What is the Tanden - and Why Does Japanese Reiki Focus on It

If you’ve practiced Western Reiki, you’ll be familiar with chakras - the seven energy centres running from the base of the spine to the crown, drawn from the Indian yogic tradition. You may have learned to assess them, balance them, or direct energy toward specific ones during a session.

The traditional Japanese system of Reiki doesn’t use chakras.

This surprises many people. But the original system Mikao Usui taught drew on Japanese and Chinese understanding of the body’s energy, not Indian yogic philosophy. And at the heart of that understanding is the Tanden.

What the Tanden Is

The Tanden is an energy centre - or more accurately, there are three Tanden. The lower Tanden, sometimes called the Hara, sits approximately three finger-widths below the navel in the lower abdomen. The middle Tanden is at the heart space. The upper Tanden is at the forehead.

In Japanese and Chinese medicine the lower Tanden is understood as the body’s energetic storehouse, the seat of original life force, the place from which grounded and stable action arises. When the term Tanden is used without qualification, it is almost always the lower Tanden being referred to.

These three centres are sometimes called the Three Diamonds - Earth Ki in the lower Tanden representing grounding and physical life force, Heart Ki in the middle Tanden representing human experience and relationship, and Heaven Ki in the upper Tanden relating to expanded awareness and spirit. They are not separate - they are dimensions of the same life, and practice is the art of keeping them in balance and connected.

Why Japanese Reiki Focuses Here

The emphasis on the Tanden rather than the chakra system reflects a fundamentally different approach to practice and healing.

Working with the chakras as Western Reiki often does tends to direct attention upward and outward - assessing, analysing, directing energy to specific centres. It is an active, doing approach.

Returning to the Tanden does the opposite. It brings attention down and inward. It grounds the practitioner before anything else happens. It cultivates what in Japanese is called Hara - a quality of centred, present, stable awareness from which everything else can arise naturally.

In practical terms, a practitioner whose attention is well-grounded in the Tanden is less likely to be pulled around by what they encounter in a session. They can remain steady, present and clear - not because they are trying to be, but because they have returned to their own ground first.

The Breath Practice

In my Shoden classes, students learn Joshin Kokyū Hō - a breath practice that develops awareness of the Tanden and cultivates the quality of spacious, settled attention that Reiki practice grows from.

It is deceptively simple. Breath settles into the lower abdomen on the inhalation, and softens outward on the exhalation. No forcing. No visualising. Just the breath, and the gradual recognition that the spaciousness you may be reaching for was always already there.

Over time this practice changes something. The nervous system learns to settle more readily. The quality of attention in sessions becomes more consistent. And the practitioner begins to understand - not as concept but as lived experience - what it means to be grounded in something larger than their own thinking.

This is very different to running through a checklist of chakra assessments. It is slower, quieter, and considerably more powerful.

If you feel drawn to explore Reiki, I offer Shoden - the first level - several times a year in Coomba Park on the NSW Mid North Coast.