One of the obstacles I faced last year, especially after getting arrested, was financial scarcity. Money wasn’t really an issue when I was working as an escort (not much of a surprise there ) but I’ve had a lot of trouble finding a job since. I’ve been working odd jobs since July and it’s been a huge stress to try and meet all my expenses. A lot of energy has gone into worrying about money that I could be putting into things that are way more fun.

Finding a more conscious, loving way of generating financial stability has been an interest of mine for years. I’m familiar with plenty of theories on how to create abundance, but I’ve never committed to creating abundance in my life the way I committed to learning courage last year. In fact, when I reflect on it, long-term conscious creation of abundance was often put on the backseat for more immediate financial needs. (Hmm… Maybe 2010 should also be the year I focus on patience? )

From what I’ve learned, the first step in creating abundance is building a vision of what you want to experience and making my inner self a match for that reality. We create the world around us, so something within me has been attracting scarcity and needs to be retrained to attract abundance. To help me get started, I visited some of my favourite resources to develop a plan of action.

Back in November, Steve Pavlina had posted a video blog about creating abundance. I’d been meaning to watch it for months but never quite got to it. I took the opportunity to watch it and sure enough, the first step he suggested was teaching yourself to sent out an abundance vibe to the universe. You do this by imagining a new reality of abundance around you and opening yourself to feel what that experience would be like. By creating that feeling repeatedly, you’re teaching yourself how to hold that state of being throughout your daily life.

Since watching the video, I’ve been practicing holding that state in the morning when I wake up and at night before I go to bed. The process has made me more aware of how limiting my casual thoughts during the day really are. It’s been helpful to take a moment when I notice these thoughts to replace them with a groovy abundance vibe. Way more fun than stressing about scarcity. I’ve been practicing reiki since last year and it’s helped me to become more aware of shifts in energy in my body and consciously altering my state of being. When I get to the right emotional state of abundance, I can feel a huge difference in my body. I feel lighter, often feel a little shiver go down my spine, and smile.

The shift isn’t always easy. Certain thoughts seem more like habits more than products of my thinking. I’ve probably thought them so many times before that they just kind of fill the space in my head when I’m not conscious of it. Fortunately, that’s just a matter of re-teaching my brain and reinforcing the new thoughts as often as possible. Depending on where I am and what I’m doing, it might take longer. But no matter how long it takes, it is so important to stop giving that energy to an experience I don’t want and redirect it into creating what I do want.

Sleep schedule and eating habits are big factors in my emotional state. I’ve noticed that if I’m tired or eaten a lot of sugar, it’s harder to change my thoughts. The gardening season has started so I’ve been getting up much earlier and leaving the house very soon after I’m out of bed. If I want to have a productive day, I need to make time to go through a morning ritual before rushing off to get things done. If I wake up slowly, spend time focusing on my vision and getting myself to an abundant emotional state, eat something alive and fresh, plan out my day, and then get started on what I need to do, my emotional state during the day is much more stable, focused, and positive. I experienced a lot of disconnect last year and after brushing up on Steve’s work the last few days I’ve come to accept that as part of learning to live consciously. I experienced first hand how acting out of fear can drop us right back into the old habits we were trying to grow past. Taking time for those steps every morning is a great environmental support to holding the new, abundant experience I want. If I skip them, I feel off-balance and less present/in control of my reality.

The second step offered in the video was the need to exercise courage to completely move into the new reality. You have to let go of what’s going to keep you in the old mindset and go for the new opportunities that will show up. You have to follow your heart and trust it to lead you. Luckily, I built some courage muscles last year to help me with that.

Another useful resource is daily “Notes From The Universe” sent from Tut.com. The notes also have a very similar two step process for creating the life you want. They encourage creating a vision and taking baby steps in the right direction and trusting the universe will support you. It’s a treat to open my email and get these notes once a day. They’re helping me to rewire my brain with the right, empowering messages.

An important component to creating abundance is figuring out what my contribution to the world is and how I want to give value to others. Companionship is extremely important to me, but I feel like need more training to do the job the way I think it should be done. I currently volunteer a lot of my time to food politics and community gardening and I’ve been getting messages about how crucial those things are. I’ve been feeling pulls towards the arts and event planning, as well as develop my skills as a healer using energy and herbalism. I know I need to write and I love being involved in activism, attending workshops, and cheerleading. I feel like I’ve been doing good work but I wasn’t being compensated for it, focusing on sex work as my only source of income. That was limiting and I need to expand my thinking to include being compensated for the various types of work that I love.

