As a Minnesota family and newborn photographer, I spend a lot of my time with moms who are running on empty and still showing up for everyone. And the longer I do this work, the more I hear the same thing between takes. I’m tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. I can’t turn my brain off. I don’t really feel like myself anymore.
That’s exactly why I started my Made for Minnesota Moms series. I wanted real conversations with Minnesota women who support moms through pregnancy, birth, and everything after.
Today’s guest surprised me before we even started recording. Jessie Rudi, PhD is a Reiki Master, energy practitioner, teacher, and mom of three. She founded Clearly Connected Healing in Wayzata, where she offers intuitive energy sessions, group experiences, and Reiki trainings for busy moms and people in caregiving roles.
Here’s my honest confession. Before this interview, I had no idea what a Reiki master actually was. I definitely didn’t expect one to have a PhD. So we covered a lot: what happens at an energy healing session
, how often people come in, what the research says (there’s more than I expected), the misconceptions that keep people from trying it, and one moment with a client that Jessie will never forget.
Meet Jessie Rudi, PhD and Reiki Master
Jessie is a married mom of three young kids and a Reiki Master, energy practitioner, teacher, and mentor. At Clearly Connected Healing in Wayzata, she works with moms at any point in the motherhood journey (plus anyone who’s just curious about energy healing) and helps them move out of chronic stress and into something calmer and clearer.
She also teaches. Reiki training comes in three levels: level one, level two, and Reiki master. Jessie teaches all of them, along with group experiences and community events that make this work feel doable instead of intimidating.
And she supports the whole family, not only mom. Jessie does energy work on babies and kids too. Her own children were her very first clients, whether they liked it or not. (They liked it.)
What Is Energy Healing, and What Is Reiki?
Let’s start with the word itself. Reiki is Japanese, and it translates to universal life force energy. It’s a gentle, non-invasive healing modality that can be done hands on or hands off. It can even be sent over distance, which we’ll get to.
If that sounds abstract, Jessie has a good way of explaining it. Everything is made of energy. There’s energy in the air. Wi-Fi is energy. And you’ve absolutely had the experience where someone walks into a room and you can feel the vibe shift before anyone says a word. That’s energy too.
One thing I appreciated: Jessie is clear about her lane. Every session starts with a consent form stating that she’s not a medical doctor and she’s not a therapist. She wants you to keep seeing your regular providers and keep taking your medications. Energy work sits alongside the rest of your care, not instead of it.
Why Moms Are the “Frequency Keepers”
Jessie shared a phrase she heard a few months ago that changed how she sees her role at home. Women are the frequency keepers.
She notices it now in small moments. Something spills, or somebody cranks the iPad volume way too loud, and she can watch her kids physically brace for her reaction. These days she’ll say something like, “Hey buddy, would you mind turning that down? It’s a little loud for me.” And she can see their bodies unclench. Okay. Mom’s okay. We’re okay.
This keeps coming up across the whole series. It’s hard to regulate your own nervous system while you’re also regulating three other people’s. But that regulation flows downhill, and our kids feel it either way.
Watch the Full Interview
Before I get into the Q&A, here’s the full conversation.
If you’d rather hear Jessie explain this in her own words (she has a really grounded way of talking about it that doesn’t feel out there at all), press play. If you’re skimming with a baby on your lap, keep scrolling. I pulled the questions and the parts that stuck with me.
Q&A with Jessie Rudi, PhD and Reiki Master
1. How does someone with a PhD end up becoming a Reiki master?
Jessie thinks of them as two separate careers that eventually met in the middle.
She started undergrad on the East Coast as a nursing major, struggled in some of the courses, and switched to human development and family studies. She loved it, got into research, and a mentor told her that if she wanted to do this every day, she should become a professor. So she did the work: a PhD in Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, focused on parenting and adolescent and young adult development.
Then she burned out. She left research and took a part-time admin job at an integrative health center, where she loved helping people access that kind of care. One day a coworker mentioned she was heading out to see her “Reiki acupuncture lady,” and Jessie had an immediate gut reaction. I think I need a Reiki acupuncture lady.
She booked with Lacey at Sacred Vibes Healing in St. Louis Park, and that first session cracked something open. She described lying there thinking, is this what it feels like to only be in my own energy? Nobody needs me, there’s no to-do list, and I’m just being held. She realized how much of her daily life she’d been living in fight or flight.
About a year later, Lacey invited her to take level one training. It was an automatic yes, and it turned into a business. The PhD came back around too. There’s a growing body of research on energy healing, and Jessie can read a new study, understand the statistics, and know exactly what the researchers did.
