Remote Reiki Testimonial

I received a lovely testimonial from a new client, Paris, after her remote reiki session.

I just wanted to thank you so so much for our reiki session. The morning after our session, I felt a clearness within that I don’t recall ever feeling before. It felt like the feeling after you’ve deep cleaned your home and just lit a candle. Relief, calmness and inspiration are just a few things that I’ve experienced in the months that followed. Before this session, I struggled with the path I wanted my life to go in. I felt like I was making some progress in the right direction but still missing the mark. After the session, I had an epiphany that seemed so obvious that it was almost laughable. Now I am taking steps in this new direction and I feel so inspired and alive.  

Integrative Healing 10 Series

It feels important to write about the 10-series I offer, and why one would opt for this series as opposed to individual sessions.

The people who normally book the series are usually following a calling- it’s a calling of big transformation for them, either they’re in their spiritual awakening process or a spiritual expansion phase. If you somehow keep gravitating towards this idea, there’s a reason. It’s in our egos to have resistance and to make excuses, but if it’s a spiritual calling, the universe will support it in all ways including materially because the way we expand is exponential.

What this series is is a deep dive into trauma release, de-programming and re-programming. We’ll work to uncover unhealthy beliefs and rework them to streamline your internal process, to get you into your alignment. A lot of this work goes into imprints from past lives and from your present past. Our realities are determined by how we perceive and react to stimulus. If we change what that stimulus means by clearing all of what it meant to us before, we can respond in a renewed way that changes all outcomes, and brings forth new possibilities.

This work spans multiple levels and multiple dimensions— it’s somatic work all the way to spiritual work.

Commitment to the series is a big one-with the regularity of working together every week, it establishes a container for the work that helps us go deeper and helps us have the continuity required for clearing out the nitty gritty and reinforcing new beliefs and behaviors.

More than anything, at the end of the 10 series it’s a timeline shift to one that matches your new vibration of abundance, love, harmony and self-love. So you can be free and empowered.

One of my first clients mentioned to me after we completed our 10 series that she felt like she could finally live. I think that sums it up beautifully. I think that before we venture into our freedom, we’re stuck in surviving, not thriving.

Hope to “meet” you soon. I’m excited for all your growth and for you to step into your truth and calling.

x M

Staying In Your Own Experience

One of the biggest life lessons I’ve ever learned was in an acting class a few years ago. It has even transformed my whole practice.

That’s what I think is beautiful about life, we can make all these connections based on things that seemingly are not connected at all. In the scheme of things, everything we learn becomes a composite within us, and is coming from the knowledge of a collective experience. So all things create what we are, and all ways of learning can enrich our direct experience.

Just a little background, at the beginning stages of my spiritual awakening, I was hungry for knowledge pertaining to healing and esoterics. But then at later stages, like the one I’m in now, I’m learning about broader concepts, life philosophies that broaden my whole understanding about life through nature, through disciplines. It’s really amazing how much we can pull from various subjects.

Anyway, in this acting class my teacher, who was a gifted empath herself, stopped me mid-scene and said, “Maria, you take care of your partner so much in your scenes. Energetically it comes through. Focus on your own experience, it gives your partner more to respond to,”

That clicked. Well, it took some time for me to really digest it. But I understood she meant that my default was that I wanted my partner to be okay, for my lines not to impact them too hard, but by doing that I was robbing them of their own experience. It wasn’t intentional, I had good intentions for taking care of their feelings, but by focusing on them so much I wasn’t contributing the other half of what was necessary for a scene to work. If I had a strong emotion, I needed to bring it, and if it took my partner back, that was their work. In totality, that was the scene.

Having been trained from a young age to naturally be a caretaker, it was like flipping my whole world upside down. I didn’t know how to have my own experience, my own emotions, if I’m honest. So the work began to take shape as I started to dig deeper and find my own emotions, those ones I pushed down in favor of helping others through their own.

In a scene from a few months ago, I remember having a very strong reaction and you could see how hard it hit my partner. He didn’t know what to do, emotionally. As he struggled, you could see that it transformed the way he related to the scene. He suddenly felt so vulnerable, and then he felt so bad because he saw/felt how his words had impacted me, and then our scene developed contours that weren’t there before.