I was planting wild strawberries this afternoon, digging in the ground with my bare hands, and I was struck with gratitude that I was a gardener. It teaches me so much about generosity and service. It’s supportive to my health, my happiness, my home, and helps me give to those around me. Gardening has been my teacher of abundance over the last few years and as the weather warms, I’m excited to see what this year’s goals and garden will bring.

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When you ask the universe for courage, it doesn’t give you courage. It gives you lessons with which you can learn courage. It’s up to us to take the course of action that will build our courage.

The first part of last year was amazing for me. I pushed through a lot of challenges quickly, becoming a sex worker, starting a raw foods diet, and learning to be more authentic in my daily life. I felt a surge of new energy fueled by my enthusiasm and a boost from getting rid of old energy drains and creating more compatible situations for myself. I felt happier, more energetic, and more connected to the world around me than I ever had before.

About halfway into the year, the natural high I was on started to ebb. Things started to becoming more difficult and I experienced a lot of emotional blows. I felt like I was constantly having to defend my work (even to others in the same field). I was arrested, experienced a huge culture shock while trying to find ways to make money and process what was happening. I had to quit raw foods, committed to a whole new set of responsibilities to help me feel like I was still in control, and had my heart broken.

I tried to keep the same level of energy and positive feelings that I had started off with, but it got harder and harder as time went on and I felt more and more frustrated. I started to doubt myself and wondered where I had gone wrong. I had been so sure about the choices that I was making, so why wasn’t it working? Why was I suffering?

A little over a week ago, I sat by the river the day of the Spring Equinox with a close friend of mine. We talked and during our conversation, I shared my frustration and the growing disconnect I was feeling. I realized something very important. I had lost my faith.

It had happened slowly, over the course of many events. I had continued to act and speak as if I was on the same path, but I no longer felt the passion and spark in my heart. I had been hurt and frustrated when things didn’t turn out as I expected them to. Instead of letting go with love and holding to my vision for what I wanted, I tried to shut it off the pain, bury it and race towards the next challenge before I was ready. I wanted to stop feeling hurt and instead of working within myself to heal the attitudes and expectations that had caused that hurt, I avoided the big challenges that could hurt me again and stopped moving forward. I started attracting energy dramas and asinine obstacles that left me feeling tired and depressed.

Over the next few days, I started working on tearing down the walls I’d put up around myself. I cried, sang, danced, and drummed. I began working on new stories and creative projects. I admitted to myself how running away from my hurt had facilitated the situations in my present life that were unhealthy. I forgave myself and others.

Anytime you follow a path, especially against the grain, you are going to face challenges that seem like they can’t be overcome. That’s why they’re challenges. Facing these challenges is a part of growth and how we become stronger. The universe had been challenging me to live up to my intentions, helping me to become the person who could accomplish those things and I held back. I let the big new challenges with teeth scare me because the first ones had been easy. I let fear weaken me and eventually drain me dry, instead of gathering my love, courage, and strength to help me overcome them.

Today, I feel strong. It’s spring and I’m celebrating my failures as experiences where I built strength of spirit and character. If I want to keep developing, I’m going to have to believe in myself and the universe, even when I’m in pain or confused. I can’t be attached to any particular outcome and have to learn the inner serenity to hold the vision of what I want in my heart despite outside influences. Hopefully it won’t take me six months to realize that next time.

I have to believe, be open, be strong, and be brave. I have to be a warrior of love.

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I’ve caught myself thinking the last few days about how differently I would interact with my loved ones now if I hadn’t been through the challenges in my past. If I’d never been hurt, would I be better than I am? If I’d never been disappointed, could I speak my mind more? If I’d never cried, maybe I wouldn’t worry about getting hurt?

We can wish to change the past, but I think deep down we know that we are who we are because of it. If I hadn’t had my heart broken, I wouldn’t have the strength that I feel quickening my blood, strength that comes from having had to rebuild when my world fell apart. I wouldn’t trust myself to rise to the challenges my path leads me down. I know, through the dark and confusing times, that I have a fire inside me that believes fiercely in love and that even if I don’t know what will happen, that I have to do what I can.

