the dream life

releasing with reiki

I didn't always know what it meant to be empathic, but I always was empathic. As a child, this led to many stomach aches. As an adult, I started to figure out how to tell the difference between what was mine and what wasn't, but I couldn't necessarily do anything about it. When I began to learn about intuitive and healing work, it became obvious that I would have to come up with a method for releasing all the stuff I was carrying around in my physical and energetic body - both my stuff and the stuff I picked up from other people.

In addition to shielding and grounding practices, I have several methods for release that are working for me right now, and one in particular that engage in a couple of times a week. I want to share it with you because it's a practical use of Reiki, it's something you can do whether you know the symbols or not, and its result is a powerful transformation that you will definitely feel. 

As with all things, you can follow your own guidance and come up with a clearing and releasing method that works for you. This just happens to be what I'm doing lately.

swan

I don't pull cards hoping that something outside of myself will tell me something I don't already know. Spirit can speak there, but I don't see cards as a crystal ball. The cards to me are storytellers. They hold symbol and myth and archetype. They are mirrors.

I sit with them and swim in my thoughts and emotion and when the cards speak, they illuminate places in me. They repeat what I already know. My reaction to the message is the message. They bring me confirmation, they validate me and help me redirect.

More than anything, I end up laughing when I pull cards. Synchronicity always makes me laugh with that special kind of joy, the kind that bubbles up from the earth, like when you ask for a sign and get a billboard. Sometimes my awareness of the pure magic of this world is so intense, so all-encompassing, all I can do is tilt back my head and laugh in sheer overwhelming gratitude and wonder.

the strength of surrender

We who talk about this stuff talk a lot about how you never really get there and how everything is a process. We also say things like transformation can take a while or it can happen in one moment, knowing that usually, it takes a while. Even in the healy-wellness-lovey-community-of-awareness, there can be this off-centered sort of finger pointing and know-it-all attitude (because those of us in the community are human, and sometimes humans do that), and we need to remind ourselves and one another that whatever's going on, it's okay; there are no time limits on feeling better. There's no window through which your healing must fly. It's yours and you can go at your own pace.

We remind ourselves and one another that this life doesn't always feel fantastic and that process is often mysterious, but while we're here saying these things to one another, we are often saying them in the midst of not-knowing. We say what we say and things are momentarily better or not better and we do this delicate dance of remembering and naming and testing things out.

But I have something different to say today. It's going to sound exactly like what I've said a thousand times before, but it isn't. I'm sitting here in my dragonfly chair with my coffee next to the window. It's raining and there's thunder. The salt lamp is on against the grey. Later, the day will be sticky and hot, but right now, I'm in this pocket of harmony and I need to tell you, need to find a way to tell you, that transformation is absolutely possible and not only is it possible, it happens. It's real. You can change your life and you can change the way you feel about your life. You can let go of things you've been carrying for a long, long time - things that have swung back and doubled back and come back on you more times than you'd like to remember. You can walk away from those things and live without them.

Physical integrity

I kept drawing the Integrity card from my Angel Therapy deck and I kept thinking, well, um, yeah, I have integrity. Next card, please. (Because I'm like that. I give the angels a lot of back talk.)

But then I started thinking about what that word really means and whether or not the pieces of me were in alignment. Was I really living with integrity? Was I really living what I believed to be true, or was I just reading about ideas and agreeing with them and then putting something all together different into play in my day-to-day choices?

Gratitude journal

Found today via Mildly Creative.

How to Start a Gratitude Journal

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit
A gratitude journal is a great way to keep yourself in a thankful and positive state of mind. This article will offer some tips for starting and keeping one.

Steps

1. Be Thankful. Thankfulness is an attitude that you can practice and develop. Cultivating gratitude as the norm in your life will make keeping a gratitude journal much easier.
2. Make it a rule to write down a certain number of things you are thankful for per day. Avoid repeating the same things. This will make writing in the journal more challenging as time goes on, but that's how your awareness and thankfulness will grow. You'll be challenging yourself to find new things to be thankful for that perhaps you never noticed before.
3. Many people start by writing down basic material things that they are grateful for in their lives. It's easiest to recognize things that sustain your life here on Earth like your house, your bed, your clothes, your food etc. Be sure to explain how this makes you feel and why you're grateful for it.
   • Example - I am grateful for my house. My house warms my body and shelters and protects me. It gives me a sense of relief knowing that there is always a comforting place to come back to.
4. Write about extended material things in your life. These things vary from person to person depending on what you like and take interest in. For example, if you love to paint, you may be grateful for the paint that you have. Or, if you like music you may be grateful for your CD collections.
5. Describe how you are grateful for yourself. You can start by feeling grateful to be alive at all. Then start writing about feeling grateful to have the body you have, even if you don't like everything. Avoid the trap of being grateful for something that is better than what other people have. Instead, compare whatever you are grateful for with how you would feel if you didn't have it at all.
6. Think about your abilities. You may start with basic abilities like your ability to see, your ability to hear, your ability to walk. Then progress to the extended abilities that are unique to you. Think about skillful things like dancing, singing, writing, and features that make up your character like your listening skills, your skills in cheering up people, your skills in being a good friend.
7. Consider the people in your life. Think about all the people you care about, like your parents, your friends, your significant other, your pets. Write why you are grateful for each person and how they make you feel. This helps you to appreciate them and see only the good in them. It's also good to write about the people that you don't really like and find a reason to appreciate them. This can be difficult as we don't really appreciate people we don't like but it can be very uplifting. There is good in everyone and it's very mood shifting to find the good in even people we dislike and feel grateful for them.
8. Write about situations and experiences. There are always situations that have made us happy. For example, you may be grateful for a fun party, a good day at school/work, a fun vacation.

