Reiki, Fear, and the Sweat Lodge Ceremony

I had the great honor of participating in my very first sweat lodge yesterday! I have been lucky enough to be introduced to a local Native American traditional women's circle here in Asheville (special thanks to Anne Heck), and through my participation, have found a truly safe haven for my heart and soul as I walk my own spiritual path.

I will admit, I was quite nervous to experience a sweat lodge! I have long dealt with two deep-seated fears that have come up for me at very inconvenient times in my life: a fear of extreme heat (picture me wincing and jumping as I go to take brownies out of the oven) and a fear of being in confined spaces (think me in a crammed car on a long road trip, stretching arms and legs over and on top of my fellow passengers so that I feel I can breathe!).

In truth, these old fears have not reared their heads much in recent years as I have settled down and into myself and my connection to the energy of the world around me. But, I knew that I would be directly challenging these aspects by participating in a sweat lodge.

Even so, I was determined to do it, and the cradle of love and support these women provided was just the safety net I needed to allow myself to take this step.

We did four rounds, one for each direction, starting with the East in honor of the Spring Equinox and the rebirth of the year. The first round was very difficult for me. The hot rocks came in, the flap closed, and the water was ladled onto the stones... and as the steam rose, so did my fear. I laid down and pressed my face to the cool earth, breathing it in and shaking and crying, the prayers of the women around me filling my ears as I pleaded with God to purge me of this fear... tears and sweat washing over my face... finally reaching a place of just saying, "Thank you, God... thank you, God... thank you, God..."

...and when the flap lifted, I crawled out into the light, not knowing if I would return for the second round. The light washed over me...

(c) Haley Steinhardt

A bright yellow butterfly descended from the sky to dance right before my face... and I returned and crawled back into the lodge.

As the flap closed a second time, I crouched low, anticipating the fear. But as the steam rose from the honored stone ones, no fear rose in me. I cautiously allowed myself to sit upright and feel the full strength of the heat. And in that moment, I realized that I was unafraid. !!!!! What an amazing gift!!!!!!! I am tearing up now just writing this!!!!!!!!!!!

I sat in for all four rounds, growing in strength, and in that strength, being able to offer it to others as we all worked through the things we came to lay down in the lodge. There were many moments where I was called to send Reiki to the circle of women, channeling it round and round in an unbroken flow... and also to individual women as they poured out their hearts into that sacred womb turtle lodge.

I can say without hesitation that it was one of the most powerful and transformational experiences I have ever had, and I am eternally grateful to the women who physically and energetically supported me passing through another doorway along my path towards my highest purpose.

A Ho Mitakuye Oyasin!

LOVE,

Haley

Reiki Benefits

What are the benefits of Reiki? I found this great little chart recently and wanted to share it with you all:)

Reiki Q&A

ICRT Reiki Master Teachers Laurelle Gaia and Michael Baird share some poignant thoughts about what Reiki is and how they have experienced it. I particularly resonate with how Laurelle describes it as the energy of Divine Love:)

If you haven't tried Reiki yet, welcome to the new year... :) There is no moment like the present to do all you can to help yourself feel and be your best!

With Love and Light for all...

Haley

Reiki for Healing ~ Reiki for Transformation ~ Reiki for Acceptance

It is my belief that Reiki energy comes from the source of all love and light. I don't pretend to know the name or shape of that source, but I am comfortable calling it God, or Great Spirit, or True Source, or any number of beautiful, meaningful names that we humans have chosen to give this massive force of goodness. 

Over the past week or so, I have called on this Great Spirit to fill me with love and light so that I may be a clear Reiki channel for many in need, including myself. There have been several deaths in my community of people, and several hospital visits and hospital stays on top of that. 

So, how can Reiki help us to cope with illness, injury, and death?

As far as illness and injury go, many people are familiar with the fact that Reiki is great for helping with pain management and stress reduction, both of which can, in turn, give the body a break and help encourage it to heal itself. Reiki is a wonderful gift for those who are suffering. 

But what about death? Can Reiki help us grieve? I believe it can. To me, Reiki would not exist without the love and light of the True Source of All. Allowing that love and light to fill us up creates a safe space within our hearts for grief to be released. 

One of the services I love to offer is Grief Transmutation. In this ceremony, I use Reiki to bring healing where it is needed, to dissolve any negative energy surrounding the grief and transmute it into the strength to create a safe, loving space for each individual to feel their grief, find acceptance with it, and release it in their own time.

I also believe that we can send Reiki to those who have crossed over... send the intention for them to be enveloped in love and light, and to know that it is okay for them to go and be in the light.

I am thankful to be able to offer Reiki to spirits in every stage of being, from birth to death and beyond. The Source of Love and Light is boundless... limitless... and I am filled with that energy each time I practice Reiki. What a gift for me, and what a gift to share. Beautiful.

>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<

LOVE,

Haley

Living, Breathing Beauty

Wow. All Honesty Here: It has been a tough couple of weeks. Being in touch with your spirituality... loving life... being an optimist... being a Reiki practitioner... none of these things means that one gets to be exempt from the more challenging aspects of life.