When I talk about love, the first thing that enters into people’s minds is romantic love. But I’ll say it again and again – love is more universal than that. Romance is an expression of love, but it isn’t what love is. It has infinite ways of expressing itself. The love I feel for my friends is no less than the love I feel for lovers or family. The love I feel for someone will change and evolve through knowing them and the changes happening in our lives. One expression of love (romantic) is not better or worse than another (familial). We simply express love in whatever channel is appropriate at the time. Love can be like fire, desire and passion driving us to action or intimacy… but love can also be like water, filling us and flowing through us. There is the spark of new love and discovery of a kindred spirit, as well as the deep love built from time, understanding, and trust. Love is a mystery. We are awed by it. We search for it, even though it’s all around us. Love is a primal force.

Love doesn’t ask us to be perfect or pure. It asks us to allow it into our lives. We all have something to offer, whatever phase of our journey we’re in. There is beauty in the love of an innocent heart that has never known pain, but there is equal beauty and worth in love that comes from a heart that we have pieced back together. There is hope and strength in a heart that chooses to ignite itself in the dark. Making the decision to love despite confusion and fear and past pain is a powerful thing. That decision invites love in and shows that we want something stronger, better, more aligned with who we are. It’s in that desire to be more than we have been before that we find power, truth, and nobility in love.

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The last few nights I’ve been feeling really restless. My dreams have been smoky and symbolic, women in threes, old overgrown gardens, strange ancient houses, voices speaking the names of old gods long sleeping. There have been so many messages and I feel like I can’t hold them all. They fade with the dawn and under the concerns of living in the physical world.

When I agreed to act as a servant of love, I didn’t believe I had anything to offer and though I put myself in her hands, I thought Aphrodite a frivolous goddess. When I thought of love, I often thought of a group of attributes, or qualities that I wanted in a partner, or a warm safe feeling that would soothe my fears and nurture me. I thought I knew what love was, and the more I follow this path, the more I realize how much I have to learn.

Love is all around us. It connects us to people, places, and objects. It’s the force that moves the universe, the life blood of creation. Every action we take, we take for love, for desire of a feeling, an experience, a person. And yet, to love is one of the scariest, hardest things we can do. I’ve often been caught up in thinking of love as quantifiable… that I have a limited source that I give to a specific someone in exchange for equal value of service, caring, etc. That if I run out, I need someone else to fill up that space for me. Sometimes I wonder if it was a cosmic joke for Aphrodite to take a lonely, dreamy little moon child and walk her down the trials of love, to see what she could become.

The funny thing about love is the more I give, the more I have. Not because one person or another gives it to me, but because the act of loving aligns me with a greater source of universal love. When I act out of love, I invite it into my life and carve a greater space within myself for love to flow through my being. I step deeper into love’s realm and that is my reward, more than any act of affection or caring than anyone can show me.

When we search for “love”, we are searching for many things that we associate with that label. The desire for love can be a mask for the desire for attention, sexual pleasure, sensual pleasure, care giving, protecting, teaching, sharing. We establish patterns early on that we continue to act out of, thinking if we can find the perfect person or the perfect way of explaining ourselves we will have those needs met and be happy.

Love is so much more than that. Love asks that we be gentle but strong, open and changing but centered in who we are, vulnerable and courageous. Love asks us to take chances again and again, even when we are tired and weathered. Love asks for us for our nobility, for us strive to be more than we have been. Love can bring us what we ask for, but the greater mystery is when love brings us what we didn’t know we needed.

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How we express our love for each other and the role it plays in our happiness was a huge theme for me last year. When I was younger, I used to think that love was complicated and fragile. I thought that it was something rare and strange that existed between two people that were then devoted to each other. Not surprisingly, I was often a lonely child.

As I’ve gotten older, I’m finding love to be very simple. Love is what connects us to those around us. Love flowing through us rejuvenates our spark, giving us vitality and passion. We love spontaneously, without reason, and with surprising strength. We love people, ideas, animals, objects, tangible and intangible things. It’s natural for us to love. Our hearts were made for it.