Tips

• You don't have to write a lot about why you feel grateful for something, but it helps to shift your awareness to the emotions and feelings that you enjoy, bringing about more of those emotions.
• This journal comes in handy to read when you're feeling down. It helps to shift your energy back to a positive vibe by reading about all you have to be grateful for.

Related wikiHows

• How to Be Thankful
• How to Keep a Journal
• How to Stop Feeling Like Your Life Isn't Good Enough
• How to Be Happy

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Start a Gratitude Journal. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Gathering

I have this desire to gather you around me. 

Let's form a circle.

Let's light a fire in the center, surround it with stones. 

I want to sit with you beneath the dome of stars and tell stories.

Let's wear quilted blankets and soft knit hats, hold mugs of smoky tea, sing harmony.

I want to stay up with you, whispering.

Anxiety

I made a realization about anxiety today.

I realized that I spent a lot of time earlier in my life paralyzed by anxiety and  a lot of time more recently seeking ways to ignore, transform or free myself of anxiety, and I've had quite a bit of success with that.

What I realized today came to me in the form of a question: What if I just made peace with it? What if I let it be? And it is an it, it isn't me. What if, when it pops up, I let it sit next to me and think, well there you are, and then go about my business?

What if when it shows up after its long absence, when it shows up after I think I've eradicated it, instead of asking it what it wants or asking it to leave, I simply acknowledge it and send it love (because, my goodness, it works really hard) and even see the humor in it?

That feels to me like freedom.

News purge

For years I lived this habit on workday mornings: I got up, poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down in front of a "news" show for 30 to 40 minutes before getting dressed for work. For the past year or so, I've had to keep the mute button close at hand as so much of what is presented on this show is not what I want to be taking in first thing in the morning (or ever).

On the weekends, I would never think of turning on the television first thing in the morning, but the weekday ritual was something I'd convinced myself I was supposed to do. It was a routine that I thought connected me to whatever was going on in the world and signaled to my brain that it was a work day.

But I don't like watching the news - even light entertainment style news (which is not the same thing as Entertainment News - I like watching that). It's so reactionary and manipulative and fear-based and it makes me feel alternately angry and numbed. I prefer to read news if I must and I've known this about myself for a long, long time. (I used to run out of the room crying when I was a little girl and the nightly news came on.)

Still I carried on with this morning news show thing and I didn't really question it even when I realized that I was muting these people more than I was listening to them.

Until this week. 

Last Saturday morning, I poured my coffee then took it back upstairs to my studio where I sat on my dragonfly chair under a blanket next to my salt lamp. On Sunday morning I did the same thing. It was such a soft, natural way to start my morning and I found myself wishing that I could sit there every morning. I actually wished that, as if there were some law that says I can only enjoy the comforts of my home on the weekends.

So this week  - no morning show.

It was a wonderful gift that I gave myself. I feel as if I've purged a toxin from my life and I'm excitedly looking around to see what else needs to go. (Don't say my coffee.)

The sanctity of home

I love my world. I love my places and my people. 

I like what happens when I reach out, when I cast the net, when leave the house and seek help (and find it) and connect and reconnect. All of that is good and necessary.

But sometimes, like tonight, I need to enter the temple in the heart of the house. Sometimes I need that hearth fire and the words of wisdom that come in quiet and sideways, next to my bath, on the hard tile. Sometimes I need the dark, the way it floods in through the window, the way it floods into my body.

The steady pulse, the whispering rhythm of interior spaces.

And I come back downstairs, changed.

 

Rest

I was all ready with big plans for my weekend beginning with projects around the house today, but I should have known a rethink was in order when I got the feeling early yesterday afternoon. It was the feeling that tells me that I'm getting tired. Really tired.

I did all right this morning. I got up extra early (in retrospect, not such a great idea), created menus and a shopping list for the week, developed a newsletter, did a load of laundry...then it hit me. Sore throat. Heavy eyes. No energy.

I took a bath, sent some Reiki to my throat, dosed up on Dr. Ben Kim's Vitamin C, drank some tea and that's it. I've been under a quilt all afternoon. I'm on my second episode of RuPaul's Drag Race, fantasizing that a beautiful drag queen is going to show up at any moment and do my make-up.

I'm not sick, but I'm still recharging.

It's unclear whether or not I'll get dressed and go to the store later.

I'm reminding myself that down time is part of balance. I'm not going to say things like lost time to myself. Time is never lost. 

Rest is good.

