Reiki Help Blog :: Oasis Reiki Dojo

This week it’s Thanksgiving in the United States. Thanksgiving is neither restricted to one day, nor is it the domain of one nation:

Grace isn’t a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It’s a way to live. —Jackie Windspear

Thanksgiving comes to us out of the prehistoric dimness, universal to all ages and all faiths. At whatever straws we must grasp, there is always a time for gratitude and new beginnings. —J. Robert Moskin

Being thankful is timeless. One can be thankful for the past and for the future. It’s one inner quality that actually negates the truth that the present moment is the only moment available to us. Kind of… Being thankful is such a deep appreciation that it can lift one up and out of the metaphysics of time/space. Yet it must be felt and practiced in the present moment. Thankfulness can’t be allotted to specific experiences and areas of your life. Either you’re all in, or you’re not.

We cannot be grateful unless we are grounded in the present moment, and we cannot be grounded in the present moment unless we are grounded in the body. Much of the time we live like disembodied minds, not even noticing what’s around us, but preoccupied with past and future. But when this mug of tea warms first our hands and then our stomach on a cold day, or the cat purrs contentedly in our lap, we are suddenly present and grateful.

We can learn to cultivate the joy of this awareness, but it may not always be easy. Illness, poverty, old age, or abuse can make it a great challenge for us to accept embodiment. And yet, bringing ourselves back into the body again and again is central to the practice of grateful living. When we do so, we allow healing power to flow through us, and we appreciate our aliveness as the great gift it is. —Gratefulness.org

Sanskrit has this wonderful word and truth: santosha or contentment.

So, what is contentment, and how do we incorporate it as an “observance” in our lives? Contentment is serenity, but not complacency. It is comfort, but not submission; reconciliation, not apathy; acknowledgment, not aloofness. Contentment is a mental decision, a moral choice, a practiced observance, a step into the reality of the cosmos. Contentment/santosha is the natural state of our humanness and our divinity and allows for our creativity and love to emerge. It is knowing our place in the universe at every moment. It is unity with the largest, most abiding, reality. —Swami Shraddhananda

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

We can be grateful in the past, but this can only be felt in the present. We can also be grateful for difficulties in the past. There lies the greatest treasure of gratitude. Not only is there treasure within the difficulties, there’s much to be thankful for that’s occurring simultaneously with those life moments that are troublesome. Similarly, we can be grateful for the future and again this can be only felt in the present.

What is this present? It’s where your body is right now. Your mind may be elsewhere and it may be pulling your body to go there too, but your body has the power to stay where it is, and call your mind home to itself. Your mind may be affecting your body by being somewhere other than here, but your body has the means to settle into itself and be in balance. The body is weighted in the present.

Thankfulness is to be contemplated and understood. It is to be deepened and dwelled upon. It’s a practice, an ongoing positive habit. Once established, it blesses every moment you breathe. Thankfulness isn’t only in hindsight. It’s real power is now, today, the current inhale or exhale that’s happening in your body.

Reframing exercise

Sit. Feel the physical boundaries and weight of the body. Let yourself settle. Let the body settle like an anchor settles on the ocean floor. Follow your body’s breathing, without changing it in any way. As the sense of this deepens, the mind follows suit. Keep calling the mind to settle with the body. Let all of you BE HERE.

Now recall a past difficult experience. Gently turn it over in your awareness until you notice a new angle, one from which you’d never sensed this experience before. Be open to the possibilities of how it actually enhanced and enriched you, despite the trouble it also gave. Note also that you’re on the other side of it today.

Sit in appreciation.

Now direct your awareness to the last month of your life, including the present day in which you’re practicing this. Reframe any difficulty that’s currently in your life.

Journal about your gleanings. You can take all major trouble spots in your life into this process. Once you’re clear and empowered, establish gratitude as the ground that your feet touch when you get out of bed each morning, and the ground on which you lie down each evening.

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!

