I’m Free

This past week, I received plenty of lessons as a healer, and, as usual, each built on what had come before and would be useless without my prior experiences.

Last spring, I began making “Soul Essence” pieces, “composing” music that was a sound portrait of a person’s inner being or core. I say “composed” in quotes because, even though I put the notes together, I don’t “create” them, per se. They are “given” to me, revealed for lack of a better word. Often, I am caught by surprise because a person’s song will contain two drasticly different melodies, and it’s always amazing to me how they are joined into one cohesive unit. No matter how many of these I do, this will always be a source of wonder to me.

The “Soul Essence” project, I see now, was a natural beginning place for my journey as a healer. I have a passion for music. I make my living teaching and playing it. So to use it as an instrument for healing was perfectly acceptable to me. It stretched me, made me grow, but I wasn’t out of my natural element and I could draw on a vast reservoir of past experience and knowledge.

It was also a way to do healing work without speaking to or touching other people. I’m fairly quiet by nature, and I’m reserved rather than demonstrative. It’s not that I don’t feel things; I just don’t show them or express them well. So again, the “Soul Essence” projects fit well. No words, no hands-on stuff, and most were received by mail. I found that, when I did music for people I knew personally, it was much, much harder.

All the while, I was going through the attunemnets for reiki, and had Level 3 in the autumn. I used reiki on myself, on my husband, on my dogs, but that was it. I didn’t feel comfortable enough in my own skin to open myself to using it with anyone else.

Then, pushed by my guides, I started doing distance work for people, with the only condition being that they had to give me feedback. I thought this would be a safe, comfortable way to grow, and I would have just left it at that.

But Ted has had a healing practice for a few years now, and he wouldn’t let me get away with a half-finished job. He encouraged me to send people comments on each healing session and any recommendations or observations I had.

The first few of these commentaries were painfully difficult for me. I liked the idea of sending energy, but wasn’t as keen about taking responsibility and actually discussing what I was feeling during sessions with clients.

Somewhere in this process, I heard a message from one of my guides. It’s a message I’d gotten before when I was doing the “Soul Essence” work, but it can’t ever be repeated enough. “There is no “I” in “healing”.” In other words, my work as a healer has nothing to do with me. It’s not about what I can do, how much I can change anyone, how powerful I think I might be. It’s just opening myself up so I can send energy to the person I’m working with at the moment and letting the energy take care of the rest.

This is very freeing. It allows you to step back and really separate what people say into their emotional response to information (which is purely an emotional response to information, not necessarily anything directed “at” you). I stopped being so self-centered to think that I was “doing” anything. I have to “be” a healer, not “do” healing work.

The first time someone paid me for distance work, I knew I was fast approaching the next big step on my healing path. That big step was soon followed up when I did my first “live” healing (i.e., I was doing “warm-blooded work”).

I was just as terrified at the start of that first live session as I was when I gave my first “Soul Essence” to its owner. In both instances, I can only be deeply thankful that the universe is kind to beginners and provides guidance and support.

I learned plenty of big lessons during that session (how to listen for subtle changes that can indicate how receptive a client is to energy, how to feel when my guides were directing me to move my hand, which will change from client to client) and invaluable little ones (if I have a client lying face up on the table, I should always remove the holder for the head cradle so I have room to walk between the head end of the table and the wall without practically tripping and making a whole lot of noise during the session).

As scary as it was to start, I felt exactly right doing it. I had no doubt I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing just I had been designed to do. Those feelings are the true gauge of our life’s work, and if you’re fortunate enough, as I am, to be making a living doing what your heart calls you to do, then you have a rare and precious thing.

It’s as if that first session opened a stream. I had two “hands-on” sessions this past week and two distance clients. In each case, I always had that little tingle of “Oh, my, what am I doing?” at the beginning of the session. But by the end of them all, regardless of whether the recipient felt anything or not, I was clearly getting, “Yes, this is exactly right”.

I am not the be-all and end-all of healers; far from it! I have skills that only I have, but I am also very aware that I have a lot of growing to do. I haven’t had years of experience, and I must always have the humility to be able to say, “I don’t have the answer; I don’t understand; I need to ask someone who is further along”.

But I am free now of the limiting ideas I had about what kind of healer I thought I could be. I’m not “just” a musical healer. I’m not “just” an energy worker. I don’t “just” specialize in one type of thing or another.

I open myself to everything the universe has to teach. But I also come into my lessons with hands open to give. What I learn from one person I may one day teach another. The healing I receive today may get passed to someone else tomorrow.

In every instance, I am free to give, free to receive, free to learn, free to teach, free to be the one-among-many, one-of-a-kind human being I was created to be.