2. What actually happens at an energy healing appointment?
You come in and start with what Jessie calls an energy check-in. How have you been feeling physically, emotionally, mentally? You share as much or as little as you want. Some people talk for a while. Some people don’t want to talk at all, and that’s completely fine.
After the consent form, the goal is getting you as comfortable as humanly possible. Usually that’s her heated massage table with blankets and little heat packs. You can lie on your back or your side. Some clients prefer to sit, which works too.
Then she guides a short meditation to help you drop in, plus a few tools to help you relax further, because the more relaxed you are, the more you can receive. Those tools include tuning forks tuned to the frequency of the earth (grounding), aromatherapy, and sometimes crystals placed on or around you when she feels called to.
The treatment itself is hands on or hands off, your choice. She typically starts at the head, gently placing hands at the crown or by the ears, then shoulders, then hovering over the abdomen, then knees and feet, moving through the energy points in the body. If something feels stuck in one spot, she’ll stay there longer.
You’re on the table for roughly 30 to 40 minutes with soft music playing, and there’s nothing for you to do. Lie there. Rest. Meditate. Pray. Fall asleep (plenty of people do). Bringing you back takes another five to ten minutes because people are so relaxed, and then you can debrief anything that came up.
3. How do people feel when they leave?
Most sessions land somewhere zen. Calm, peaceful, floaty. Clients tell Jessie they feel like they’re walking on a cloud, or that they feel clear and grounded in a really good way.
But she was honest about the other thing that happens. Sometimes your nervous system relaxes so much that stored emotions come up. People cry, sometimes before the session even starts, and Jessie’s response is basically please do. That release usually happens because they finally feel calm and safe enough for it to surface. Those clients often say it was exactly what they needed that day.
Beyond that, it varies a lot. Some people see colors behind their eyes. Some get memories or visions. Some people just say it was nice to lie down and do nothing for half an hour. And your experience can change from one session to the next depending on what your body needs that day.
4. How often should you come in?
There’s no prescribed schedule. Jessie receives energy work herself about once a month, partly because she’s holding space for other people all week.
Clients going through something big (a divorce, a job change, an infertility journey, the loss of a loved one or a pet) often want to come in more often for a stretch, then space it out again. Others come once or twice a year for what they call an energetic tune-up. A few book a session every year on their birthday, which I thought was such a lovely way to mark it.
5. Why are moms and caregivers so prone to chronic stress and overwhelm?
Jessie put it plainly: people need you all the time. She’s managing four to five full-time schedules at this point, and that’s before anyone’s actual needs.
She pointed out this hits anyone in a caregiving role, whether that’s caring for a loved one or working in healthcare or therapy. You’re holding space for other people most of your waking hours. And it used to be so much easier to take care of yourself. The gym fit. Walks fit. Meal prep fit. Then kids arrive and your alone time becomes the shower or the bathroom, which isn’t enough.
That’s why she describes Reiki as restorative self-care, the kind that can last days, weeks, or months. She calls herself a professional space holder, someone who gives you a place to just be, whether that means crying or celebrating.
Then she shared a line from her own daughter, who asked for a session and afterward said her heart felt so full of love that now she could go give that love to other people. That’s the whole idea.
6. Are there signs energy work might help you?
Jessie says it’s especially useful if you already sense your nervous system is dysregulated. That feeling of I’m trying to calm down and I just can’t is a solid signal.
Here’s what people actually come to her for:
- Burnout
- Trouble sleeping
- Low self-esteem or loss of confidence
- “I just don’t feel like myself”
- “I don’t even know what I want anymore”
That last one hit me, because it’s the exact feeling behind matrescence (the motherhood version of adolescence, where your hormones and identity are both reorganizing themselves). Jessie also shared a phrase in the Reiki world: you don’t find Reiki, Reiki finds you. She sometimes wishes she’d had these tools before kids, but she gets why it arrived when it did.
7. Moms are conditioned to put everyone else first. Does that show up in your work?
Every day, and Jessie included herself in that. She does Reiki on herself 99 out of 100 days. On the days she skips it, she can feel the difference, because she hasn’t grounded herself or connected to anything bigger than her own to-do list.
8. What are the biggest misconceptions about Reiki and energy healing?
Two big ones.
The first is that it’s tied to a religion, or that it’s anti-religion. Jessie has been asked if it’s devil’s work or if it means playing with energies you shouldn’t touch. Reiki isn’t tied to any religion, faith, or belief system. She compares it to going for a walk or journaling. It’s a healing modality. And the act of sending Reiki is literally sending love and light to a person, place, or situation, which is about as far from that concern as you can get.
The second is that it’s woo-woo hand-waving that doesn’t do anything. Jessie’s answer is the research (see below), plus a note on training. She’s seen programs claiming to teach Reiki in an hour and can’t imagine how. When she teaches, every level is a full two-day training. There’s a lot to learn about energy at each stage.
