healing – Page 16 – One Woman's Quest

Dragon Energy

Referred by her priest, a young woman made an appointment to see me.

“It’s urgent!”

She arrived the next day, and I could see by her movements that she was in distress. No more than thirty, the woman looked tired, and something else – afraid?

In keeping with my preferred practice, I had requested that she not reveal any details of her situation to me in advance. I prefer to start with a clean slate, no expectations or assumptions to confuse me.

I asked her if she had ever had energy work done before. She had not.

“I’ll explain as I go along,” I suggested. “First, make yourself comfortable.”

She chose to lay face down on the treatment table, and I began my preliminary assessment. There was clearly a barrier of some sort in the field. If you meet with resistance, it is usually yours, Delores Krieger’s words echoed in my mind. I started again, this time moving my hands further from the surface of her body. No change. Maybe I am too forceful, I thought. Intentionally, I focused on being whisper gentle. The energy bounced back at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But this does not seem to be working. Are you open to trying a different approach?” I had just studied third degree Reiki, and while my experiences with it were limited, I didn’t know what else to do.

I moved her to a chair, and explained that whatever was happening was between herself and whatever she deemed God to be. “The process which I am about to do, will help you make that connection, so that you can ask for what you need. Are you okay with this?”

She nodded ‘yes’ and I instructed her further as to how we would proceed. I invited her to close her eyes and breathe deeply as she concentrated on what she needed. Then I began.

The ritual doesn’t take longer than fifteen minutes, and when I indicated that we were finished, she opened her eyes clearly revealing that she wasn’t convinced.

I didn’t know what else to say.

Two weeks later, she called again. “That thing that you did, how often can you do it? Is it too soon to have another?”

When she arrived this time, she was animated, almost excited. With no preliminaries needed, we moved right into the treatment. This time she had tears in her eyes at the end.

“I felt it!” she said quietly. She asked to come back in two weeks.

“I can feel it wearing off days before I come,” she told me on her next arrival.

“How does it feel?” I was curious. This was fairly new to me too.

“It’s hard to describe, but I somehow feel more vital, alive, and then I feel myself becoming tired again just before I’m due to come back.”

Then she really caught my attention.

“I was supposed to be dead by now.”

The woman explained that she had been diagnosed with a rare terminal ailment, and given two weeks to live. A single mother and business owner, she wasn’t ready to give up, so she visited her priest, who then referred her to me as a last resort.

“The treatment for my disorder takes a month to work, and I was too far gone, so I needed a miracle.”

Reiki employs symbols that access different forces, one of which is the dragon. I have never really been able to define what this energy is other than to note that is often connected to breakthroughs.

Last time I saw her, my client continues to run her business and enjoys watching her own daughter blossom into a young lady.

An Enlightened Life

“What would you like to learn about?”

“Tell us about your life,” one woman called out.

“Well, yes, that,” the tiny woman responded, “but there’s nothing to learn there. What do you want to learn?”

After several protests, our teacher promised that she would fill us in on her ninety plus years at the end of the weekend.

I had anticipated this workshop for months, without really knowing what to expect. Dora Kunz, co-founder of Therapeutic Touch, had published several books about her work, but I found them difficult to read, and hadn’t gained much from them. Unlike her partner, Delores Krieger, Dora did not have a nursing background and so remained somewhat of an enigma to those of us who pursued understanding of this simple, but powerful technique. I had taken several workshops with Delores, each of them long and gruelling, packed with information and experiences, Delores being a tireless lecturer. Krieger’s workshops were always accompanied by an outline of curriculum expectations, and formally conducted. Participants would have to ask for breaks, as Krieger’s passion for the subject matter precluded any need for a break in her presentation. It was immediately apparent that Dora Kunz’s approach was in stark contrast to that of her colleague.

My initial reaction to Kunz’s opening question was disappointment. I had signed up for a workshop on meditation, did she not know that? Was this woman too old and senile to be able to put a program together?

“Well we signed up for a workshop on meditation.” Someone else must have been thinking the same as me.

“Yes, but what about meditation would you like to learn?” I had to admit, the lady was charming. She must have been all of 4’10”, with waves of white hair caressing her gentle face. A warm smile, and twinkling eyes embraced her audience, and an obvious sense of humour set us at ease. “At my age, I don’t plan for these things, you know. I find it’s better to just go with the flow.”

So that’s what we did. For three mesmerizing days, we listening hungrily to the words of this tiny guru, whose vast bank of experience and pragmatic approach to teaching guided us to the deeper understanding we sought. For me, her greatest lesson was yet to come.