Shifts

Yesterday was a fascinating and wonderful day - the sort that comes often this time of the year. I think it's because of the way I view the shift of the year. By setting intentions for the new year, holding a guiding word and creating a dream board on New Year's Day, when November and December begin to flow into January, the lessons and challenges and insights of the previous year begin to rapidly show themselves one last time, popping up for me to consider. It's a clearing process and ultimately, about illumination, but it can be challenging. 

Yesterday when I felt the need to sit for a while in sadness I did not follow my usual course of keeping that from this place. Instead, I was drawn to write about it, to write to you about it, to share it here the same way I share joy. That choice was a key for me and it wasn't because I want to dump the whole of my life here or use this place as a place to vent - because I absolutely do not - but because writing here, though many may not understand it, has become a genuine home to me and you handful of wonderful people who read it, my true companions on this journey.

So yesterday, I felt broken - but not hopeless and not ever unaware of how it is all a part of process and movement, and I wrote to you here and things began to shimmy and rearrange.

Shortly thereafter, I came upon a small series of revelations -- and I choose that word carefully. Things were revealed to me in that gentle and miraculous way that the universe sings to us and I felt myself standing, comfortably, so much closer to big and beautiful change with misunderstandings dissolved and new understandings formed.  And I learned something crucial about honesty.

And you much-loved dream lifers were a part of that.

So, thank you.

Before release, this moment

When this happens with other people, when they come to me and tell me that they are broken, I usually have things to say. I have practices and perspectives. I have books and cards and crystals. I have messages that come from my intellect and my intuition, and I have support and love, and I give these things (I haven’t told you this but I actually want to become a life coach, except without the word “coach”, because this thing that I do that I used to call “readings”? It's not about telling the future, it is about tapping into a sort of consciousness, an energy of which we are all a part, and helping people get clear about the story they’re living, and I think that maybe I’m sort of good at it) and all of that occurs fairly easily.

And then it happens to me.

I’m walking and I look up and the way the blue van is turning out of the parking lot in the cold noon day sun strikes against my heart, and the tears well in my eyes. I’m sitting at my desk at work and a lump rises in my throat and I find it difficult to shift my attention toward anything other than the sensation of emotional pain. I am fine and then I am not fine and I can name the things that are wrong and need fixing but more important than those names is the simple fact that I feel broken and in the moment of brokenness, when I am immersed completely in it, I’m not interested in logic or even, really, a way out.

In that moment of sorrow, when the heart is exposed and vulnerable and the old hurt is coming forth to join the new hurt, in that moment I’m not quite ready for skills and lists and techniques and affirmations. I’m not quite ready to count my blessings or put things in perspective. I want out of it, yes, but I also want to name it, to hold it, to breathe into it, to let it be.

I want all of the shoulds and buts to be quiet because when they are, I can begin to be present, to sit with the brokenness and without trying to mold it or reframe it or dismiss it, listen to it tell me what it needs to say.

When my heart is this small flapping bird with the one wing dragging the ground, when my heart is this open gash that won’t hold the stitches, when my heart is this gaping, choking thing, I know that it is on the verge of rebirth, and yet I hesitate a moment before I open that door and walk through.

How I spent my fall vacation: day six

So.

Today.

Today was interesting. For hours it masqueraded as a less than satisfactory experience. I woke up on a funk and just got funkier (but not in a good way.) I drifted around for most of the morning, completely forgot about my writers group, then went to the grocery where I walked around rather aimlessly. 

This afternoon I found out that something I'd been looking forward to all week is mostly likely not going to happen and though it should have been a mild disappointment, it hit me much harder. There was a lot of weight in that small shift and I struggled with how to release the bitter sadness and fear that was about this disappointment but also tied to a much bigger issue.

I sat outside for a while, I cried, and finally I went to my space and light the candles and pulled some cards and thought about the messages I saw there. 

How I spent my fall vacation: day one

I am determined to get the house in some sort of shape at the beginning of my week so that I can enjoy it during the later part of the week and return to work with a better state of affairs around here. Last night I was all inspired to start working on the office. I succeeded in pulling piles of stuff out into the middle of the floor (and watching the movie Shrink, which I loved), but only one tiny area got organized.

This morning was not the time, however, to dive back in. This morning was the time to drink coffee and make a huge shopping list. Tracy and Woody were sleeping in the next room, so I couldn't very well go banging around in there. When finally they decided to brave this cold grey day and get out of bed, Tracy agreed to go with me for lunch and groceries and the co-op.

Masking & breaking free

If I had to create a visual symbol of what it’s like to be me right now, it would be me inside an egg made of concrete with breaks and cracks and fractures all over it because the whole thing is getting ready to fall away.

Not to be overly dramatic or anything.

Because I’m on this cusp, this dawning of a new phase, I’m thinking a lot about authenticity and what that really means. I’m thinking a lot about the various masks I wear. We all have, I think, different sides to our personalities. We speak and behave in different ways with different people. Some friendships bring out certain parts of us, other friendships honor other parts – that’s natural and normal and good, but I don’t enjoy and have never enjoyed the sensation that anyone with whom I spend a significant amount of time doesn’t really know me.