Reiki for Healing ~ Reiki for Transformation ~ Reiki for Acceptance

It is my belief that Reiki energy comes from the source of all love and light. I don't pretend to know the name or shape of that source, but I am comfortable calling it God, or Great Spirit, or True Source, or any number of beautiful, meaningful names that we humans have chosen to give this massive force of goodness. 

Over the past week or so, I have called on this Great Spirit to fill me with love and light so that I may be a clear Reiki channel for many in need, including myself. There have been several deaths in my community of people, and several hospital visits and hospital stays on top of that. 

So, how can Reiki help us to cope with illness, injury, and death?

As far as illness and injury go, many people are familiar with the fact that Reiki is great for helping with pain management and stress reduction, both of which can, in turn, give the body a break and help encourage it to heal itself. Reiki is a wonderful gift for those who are suffering. 

But what about death? Can Reiki help us grieve? I believe it can. To me, Reiki would not exist without the love and light of the True Source of All. Allowing that love and light to fill us up creates a safe space within our hearts for grief to be released. 

One of the services I love to offer is Grief Transmutation. In this ceremony, I use Reiki to bring healing where it is needed, to dissolve any negative energy surrounding the grief and transmute it into the strength to create a safe, loving space for each individual to feel their grief, find acceptance with it, and release it in their own time.

I also believe that we can send Reiki to those who have crossed over... send the intention for them to be enveloped in love and light, and to know that it is okay for them to go and be in the light.

I am thankful to be able to offer Reiki to spirits in every stage of being, from birth to death and beyond. The Source of Love and Light is boundless... limitless... and I am filled with that energy each time I practice Reiki. What a gift for me, and what a gift to share. Beautiful.

>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<

LOVE,

Haley

Living, Breathing Beauty

Wow. All Honesty Here: It has been a tough couple of weeks. Being in touch with your spirituality... loving life... being an optimist... being a Reiki practitioner... none of these things means that one gets to be exempt from the more challenging aspects of life.

And here's where you might be saying, "DUH!" ;)

But, I bet some of you out there might be something like me and tend to put people up high on a pedestal for possessing traits or undertaking life practices that we greatly admire. Heartfelt admiration is a beautiful thing, but I have found many a time where I need to check myself and remember that those I admire are also just people... people with bodies in various states of wellness... people with relationships in various states healthiness... people who have to contend with whatever life throws their way, just like me.

So, yes. It has been a hard time for many of late. But the gift we are all given is the CHOICE of how we respond to the situations life presents us with. And it is a choice. Sometimes our instinctive reactions don't feel like choices, but they are; they're just choices we make very quickly and with only nanoseconds of thought put into them... combined with a lifetime of previous responses that provide us with a tendency. And ohhhh, to be able to negate some of those tendencies... a great goal, indeed, worth investing our time and energy in.

Thank God for Reiki! Reiki is the one thing I have found in my earth walk thus far that can truly quiet my mind and heal all parts of my self at the same time. It can be used to heal our past and send healing to our unfolding path as well as healing our present moments. What a gift.

And speaking of gifts, it was my honor to be the recipient of an intensive 7-day distance healing that ran from last Thursday through yesterday. As you may have already read on my page about distance Reiki, this means that the energy from that last session will still be unfolding and revealing itself through tomorrow or so... or even longer! Reiki does not play by the rules of linear time;). AWESOME.

So... story time: On day 5 of 7, I found myself purging a HEAP of emotion. It rose up in me so unexpectedly, while I was writing a truly mundane email to a coworker. I felt the Reiki opening up my heart wider, wider, WIDER, and felt the need to seek some privacy and do some hands-on Reiki on myself to soften my experience of it.

A little later that day, feeling raw and WIDE open... revealed... unhidden... I took a walk through downtown Asheville. I wound my way around to a quiet spot in a nearby courtyard and sat down on some stone steps. The air felt warm and still and perfect; the sun was shining. I found myself staring at an outdoor potted plant.

My mind felt so relaxed as I watched the plant, and suddenly I realized that I could see it breathing... see it's leaves drawing in the air and releasing it... see it's branches reaching in a slow, steady, almost imperceptible motion towards the sun, and towards the other plants nearby. There was no wind to rustle the leaves or sway the branches of this shrub; it was purely the energy of the plant that I was seeing as it created and willed its own movement! It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and when I looked over to another plant... and another... I could see their living, breathing beauty as clear as day, too.