As this framework settled into my life, I noticed that yes, obviously my job involves focusing on my clients’ experiences and emotions, but that the more I have my own experiences (and contain them, for the session) the more my clients have theirs. If I’m lost in the healing, if I’m not there, then I’m not holding space. Although I’m completely focused on my client, I also need to be a very anchored and strong force that comes with the entirety of my life experience and knowledge.

Back when I started healing, I was still working through a lot of the healer/empath dilemma. I was so sensitive to the suffering of others, and that pulls you into the dangerous rescuer dynamic. I always put my clients first, so much that I couldn’t really have my own life. I gave all of my energy, absorbed all their pain, and had nothing left for myself. I’d drop everything if a client needed me. And you know what, that’s not okay.

I will never bring my own stories into sessions unless it's necessary, as sometimes guides will ask of me to share personal experiences to ground certain lessons, but I think that to be a well-balanced healer requires you to focus on living your own life, discovering your own emotions for the 75% of the other time you’re not healing. My balance before was more like 20-80, 20 for me. I’ve noticed that even in that 75% though, it’s about my own healing. The more I can show up sovereign, empowered, the more my clients can too.

That’s something I’m coming to appreciate more and more about being a healer. It’s a calling for me that runs so deep, but more than that, it’s my ikigai— that sweet spot where you don’t feel like you’re working when you’re working. It comes so naturally to me, and I recognize that by having signed this “pact” so to speak to be of service, it means that I understand that healing myself is a continual process and essential for my work. So all opportunities are growth opportunities, and my whole life is based around healing, but not all allocated for the actual healing work itself. It requires you to have a strong sense of self, but also a well contained ego.

Outgrowing

When we’re on the path of growth, ascension, healing, whatever you choose to call it, you invariably start adopting your own pace that’s a reflection of your vibration. It’s really difficult for two people to travel vibrationally at the same rate because we’re all unique.

Something I’m learning through my own path is that there will be times that are very uncomfortable as we shift into new ways of being. The matches externally die out as we shed new skin, and we can no longer match certain people in our lives that we, at lower frequencies thought we’d know for a lot longer. It can come very suddenly and can often times be very jarring. Why does it feel like I can no longer talk to this person? Why am I suddenly dreading responding to them, like my energy doesn’t want to go near them? These are some of the thoughts that pop up when I reach this stage. It’s not avoidance, because nothing changed in the relationship— but, I changed.

Sometime we outgrow our teachers. I’ve had teachers and healers, and sometimes both are the same, meet me when they were of a much higher vibration. But, somewhere along the way I rose in frequency above them and their words, teachings, healings, no longer carry any resonance for me. Their truth is not my truth, even if I once saw it as the truth. I’ve come to find that in these cases, either they will shift out something just won’t work— like you can’t seem to coordinate a time to meet, or what once felt really easy to align won’t anymore. Sometimes it’s not just a scheduling mishap- it’s literally something in the connection that’s out of alignment. When you match with someone, things feel more effortless. When things start to tip out of balance, you’ll know too.

The most important thing here is respecting your own vibration. I feel that human beings often confuse things and think we’re all the same, or there’s one path. But people come into this world with different levels of skillsets and some move faster and some move slower. Everyone has their natural cadence, strengths and weaknesses and they can’t be assessed based on one set of criteria. People will also hold you to their own limits, whether they’re conscious or unconscious. So if you allow them to determine where you can go and where you are, you’re agreeing to their limits which may hold you back. Limits may feel safe to begin with because they establish a certain code of conduct, or way of understanding/relating, as you’re adjusting to a new framework. But, if you stay true to you, you’ll know when it’s time to move and stretch your container. You also know when someone is growing continuously and not imposing limits on you.

For me, it’s become more and more important to find people who do not have limits. These are people who’ve made the impossible possible, because these are people who do not think about the world in limits and do not look at me that way either. They often tend to attract a higher caliber (and I mean this as vibration and consciousness) of people who also exceed imposed limits that are decided based on limited consciousness and a consensus, an average.

