Punyapriya (Benu) Gopal, MD

I am a physician. I am also a Reiki Master Teacher. For most of my career these two roles lived in separate parts of life.

My medical training was in Radiation Oncology — a technically demanding and emotionally intense specialty. You work with people whose bodies are being treated with precision and whose inner lives are being asked to bear something enormous, often in silence, while moving on the best they can so as not to burden their families.

My turn towards Reiki came from my response to fill a need that I didn’t know I could fill, but had the support and guidance to try. I started my Reiki journey as a volunteer practitioner at Yale New Haven Hospital. Session after session, my skeptic mind was blown away. Something was happening in those sessions that my clinical framework couldn’t fully account for. I continued to observe, and to practice.

Since 2013 I have practiced Reiki in hospital settings, and for the past nine years I have coordinated the Reiki Volunteer Program at Hartford Hospital — the nation’s longest-running hospital-based Reiki program. I have worked with more than a thousand patients across oncology, palliative care and serious illness — and I still do not have a complete explanation for everything I have witnessed.

What I do have is a structured, clinically informed practice, a research-informed curriculum, and a very clear sense of where this work helps and where it does not.

I work with cancer patients, people in palliative care, healthcare professionals experiencing burnout, and people navigating a health challenge or life transition that conventional care addresses only partially.