How Reiki affects my life: Part II
I have hesitated to write this piece as I am still reflecting and processing the last seven years of transformation. However, I endeavour to be someone who is open about my humanness as well as being dedicated to helping others. Hence the name, Heal with Hay.
The most powerful places of healing and transformation for me in the last cycle (ages 28-35) have been through opening up deeper into my spirituality and sexuality. The richness behind diving into these parts of ourselves, often not a choice, and witnessing your power and capacity for love expand immensely is mind blowing.
The affect of Reiki in these arenas was an initial energetic opening and readiness of these parts of me to be heard, expressed and developed. Reiki continues to help me see and heal many of these patterns and memories. It is the tool I use to always come home to myself amongst the chaos of change.
I have come to believe that spirituality is, “how we open to the flow of love”, it doesn’t matter how you do it, it is this process of opening that deems it to be a spiritual experience. Honing these connections to our Self, spirit, our soul or the universe etc is where our highest healing potential can lie along with our capacity for love, pleasure and feeling successfully fulfilled on our path.
For a few years prior to learning Reiki I had a knowing inside my body that something big still needed to be uncovered. At the end of 2017 (after Reiki 1 & 2) I was seeing my osteopath/energy healer in Queenstown. There was something stuck at my lower back that we couldn't shift. She asked another healer to join the session and work on me. He put his hands on my lower back and began to ask questions such as “was I abused as a child?”, and then came to say, “Do you like girls?”. My body responded instantly. I started heating up, it felt like I was on fire and my mind read, “You can't hide from it any longer”.
Cue - sexual awakening in my late 20’s… fucken great.
I took the next day off work to digest this insane awakening experience. I was shocked to the core. I mean, of course I knew I liked women but my 90’s conditioning had me believe I was straight with the perfect amount of liking girls. Ha. What really blew me away was the sheer strength of my mind to suppress such a powerful part of myself for two decades. I had no conscious idea.
When a big part of ourselves is brought into conscious awareness it reestablishes and sheds light on so many past memories. For weeks my mind was bringing up memories that were now changed and explained by this hidden piece of my true self. The comical thing is that it is very obvious looking back on my life that I was attracted to both men and women.
However, this is where trauma can massively impact how we see and know ourselves. This part of me was first shut down by a teacher shaming me in primary school when I shared about my friend and I exploring our bodies when we were 7 or 8, she strictly told me to never do that again.
Later, I had another experience in my early twenties when I started my emotional healing journey. I again shared this memory trying to gain clarity or access to this part of myself, when a look of disgust from the religious healer had me suppressing my sexuality for another seven year cycle. My body waited until I was safe to heal and integrate this core part of myself. I was married to Pat after eight years of being together and felt very safe in our love. We are now married 8 years and make our own rules.
Pat moved away to study for a year not long after this awakening occurred. I had time and space to integrate this new found part of myself. I remember feeling as though this part of me, now conscious, was still a teenager, yet the rest of me had grown up. Despite showing very clear signs of being into women as well as men in my youth my mind was so conditioned to shame and shove the truth of those feelings down deep. The benefit to this fragmentation was that I had a wise part that had been through puberty and young adulthood already and could help this new part grow into herself.
Our sexuality is at the core of our being, it is our life force energy, creativity, radiance and power. To have this part of ourselves suppressed will always result in blocked energy causing unwanted symptoms and often an inability to access our true essence and energy. It has been a scary, exciting and liberating experience to tap into what feels like the other half of my sexuality. Especially in a world where our sexual identities are often merged with the traditional roles of husband and wife once we marry.
I still struggle to hold my full sexuality on equal footing with the rest of my Self. When suppressing is the norm for so long it takes conscious effort and energy to create safety to be authentic. It’s so easy to be sucked back into an old way of being and forget about the powerful and true parts that exist outside of the dominant roles society has given us.
I try to remember that healing is not a linear process, it spirals through your being in harmony with the nature of the universe. I know I am always connected to my higher self when using Reiki and therein lies its power. I allow myself to trust this process still.