Jamie Sam’s book Dancing the Dream talks about various paths that we walk. Sometimes, people skip certain paths and come back later to review, some people get stuck on one path, some people move through all swiftly. Our teachers also need to be a few paths farther than us so they can show us the way. In those uncomfortable moments when we’re shifting out of paths and everyone else is still where we left them, it’s important to just breathe and know that just because there’s an empty space now doesn’t mean that new people won’t come in, or the universe won’t guide you towards another teacher. In fact, it’s the empty space that is the very thing that will attract those people to you faster. This is the important moment of self-mastery where we do need to be conscious of what comes up- fear, loneliness, grief etc.. we need to feel them, honor them, but we don’t need to let them overtake us and sacrifice our own vibration to scratch an itch.

It’s very human to want to run back to what we know, but the spiritual path requires us to have integrity with regards to our own journey and our own reason for being here. Some mindset coaches will tell you to transcend the emotion. I’m not, I’m saying that it’s important to feel them through, but that we don’t always have to act on them. We most certainly don’t want to suppress them, or bypass them, or “transcend” them. We need to be honest with ourselves, use our tools to process, but ultimately make informed decisions based on prioritizing our greatest good.

Regardless, the main takeaway in all of this is, sometimes someone’s truth can be your truth for a while, but there is never an absolute truth and in finding our own truth and sovereignty we need to remember that we have the power to decide what is true for us, even if it’s true for someone else.

Emptiness

I had this memory surface today of being at dinner with my mom and my siblings. That night, we were having dinner and I invited my friend to join. She was flakey by nature and not the most accountable when it came to time, so of course halfway through the meal she told us she wasn’t coming. It felt normal then, but I remember how we just waited on her and that’s it. The focus of our dinner was waiting on her. And then when she cancelled, the whole focus was still on her and her absence. That’s how my mother taught me to be- always focus on other people. We didn’t talk except for my mother asking “when is she coming?” we didn’t order. And when we finally did, it was, “why isn’t she coming?”

Getting to this point in my life and through my own healing process, it’s remarkable to look at it from a distant lens where I realize we had no genuine Homelife. It would seem normal for me now, for a friend who was maybe joining for dinner to fade into the background and for the family to be talking and engaged with one another. And for the absence to just be an annoyance, if that. I would imagine that it wouldn’t even matter as a detail. But back then, we had together a very real emptiness.

The reason for this comes down to not just because of narcissism, but because of martyrdom. In my mother’s mind, a good virtuous woman (and these ideas were from her very traditional Chinese upbringing) was one who sacrificed her own needs for those of others especially her husband. That was her duty. As a young child I believe she wasn’t properly cared for at a young age, and to gain any sort of identity or value in the home she took on the burden of the family always caretaking and controlling her younger siblings. This created a very fragile ego in her that was fear based. She needed to always be in control or else the fear would take over.

With this lack of interior sense of self and no healing work, she of course attracted my father who was an overt narcissist with a strong match to hers. Where she was covert, he was overt, so they could create a codependent dynamic unconsciously where both of them reaffirmed certain insecurities, shame, and also reinforced a sense of ego-ic value. When these counterparts meet, there’s usually a huge emptiness in both of them that need to be filled in various ways. The failure to look at and address this emptiness then becomes projected out onto each other and onto other family members, namely the person who then becomes designated as the family scapegoat. I was that person who received the backlash of their unconscious desire to not actually be parents (but their fragile egos needed to abide by cultural and familial norms to be accepted) because they weren’t ready and were too immature. Also, the whole family structure revolves around this emptiness and creating an external image that functions as smoke and mirrors to gain other people’s envy, so they can somehow fill this emptiness with that.

As a child who was born into this and abused narcissistically, I also learned to adopt that emptiness. In fact, my whole identity since I was a child was based around that. Because no one could mirror my needs, my emotions, at a young age, or validate my existence in necessary formative stages, I learned to overcompensate by directing all my focus onto them just like they wanted. With narcissistic and self absorbed people, they want the focus to be on them- I’ll post a video discussing this soon. If these are your parents, they form your basis of value and also your orientation. Because my sense of self was not formed, it was formed in relationship to other people’s needs and to this curation of approved of characteristics. My parents were achievement based, so that achievement became the foundation of worth in my household especially since my real human sense of worth and value were diminished and taken from me when I was little through words and abuse.

