Reiki Help Blog :: Oasis Reiki Dojo

In its simplest, most direct manifestation, to be empowered is already happening if you’re consciously involved in working on yourself. If this work is psychological, spiritual or better a combination, and it’s consistent and sincere, then empowerment is taking place.

This truth is often missed. Perhaps your inner work’s momentum hasn’t quite gathered yet. Perhaps your struggles are still in your face. Delight in the fact that still elusive outward changes are a reflection of how you’re changing inside; they just haven’t quite taken form yet. And things may not be all that pretty inside. Instead of being neurotic that change hasn’t manifested, realize it’s in process; you’re working it.

The truth of the matter is that empowerment is ongoing. You have to climb a while before reaching a plateau. And then the path still continues.

Empowerment is personal power. It’s used for routine tasks such as getting up, making breakfast and going to work. It’s also used as self-determination and integrity. Personal power properly claimed and wielded, can bring you emotional freedom and peace of mind. There has to be a modicum of personal power to just survive, let alone thrive. Depending on your ‘story,’ your bio, you may have been raised in an environment that provided this. Then it can be built on. If not, and even if so most of us still need to work on it, personal power is personal: You must dust it off and let it shine. No one else can really do it for you.

Everything that we’ve shoved away, we shoved away with a curse; most of it came from the outside. With a curse comes a hiding, comes a shame. To dare to be seen and to speak from what’s authentic undoes a curse. It’s time to stop hiding behind some fiction of “bad me” and burn through to shining.  — Jeannie Zandi

With personal power comes tremendous trust and energy. You’re able to trust yourself, and life. It energizes your psyche which fuels your imagination, purpose and passions. It lifts you. Personal power can be a diamond in the rough, however. Its best use isn’t for you to impose your will over your circumstances. This can be destructive, short-lived, and in service of the ego.

Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less. — Ken Blanchard

Once personal power is actuated and exercised regularly in a balanced way, it begins to become empowerment. Empowerment is a settled resource, while personal power can fluctuate. Empowerment is lifelong and more of the spirit. Personal power giving way to empowerment is the transition from ego to soul. The soul is truth. When you know your spiritual truth, all other lies fall off. It’s a knowing that can’t become unknown.

This is the pinnacle of empowerment, but it doesn’t have to be fully reached before being radically effective in your life. You need empowerment in your career, for personal growth, to heal, for spiritual development. If you’ve put in the work to find some psychological wholeness, and also reached into your soul and are on a spiritual path, the practices you’re engaged in, the realizations that come, and the way of being that establishes itself in you are all naturally empowering. Over time it becomes firmer and firmer, more and more knowable and reliable. There’s a gentleness to empowerment, a detachment. Even with annoyances or more substantial issues that may still come up, empowerment once accessed filters into your life, and eases your way.

Truth is empowering. Everytime you turn to truth, it empowers you more. Knowing your true nature, and before that growing in understanding it, being it, experiencing life from its perspective is empowering with each encounter. Each moment of spiritual practice polishes your diamond.

Fear does arise on the way to empowerment. Fear is a many-headed beast. Therefore courage is a must. Ironically, you need courage to be empowered, and empowered to show courage. They are inextricably linked. One feeds the other. Courage is a fire that burns away fear. Empowerment keeps the fire going.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. — Ambrose Redmoon

Power is essential to life. Every living thing needs to be powered somehow. Humans are powered by soul consciousness, light, breath, life force, and food and water. Of these, consciousness is the overseer and director, and life force is the ‘electricity’ and subtle hub making each item work with all the parts of a human.

If consciousness and life force are trapped in past hurts, or projected into future worries they aren’t available now where you need them. Their power is diminished greatly, and you’re left powerless in the present. Loss of power is much more than lack of energy. It can lead to depression, confusion, and low vibration choices which exacerbate your situation.

To reclaim and cycle your power in through your present moments is an act of empowerment. Feeding old ghosts or giving juice to future fear dragons is disempowering. Your power is needed now, here with you.

But the greatest power is always love. Power can be used in the service of love, but not vice versa. — Ram Dass

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It’s impossible to ignore the shifting sands of current global events. The previous two posts (The shifting world and Shifting the world the healing way) attempt to make sense of what’s going on and make it meaningful beyond all the surface ripples. Social, political and economic details can be found in the news and in themselves provide fascinating accounts of a region in transition. Here, I’d like to look at it from another lens, one that remains valid no matter the final outcome and any repercussions, or seeming status quo.

Granted, it’s a moving landscape of events, but what’s happening isn’t a mere uprising. It’s a global indicator. One that has been trending for some time, hidden to casual observance. This part of the world is a nexus. Because both Tunisia and Egypt are in North Africa, not only the Middle East is at play. This nexus has three major rivers running through it: the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris. Rivers have always been places where beginnings are generated for human societies and polities.

This area of the world has also been historically and presently intractable in a number of ways. If we look beyond the granular story of current developments, we see an overarching theme, which may have been missed if it had stopped in Tunisia, as it was barely covered in the news. Instead, it mushroomed into Egypt and conquered the world’s attention, because of Egypt’s size and role in the region.

Let’s look at the reasons this event is singular compared to most other similar events in history:

• It’s nonideological
• It’s nonreligious
• It’s nonviolent (at least until there was pushback)
• It’s leaderless or leadership is shared
• Its organization is decentralized
• It’s an outcry of the human will
• It has a domino effect in the region

What are some of the images that have emerged from these events?

