Kathleen Prasad

Kathleen Prasad didn’t just master a healing art — she gave the world a new one. More than twenty-eight years ago, she turned to reiki to calm her own anxiety, and noticed something that would change her life: her dog Dakota kept coming to sit beside her, drawn to the calm, grounded space she had created. From that quiet observation grew the field of Animal Reiki as we know it. When the hands-on, human-led approach of the 1990s left sensitive and traumatised animals rejecting sessions, Kathleen developed something radically gentler: the Let Animals Lead® Method — a meditation-based practice in which the healer simply becomes a calm presence, and the animal chooses how, when, and whether to connect. She wrote the profession’s very Code of Ethics, and founded the world’s first and only reiki nonprofit for rescued animals, the Shelter Animal Reiki Association.

Through her Animal Reiki Source Academy in San Rafael, California, Kathleen has taught thousands of animal lovers across the world, and her fieldwork reads like a pilgrimage of compassion: Best Friends Animal Society, the San Francisco SPCA, Guide Dogs for the Blind, The Elephant Sanctuary, and shelters and sanctuaries on multiple continents. Her many books — Reiki for Dogs, Everything Animal Reiki, Heart to Heart with Horses, the Animal Reiki Handbook — carry the same conviction that animates every session: animals are not patients to be fixed but conscious teachers and partners in healing, deserving of agency, comfort, and consent. For anyone who has ever wished they could ease the suffering of a beloved animal, Kathleen Prasad is the teacher who shows them how — by letting the animal lead.