We’ve chosen to teach each other that love must flow through certain channels (friends, family, lovers, etc) to be valued and celebrated, but I’m learning this complicates and confuses my feelings. Instead of focusing on expressing what I feel naturally, I worry and begin to concentrate on expressing my affection through ideas of what is and isn’t acceptable based on what class of relationship I’ve put someone in. Love doesn’t flow as easily and I start to feel a lack of it in my life. I block the love that is being given to me and my spark doesn’t burn as brightly.

This year, I’ve let myself love much more. I’ve explored different types of emotional and physical relationships, deepened existing connections, let more people into my life and shared more about my inner self. I’ve been more assertive socially, more forward about what I wanted, and when in doubt, I did what my heart told me to do. I indulged my curiosity and instinct to explore. I learned to first speak my mind in difficult conversations and later to initiate them if I felt confused or that it was necessary. In return, I’ve found more joy, more connection, and more self-confidence. I’ve felt both happiness and sadness, clarity and confusion. I’m a lot closer to many people in my life and farther away from others who I wasn’t compatible with.

Because I was often pushing myself to express what I felt, while being afraid to do so, sometimes I felt erratic and foolish. I felt a little like a child who was learning to speak. The act of loving felt natural, but holding it back also felt natural, maybe because holding back was something I’d practiced so often.

When I express love for different people, what I’m feeling is a mixture of affection, affinity, intimacy, desire and other things I don’t know the name of. How I feel about each person is unique and the way I want to express it is fluid. Sometimes it can be material, like the desire to give gifts or to pamper (making food and feeding people is becoming one of my favorite ways to express love). Sometimes the expression of love is physical. We associate physical intimacy with sex and romantic intentions, when it’s just another way we express ourselves with each other. I’ve found the more I let myself express love organically, the more physically affectionate with my friends I’ve become. I hug more, hold hands more, kiss more and cuddle much more. This type of affection used to be reserved for romantic relationships but the friends I feel comfortable with physically are often also the friends that I feel emotionally close to or strongly about.

How we love is shaped by our personality, past experiences and the choices we’ve made. When we interact with someone, it can feel complicated because we’re often struggling with ghosts of jealousy,insecurity, paranoia, anger, and other demons. Even if we’re able to love with an open, care-free heart, we often use the same words for different things and forget that our desires and styles of loving are unique.

Communication has been the most useful and hardest skill to build in my relationships. It can be hard to talk about intentions and where each person stands in a relationship. It can be hard to talk about something someone has done that has hurt or upset us. Sometimes we just don’t know what we want or feel vulnerable talking about things that hurt us. But it’s necessary to build the skills of expressing to others what we want, what we’re feeling, and our intentions and boundaries. We learn how to do it by opening up and trying. The more we practice, the better we get. This is an integral part of showing love for our self and for others. It can build stronger relationships or show us the ones that we have to let go of.

I’m learning that the relationships we have strongly shape our view of the world. If I spend time with those I have honest and loving relationships with, I feel that the world is a safe, loving place. If I put energy into relationships that are full of insecurity and confusion, I end up feeling insecure and confused. Our relationships are reflections of ourselves, and where we put our focus is what we’re going to create. Looking forward to this coming year, I want to focus on being around those that value the things that I value (honesty, courage, and abundance in love). I want to share my time with those that bring joy and wisdom into my life by inviting out the best in me and asking the best of themselves.

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Warrior Princess; Originally uploaded by carpe_diem_terry

The first full moon of the new year is tonight and after attending a community kitchen at The Good Food Club, I’m planning to continue the weekend’s festivities and celebrate and cement what I want to cultivate for the coming year.

Going back to work escorting doesn’t feel right. I don’t agree with the laws, but am bound by them and don’t want to put my roommates, my clients, or myself through more drama like this summer. Early last month, three sex workers launched a constitutional challenge against Canada’s prostitution laws, which endanger workers by denying them the right to work legally indoors or even hire security. While it could be quite a while before a resolution is reached, I’m hopeful and grateful that I live in a country that such a thing is possible. I don’t want to give up my profession completely. I’ve found a lot of growth in this path and it speaks to me spiritually. I want to continue to challenge myself and learn more about my sexuality and explore the sacredness, healing, and beauty in experiencing pleasure. I can continue to do that, just not as a working professional. I’ve decided to continue the course of study I charted out for myself when I first wanted to be a companion. In this way, I’ll still be honouring my path and putting my energy towards the pursuit of growth, instead of trying to continue working “underground” or with a fake name.