At the end of the weekend, as promised, Dora told us about her life.

“I was only five years old,” she began, “when my parents, recognizing there was something different about me, built me a meditation room.” As a young child, Dora had an awareness of energy and other realities that most parents would brush off as an active imagination. Dora’s parents decided to nurture these gifts in their only child. When Dora was eleven, she was invited to study with a man at an institute continents away, where the spoken language was different from her own. Her parents told her to meditate on it, which she did, and decided to accept his offer. “I looked like an eight-year-old boy,” Dora laughed, “when I arrived at this institution full of adults.” Dora stayed and studied with this man for several years and then moved to another foreign country to further her studies. Her work eventually led her to the United States, where I would have the privilege of meeting her.

When asked how she knew which offers to accept, Dora responded: “No was not an option for me. I trusted that this work was my calling, and so I always looked for a way to say yes when opportunity knocked.” It was not always easy, she went on to explain. At one point in her life, she was asked to speak about her spiritual beliefs to a group of convicts. She was just a young woman, and felt incredibly vulnerable and intimidated by the gathering of murderers and hard-core criminals she encountered, but she said that was all soon forgotten when the men found something comforting in her words.

Dora continued her work, and I would encounter her again at another workshop, still teaching, just two weeks before she passed away. She was 95.

Dora Kunz remains for me an icon of someone who has led a complete life. She lived her life inspired by a passion for learning and helping others. She was dedicated to a life of service.

(Image from nancybragin.com)

Emptiness

Sue Bender, in her book Everyday Sacred, uses the symbolism of the bowl to depict the spiritual life. She relates this image to Tibetan monks, who as part of their training must survive with begging bowls: they must ask for what they need and make use of what they are given before they can beg for more.

Everyday Sacred literally fell off the shelf and into my arms one day, as I was reaching for a novel in the library. It could not have appeared at a better time. I was mesmerized by Bender’s words, and loved her analogy. I could relate to the idea that we are bowls, or vessels for Spirit, and that whatever comes into our life must be consumed and processed before we can ask for more. In this way, we make life sacred.

Shortly after discovering the works of Sue Bender, my marriage ended, leaving me shattered and scarred. I prayed for a sign that everything would be okay. Signs and omens surrounded me, and I felt comforted. Then I got my new phone number. I was disappointed that it had no obvious pattern to remember: 2695 were the last digits. One day as I sat musing over how I was going to remember the number, I had a thought: what did the numbers spell?- b-o-w-l. Bowl!

Life had served me up a full helping of misery, and it would be a long time before I could empty it, but I came to understand that emptiness is what I needed before anything good could come my way. As long as I hung on to anger, grief, or resentment, my bowl did not have room for anything else. Empty was the goal.

(Image: www.hungrysouls.org)

On Wisdom

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is experience.

A young man once asked me if he could shadow me for a summer, so that he could learn from me. I asked him to tell me about his life.

“It’s good,” he replied.

“Tell me about a hardship that you have overcome.”

“None that I can think of. My life has been easy.”

“Are your parents together?”

“Well, no,” he explained. “They separated when I was fifteen.”

“That must have been hard.”

He shrugged. “That was about them. It wasn’t about me.”

He was a nice young man, and I believed him to be very sincere. “What will you do with your summer, if I say no.?”

“I was thinking I’d try to get a job at a resort up north.”

“That’s what I would recommend!”

His disappointment was visible. “But I want to help people; I want to do what you do.”

“Let’s look at this hypothetically. If someone came to you suffering from deep depression, how would you help them?”

“I would meditate on it and look for answers.”

“I see. And if none came?”

He had no response.

“Let me explain something,” I was starting to feel a little bit like David Carradine talking to Grasshopper. “Much of my ability to help another comes from life experience. In the case of depression, who do you think would be in a better position, someone who has lived through it and come out the other side, or someone who has meditated on the possibility?”

He didn’t need to answer.

“The best thing you can do for yourself right now is gather experience. Learn all that you can, too, but when your intellectual knowledge, meets your experienced knowing, then you will be ready.”

“How long will that take.”

I had to suppress a smile. I was impatient once too. “That depends on you. From where I stand, you have a ways to go.”

“Why’s that?” He looked offended.

“You haven’t even recognized the pain of your parents’ divorce. How can you help another deal with their wounds, when you haven’t looked at your own?”

“There is time for everything,” I said more gently. “Now is a time for gathering. Go North. You’ll learn much more there than I can ever teach you now.”