As I grew older, I noticed that for certain friendships where I had to be performative, there was a cut off point. One day I couldn’t keep up with the friendship anymore as it entered into more intimacy because that intimacy was not one I had with myself. The whole crux of that emptiness is based on avoiding oneself and so situations that required more openness, vulnerability and intimacy touched on that feeling of emptiness within that was so painful for me to feel. But looking back, my life did revolve around other people. It was always waiting for other people. Anticipating other people’s needs. Giving, doing. It was like I did not exist when other people were not in my proximity, nor needed me. Alone, I still defaulted to my trauma behaviors of dissociating, so I wasn’t home even when I was home alone. I noticed that I always liked to put the attention on the other person so I didn’t have to share much about myself, but this also led to conflicting feelings where I felt like I wasn’t heard, I wasn’t seen, yet it felt more comfortable for others to dominate the conversation because then I didn’t have to be vulnerable and I didn’t have to disclose that underneath it all, there was nothingness.

The long healing journey has been one of reclaiming my authenticity. Underneath all the things I learned I needed to do for love (which was fundamentally empty because it was conditional) and approval and attention was the core part of me that learned it was not okay. I stuffed into my shadow normal things that humans have: their own wants, needs, desires and a healthy level of selfishness. Part of the narcissistic tactic is to gaslight their victim into thinking that any needs they have are selfish. Any time that is “available” that isn’t given is selfish. Anything that can be given and done when someone has the capacity to even sans desire should be done. This is also where the martyrdom comes in, because I watched my mother martyr herself over and over for everyone, to feed her codependency and her need to be validated in being a “good woman”, and also to be a functioning co-creator in a marriage with an overt narcissist.

At the beginning stages of healing I didn’t know tangibly what “putting myself first” even meant. I spent a lot of time alone, self-isolating, so I thought that was enough. But it wasn’t, because I was still actively dissociating and playing into the image of what I thought I should be. I thought that was my authentic self, but my authentic self was hiding without any permission to express herself truthfully. For those of us who are more attuned to our higher chakras and have abuses like the ones I’ve just written about, the focus is on the lower chakras and healing those aspects of us that didn’t form in early development, the healthy ego-self, boundaries and the like. I was punished for having boundaries because those didn’t serve my caretakers. I thought I was putting myself first when I was putting myself last because I still did receive a certain level of validation that my ego needed to know that I existed. My ego had prioritized validation because at the root of it all I just needed to know that I was alive, that I had a purpose because it wasn’t reflected to me at all as a child.

I still have programmed responses and I feel them very strongly. These override my own instincts, but it’s been a long long time that I was conditioned to people please, to put my needs last, to self-abandon at every turn. Now, I take a pause and I really check in with myself. Do I want to do this? Do I even want this person in my life? I used to be afraid of people entering my life because in my mind it felt like they wanted something from me and I would then need to take care of them, did I want an added responsibility? My idea of friendships and relationships was so skewed to me needing to give, and not receiving anything in return which mirrored, emotionally, how I was received at home. This created the unfortunate trauma pattern of attracting those very people I was afraid of, because not only was this energetic, an imprint, but also because they fulfilled an expectation cognitively and therefore my nervous system was habituated to that feeling of familiarity.

I remember when I was maybe 7 or 8, I had a friend Lisa who would come over sometimes. We were out playing in the backyard, and we were muddy. Her dad came to pick her up and Lisa ran across the new Persian rugs that my parents just bought. My dad told me that friends are my responsibility and then punished me for the rest of the afternoon when I didn’t do anything. I remember crying, because at that moment he broke my spirit and programmed me to think that all things that my friends do becomes my responsibility and that I don’t have a separate identity outside of that. I noticed that that made my mental boundaries very penetrable, like I had no ability to fully think for myself- I adopted the thinking patterns of those around me, as well as their attitudes and beliefs, which happens so unconsciously for empaths who haven’t yet healed.

I also noticed that I had a tendency to take things to heart when someone didn’t respond to me, or didn’t consider me, because it put me in touch with the feeling of emptiness internally, of “I do not exist”. There was this big part in my identity that was like a black hole because I literally did not have the permission to explore it like a child normally does. And so, this healing journey is one of coming back home and figuring out what really does fulfill me in a way that is true, and not one that is performative. It’s one that I really allow myself to savor and to have, and doesn’t require me to change my plans or alter my space to make someone else feel comfortable when I don’t even want to share the experience. And that, when I’m home, and I feel fulfilled on my own, means that I look at others as additives to my life, not because they help me reaffirm my identity in the roles I was assigned, as caretaker or healer or giver, but because we can lift each other higher.