This opens up the area of career in my life. I love working with food security and feel passionate about the cause, which had me wondering if community development is where I should be. But after sitting with that thought for some time, thinking about how most jobs in the area are structured and investigating my school options, I didn’t feel excited about the idea of making a career out of community work. I want to continue to volunteer my time and resources, but choosing it as a primary outlet/source of income doesn’t suit. My heart still desires a path influenced by Venus.

One of my joys of the summer and autumn was the opportunity to attend festivals and shows around my city. I took in plays and a few burlesque shows, attended a lot more parties, planned my own events and performed a drag-to-femme striptease at a housing co-op fundraiser. I’ve been noticing a growing interest in entertainment and special events, as well as costuming and performance art. It seems like a natural off-shoot of my other interests (design, writing, marketing, the arts, etc) and my desire to learn more about entertaining and other social skills as part of my companion studies. I’m not sure how this will manifest in the coming months, but it sparks my interest and creativity and feels… congruent.

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Princess Lotus by ~marumiyan on deviantART

I recognize Halloween/Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve as the end of one year and the beginning of a new one and a time to reflect.

Last year saw many changes for me as I sought to align who I was with who I wanted to be. A few months in, I set some goals to help me develop my courage and take more chances. I ended up working as an indoor sex worker, fulfilling a desire I’d been too scared to realize for over a year. I also ended up getting arrested, having to tell my parents about my chosen profession, and learn to navigate through a sea of assumptions, accusations, and stereotypes about the work. I’d been very lucky that my focus on honesty and courage had pushed me to be open about my work to most people I knew.

It’s been four months since the arrest, which literally turned my life upside down. I haven’t taken any clients since, surviving on temporary work in different places while I tried to sort out what I was going to do. I didn’t want to stop; I enjoyed the freedom to work only a few hours a week and having work that I enjoyed and challenged me, but it was obvious I couldn’t continue the way I had been. I’d also been experimenting with a raw and organic food diet for about six weeks before the arrest and unfortunately couldn’t continue without the income from my work.

I crashed, feeling depressed and stuck. I spent about almost two months trying to get myself back together. I felt angry and frustrated, unable to work the job I wanted nor really talk about what had happened for fear of retaliation from the police or attorneys handling the case. Near the end of August, I was blessed to be given the chance to go away for a few days to the mountains to re-center and get a break. During the trip, I had my nose buried in a fantastic book by Starhawk called “The Fifth Sacred Thing”. Feeling very inspired by the co-operative community and soulful living of the characters and Starhawk’s vision on how we can create a society that supports life and beauty, I threw myself back into the volunteering I’d done the year before with food security and community development.

I also felt inspired to become more involved in activism, joining Radical Cheerleaders and helping organize events and rallies on feminist issues. I’ve spent my time going to food security and community development events and networking with different people who have an interest or role in shaping the world into a place that is more fair and nurturing for all.

In my personal life, I’ve been learning what it means to create a nurturing home for myself with a chosen family, as we welcomed another roommate and two more furbabies bringing the total in our house to four humans and three felines. I’ve been trying to keep myself grounded by dancing daily and working through the angry and fearful emotions the events of the summer brought up.

This year brought a lot of new sexual and romantic experience for me, through work, crushes, and short-lived romances, leading me to ask lots of questions about my sexual identity, my female identity, and what inspires desire in me. I also felt the need to re-devoted myself to an earth-based spiritual path, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager. I’ve been working with the archetype of Venus as expressed through Aphrodite for the last couple of years and my focus this autumn shifted to include Ishtar, another divine aspect of Venus, as I felt the desire to learn to access the warrior in me and use that strength.

This autumn marks the end of an important cycle for me. It’s been seven years since my most influential spiritual awakening. I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve had and support I’ve received. The wheel is turning and it’s time to turn my thoughts towards a new year and new beginning.

