Insights for a More Balanced Life – The Loving Karma Journal

    Hi, my name is Angela. I’m a Feng Shui Consultant, and I have a confession to make: 

    I’m a serial re-gifter. (Sorry Mom & Dad, Sister, Daughter, Boyfriend… everyone.)

    Not all gifts though… just the ones I know I won’t use or don’t love. It’s a cardinal Feng Shui rule that was instilled in me by both of my teachers, “Tisha Morris" and “Karen Rauch Carter.”   

    It doesn’t make a difference either, how close I am to the person giving me the gift. 

    And I’m not done outing myself yet: sometimes I donate these gifts to people I don’t even know… and have been doing this for years. 

    There. The cat’s out of the gift bag.

    Don’t get me wrong – I don’t ever open a gift in front of a person and actually say, “uh… totally not keeping THAT.” (Even though my inside voice may speak such words freely in my own head, I know better than to actually say it out loud.)

    I truly am grateful and appreciative for the love that was put into picking out whatever was intended for me. However, I would rather see someone make good use of this thing that would otherwise just sit in a dark closet or drawer for the rest of it’s life, had I held onto it.  (And if you know Feng Shui, then you understand the thing that sits unused and unloved in your home may start to reflect the same kind of energy in your life somewhere; maybe it’s ‘you’ who ends up feeling unloved/unappreciated as a result of this, because our homes are a reflection of ourselves and that’s how energy works.)

    I used to work with a woman, who in her sixties and nearly retired, had given up on decorating for Christmas in her own home. She was divorced, her kids were grown, and she lived alone. Her life was mostly work and not much time for anything else.

    She worked long hours at her job and was too tired and exhausted by the time she got home to even think about anything other than sleep. “It’s too much work,” she said, “to go into the attic, and drag out the tree, and pull all the ornaments out, and make space for everything, and rearrange furniture, and my kids are all grown and why bother, and and and..…”

    It wasn’t even my home, but it literally hurt my heart to hear her go on and on about how she “just wasn’t going to do it.” As a Feng Shui Consultant, part of me wondered though, if it was too painful for her to pull out all the memories of the past.

    Decorating for the holidays is for sure nostalgic for most of us, but for others, the pain of the memories and the process of taking everything out itself is unbearable.

    I can totally relate to those feelings as well on a multitude of levels. The first Christmas after I was separated from my now ex husband, was probably one of the hardest for me. Even I didn’t want to unpack all of the Christmas memories. Why, would I want to voluntarily evoke those painful memories and be reminded of a time in my life that didn’t exist anymore. I get it. I TOTALLY get it. But then there is my daughter who was only 9 years old at the time. I had to keep the magic alive for her. It was one of her favorite times of the year, and I couldn’t let my pain rob her of her happiness.

    I drudged through it, box after box. I literally had to push myself through, pick myself up off the floor, maybe even with a scraper at times. While pulling out the ornaments, I would secretly run to the bathroom to cry sometimes, not wanting her to see me, then come back out, and feel the raw emotions; ornament, after ornament, after ornament. I needed what felt hard to hurry up and move through me in order to be able move on from the pain.

    What if I told you that as a Reiki Master Teacher, I couldn’t whole heartedly explain to you in words exactly what Reiki was and how it worked, but that it has yielded results that sometimes have taken even me by surprise.

    The truth is, I’m not here to fix, heal, change or improve anyone. I am only here to help YOU restore balance to your own body, one session at a time; and that looks like different things to different people. 

    I think one of the biggest misconceptions that holds people back from trying Reiki is that they think it is “woo woo” or some sort of a religious practice or cult, which I can assure you, it is not. Typically, the people (that I have come across) who believe this have not done their own research, but have taken someone else’s word for what they believe it to be, without ever learning or trying it for themselves.

    If you were to ask Google to define Reiki, you might find something along the lines of it being a Japanese form of energy healing or type of alternative medicine, where Reiki practitioners use a hands-on healing method to connect to “universal energy” that moves from the practitioner to the client to facilitate healing on some level.