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Healers hold for individuals, and by accumulation for everyone, the shared story of the human journey. With each encounter, what it is to be human emerges more and more, until there’s a fuller view. With each encounter, the common sufferings and dilemmas of existence are revealed. Our joys are shared too. Some of these themes are universal and some contemporary to the current age. In the previous post on listening I wrote, “In true listening there’s an unmistakable recognition.” This is a witness state.

Being a witness in this sense is the quality of being in stillness and silence inwardly. No demands are being made. The demand that the story you’re receiving be short or long, orderly or chaotic, enlightened or mundane. The demand that you have the right answers, have be brilliant, or mold the person to an agenda. Witnessing is clear-seeing. It’s neutral, non-grasping and open-ended.

When you listen as a witness, both parties are held in a greater field of knowing and compassion. As a true listener, the healer already holds what’s shared in the understanding that it’s a holy encounter. As the sense of this deepens with practice, a larger field also appears because it’s already there, and because the healer is awake to it.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him. —Simone Weil

Accessing this greater field aids both parties. Some stories are truly horrific. The compassion and knowing which is present is universal, a real strength beyond the abilities of the human heart and mind. If it’s compassion and wisdom listening through you, then bearing witness is much more comfortable and effective.

Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand. —Sue Patton Thoele

Healing begins in a very real way, right at point of listening and being listened to. The acknowledgment that true listening creates opens the door to trust which opens the door to healing. With trust, what’s been kept dark and hidden feels safe enough to come out. This can be secrets held hidden knowingly, or subconscious and unconscious material surfacing.

Listening is preparation for healing. It sets up the right environment for healing to happen. When a person feels heard by the heart, it gives them courage and confidence. It softens all the hardened places inside and allows flowering of the spirit.

By listening from the heart, the healer too is enhanced. Perception and intuition opens up, insight becomes reliable, and the person of the healer can step out of the way. In essence, there isn’t a healer. Only healing.

Let’s end now with an excellent view of true listening:

An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually and extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will fell less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is begun again. —M. Scott Peck

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!

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Listening is a vital part of life, relationships, and the spiritual path. It’s also a lost art! There’s just too much noise in the world, and perhaps worse than that is internal noise. There are mental and emotional filters that block true listening. It’s impossible to get through these filters and be received, just as…as is. True listening is a commitment. It’s also the ability to sense what’s not being said, or what’s signaled in a subtle way. To be truly present to life, others, yourself and the Divine, the portal of listening must be wide open, and a dimension with which you’re intimately familiar.

Listening is so very powerful. To be so, it has to come from deep silence within. That silence is cultivated and isn’t available on a magical command. Listening is not hearing. You hear a car go by. You listen to someone’s suffering. In true listening there’s an unmistakable recognition. It is the meeting and merging of hearts. If you’re able to receive the person across from you from the ground of being, then something real is happening.

There are different forms of listening. In Nature, listening isn’t merely appreciating bird calls, but feeling the vibrancy of life and the heartbeat of the Earth. Within the individual, listening is that clear self-awareness that knows the traps, and also ensures we’re not absent from any part of us for too long. In the relationship with the Divine, listening becomes total receptivity and willingness.

If you listen openly and without filters or an agenda to another person, a great rapport is established. You become a receptacle for that person. Not an expert, not someone who will offer a diagnosis or advice; you’re not there to strategize or crunch statistics. You’re simply there. And you hold the other person’s suffering, shame, guilt, anger or other diminishment. Just hold it and hold space with them. When this is happens from cultivated silence within, this space becomes sacred, and what they share holy.

True listening yields information beyond the content of the sharing. It’s a chance for renewal and transformation. Insight becomes readily available for both parties. The story is acknowledged, and there’s a precious opportunity to transcend it. When you commit to listening, you commit to the person who needs you in that moment. It’s a bond. If you show up, it often encourages him or her to show up too. Then the mask can fall, and truth be revealed. There’s real strength in that.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force…When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life…When we listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other…and it is this little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom. …Well, it is when people really listen to us, with quiet facinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way. —Brenda Ueland

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!