Part One – The Journey
Mine is the story of forgiveness, gratitude, expansion, and transcendence. That I am still alive is nothing short of a miracle, but not only that, my now aliveness is vital, bubbling, aware and filled with awe. This hasn’t always been the case.
For decades, I was held captive by the trauma, despair and dehumanization of domestic violence. For decades, I was oppressed by the embodied unremembered recollection of sexual molestation that flowed like ice through my veins and attracted rape to me. This was my narrative, a storyline that shaped my beliefs about the world around me, about myself—sullied, broken, inferior, underachieving, victim. For decades, I longed to die and managed to seek refuge in the barren contours of my shadowland where I fed my hungry ghost with heroin, morphine, oxycodone, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol anything that could shut out the distress of this terrifying world. I subsisted in shadowland for some time and yet managed to survive. When the numbing wasn’t enough, the sirens of death called me, lured me with their unrelenting songs of torment urging me to take my own life. Twice I tried, but death was not permitted.
My story does not stop here, however, because amid all of this there was inside of me a sparkler—a frantic and playful sizzling of light jutting forth in every which direction that wanted more, that knew more existed. Inside of me was some other awareness that guided me to places of creativity, expression, color, light, community and love. Overcoming hardships, confronting my addictions came at price. I had to delve into the eye of the storm, and in that chaos, I had to seek out the counsel of forgiveness.
First, I was to forgive the man who raised me, who threw plates of food at my mother’s head, drenching her with shame and humiliation. I had to find a way to let go of the past: 15 years of eggshell walking; 15 years of rage and violence. I had to find a way to let it all go. My attempts were hit or miss and, sometimes I’d find myself circling back to some abandoned shadowland-shack—a debauched detour before a morning of shame and regret. But despite sudden and seemingly arbitrary pitfalls, I managed to have a life, job, home, and romance. It wasn’t until a New Year’s Eve mugging that the whole house of cards came tumbling down.
In recovery, I worked hard on forgiveness and letting go. But to my detriment, I had not ever acknowledged the oppression of my unremembered recollection of sexual molestation. The mugging and subsequent blow to my head, had taken my trauma to a whole new level. It cracked my consciousness wide open and forced me to remember. Pain and grief poured out of me like rushing waters buckling the fragile levies and dams that held me in place. Lost my job. Lost my mind, but in the end, I was reunited with my soul.
Part Two – Reiki
Reiki found me slacklining, trying with all my might to stay perched and balanced on an ever-swaying rope—always mindful of the consequences of the fall. Reiki found me pretending, and in that pretense, showed me a picture of myself that was recognizable yet foreign. Reiki helped me remember where I came from, and how I decided to come to this place, to confront these particular sets of hardships. Reiki reveled the magic and the medicine that permeates throughout me and all my aspects. Reiki soothed me like a balm and expanded my heart tenfold; it stripped away that sense of alienation and separateness and illuminated the ethereal threads that connect us to each other and to this earthly plane. Reiki taught me stillness, peace, and how to wield love like a healing stick letting it guide me to everyday miracles, epiphanies and internal landscapes that shimmer like starry moonlit nights. Reiki taught me how to breathe. Reiki touched me so I could know myself, and in turn, see myself in others. If you are soiled and broken, I will hold you because I too have been soiled and broken.
It is this transformation that I wish for us all—that ability to traverse the dark night of the soul, and yet still rise anew each dawn, luminous with wisdom. That we might find a new and common language with the power to heal, connect, and create that sense of spiritual oneness is my hope for humanity. This is a new era. Much is broken, but healing, with all its fits and starts—two steps forward and three steps back—is inevitable.