About Bonnie Hassan

Some of us like to know the details; we want the whole scoop. Others just want the highlights; we could care less about the details. For those of you who just want the highlights of my journey, I’ve provided a timeline with the basics. For those who want the details and would appreciate a longer read, please read the short story. Hopefully, whichever you choose to read will help you decide what next step to take.

I have a Master’s Degree in Social Work, a B.S. in Human Resource Management, and I’ve been practicing and teaching Reiki since 2000. I’m a Reiki Master in six different forms of Reiki: Usui/Tibetan, Sekhem-Seichim, Karuna Reiki®, Usui/Holy Fire® III Reiki, Holy Fire® III Karuna Reiki® and Transformational Reiki.

Transformational Reiki is a combination of Native American and Japanese energies and introduces the practitioner to the use of a drum for Reiki sessions. This type of Reiki evolved as a gift from Spirit as my own abilities as a medium, channel and psychic opened and expanded through my journey with Reiki.

I first became aware of God’s direct intervention in my life when a prayer I uttered in church in December 1991 was answered in an amazing way just a few hours later.

That answered prayer began my intentional, though inconsistent, search for a Higher Power I could believe in and trust. One by one I was guided to books and people that helped me view God in a way that was distinctly different from what I had been taught in my early religious training in a Catholic home. My therapist, Sr. Bernadette Manning, gave me the space and opportunity to discuss and explore those alternate viewpoints without judgment or criticism.

Those experiences, and more, have led to a faith and trust in a Divine power that has solidified and expanded. Since that time, my life has been directed by Divine Guidance in many ways, from the decision to attend graduate school full time at the University of Pittsburgh, to my first job as a psychotherapist, to my first Reiki class (a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that aids the body’s ability to heal itself) in 2000.

Those were the beginning steps to an incredible journey. I completed my master’s degree in social work in 1998. I was hooked on Reiki after my first class, which led me to become a Reiki master/teacher. I’ve been practicing and teaching Reiki since I completed the master class in September 2000.

I was so taken with Reiki that over the years I’ve become a Reiki Master in six different forms of Reiki: Usui/Tibetan, Sekhem-Seichim, Karuna Reiki®, Usui/Holy Fire® III Reiki, Holy Fire® III Karuna Reiki® and Transformational Reiki, my own unique form of Reiki. This form of Reiki combines Japanese and Native American energies and introduces practitioners to the use of drums and rattles in Reiki sessions.

As I continued to heal myself with Reiki, and follow the Divine guidance I received, my gifts as a medium, channel and psychic evolved.

The Beginning of My Reiki Journey

I learned Usui/Tibetan Reiki from Reiki master/teacher Sr. Mary Jo Mattes, a nun at Tabor House of Prayer in Millvale, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh. She practiced and taught Reiki as part of her ministry. Sr. Mary Jo taught me that if I truly embraced Reiki as a part of my daily life, God would lead me down my own unique path. She also taught me that my Reiki energy would become stronger the more I used it.

I took that initial Reiki class because my first job as a psychotherapist in a residential treatment facility for teenagers in the foster care system left me feeling overwhelmed and doubtful of my ability to make a difference. Having been introduced to Reiki in 1995 when I was volunteering for a crisis telephone line in Pittsburgh, I decided to explore it as a possible adjunct to my therapy sessions with those teens.

What I Experienced

Once I learned Reiki, I used it multiple times a day on both the teens in the facility and myself. Amazing changes began to occur in the kids. Depression lifted. Panic and anxiety attacks diminished. Kids who had previously refused to work with me in therapy began knocking on my door asking if we could talk. I knew it was the Reiki, because until I began using it, none of these changes had occurred.

Reiki didn’t only help the kids. It was a major source of healing for my own abuse issues. My father was an alcoholic. My mother had a lot of emotional baggage from her own childhood which played out in abusive episodes often directed at me. The events of my childhood had left me with a ball of rage in my belly that nothing had been able to heal. Reiki, however, took that ball of rage away. I believe healing that rage allowed me to heal on a very deep level and helped me gain the courage and self-confidence I needed to own the intuitive gifts that have evolved since that time.

