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 get 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.
As a child, I talked to God the way other kids talked to their imaginary friends — except mine answered. 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, almost embarrassingly simple knowing: God cared, even about the small things.
There were heavier moments too. Dreams that foretold a family member's 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. I'd grown up Catholic, but no one had ever taught me what it meant to actually know God — only 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 future 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, the nobility of saving lives with your hands. And then came a moment that would quietly 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? He said no. 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. Taught chair yoga to seniors. Taught dance, and was even being courted to buy into a dance franchise. I office managed a hypnotherapy practice. 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, hoping one of them might tell me. Most of them just told me what I wanted to hear. None of it felt true and I felt like I had wasted hundreds of dollars on scam artists.
Then, on an ordinary day, I wandered into a metaphysical bookstore I hadn't been looking for. A woman there read my life back 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 said: none of them. She told me to keep dancing, for the sake of my creative spirit, but that none of those paths were the one. She said she saw me with my hands on people, healing them. She said: crystals.
I'd collected crystals obsessively as a child — so much so that I once fell backward out of a moving 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 then 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.
It started with friends. Then friends of friends. Then it outgrew my bedroom entirely. Over years, watching person after person have genuine, profound experiences on my table, my skepticism quietly eroded — not through belief, but through evidence. Now, over seven thousand 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.
Along this path, my spirituality evolved into something more new age — a relationship with the universe, with guides and angels, but still, quietly, without a relationship with God.
Then, in 2023, everything changed again. During a Reiki session I was receiving, Jesus came to me. So did God. I don't have adequate words for what that encounter was — only that it resembled the near-death experiences I've heard others describe: a sudden, total knowing, an instant in which something heals that you weren't even consciously asking to be healed. It wasn't something I sought. 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 only legitimate one.
What I love most about the church is the community it offers — the sense that no one has to walk a spiritual path alone. What I've often seen missing in new-age and even Reiki spaces is exactly that: real community, real belonging, real depth. So that became my mission, beyond the healing work itself — to build a space that holds both. A space spiritually rich enough for devotion, and warm enough that you're never walking it by yourself.
What started as my own private practice has since grown into a full team. 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 and trained inside that same lineage — so you can trust that whoever you sit across from here is exceptional at what they do.
I've watched it happen, again and again, in our community: one woman shares her story, and something in another woman's spirit quietly says, I can do that too. That is its own form of medicine — one that can't be replicated in a solo session, no matter how skilled the practitioner.
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. We built it that way on purpose.