9. What does the research on energy healing actually show?
This was my favorite part, because I did not expect numbers.
A lot of the studies look at pain relief, especially chronic knee pain and joint pain. In research, a pain reduction of about 30 percent is considered clinically significant, whether it came from a pill, a surgery, or an injection. Studies on Reiki are finding reductions between 40 and 60 percent for things like back pain, migraines, and knee pain.
What makes it more interesting is how these studies are built. Many include a third group receiving what researchers call sham Reiki (Jessie’s term for it is “fakie”), where someone moves their hands around without any intention of sending energy. So you’re comparing standard care, fake Reiki, and a trained practitioner. People do get some benefit from the fake version, likely because they believe they’re being helped. The real sessions produce the bigger effects.
There’s also research on distance healing, which is taught at level two. Researchers have put the practitioner and the recipient in completely separate rooms and run brain scans on the recipient. Jessie’s take is that this area is just getting going, and she thinks of energy healing as a complementary therapy alongside whatever you’re already doing.
10. Can you share one powerful moment you’ll never forget?
Jessie had a client come in for her third or fourth session. What Jessie didn’t know when the appointment was booked was that this woman had recently been through a miscarriage.
Nothing about the session itself was unusual. But at the end, the client sat up and said that for the first time since the miscarriage, she felt like she could breathe. She took a couple of deep breaths getting off the table and said she’d only been able to breathe into her throat since it happened.
Jessie said she felt honored to hold that space. She also explained something about how it works: Reiki is a pure and intelligent energy, so it goes where it’s needed. She could have her hands over someone’s heart while the energy is doing its work somewhere else entirely.
The Real Life Rescue Kit
Three Minnesota-specific recommendations from Jessie:
- Takeout rescue: Cocina de Ana, with locations in Plymouth and St. Paul. Jessie orders the chilaquiles verde. They do ready-made and take meals, freezer meals, and fresh meals, with gluten-free and dairy-free options. It’s her go-to gift for families who just brought a baby home, because it reheats beautifully and it’s genuinely nourishing food for postpartum.
- Worth-the-effort outing: The pool and waterpark at Shoreview Community Center. There’s a shallow, contained, zero-entry area for littles called the Tropics, plus a deeper pool with bigger waterslides, so it works for a four-year-old and a ten-year-old on the same trip. It’s all indoors (great for February), there are lifeguards everywhere, and Jessie says it’s a crowd pleaser from about 9 months to 16 years. Two tips: bring quarters for the lockers, and expect crowds in winter.
- Local mom resources: Jessie couldn’t pick just one. She recommends Experience Wellness Chiropractic in Plymouth for gentle chiropractic care (they have professional baby holders so you can actually get adjusted), Hannah Lewis at Radiant Health Collective in Osseo for holistic integrative care that takes your symptoms seriously, Anna Barlage at Long Lake Psychotherapy, and Sarah Knight at Vita New Life for pelvic floor PT.
I actually interviewed Hannah earlier in this series, so if that last one caught your ear, go read What Is a Functional Medicine Practitioner? and hear her explain her approach herself.
Jessie also said something about that kind of care that a lot of us need to hear. You want a provider who won’t just tell you that you’re tired because your kid doesn’t sleep. Sometimes there’s more going on, and it’s worth finding out.
Where to Find Jessie
- Visit her website and book a session
- Read her blog, including a recent post on energy work for kids and why you might book a session for your child
- Follow her on Instagram where she shares what she’s learning and working on
A Personal Note from Me
I walked into this interview knowing nothing about energy healing, and I walked out planning to book an appointment. Whatever you think about it going in, I’d say give it a try and form your own opinion from the table.
That’s really the whole point of this series. Minnesota moms deserve actual options and actual names, not another hour lost to a search bar at 2 a.m. Whether that’s an energy practitioner in Wayzata, a women’s health acupuncturist in Minneapolis, or a postpartum doula you didn’t know existed, you deserve a team.
As a Minnesota family photographer, I get to document the messy, loud, beautiful middle of family life. But there’s a real person behind every photo, usually holding more than she lets on. Supporting moms matters more to me than the images do.
If you’re in postpartum right now, take a look at my Postpartum Care Kit. If you’re still pregnant, grab my free Minneapolis Pregnancy Guide. And join my newsletter so the next episode lands in your inbox.
Motherhood was never meant to be figured out alone.
When you’re ready to document this season of your family’s story in family photos, I’d love to connect with you.
Disclaimer: This blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek advice from your physician, midwife, or other qualified healthcare provider with questions about pregnancy, labor, postpartum, or your health.
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