As difficult as it is to believe for me now, there was once a time before I was a meditator. Ten years have passed since I took my first meditation class, and I can honestly say that my life has drastically improved ever since. Through meditation I have learned so much about myself and have become a better person because of it. I have been able to notice tension in my body and consciously release it in order to be more relaxed, and I have been able to recognize when I'm paying attention to the task at hand or daydreaming and not present. I have learned to observe my thoughts as they are without judging myself harshly for the ones that I would rather not appear in my mind, and I have also learned to cultivate more positive thoughts and perceptions on life.
I'm not going to tell you that meditating is easy, and it definitely was no walk in the park for me in the beginning.
I was very frustrated at my inability to remain focused on my breath for more than two or three inhales at a time during those early meditation classes, however after taking a weekly class for several months I made a commitment to myself to meditate every morning as soon as I got out of bed. On some days it was easier for me to focus, and I could see progress being made. On other days my inability to focus seemed to stir up harsh self-criticism which I could have easily used to tell myself that meditation is not for me and that I should quit the practice.
But that's just it. Meditation is a practice. It's not a perfection. You see the results of meditating from doing it consistently.
There’s a quote from Zig Ziglar that I used to have posted in my classroom that said, “People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily.” I could say the same thing about the effects of meditation. They won’t last unless you do it every day.
Nutritionists will tell you that you can’t really determine the effects of a change in your diet for 2-3 weeks when you follow the plan daily so don’t go into meditating thinking you can get great results by sporadically meditating. Make a commitment to yourself to meditate daily for 21 days and then assess how you are doing.
Read moreBill Nye, the famed Science Guy, has a new show released on Netflix and being a fan of this science educator I decided to dive in and watch a few episodes the other day. The second episode caught my attention because it was on debunking claims from alternative medicine. Although it didn’t bring up Reiki specifically, it reminded me of some of the opposing views that I as a Reiki Practitioner have to face in the world. Someone even said that I was doing “the work of the devil” a few years ago when referring to my Reiki practice, and these types of thoughts and beliefs about what I and other practitioners do can get me down. I’ll even admit that there are times when I think of myself as a “snake oil salesman” and charlatan when comparing what I do to doctors and other medical professionals because I don’t know nor can I explain scientifically what, if anything, is actually happening during a Reiki treatment.
The practice of medicine uses scientifically based methodologies that have shown to produce consistent and repeatable results time and time again, and Reiki has yet to be consistent in its results nor has enough research been done to refute the claims that is no better than a placebo. With articles such as “Reiki is Nonsense” (2015), “Reiki: Fraudulent Misrepresentation” (2014), and “Giving placebos such as reiki to cancer patients does more harm than good” (2011), it makes it hard to share openly in public what I do for a living, and even harder to talk about it some family members.
These critiques of the use of Reiki helps drive me to find out what research has been done and to look at what the results say, and surprisingly there are a lot of studies that have been done. Not all research has followed the strict guidelines of being a double-blind study, but more and more of them are starting to show up. I’d like to share some of the research and articles that I have found with you, and let you come to your own conclusions and conduct your own research.
Read moreInspired by the artist that spoke last night
I'll attempt to write a rhyme that flows faster than light.
But there I go again,
Comparing myself to others
When all of my pain comes from focusing on these druthers.
I'll prevent myself from editing
As is so often the case in this place called my mind
Where you'll find that these thoughts are not even mine.
Yet they come from a place we might call the Divine
Even though I have no thought of what I will find.
When I look to the depth of the world of inside...
Read moreWhile perusing through my old journals, I came across a couple of entries that I titled “Why it’s time to Believe in Reincarnation.” In those entries I went into a rant about how we are destroying our planet and that by believing in reincarnation we might take better care of it because we would be destined to live on it again for many lifetimes. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a home to come back to in our next life.
Aside from that rant, I found that I had somehow explained to myself how we are connected to the beginning of time as we currently define it in through science (The Big Bang) and that we will continue to be connected to the cosmos long after we die.
I’m sure there are many “holes” and assumptions in my explanation, which would make it a terrible logical argument, but this all came to me in a flash over two mornings in 2014. If you willing to set aside judgments and beliefs for a few minutes and allow your mind to go on a journey, then I invite you to read further.
Read moreLet's start with you. You are the center of the universe so I think it's a good place to begin. Let's represent you with a point, Point Y as shown in Figure 1. Since a point is defined in Euclid's Elements (the book that contained the ancient geometric understandings of Greece) as "that which has no part", we can safely say that you are nothing. You have no dimension. That is until you start to think.
From there you start to have thoughts of things outside of yourself and create lines of thought, or rather, rays of thought. These rays begin to create single dimensions stemming out from you and reaching out in a specific direction or on a line of thought. See Figure 2. You can have many thoughts reaching out from you, and thoughts on different subjects go in different directions as represented in Figure 3.
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