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The other week, at the “Love and Other Delusions” show, I met a woman from out west. I noticed her walk in and introduced myself when I saw her talking with a friend of mine after the show. She invited Roommate X and I for drinks with her, one of the performers and the performer’s friend. Roommate X bowed out and I went alone. I was so nervous I drank half my drink before finding them. In between conversations about the performer’s career, our various jobs, astrology, and hockey – our knees knocked. I took a big sip of what was left of my drink. She asked to kiss me. Then she asked me home. ♥

And later on, she asked me to go camping in the MOUNTAINS. I just about died. She was driving back home in a few days and wanted company. I had never seen the mountains before, except for afar at the airport in Trinidad. We spent about four days in total together, one in Winnipeg talking, taking her dog to the park, listening to Indian chanting and Tracy Chapman – who is a great artist, and more talking, three driving and camping. I learned how to put up a tent, that I’m destined to find older Taurean dames deliciously dangereux, and that generosity of love and spirit is a beautiful thing in a human being. She was so lovely.

I ended up spending a day and a half in Banff by myself, which was pretty fun. I stayed in a hostel for the first time. My roommate worked for as a juvenile corrections officer in an other country, which was funny since my first court date was swiftly approaching. I spent a gorgeous afternoon in a beautiful garden near the edge of town, reading a book she had given me. It was called “The Fifth Sacred Thing” and it was written by Starhawk. I’ve never read any of Starhawk’s writing before, but I loved this book. I read it a second time on the 22-hour bus ride back to Winnipeg.

It’s about San Francisco, known as the City or the North, in the year 2048 where it has become a place where no one hungers, no one thirsts, no one lacks a home or companionship, and everyone acknowledges the four sacred things: fire, water, earth, and air – no matter their religion. Madrone is a healer in the City and ends up taking a journey to the South, down to Angel City where access to food and water is dependant on obeying the Four Purities, women can no longer work, and speaking a language other than english is considered deadly. Bird, a musician who grew up in the North, one day wakes up in a southern jail after been missing for ten years. He escapes and makes his way home to the city where water flows through the streets and tries to heal from his broken hands and heart. On his way, he learns that military armies of the South are preparing to invade the City, sparking the question can a non-violent society stand against the anger and violence of a culture that seeks to dominate? What is stronger… violence or the fifth sacred thing – spirit.

Through the book, Starhawk shows a utopian vision of how we can create an abundant future… and the likely alternative. The book speaks to everything I worry about and question when I look at the world and my own choices. Which direction are we heading: the enslavement of all or the freedom of all? The lack or the abundance? What kind of choices are we making?

This trip was so fulfilling in so many ways. It was the perfect way to close my summer. I’ve felt more active every day, more able to give, more able to show love, stronger. We’re entering into the harvest and I feel that season of transition coming, shaking things up.

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We are halfway through 2009, which I decided some months ago would be the year that I built up my courage muscles. Since I started, I’ve learned a lot about what courage really means to me.

When I first started this challenge, I focused on the ways in which I let fear compromise what I thought I believed in. I left a job that no longer served me. I told the truth about things that I’d lied about in the past. I even started telling everyone I knew about my work as a way to push past the confines that living a life of fear had placed around me.

As I set different challenges for myself and accomplished them, eventually I came to a space where there was no clear path. I had scraped away the first layer of things I wanted to change and I was left with much deeper challenges.

When we let ourselves be ruled by fear or the constraints of society, it’s easy to privately rebel. I used to spend so much time in other jobs writing about all the stories and art projects I could have been accomplishing. I would writes pages of notes that I would feel frustrated that I couldn’t develop beyond the small amount of time I had between other tasks. I felt resentful and frustrated that I couldn’t spend all day every day following my heart and passions. The first thing I thought I would accomplish once my time was free would be to barrel head first into completing these projects. After all, I would finally be free of all those silly restraints society had placed around me.

Once I changed jobs and started working in my chosen field with Sydnee and Winnipeg’s Finest, I had a lot of free hours on my hands that I could be doing anything with. Instead of being more productive, I found I was doing less than before. I ended up doing almost nothing. This went on for a few weeks before I decided I needed to understand what was going on.

After some time and thought, I realised that in the past I had been blaming jobs, peoples, and situations for things that I had complete responsibility for. Jobs, imperfect situations, or imperfect relationships had nothing to do with how much I was or wasn’t contributing to society. It was my personal drive and beliefs that dictated what and how much I was doing. I’d believed that we created our own circumstances for a long time, but now I was faced with the a darker side to it. I wasn’t acting in a way that I thought aligned with the beliefs I had chosen for myself. I wasn’t putting action to words because somewhere deep inside I was afraid to change.