• A protesting woman kisses a police officer.
• Christians protecting Muslims during prayer.
• The Egyptian military cordoning off protesters and checking IDs at Tahrir Square so other agitators don’t enter. The military is usually the regime’s enforcer, or the instrument of a coup! As far as I know, only the United Nations uses the military as a peacekeeping force.

These are truly nonordinary occurrences.

The Berlin Wall fell. Apartheid ended. Now there’s a transition in one of the most conflicted areas of our world. The people there are asking for some fundamentals, nothing more. All in a nonsectarian way. It’s an equalizing movement. It’s open source and fluid. It follows the truth that:

Power which no longer serves first becomes entrenched but eventually topples.

The dynamics of the world has a safety principle that corrects its trajectory. The world has a conscience and it speaks through such occurrences. This is coded in. It activates and sets itself into motion. It’s a code we know and recognize, therefore we bring it to  the world. It’s in the DNA of life. This is the future’s voice!

The reality is that we can always be someone and do something to help change the situation. Like us, our political leaders have positive seeds and negative seeds. They may be surrounded by people who don’t water to the good seeds in them. Their advisors continue to water the seeds of fear, craving, anger, and violence in them. We have to find ways to get in touch with our political leaders and help them. Protesting is a kind of help, but it should be done skillfully, so people see it as an act of love and not an attack. —Thich Nhat Hanh

Control is out. Rigid, top-down predatory structures can’t bring us the future. The future, if we would just listen to it, is telling us to embrace this moment. Its time has arrived and sends a clarion call.

Related:
Egypt, Transformation & Signs of a Planetary Culture

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

Donate to this blog. Thank you!

After posting The wisdom of “receiving” a little while ago, I came across this. It really brings home the point.

Being Held

A hardness we can’t see, cold and rigid, begins to form between us and the world, the longer we stay silent about what we need. It is not even about getting what we need but about admitting, mostly to ourselves, that we do have needs.

Asking for help, whether we get it or not, breaks the hardness that builds in the world. Paradoxically, asking even for the things that no one can give, we are relieved and blessed for the asking. For admitting our humanness lets the soul break surface, the way a dolphin leaps for the sun.

One of the most painful barriers we can experience is the sense of isolation the modern world fosters, which can only be broken by our willingness to be held, by the quiet courage to allow our vulnerabilities to be seen.  For as water fills a hole and light fills the dark, kindness wraps around what is soft, if what is soft can be seen.

So admitting what we need, asking for help, letting our softness show — these are prayers without words that friends, strangers, wind, and time all wrap themselves around.  Allowing ourselves to be held is like returning to the womb.

— Mark Nepo

Graphic video warning!

Largest Recall of Ground Beef Is Ordered

New York Times
By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: February 18, 2008

A California meat company on Sunday issued the largest beef recall in history, 143 million pounds, some of which was used in school lunch programs, Department of Agriculture officials announced.

The recall by the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company, based in Chino, Calif., comes after a widening animal-abuse scandal that started after the Humane Society of the United States distributed an undercover video on Jan. 30 that showed workers kicking sick cows and using forklifts to force them to walk.

The video raised questions about the safety of the meat, because cows that cannot walk, called downer cows, pose an added risk of diseases including mad cow disease. The federal government has banned downer cows from the food supply….(read the rest).

What does it mean to be a Healer? The Healer is first a unifier. This can be at a political level or in the psyche. When it comes to healing, old definitions no longer fit. Definitions are broadened or altogether discarded. Why? Because the Healer personifies change. Change, and spiritually it’s more about transformation; change of shape, the shape of how you see yourself, the world, the cosmos.

The Healer represents an inclusive model. At its highest, this means that there’s an embodied realization of the Oneness of All That Is. This is a state of enlightenment. But it need not be other-worldly. At the social level it means including other. Of course this can only be engendered by the solid knowing that life is from One, undifferentiated source where there is no separation. This meta-level knowing must also be turned into healing action where other dissolves.

Let’s look at the Healer outside the confines of a healing context for a moment. Can anyone be a Healer? Yes. Anyone who has integrated and embodied a non-materialistic worldview, and this informs their understanding is a Healer. If you see the person in front of you as being six feet away, someone other and separate, if you highlight your differences in age, gender, race and social standing, then it’s a fragmented, dualitistic worldview that only leads to a limited embrace, very quickly threatened by ‘me and mine’ positioning in the frail mind.

Can you accept that the person in front of you reaches beyond the limits of his or her skin? Can we grow our understanding to know that they are not contained in their skin or defined by it, that the space between two people is illusory?

In reality, that is non-material reality, there’s a common ground of connection and unity between two people which is the Healer’s domain. In that domain we share humanity, resources, power, love, burdens and life.

The Healer’s worldview also comes into play in the relationship between human and Nature, which includes all its systems and life forms. The predominant approach is that the world outside of us is just that, outside! It is yet again, other.

Whether human or environment, when viewed as other the responsibility of kinship is so easily and callously discarded. The natural care of the heart is shut off and we enter destructive patterns of dominance, consumption and profit.

Just as we’re dependent on every single human that cohabitates this planet with us, we’re dependent on the planet itself, and it is dependent on us.

Symbiosis is the Healer’s virtue and strength. To install this lens over the eyes of the heart is the work of love and love at work.

It is love that reveals to us the eternal in us and in our neighbors.

–Miguel de Unamuno

to be continued…