Our mission
If I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you yet, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sara Mitteer, and I am the founder of Reiki of San Diego. There is so much heart and intention behind the creation of this company and community, how it came to be, and what led me to where I am today. It has been quite a wild journey and I feel so immensely grateful every day that this is the work I have the privilege of doing. I would love to share my story with you and how it has created the mission and purpose behind Reiki of San Diego.
My Story
I didn't arrive here by accident, though it took me most of my life to understand that.
I grew up Catholic, and as a child, I talked to God the way other kids talked to their imaginary friends. My mother used to tell people, half joking and half in awe, that God always answered my prayers. I remember sitting at a Padres game once, maybe seven years old, having made a deal with my great uncle: if the Padres hit a home run, I'd get cotton candy. The odds, by any reasonable measure, were not in my favor. So I closed my eyes and prayed. Minutes later, the crack of a bat — a home run, and my cotton candy. Small as it sounds, moments like that happened often enough that I grew up with an unshakable, simple knowing: God cared, even about the small things.
There were heavier moments too. Dreams that foretold a family member's unexpected passing. Encounters with loved ones after they'd crossed over that were too vivid to dismiss as imagination. Afternoons spent lying in the grass, genuinely communicating with trees. I didn't have language for any of it. I just knew it was real.
Then adolescence arrived, and with it, darkness. What I began sensing in the spiritual realm stopped feeling safe. Even though I grew up Catholic, no one ever taught me what it meant to actually know God. I only knew how to perform the motions of believing in Him. So when real tragic trauma broke into my late teen years, it shattered something. I couldn't reconcile a loving God with what I'd lived through. I made a decision: I would stop believing in God, and start believing in science instead. This marked the beginning of my season as an Atheist, which funny enough, didn't last very long at all.
I pursued a career in neurosurgery. I'd always wanted to help people — first as a school teacher, then through a growing fascination with psychology and the brain. I was working on two science degrees, in psychology and biology, and was in a pre-medical program at SDSU. I was captivated by the precision of the brain and the nobility of saving lives with your hands. And then came a moment that would quickly redirect everything.
I was being mentored by one of San Diego's leading neurosurgeons, and during one of our meetings I asked him the question I most wanted answered: if he could do it all again, would he choose this path? His answer left me stunned. I thought surely as someone who had made it to such a level of meaningful success, that he would do it ten times over. He told me, with real grief in his voice, about the birthdays missed, the championship games he never saw, an entire category of life sacrificed at the altar of his work. Not even a few weeks later, he died in a motorcycle accident. My whole sense of direction turned upside down.
I left pre-med. I finished my psychology degree. And I entered one of the most wide-open, directionless seasons of my life. I bartended. Babysat. I became a certified yoga teacher and created San Diego Chair Yoga, and brought chair yoga to seniors. I was a dance instructor, and found myself close to buying the San Diego franchise for one of the companies I worked for. I was the office manager for a hypnotherapy practice. I had so many part-time jobs and gigs, just trying to make ends meet. I had every door open and no idea which one to walk through — so, somewhat out of curiosity but still so full of skepticism, I started seeing psychics in hopes one of them might have guidance for me. Most of them just told me what I wanted to hear. None of it felt genuine and I felt like I had wasted hundreds of dollars on scam artists.
Then, on an ordinary day, I drove by a metaphysical bookstore and felt drawn to go in despite having no idea what the store even was. I found myself surrounded by crystals, incense, and books about chakras. As I was browsing this peculiar store, I overheard a conversation between a customer and the lady at the register who apparently was one of the bookstore's psychics. Feeling frustrated by my prior experiences with psychics but still an unshakable curiosity, I asked if I could receive a reading from her. This woman read my life to me with a precision that startled me — and when I finally asked the question I'd been carrying for years (which door do I walk through?), she shocked me when she said: none of them. Now she really had my attention. She told me to keep dancing, for the sake of my creative spirit, but that none of those paths were the one. She shared she saw me with my hands on people, healing them. None of this made sense to me, but she mentioned crystals.
I'd collected crystals obsessively as a child; so much so that I once fell backward out of a car under the weight of a backpack stuffed full of them. It was a long-running family joke. So her words landed somewhere I couldn't quite explain, even though "hands-on healing" meant nothing to me yet. I set it aside.
Shortly after, I started receiving emails — unprompted, unsolicited, for Reiki trainings I never signed up for. I mean it when I say Reiki found me, not the other way around. I took the training fully convinced the entire premise was ridiculous. And yet I walked out with an inexplicable, unshakable calling to do it, to put my hands on anyone willing to receive, as often as I possibly could.
I bought the cheapest treatment table I could find and set it up in my bedroom. Still so full of doubt, I started offering sessions to friends. Then friends of friends. It quickly began to outgrow my bedroom. Over a few short months of watching person after person have genuine, profound experiences beneath my palms, my skepticism quietly dissolved — not through belief, but through evidence. My practice grew quickly, I opened my official professional practice in October of 2016 and became a full time Reiki Master within a year. It was clear that this path was being divinely paved for me, and I felt such a deep sense of purpose. Along this path, my spirituality evolved into something more "new age" and mystical in nature — a relationship with the universe, with guides and angels, but still, quietly, lacking a relationship with God.
Then, in 2023, everything changed again. During a Reiki session I was receiving, Jesus came to me. God revealed himself to me in a way I don't have adequate words for — only that it resembled the near-death experiences I've heard others describe: a sudden total knowing that cracks your heart open, an instant in which something heals within you that you weren't even consciously asking to be healed. It wasn't something I was seeking. It found me, the way Reiki once had.
That encounter sent me back to my roots — not to abandon what I'd built, but to integrate it. I came to understand that there is light and there is distortion in every religious and spiritual tradition, without exception. And I came to believe, with real conviction, that God calls each of us toward a path uniquely suited to who we are and that no one gets to tell another person their path is the right one. The more experiences I've had with various religions, the more I see the same Divine thread woven through each of them.
Something I discovered I love about the church is the community it offers — the sense that no one has to walk their spiritual path alone. What I've often seen missing in new-age and Reiki spaces is exactly that: real community, real belonging, real depth. So that became my mission, to go beyond the healing work itself and build a space that holds both. A space spiritually rich enough for devotion, and warm enough that something heals in you just knowing you're never walking it by yourself.
What started as my own private practice has since grown into a full team and an incredible community of students. I've had the honor of giving other practitioners the foundation to carry this work forward — training, mentoring, and building people the way I once needed someone to build me. I have a particular gift for spotting potential, for seeing someone's gift before they fully see it themselves, and a deep commitment to training with real care and attention to detail. Anyone you work with on this team has been personally vetted — so you can trust that whoever you sit across from here is exceptional at what they do. If you would like to work with a practitioner who has been trained within my lineage and closely mentored by me, ask for one of our Spiritual Energy Medicine™️ Practitioners.
It makes me smile to look back at the person I used to be. Skeptical, spiritually confused, clumsily navigating life...completely unaware of the divine hands that were guiding her the whole time. Now, over 7,000 clinical hours later, I hold no doubt that this work is real, and that it is consistently, reliably effective — even where science doesn't yet have language for why. I've come to believe some things in life are not meant to be fully explained. That's part of what keeps them sacred. So whether you're here out of pure curiosity, just dipping a toe into something unfamiliar, or you're ready to go deep — to build a devoted spiritual practice and find a community to hold you in it — there is space for you here.