Life is all around us. There are things we can't control, things that challenge us to remain open... but what a gift when we find that, even in the face of hardship, we CAN. We can choose to leave room in our hearts for beauty to come in and fill us back up. And it feels so good. I am so very grateful.

May Love and Light flood your heart and spill out into the world for all to see...

>>>>>><<<<<<<

Haley

Inviting Joy

Sometimes life can feel so hectic. In my own life, I wake up in the morning, drive my daughter to preschool, drive to work for the morning, go back to pick my daughter up from preschool, drive us home for lunch, drive back to work for the afternoon, then drive home again for dinner. From that point, I have about 3 hours with my family before my daughter goes to sleep. Once she's down for the night, I have to choose between doing laundry, tidying up, working on the book I'm writing, blogging on Blue Mountain Reiki, keeping up with my various social networking channels, or trying to relax and spend some time with my husband.

And this schedule is TAME compared to some of you out there!

Sometimes, I try to squeeze as many things from the above evening list in as possible... which means I am often up until after 1AM... only to wake up groggy to repeat the schedule the following day!

But, in spite of feeling like a whirling dervish half the time, I can honestly say that, more often than not, I feel joy in these moments. Of course, I have rough days like anybody, and I have my own personal ups and downs and issues that I struggle with... but the overarching reality for me is JOY and GRATITUDE.

Reiki has been a huge help in allowing this to be true for me. The very act of practicing Reiki is one that involves asking the ego to step back. This practice of essentially allowing oneself to engage with the energy of the universe without that internal voice of judgment is incredibly freeing. Even when I am not in the act of channeling Reiki for myself or a client, I feel that this energy is with me, encouraging me to see the world with an open heart.

There are so many things that we don't have a choice about, but inviting joy IS a choice. No matter how busy--or grumpy!--you are today or tomorrow or this week, find a moment to pause... and take a deep breath... breathing in gratitude for something (a smile from a stranger, a hard lesson you've finally learned, your morning cup of coffee--anything!), and breathing out all the self-judgment, frustration, anger, sadness, or anything else you've been trudging around with.

For at least this one moment, give yourself permission to stop carrying that weight.

With your breath in, pull energy up, through your feet, up the back of your legs, up your spine, and up over your head... then with your breath out, bring the energy down over your forehead, over your face and your neck, down over your chest, heart, stomach, and aaaaaall the way down your body to your feet and back into the earth.

Try it, even if just once. A deep breath, like Reiki, can only help.

>>>LOVE<<<

Haley

Remembering How to Listen

This poem--shared with me over the weekend by beautiful and talented artist, photographer, teacher, and friend, Catherine Anderson--goes straight to the heart of the dichotomy that, too often, we create and enable within us between our spiritual self and our everything-else self. (I talked about this in my first blog.) The truth is that we all have wholeness within us, if we could only remember how to stop all the mental chatter and LISTEN for it--listen to our hearts, listen to the wind... or listen to the singing of the stars...


LOVE,

Haley


The Silence of the Stars
by David Wagoner
 

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now? And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their televisions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

Thoughts Have Power

One of the most amazing illustrations I have ever seen of how powerful the energy of our thoughts can be was in the film What the Bleep Do We Know? In this segment of the film, a woman is discussing the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, who photographed water molecules under a microscope after doing things like taping written words to the bottle of water, having a monk bless the water, or playing music to the water.

The resulting images are a testament to the power of our thoughts, and as one character in the film asks, if that's what our thoughts do to water outside of our body, can you imagine what our thoughts do to the water inside of us??



Receiving Reiki is a great way to fill the molecules in your body with love and light. Next time you get Reiki, remember this video and the beautiful photo of the water that received a monk's blessing, or the one from the bottle that had the Chi of Love written on it. Let Reiki fill you up with goodness... and in the meantime, focus on thinking kind, loving, and compassionate thoughts, not just about those around you, but about yourself.