And here's where you might be saying, "DUH!" ;)

But, I bet some of you out there might be something like me and tend to put people up high on a pedestal for possessing traits or undertaking life practices that we greatly admire. Heartfelt admiration is a beautiful thing, but I have found many a time where I need to check myself and remember that those I admire are also just people... people with bodies in various states of wellness... people with relationships in various states healthiness... people who have to contend with whatever life throws their way, just like me.

So, yes. It has been a hard time for many of late. But the gift we are all given is the CHOICE of how we respond to the situations life presents us with. And it is a choice. Sometimes our instinctive reactions don't feel like choices, but they are; they're just choices we make very quickly and with only nanoseconds of thought put into them... combined with a lifetime of previous responses that provide us with a tendency. And ohhhh, to be able to negate some of those tendencies... a great goal, indeed, worth investing our time and energy in.

Thank God for Reiki! Reiki is the one thing I have found in my earth walk thus far that can truly quiet my mind and heal all parts of my self at the same time. It can be used to heal our past and send healing to our unfolding path as well as healing our present moments. What a gift.

And speaking of gifts, it was my honor to be the recipient of an intensive 7-day distance healing that ran from last Thursday through yesterday. As you may have already read on my page about distance Reiki, this means that the energy from that last session will still be unfolding and revealing itself through tomorrow or so... or even longer! Reiki does not play by the rules of linear time;). AWESOME.

So... story time: On day 5 of 7, I found myself purging a HEAP of emotion. It rose up in me so unexpectedly, while I was writing a truly mundane email to a coworker. I felt the Reiki opening up my heart wider, wider, WIDER, and felt the need to seek some privacy and do some hands-on Reiki on myself to soften my experience of it.

A little later that day, feeling raw and WIDE open... revealed... unhidden... I took a walk through downtown Asheville. I wound my way around to a quiet spot in a nearby courtyard and sat down on some stone steps. The air felt warm and still and perfect; the sun was shining. I found myself staring at an outdoor potted plant.

My mind felt so relaxed as I watched the plant, and suddenly I realized that I could see it breathing... see it's leaves drawing in the air and releasing it... see it's branches reaching in a slow, steady, almost imperceptible motion towards the sun, and towards the other plants nearby. There was no wind to rustle the leaves or sway the branches of this shrub; it was purely the energy of the plant that I was seeing as it created and willed its own movement! It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and when I looked over to another plant... and another... I could see their living, breathing beauty as clear as day, too.

Life is all around us. There are things we can't control, things that challenge us to remain open... but what a gift when we find that, even in the face of hardship, we CAN. We can choose to leave room in our hearts for beauty to come in and fill us back up. And it feels so good. I am so very grateful.

May Love and Light flood your heart and spill out into the world for all to see...

>>>>>><<<<<<<

Haley

Inviting Joy

Sometimes life can feel so hectic. In my own life, I wake up in the morning, drive my daughter to preschool, drive to work for the morning, go back to pick my daughter up from preschool, drive us home for lunch, drive back to work for the afternoon, then drive home again for dinner. From that point, I have about 3 hours with my family before my daughter goes to sleep. Once she's down for the night, I have to choose between doing laundry, tidying up, working on the book I'm writing, blogging on Blue Mountain Reiki, keeping up with my various social networking channels, or trying to relax and spend some time with my husband.

And this schedule is TAME compared to some of you out there!

Sometimes, I try to squeeze as many things from the above evening list in as possible... which means I am often up until after 1AM... only to wake up groggy to repeat the schedule the following day!

But, in spite of feeling like a whirling dervish half the time, I can honestly say that, more often than not, I feel joy in these moments. Of course, I have rough days like anybody, and I have my own personal ups and downs and issues that I struggle with... but the overarching reality for me is JOY and GRATITUDE.

Reiki has been a huge help in allowing this to be true for me. The very act of practicing Reiki is one that involves asking the ego to step back. This practice of essentially allowing oneself to engage with the energy of the universe without that internal voice of judgment is incredibly freeing. Even when I am not in the act of channeling Reiki for myself or a client, I feel that this energy is with me, encouraging me to see the world with an open heart.

There are so many things that we don't have a choice about, but inviting joy IS a choice. No matter how busy--or grumpy!--you are today or tomorrow or this week, find a moment to pause... and take a deep breath... breathing in gratitude for something (a smile from a stranger, a hard lesson you've finally learned, your morning cup of coffee--anything!), and breathing out all the self-judgment, frustration, anger, sadness, or anything else you've been trudging around with.

For at least this one moment, give yourself permission to stop carrying that weight.

With your breath in, pull energy up, through your feet, up the back of your legs, up your spine, and up over your head... then with your breath out, bring the energy down over your forehead, over your face and your neck, down over your chest, heart, stomach, and aaaaaall the way down your body to your feet and back into the earth.

Try it, even if just once. A deep breath, like Reiki, can only help.

>>>LOVE<<<

Haley

Remembering How to Listen

This poem--shared with me over the weekend by beautiful and talented artist, photographer, teacher, and friend, Catherine Anderson--goes straight to the heart of the dichotomy that, too often, we create and enable within us between our spiritual self and our everything-else self. (I talked about this in my first blog.) The truth is that we all have wholeness within us, if we could only remember how to stop all the mental chatter and LISTEN for it--listen to our hearts, listen to the wind... or listen to the singing of the stars...


LOVE,

Haley


The Silence of the Stars
by David Wagoner
 

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now? And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their televisions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.