The Place for Reiki

I loved working with the kids and seeing what a difference Reiki made in their progress. I truly believed I would be a full-time therapist for the rest of my life. However, one day in May 2003, while I was doing Reiki on myself and was in a meditative state, I saw the Blessed Mother appear in front of me. She said: “I have work for you to do, and you can’t do it here.” (‘Here’ was Holy Family Institute, another residential treatment facility for kids.) Soon after, I resigned. On October 6, 2003, I opened The Place for Reiki, a private healing practice in Pittsburgh, PA. Once I opened my practice, I began using therapy as an adjunct to Reiki, rather than Reiki as an adjunct to therapy. It made the healing process go much more quickly and easily that way!

The Beginning of the Changes

Even before opening The Place for Reiki, I was beginning to do my Reiki sessions differently from the traditional way I had been taught. I had been taught to rest my hands gently on my client’s body in a specific pattern of placements during a Reiki session as the energy flowed through me. However, one day my hands spontaneously lifted off my client’s back during a session and began to move in the air above it. As I watched, they moved in circles, each at a different speed, and then gently returned to the body. This was the point where my Reiki sessions began taking on a life of their own.

Once I opened my private practice, additional changes occurred. Not only did my hands begin to move in more and different ways, but my body began to move around the table and around the room when I was doing a Reiki session. It felt as if some knowing force was guiding my actions and placing my hands and my body in positions that would further empower the Reiki energies without me needing to know how or why.

Beginning to receive ‘messages’…

As that Higher Power continued to guide me during my Reiki sessions, I became aware there were other people’s energies/spirits in the room when I was working with a client. Although I didn’t know the names of the people who were present, I was aware of how they were related to my client (mother, father, husband, wife, etc.). I was also often aware there were angels present!

Little by little I began to receive messages and information from those spirits. Some of those spirits were people who had already transitioned. However, many were people who were living and very much a part of my clients’ day to day lives! It seemed that anyone with a relationship to the client who needed healing, or wanted to help the client heal, was able to join us energetically to share messages and receive the healing they needed. It was an amazing process to facilitate!

The changes continued…

As my Reiki practice expanded, my intuitive and spiritual gifts evolved.

In late November 2003, I began spontaneously chanting while I was doing a Reiki session on myself at home. The first sounds that came out were “very guttural and sounded nasty” (from an entry in my journal), but then changed and sounded Native American in origin. The entry in my journal states: “like the chanting of a Medicine woman might have sounded.” Eventually I was ‘guided’ to allow the chanting to occur during Reiki sessions with clients. Adding the chanting seemed to further empower the Reiki energies.

My clients frequently asked what the chanting meant. I intuitively knew I was relaying a message from Spirit but had no idea what the message was. When I sat in the silence and asked for Guidance about this, I received this answer: “When you are speaking in another language, I (God, Spirit, Creator) am speaking to their souls, in a language only their souls understand.”

As I continued to allow the chanting to occur, the verbalizations changed. I began bringing messages through in English, some of which were over 5,000 words in length!

The summer of 2004 brought another major change to my Reiki practice. I had been taught to do Reiki on one person at a time. However, during a street fair in Carnegie, PA that summer, I was guided to do Reiki on groups of people simultaneously.

I had a booth at the fair to demonstrate Reiki and the line of people wanting to experience Reiki kept growing. As I looked at the line, the idea came to me that I needed to do Reiki on more than one person at a time to accommodate everyone who was waiting. I began seating people in small groups. As I started doing Reiki, I moved among them, allowing my hands and arms, and my body, to be guided as they were when I did individual sessions. This become the new way I offered Reiki to larger and larger groups of people as my Reiki practice evolved and expanded.

Addition of the Drums

In 2005 I took a drumming class outside of Ashville, N.C. in which I learned a specific way to use a drum in a Reiki session. I enjoyed the class but found the technique very limiting. I tried using the drum in sessions when I returned home as I had been taught, but it never felt ‘right.’ Eventually my drum sat unused near the altar in my session room for months.

