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healing

The Healing Power of Reiki

After years of studying and practicing Reiki, I often feel like I take the subtle healing power of Reiki for granted. I began studying Reiki when I was 23. Back then, it was an amazing revelation. I was astounded by it. Over time, I got used to it. I studied other healing modalities. Reiki was cool, but so were all these other healing paths, I thought. But something happened last week that really upped my appreciation for Reiki. I began working one-on-one with a student in need of healing and guidance. As I began teaching her about Reiki in this intimate setting, I started to truly appreciate its power and promise. What a beautiful method, so accessible and simple, and yet beyond our human understanding. Reiki...

Practice

As the weeks of the shutdown amass and the days blend together, I'm reminded this morning of the importance of sacred practices to connect to love, God, and peace. They are beacons of light. Your sacred practices do not have to be the same ones you preferred last year. They do not have to be the same ones your friends do. They can be the ones that best fit you and your heart. How will you know if it's a sacred practice? It will remind you of the love that you come from and the love that you are. It will have a quality of ineffability, and it will bring you some amount of peace. It's easy to put a practice on the back burner when life...

The Soul Space

Sending greetings from this new normal of pandemic life. It's definitely a different world to adjust to. Everything in my life has become very small: small orbit, small income, small child. We have spent a lot of time in our yard and walking around the neighborhood, taking many things very slowly. How are you? How have you and yours been faring? I know many lives have been changed in different ways and I hope you've been safe, healthy, and cared for. I've been thinking a lot this week about what it's like to live within the soul space. There are times in my life when I've been there, and many times when I haven't. When I'm living in my soul space I feel very light, joyful, and...

Inner vs. Outer Worlds

One of my greatest coping mechanisms after my trauma was learning how to seem "okay" and even "successful" in my outer world as my inner world spun out of control. The technique helped me stop getting in trouble with my family, and helped me feel in control of my life. For a long time I even believed that I was okay because I had it all together on the outside. How wrong I was! I learned that lesson when my outer world stopped working for me. My heart kept calling out to me to heal beneath my successes through forms such as anxiety, insomnia, and depression. Friends from that time in my life might not have noticed, and I wonder if many of them may have...

Doing Things you Love

When the world seems to be mired in suffering, it can feel selfish and a little pointless to do the things you love, but it is at those times that your joy is most important. The world benefits as much as you do from your healing, loving, shining heart. What brings you to that place of joy? What helps you feel love? When I was at my most depressed, I didn’t even know what joy felt like, much less what could help me feel it. I remember for a while, the only thing that helped me feel better was singing Christmas carols. So I did that. Over time I’ve found more and more things that bring me joy. Healing has been an interplay of moving towards joy,...

Tools of the Spirit

I recently had someone reach out to me feeling overwhelmed about the world of healing. She said that she had purchased some crystals and books on chakras, but felt out of her league. I totally identified because I had definitely been there when I started healing. There are so many facets of spirituality and healing, so many schools of thought, and seemingly so much to learn, that it can feel daunting. What if I do it wrong? What if I’m not good at healing? Other people seemed to know so much more than I, and I often felt confused about what was up and what was down in the beginning. It took me many turns, many hiccups and some confusion to return to the truth of...

Healing and Nature

I write this today a few days ahead of the massive climate walk-outs being planned this Friday across my country. For the past several weeks we’ve had temperatures in the mid-nineties. I’ve been at a point of panic about our environment and experiencing a bit of hopelessness. Today’s blog is about how I approach these topics in balance with my spiritual life. When I first had my experiences of God and light, nature became much more alive to me. I was raised in a culture that disregarded nature. As a child I loved nature but had no language with which to approach it, and eventually stopped noticing it or feeling a part of it. My experience changed all of that. Nature pulsed with the beauty of...

Creating a Dream or a Nightmare

It’s possible for each of us to create a dream or a nightmare out of our lives. Though it seems we are at the whims of fate, we each have the power within us to veer our lives into territory of love or of fear. Much of this has to do with our thoughts and how centered we are in our hearts. Thinking the highest thoughts and focusing on love allows us to bring more love into our lives, like an internal feedback loop. The reverse is true with fear and fearful thoughts. I write about this because I’ve experienced both in my life. I entered into huge fear territory after my trauma. I didn’t only create a waking nightmare in my life, I had terrifying...

I am Not my Body

Well, here I am. I am sorry for being so out of touch for the past week. After some prayer and contemplation I decided to begin blogging once a week while I focus on writing my book and studying for the GREs. I was planning to blog weekly on Wednesdays, which would have been yesterday. However, I ended up in the hospital, where I’m writing to you now. “Heal with Rebecca” indeed! While I have navigated psychological recovery very deeply, I haven’t had very extreme physical illnesses. The physical ailments I suffered from in my early twenties were, I believe, deeply related to my psychological and energetic state, and I was able to heal them with nutrition, meditation, and alternative healing modalities. Primarily, I used to...

Staying Grounded

It’s taken a lot of work to help me learn how to stay grounded. When I was first traumatized, I survived by disassociating, or basically leaving my body. I didn’t know I was doing this until I began to do more in-depth healing work with bodywork and Reiki. Even therapy, which had many benefits, didn’t really help me too much to learn how to live in my body. In addition to being traumatized, I had some spiritual inclinations. Honestly I believe that these two things can go hand in hand. As one healer I worked with put it, “when the physical world doesn’t take care of you, the spiritual world does.” Or as the Bible says, “When you are weak, God is strong.” Both my trauma...