    My opinion? I find most definitions of Reiki to be limiting, and barely scratch the surface of what it truly is and can do for people. But I can tell you it’s not a pill with a possible side effect, that society has taught most of us to seek out first.

    I think many of us consciously or unconsciously bury traumatic events from our pasts that are too painful to deal with on a physical, mental, and or emotional level. And in those deep down  unhealed places where things go unaddressed, unseen, and unresolved, our bodies become weakened, and then start speaking to us through physical discomfort and dis ease, begging us to address what we have ignored our whole lives.

    We are so quick to go outside of ourselves looking for help yet haven’t really learned how to be aware enough to go within. Reiki helps us do that. Reiki helps me pay deeper attention to what my body is saying with a much greater awareness. 

    When I tell you I am about to be vulnerable, I’m about to be vulnerable with a capital V. We’re talking Vagina vulnerable. And if you are wondering WHY on earth I would be talking about my vagina so publicly, I would tell you it is because I want to help as many others who have suffered the most horrible pain you can possibly imagine on a multitude of levels when it comes to the “down there” parts of our bodies, which affect the up-here parts of our mentality and the everywhere else parts of our soul. 

    I’ve always told people I’m a delicate flower. Since I was 18 I’ve had so many random, “what is that on my body,” or “where did that rash come from,” or “what did I just eat that is giving me a pounding headache,” types of experiences. But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, has ever come close to what I have been dealing with for these last 6 months. 

    I KNOW like I KNOW like I KNOW that this information is going to help at least one person out there who is suffering from something that doctors can’t seem to figure out or identify the cause, but have given a prescription to mask the symptoms. While it is all done in kindness to provide us some sort of relief, we are still sent on our merry way to continue to suffer, and be exposed to whatever it is that is causing us this unimaginable, and debilitating at times, sort of nightmare. 

    So if it is you, the reader that I help, then all of this mortifying and embarrassing vagina talk will be worth it.

    I can remember attending a workshop at Omega in Rhinebeck, NY, just weeks after my ex and I broke up last September, barely able to walk because it hurt so badly. Was it a yeast infection? Was it a bladder infection? God forbid was it an STD? I knew he sailed from our relationship straight to his next one, but did he cheat on me? This felt worse than anything I had ever experienced before. What the hell was wrong with me and why was this happening AGAIN?

    I sat on the floor of my daughter’s room and  held his little frail body in between my hands. There wasn’t much warmth radiating from him and I knew he was dying. Wanting to ease his pain, I turned on the Reiki and felt the slightest bit of static emanating from his little body. Normally when I do Reiki on a healthy person or animal, I can sense a vitality that is palpable, strong and expansive, but with Keebler, it was hard to even sense. 

    When I was little, my (typical) brothers used to use me as their 9 volt battery tester. The sensation from touching a new battery to my tongue would send me through the roof, but a 9 volt battery that was weak, would barely give a zing. Keebler had no zing.

    I remember adopting him from the Humane Society when he was just six weeks old for my daughter. It was just days after her last guinea pig Rita had passed and she was devastated. Since the day we brought him home, he had such a presence and aliveness. Guinea pigs do this thing called “popcorning” where they bounce and jump and squeak when they are happy and excited. He was such a love bug.  I would listen from my bedroom while he and my daughter would have conversations through piggy squealing back and forth. And in the mornings when I would wake up my daughter and he would see me, he would get so excited and race around his cage making his little piggy sounds because he knew he was about to get carrots. It was our little morning ritual. 

    As we sat with him feeling heavy and sad knowing he was transitioning, I remembered one of my Reiki teachers, Kathleen Prasad, who taught me, and is the founder of, the “Let Animals Lead” method. We are all energetic beings and can feel one another’s emotions and state of mind. And the greatest gift we could give to Keebler in that moment was to put our feelings of sadness aside. The depths of pain we felt were likely overwhelming his already heavily and very little burdened body. 

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