REiKi

For years I have been aware of the energy therapy called Reiki that was developed by a Japanese man who lived up until 1929 who had an awakening and developed this method for helping to move energy blocks.  I learned about it as a therapy while speaking to a friend and psychotherapist who was beloved by many in our community as a wise and intuitive healer.  We were sitting in his yard and I was explaining that I felt like there was a way that one could heal a person through their energy field without talking to them, or even touching them, all done at a distance.  He smiled and said that I might be on to something. It was there that I learned about this therapy called Reiki.  Being the nonconformist and lone wolf, I never did any more than read about the basics of the discipline.  Having been aware of energy for years since beginning to see auras when I was 18, the ideas behind Reiki all sounded on the mark to me.  But I was not a joiner.  It was like some sense I had even back then that by not aligning to other methods that I would be more free to create my own or to see something perhaps more clearly….what, I was not sure.  Twenty years and an awakening later, this impulse has begun to make more sense to me in terms of what it is I am trying to do with understanding awakenings.

It has been seven years since my awakening began and in that time I have had clearings of old latent material from a host of different levels within the light body, what is also called the pranamayakosha.  This light body has sheathes or levels much like an onion.  The literature states that there are five layers in the pranamayakosha, but intuition tells me there are seven within the range of our awareness in the physical.  In all truth, I suspect more and more that the real structure is that of a cone, a continuous broadening of the energy body into ever larger dimensions of awareness.  This is where we begin to experience the higher self.  Here resides bliss which we can begin to learn to anchor in our bodies, thus marrying heaven to earth, which I know to be a big goal in my own life.  If it helps to think of this all as layers, then use it, but just don’t limit your thinking…..there is more to all of this and it is waiting for you and me once we are ready to see touch and taste it. The result of this clearing is that I have removed a great deal of material.  It has been quite the trip!  And if anything has been a certainty is that the movement of life force or kundalini has not always been orderly. It has gone where it could do the most work, it seems.  So the idea that it goes from root to crown is a nice idea, but for me, the material in my root has been the hardest most stubborn stuff to deal with and so it has remained throughout this journey.  I have become increasingly aware of just how important is has been to clear this area, but it has been an example of a big glitch in my karmic makeup.

I have observed that most people seem to have a small cluster of issues that form a hard center or core of challenges that often tend to repeat from one lifetime to another.  Being able to heal these patterns is a huge thing since by dissolving it in one life it can loosen the threads in all others.  In truth, the idea of time works only as it is being lived…..but in the larger perspective, alltime becomes more like a landscape where many more things become possible. An event, then, in the past effects the future just as much as a future event sends out energetic ripples deep into the past.  In a recent journey into my own life as a teen, I was able to slip into my dreamtime way back then and insert a brief but brilliant moment of wisdom to my younger self.  The effect the following day was nothing short of revolutionary.  Whats so  curios was that I can remember having a dream where a weird almost manic future self showed up in a dream I had, looked me deep in the eyes and told me one simple thing.  It wasn’t about how to win the lottery or anything like that.  It was the one thing that would make the single biggest impact; love.  Love as deeply as you can.  She is going to come around the corner in fifteen minutes and if you get on that bus, you will miss her.  Just wait.  Wait and you will see her.  Love is the way. The following day there was a subtle yet noticable difference.  In the same way that I have known that the intelligence of kundalini is itself a future self more refined looping back through all time into its version of the past, it is helping me to change the pattern that might have otherwise been my life the way it was going before awakening visited me seven years ago.  The future self is thus changed.  I am changed.  Doing this travel is easy to do actually because it involves no mass.  No body. Just the light body. Try it.  You might be surprised just how easy it is.  Increasingly as people are becoming aware of this as a possibility this sort of travel, when used for healing and growth, reaps huge rewards.  The future self, like a more developed you, perhaps even like a cosmic parent, can visit you right here and now.

So this root has had be hung up. This root has been about the death of a father, the loss of a mother, a small baby who was not loved enough, who did not feel safe, who shut down…..and was thus also part of a pattern of countless lives lived where children were left without parents, adopted, left to live as urchins on the streets in centuries past.  This glitch in my makeup wore deep groooves into my being. Coming into this life, I carried it as a big skip on my karmic recording.  It kept going round and round, the record playing the same full revolution, never getting past that one spot. So it has been with awareness that I have sought to lessen its effects energetically as much as I can.  It has been stubborn.  Over the last few months, the removal of other material has highlighted the root more and more.  I have become more aware of it in a singular sort of way.  I have felt a near-constant sense of nausea, a feeling of thickness energetically there. And so it was that when I heard that there was a group who did Reiki attunements in my area that I thought it would be a good idea to get to know these folks.

I went last night.  The air was brisk and as I entered, there were perhaps seven people working on two people in the room.  I chatted with one of the therapists as they completed a therapy session with a student.  In an interesting turn of events, I was explaining that I had had a friend and healer who helped to move a block in my sacral with the waive of her hand. It was so effortless it changed how I thought about this “work” that we do in liberating ourselves from these kinds of things.  What was so unusual was that during that visit, the person who had just hopped up from the table had been at the local farmer’s market in my area and they chatted while we browsed the booths.  So here he was, again, standing up just as I told how my friend had done this clearing for me when we had met this young man who was…..just getting off the therapists table!  We all had a big smile and I got on the table.