We get comfortable with who we are, even if there are things we’d like to improve. We may dream of different things, but the courage to change is not something we always want to embrace. In many ways, I was extremely comfortable sitting on the sidelines, dreaming and not acting, and watching the experiments of others. Asking myself to change forced me to look at things I didn’t necessarily want to see about myself. The next step of acting on the desire to change asked me to call on compassion and will to rewrite a lot of the beliefs I carried around inside me that were holding me back.

Change like that doesn’t seem to come easy. It’s a constant process of shaping who I want to be in the world. It has to come from a place of love and strength. Strength to chose to act differently and continually embed new beliefs into my heart and mind, and love to forgive myself my faults and embrace what I am.

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{For an introduction to Reiki, please visit the Wikipedia article.}

This past weekend I attended a two day Reiki workshop with Joe of Cosmic Tools. My friend Rae-annon had received her Level I and Level II attunements last November from Joe and ended up developing a friendship with him, often stopping by his shop to visit and have discussions with him.

Recently, she and I were talking about my work and some of the challenges I was noticing. I’ve always been sensitive and empathic and depending on the person, our relationship, compatibility, or strength of emotions my empathy at times would blur the line between what I was feeling and what the other person was feeling. At times, this can be a wonderful gift, leading to deeper understanding and connection with those I care about. Other times, it can be very distracting and even harmful to me, since I end up confusing where I’m really at with things I’ve picked up from other people. Since I would be seeing clients in a very intimate setting, with little to no knowledge as to what emotional and psychological baggage they’d be bringing into the space, we both felt it would be important for me to start taking steps to build boundaries between myself and who I was seeing and cleanse my spirit. Luckily, Joe was having a class the next week and I emailed him to sign up.

Joe became a Usui Reiki Master in 2005, a Karuna Reiki Master in 2006, and a Lightarian Reiki Master in 2007. He has participated in vision quests, sundance, Buddhist and Shamanic healing workshops, drumming circles, Reiki Shares, native sweats, motivational workshops and various forms of energy workshops. He’s currently studying shamanism.

The class started at ten Saturday morning, at the Natural Essentials space in Osborne Village on River Avenue. I arrived early and spent a few moments enjoying the sunshine on my face before heading to the class. I was the first student there, but the others weren’t far behind. There were three students in total: myself, a young man who we’ll refer to as A, and another young woman we’ll refer to as S. S and A had already met Joe, drawn to him by an advertisement for his class in a health magazine and having visited him a couple of times at his shop. We introduced ourselves to each other and Joe started the class.

His first step was to establish that he was a facilitator, not a guru. He invited us to chime in with our thoughts and experiences while he was sharing the course material with us, which set the tone for more round table discussion throughout the next two days which was very inviting. He asked us to share what had brought us there. We all spoke our individual stories on what had brought us there and what we were hoping to learn. The next few hours were spent learning the basic theory of reiki, a bit of history, but most of the teaching was shared through Joe’s personal experiences and stories of healing. We often found ourselves breaking away from the outline to share our experiences and discuss the ideas we were learning. It was a very stimulating class and I found myself quickly warming up to Joe and the other students.

Next we prepared ourselves for our attunements. We started with a guided sacred space meditation. Joe put on a cd and lead us through the meditation to establish a sacred space that we could return to during the course of our path. I hadn’t done a sacred space meditation since I was about seventeen and had some trouble at first silencing my mental chatter, but relaxed into it after a few moments.

By nature of what it is, a sacred space in your mind’s eye isn’t meant to be shared with others, so by necessity my description will be vague. My sacred space started off as a very earthy place, dark and deep in a forest. After a couple of moments, another completely different image filled my mind and I was torn between the two. I decided to relax and follow the second image, opening myself to the images and senses of it. It was a beautiful space, near the elements of sky and water, with a twilight light falling around it. It was filled with images and symbols that I’d often related to the Moon and I thought back to a day prior when I had been dancing and felt the desire to pray. I had been a bit perplexed at first, unsure whether I wanted to offer prayers to the Moon, who I’ve always felt a connection to, or Venus who I have been establishing a connection with. On reflection, my distress was a bit silly – you simply offer prayers where you feel drawn to – but at the time, I seemed to be very stuck on that question. During the meditation, I remembered those feelings and began to realize that the symbols I was seeing were symbols that could mean equally the Moon and Venus. I smiled a bit at that.