One day as I was doing an individual session, I was drawn to stand by my altar and the drum that was resting against it. As I stood there wondering what I was supposed to do, I heard this voice in my head that I had by now come to call my ‘God voice’ say: “Pick up the drum.” As I picked it up, I said to my client “I think I’m supposed to use the drum for your session.”

No sooner were the words out of my mouth, then the mallet began striking the drumhead, as if the mallet had a mind of its own. There was no similarity at all between how I used the drum in that session and the way I had been taught to use the drum! Once again it was as if that guiding force that moved my hands and body around in my sessions, was now directing the way in which I was using the drum. After that session, the drum, and eventually a rattle, became an integral part of many of my sessions.

Moving Forward

In 2011 I found out I was going to be a grandmother and decided I wanted to move to Nashville, Tennessee so I could be closer to my son and his family. It was important to me to be a hands-on grandmother to my granddaughter, who made her arrival in January 2012. I closed my practice in July 2012 to prepare for my move.

At the end of July, guided by Spirit, I left on a road trip that lasted over three months. I drove over 14,000 miles on a journey that took me across the United States, through Canada to Anchorage, Alaska. I finally made my way back to Pittsburgh at the beginning of November.

I moved to Nashville in August 2013. Starting over in a new city, without friends or my support system, wasn’t easy. To stay connected to the folks back in Pittsburgh, and to begin to expand my work to other cities, I began to offer group healing circles via teleconference. My first distance session was held on November 4, 2013. Fifty-five people from eight different states participated! It was an incredible experience!

That initial distance session grew to weekly healing circles via teleconference and helped to jumpstart my in-person work in Nashville. I began teaching all levels of Reiki classes and offering unique individual and group healing sessions. I also began traveling around the country, offering individual and group healing sessions and Reiki classes wherever I could.

In early 2018 I began to get repeated messages from my ‘God voice’ that I needed to take the messages that I channeled during group healing sessions and publish them in a book. In January 2019 I finally began to act on those messages. My book, “Straight Talk from God: Daily Guidance to Encourage, Empower and Transform your Spiritual Journey” was published on Amazon in October 2019!

The Coronavirus put an end to my travels and my in-person sessions in 2020. Because I had been using teleconferences long before Covid, it was a simple matter to expand my schedule of teleconference classes and workshops. I also began doing all my individual sessions via teleconference. I was grateful that I had begun the teleconferences years before and didn’t have to learn something new to cope with the limitations the pandemic forced upon us all.

Eventually, to give my clients and students a more personalized virtual experience, I shifted from teleconferences to Zoom sessions. As the pandemic subsides and restrictions lift, I plan to return to a combination of in-person and virtual offerings.

As I began to teach Reiki classes virtually, I decided it was time to learn the two newest forms of Reiki, Usui/Holy Fire® III Reiki and Holy Fire® III Karuna Reiki®. I became a Reiki master in both of these types of Reiki in 2021 and it has made teaching Reiki classes via Zoom so much easier. It’s also made my Reiki sessions more powerful!

My life since learning Reiki has been an unexpected and very unpredictable journey. If Sr. Mary Jo had been able to forecast my future when I took that first Reiki class and had shared with me where it would lead me, I probably would have run the other way!

I’m so glad that wasn’t the case. I’ve learned through this journey, and my experiences with Reiki, that there is a unifying force in the Universe that connects us all and wants to be known personally and intimately by each of us. Call it God, call it Spirit, call it I AM, call it he or she: no matter what you call it, that force has become the guiding force in my life and has helped me heal and grow in ways I could never have imagined.

I look forward to sharing my work with you, and perhaps through that sharing, helping you heal more deeply and get in touch with that Divine Source in a bigger, more powerful way yourself.

Thanks for taking the time to get to know a little bit more about me and my work. I look forward to our next connection, whenever that may be.

With blessings and gratitude,
Bonnie