lifetime. It is not only a physical centre in the body. It is the seat of the essential self.

The hara is a principal concept in Japanese meditation teachings and in Animal Reiki as taught through Kathleen Prasad’s Let Animals Lead© method, which is the approach that shapes how I work in every Reiki session with cats and dogs.

The Tree Without Roots

The word hara in Japan is deeply interlinked with the word tanden, known in Taoist traditions as dantien. In the system of dantiens, three main energy points are recognised within the body. The hara condenses the primordial essence to a single point, a few centimetres below the navel, closer to the spine than to the skin.

Many spiritual schools place their emphasis on the energy centres in the upper body: the third eye, the crown. This focus upward, without a corresponding foundation downward, creates a state of energetic imbalance and a loss of grounding. And grounding is of crucial importance when walking the path of energy healing, and especially when working with animals.

Consider an upside-down pyramid. When all the energy is concentrated in the head without expanding into the lower body and into the earth below, the structure becomes inherently unstable. One strong wind and it topples.

I talk more about what happens when we have an upside-down pyramid in this video:

A tree must build a strong root system before it can reach the heavens. Without deep roots, the tree is at the mercy of every gust of wind, every change of weather, until eventually it is uprooted entirely. The hara is the root system of the energy healer. Everything else grows from there.

Working With the Hara

While the hara is physically located a few inches below the navel, it is the energetic and spiritual significance of this centre that holds the greater importance. It is not primarily a physical location to be found and held. It is a quality of presence, a settled, rooted, open awareness that becomes available when the scattered mind comes home to the body.

For those beginning on this path, specific practices and meditations direct the mind toward the hara and assist in reducing the habitual mental distraction that pulls awareness upward and outward. As the mind settles and those practices deepen, the experience and understanding of the hara naturally expands. What began as a technique becomes a way of being.

Healing for Others Begins With Healing Ourselves

We cannot heal others from a place we have not found in ourselves.

The hara plays a central role in healing because it represents genuine connection with one’s own true nature. Healing offered without that foundation is healing offered from the surface, from ideas and techniques and effort, rather than from the depth of who we actually are. It remains shallow because the channel itself is shallow.

When we connect with an animal in a healing session, we are connecting with their hara, their essential nature beneath the illness, beneath the fear, beneath the years of accumulated experience. That connection between essence and essence is what creates the space for something genuinely profound to happen.

This is also why energy healing for cats goes beyond technique. A practitioner who is grounded in their hara brings something that no amount of technical knowledge alone can supply: the quality of presence that allows an animal to feel truly safe, truly met, and truly seen. And it is in that feeling of being met that healing finds its opening.

What This Means for Your Animal in a Session

Cats especially are extraordinarily sensitive to the quality of presence a person brings. They can feel immediately whether someone is genuinely settled or merely performing stillness. A cat who senses authentic, hara-rooted presence will often move toward the practitioner, settle, yawn deeply, or drift into a restful sleep that looks like something finally switched off the noise. A cat who senses effortful technique without that groundedness will simply walk away, which is their entirely reasonable response to being approached from the wrong place.

This is the heart of the Let Animals Lead© method: the practitioner does the inner work first, arriving rooted, open, and genuinely present, and then offers that quality of presence to the animal. The animal chooses how to receive it, in the way and at the pace that is right for them. Nothing is imposed. Everything is offered. And in that offering, extraordinary healing becomes possible.

Written by Indrani Das (Idee), founder of Artemis Animal Healing, animal intuitive, communicator, energy healing practitioner and teacher.

You Might Also Enjoy Reading