LOVE,

Haley

Medical Community Support for Reiki

Hospitals like The Cleveland Clinic and UCLA Medical Center are now openly endorsing Reiki and welcoming it into their institutions as complimentary care for their patients. It is an exciting time to be a practitioner! Now, perhaps more than ever, alternative therapies are being explored and researched by those in the medical community, and the results reported by those who receive Reiki speak for themselves.

The well-known and loved Dr. Oz was featured recently on a CNN report about energy healing and "psychic touch" that reveals some of what these open-minded medical professionals are seeing in Reiki. Check it out:

Endings and beginnings

Today, I heard news of the passing of a recently made acquaintance. I met Gerry while conducting interviews for a book I'm writing about intuitive people; he had a warm, playful energy and a comforting laugh. He spoke to me of one of his earliest intuitive experiences as child in a clearing near his rural home:

"One of my favorite spots was a place in the woods; I always called it a fairy circle because around it was all very, very thick mountain laurel that you had to struggle through to get to. But this area was probably about 30 feet, open. And I used to go there and just sit. ... [T]his one day I was sitting there, bright sunshine, very comfortable, just kind of relaxing--I guess you could say being open--and leaning against a big oak tree. And all of a sudden it was open to me; it was almost like a revelation about the interconnectedness of all life, how everything is related, how everything ... has a symbiotic relationship with everything else. I understood the meaning behind the trees, the little teaberry plants, the bugs crawling on the ground, and everything else. ... It changed the direction in my life."  

How many of us have shared in moments like this? Moments in which something strikes a chord deep inside that resonates within us as TRUTH? In my experience, truth really does manifest a certain feeling of connectedness that transcends any of the mind's wheel-spinning machinations. I revel in these moments, cherishing the experience of quiet knowing.

As Gerry's time in this earth walk finds its end, I am sad for all of us who will not have the pleasure of his company in bodily form, but I am also comforted by his words, by his deep knowing that all things are connected in this great cycle of life.

Today, I will attend the wedding of one of my dearest friends. I will join in the celebration of two lives converging to start down a new path together. As one cycle ends, another begins... and so it has always been. It is an honor to bear witness to this turning of the page.

With love and light for all...

Haley

Keep Calm and Practice Reiki -- from Pamela Miles

Visionary Reiki Master, Pamela Miles, keeps up a truly wonderful site that I highly recommend you check out. Much of the information is geared towards Reiki practitioners, but even if you are not one yourself and are simply exploring information about Reiki and considering whether Reiki treatment may be right for you, Pamela's site, ReikiInMedicine.org, is an amazing resource for everything Reiki.

I was particularly moved by her blog post this morning, entitled Grabbing Reiki, in which she gently reminds us that freedom is found in letting go and in realizing that Reiki, as with so many things in life, is something that we cannot merely contain in our grasp.

Additionally, she shared a graphic that simply reads: Keep Calm and Practice Reiki.

This is exactly what I needed to hear today!

We all encounter bumps in the road of life from time to time, and I am no different. I am thankful to have Reiki practice in my life, and engaging in self treatment is a wonderful way to help hard times feel less heavy. I look forward to offering classes beginning sometime this next year, and invite any of you reading this to touch base with me about taking Reiki Level I to learn how to do Reiki on yourself! I am confident that you will love this beautiful practice as I do.

:)

Blessings to you all as you navigate your own paths...

LOVE,

Haley

P.S. In closing, here is a word from Pamela about Reiki:

Reiki and Hurricane Irene

Last night as I went to bed, I spent some time meditating on Hurricane Irene and sending Reiki towards dissipating the storm. I reached out into the ether to connect with the storm's energy and visualized pulling it apart from the center.

Is there any way to prove that Reiki has had an effect? No. But, my belief is that each of us has the ability to effect the world around us with the energy that we put out into it. And so, for that time during my meditation last night, I put forth energy towards weakening the storm.

Whatever any of us believes, I still smiled and thought of my Reiki meditation and pulling the storm apart from the center when I saw this morning that the storm had weakened as expected, and had "lost some organization."

It is still a dangerous storm, however.

Off to send more Reiki...


LOVE,

Haley

Wholeness

"A hidden wholeness underlies all of creation - it is this invisible wholeness that matters most."


--Deepak Chopra

Saw this quote tonight and wanted to share it with you. This is exactly what I was referring to in yesterday's post.

:)

Love!

Haley