At first, I could feel the energy, yes, but nothing happened.  One of the therapists left mid way through as he had to leave to go to work.  After he left, the therapists changed orientation.  We spoke as they began to place their hands at different places on my body.  I explained what it was that was giving me trouble, that for all the clearing I had done my root was giving me a real challenge.  Everyone was gentle, kind, and supportive.  As I relaxed more and more I found that my awareness opened up and I dropped into what I call the zone.  Within minutes I felt a shimmering of high vibrational energy moving through me.  I could feel the therapist with her energy moving up through my feet into my legs, serving as a kind of tuning fork for my own energy.  Someone at my head cradled me. After some minutes the therapists changed position and someone new came over to my head.  This was where I felt like some part of my awareness went waaaay out.  Gosh, what WAS that?  I felt like he was almost bilocated to some other place…..a higher dimension.  I kept hearing the number “7” being said over and over.  I realized that this was my crown chakra.  “Oh right!  Crown!…..”  there was a presence in the room and I was suddenly standing with him over near where I first came in.  I was asking him something but he smiled and said, “you wont remember…..just keep with the attunement and all will be well…..”

A therapist asked if my neck hurt and I said that it didn’t.  In that moment, though, I felt a sudden thickness in my shoulders rising up out of my heart and I replied that while I didn’t feel physical pain, I did feel like a block was trying to move all of a sudden.  I felt a familiar kind of sense as though I was about to pass out, except I never did. This feeling always seems to accompany strong releases of energy for me.  I also can get a feeling of nasusea as well.  I was getting both at this point.  It was here that I mentioned how I felt the pain in my energy body from the root upwards into the sacral.  A therapist was already there describing it, which was when the energy began to move.  I had said earlier that I thought that maybe the energy would move quietly through Reiki, but I was beginning to feel a swelling of emotion deep down inside of me.

I felt as though I had been hurdled all the way back to an early time in life.  This was hard.  It was a hard, sad, and even scary time.  My father was dying and my mother was in turmoil.  I was very young, an infant.  I felt a swirl of emotion.  I felt sadness over not being loved.  I also felt grief.  I was aware of my father dying, of his absence and how important his presence was in my life during that brief time. It was as though I never got to grieve his death.  This was a light bulb moment for me.   I had always felt a kind of sadness related to him, whcih I of course associated with his dying so young.  But when I touched it, the feeling was incredibly specific.  You see, I had always thought if I ever touched these feelings they would just be vague senses of loss or sadness.  Not so.  Everything felt keyed into very specific things that were immediately identifiable in my life.  It was as though emotional energy had the capacity to interface with very specific memories or perhaps that memory is also buried within feeling (which I think is maybe not what we might think at first blush when considering these things).  The discovery was that even as an infant, I had never gotten to grieve his death properly.  All of that grief got bottled up inside me. This was actually very clear.  I was very sad and had not grieved his death properly.  At age 14 months, I was not taken to his funeral. Deeper still were all these layers…..I wasn’t good enough to be loved….that was why I had slipped into this situation…..I feared I was not lovable.  These waves of emotion came one after another as I felt as though I had been pressed into the first year of my life, back into a space where I felt very small physically but very big energetically.  Everything felt out of proportion somehow.

The therapists could not have been more kind and supportive.  There was gentle and loving laughter as we chatted between my fits of grief and sadness.  It felt like layers were being shed.  I was aware of an edge of being uncomfortable with really letting go fully. There were other people there on another table.  One therapist said for me not to feel funny just letting it all out.  He let me know it was not unusual to really howl if I had to.  After a few more minutes it felt like I had cleared a good piece of it.  I felt some relief and THAT was a real relief.  As I lay there I could feel how everyone was wanting to go home.  It was a very quick and simple end to the session.  I got up and found that I could not write my name or my email address for a few moments.  This was a bit unexpected, but I really felt like I had gone way out. I suddenly had a flurry of impressions about the people who had worked on me.  One man I saw scrambling around on rocks near water.  He said he loved to be outdoors.  The man who had been there earlier I said I saw as a cook in another life, one in which he valued quality, was kind of crazy about quality as a path toward nurturing people. They smiled and explained that he was having to go to his job that he hated, which was at a local restaurant where the quality of the food was poor.  He was hoping to get a job at a place that valued quality more.  I agreed that he really needed that and actually thrived on it.

For the next hour I felt similar to how I had felt after I had had  acupuncture  a year previously.  I was aware of feeling a whole new layer of feelings that had been stuck in the root somehow. I felt…..different……I felt a level of compassion that was different than before.  It is hard to explain but I saw some things in my life differently.  I realized I had been seeing them through a lens of the old latent hurt. I also was able to see how the hurt as it was composed had attracted certain people in my life and how it too had blinded them in a like fashion.  I saw more clearly how important it is to accept our own stuff and not seek to put it on to other people, something that I saw how others had done to me before and that I had done to others also.  I saw how I had only been hurting myself, but that I had also hurt others by allowing this distortion to persist within me.  This distortion disrupted my ability to align to my higher self in this clearer way.  As long as that was in the way, I could not know the subtlety of awareness and perception that existed beyond the realm of those old suite of clothes.

My sense is that while I had an intense session, clearings using Reiki will have different effects for people at different stages of their process.  Like an onion, you may find that you start in one place and progress ever deeper until you reach the harder places where the self does not want to let go out of fear or shame.  This process, though, is slowly revealing the beauty that we are within. And me, I am going back next week for some follow-up work.