Joe finished the meditation and we kept our eyes closed while he walked around us, giving each of us our Level I attunement in turn. An attunement is a way of opening a new Reiki practitioner to the energy they will be working with. I focused on the different sensations I was feeling. I felt a heaviness around my forehead and crown, almost like a half-mask that felt tense and anxious. I also became aware of a heaviness around my shoulders and back that I’ve always equated with the idea of etheric wings.

After our attunment, Joe shared with us what he had felt and learned during the experience and we responded in kind. When my turn came, he spoke of a past life, which I’ve never had done before, where I had been a healer in South America and other talents. He told me something that I would find trouble with would be belief in my talents and blockages buried deep that didn’t necessarily come from me, but from certain people I’d spent a lot of time with. I found a lot of comfort from his words and the things that he had vocalized that I was struggling with. After that, we broke for lunch and I enjoyed a very good meal with my classmates at a nearby sushi restaurant. We continued our discussions and shared the different experiences and sensations we’d been feeling during the class. It was a lovely lunch.

After we returned, Joe asked us to pick out a quartz crystal to take home and it was time for us to practice and I volunteered to lay down on the table first. S had to excuse herself, so it was mostly Joe and A working on me. I don’t remember too much of my experiences on the table, except deep sense of relaxation and peace and the uncanny way Joe was able to identifying a blockage that has been veyr influential in my life within a few moments of me laying down. A shared some of what he had felt during the experience and different images he had picked up while working on me. We had gone way past the workshop schedule at that point, ending at seven thirty instead of five and I walked home feeling lighter and more like myself since I had before I moved.

The second day we started a bit later, at eleven instead of ten. We started off by finishing with the written notes, getting some background on spirit guides, symbols, and long distance reiki. Joe directed us to continue our practice and S laid down on the table to receive reiki from both A and myself. We closed our eyes, asked for protection from our respective deities, the attendance of good natured spirits, and invited healing for S’s highest good. We asked to become clear channels for spirit.

It’s hard to relate what I felt during my first experience giving someone reiki. I’ve always been aware of the sensation of energy across my palms and finger tips and the almost electric buzz. I started exploring with that sensation to see what I could pick up and learn. One of the points that Joe stressed during our class is that everyone’s experience is unique and that we should value our own intuition and instinct more than any written work or direction from a teacher. I soon became aware of the fact that I was feeling different aches in my body that I hadn’t felt a moment before. I asked Joe about it and he encouraged me to go to those areas and work there. The strongest sensation I felt during those moments was a deep sadness and a heaviness of heart. Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes and I relaxed into the work, feeling a compassion that was… serene. I followed my feelings, moving to different spots and whispering a few words to S when I felt moved to. I had a few flashes of intuition based on the nature of S’s role in her family life, similar to the sensations I pick up in my daily life but it was clearer and a little more concrete than what I normally feel. After the session, we shared with each other, delighted by the images and feelings we had shared and learning about the different ways our abilities complimented each other. We had had too many synchonicities during the class to really feel surprised by how our experiences were lining up.

A took his turn next and Joe asked us to pay special attention to his kundalini and develop our sense of that. I felt a little less nervous this time around and was able to enter the space a little more quickly than last time. The first thing I noticed with A and how working with him differed from working with S was that I felt flushed almost immediately, while with S my hands had felt quite cold. S experienced the same and actually had to stop at a certain point. Again, I had vague senses about A’s role in life and began identifying what a blockage felt like versus energy flowing freely. We were able to sense a change in vibration and heat when we actively sought to allow his kundalini to flow. At one point, Joe directed us to look at A’s face, which was unlined and seemed very young and peaceful. We finished the class by practicing long distance reiki on each other in pairs, with Joe participating due to the uneven number of students.

There’s no way for me to really express how wonderful my experience was. I took the class almost as a whim, thinking it would be a good skill to have in my line of work and with where I want to be in the future. I’m so grateful that I was able to experience this and learn the stories of Joe, S, and A. There’s so much that can’t be shared yet, but my understanding of what I experienced will unfold as I practice with my new skill.

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