Betrayal

The thing that hurts the most isn’t even the betrayal itself, it’s the aftermath.

It’s in how we then start to trust the fear and go looking for evidence. And when looking for evidence, the confirmation bias applies- we will always find what we are “seeking” because our minds will fill in the blanks based on our past experiences.

I remember the times when I was betrayed, I learned to tune out what I thought was fear. I interpreted the caution as overreactions, the hyper vigilance as irrationality and the small alarm bells as nitpicking. It’s an interesting thing how fear and intuition sometimes blend together in personal situations, so much that it blinds you from seeing where the delineation is. I thought I was getting better at sorting, or at least tuning out the fear, until you find out the truth of the betrayal and learn to trust the fear instead of intuition.

Those small lies did add up to something, even if you convinced yourself they were each isolated incidents and not such a big deal.

I believe that we then try to control outcomes by relying on the fear as a preventative. Although I can detach and observe my own mind, I still see that I’d rather be fearful sometimes in situations that can trigger the same feelings from a past betrayal because when we act out of fear we are often times trying to control an outcome.

I see this playing out mostly in romantic situations for myself, because romantic situations trigger a certain insecurity in me. It also tugs at self worth, not enough ness, and all of the shades of self concept that were or were not well formed growing up. It’s been shown to me over and over in several healings recently how there is a formula. In childhoods that were chaotic, or that had abusive dynamics, the child isn’t given the proper care, nurturance, attunement for him/her/them to feel a grounded, secure sense of self. This creates a fragile foundation that then later becomes highlighted as insecurities in places where we think we have more control, where society holds value and this is gendered. For instance, for women it tends to be insecurity displaced onto physicality and for men, on wealth and status. And of course more than anything these areas are both highlighted in romantic situations regardless of whether our partners actually care any of those things, but those of us who have these insecurities do and project that onto others. And/or we match with people who do care about those things and scrutinize us the same way.

There was one karmic situation that I had end of last year, and it was something that triggered such a huge amount of expansion in me, but it was beyond painful. I knew that he projected his fear onto me, his betrayals, and thought that I would hurt him because he felt vulnerable around me. He did say that to me, but he didn’t tell me why he felt vulnerable, but it’s easy to fill in the blanks. I was receiving certain intuitive messages/images related to how he really felt for me even if he acted distant and disinterested. Literally continual images of him wanting kids and marriage with me. I had multiple healers look at the cording between us because it was extreme. And they all said, “whoa, his energy is around you all the time. And this cord comes in with ‘you’re the one’ energy,” At this age it’s kind of obvious when someone’s playing it cool and the level of “detachment” is correlated to how interested they actually are, but when I’m triggered, I’d rather take things at face value, well because, fear. I’m also likely to doubt the intuitive messages and the images even if I am very secure in my intuition otherwise.

I feel that he really saw something with me and we had an unusually strong connection recognized by both sides. I remember one of the first times we spent time together, it feeling so important to tell him out of nowhere, “I won’t hurt you” with the purest, cleanest energy possible. I was surprised that these words came out of my mouth but they were guided. When I don’t have as much emotional attachment, it’s easy for me to see. But when I get emotionally involved, subjectivity takes over and with that is the lens that I’d long forgotten in childhood. My own fears started to take over and I projected onto him. I think that especially in cases when people are perceived a certain way, it can cloud how they are inside. He was, in my mind, gorgeous. I mean, he was a model, so yes, but I started projecting onto him that he was a player and wouldn't choose me. I was also going off his mask because that was easy. These of course stemmed not just from my own fears, but from truths of betrayal. I then started acting out of that fear, and he started acting out of his own that I would hurt him because I didn’t realize at the time, he had me on a pedestal and most certainly had a match to me- he thought I wouldn’t choose him even though I would have. In fact, what I didn’t tell him was my dream about him early on, or what I felt was singular. I’d never in my life felt the way I felt/feel about him- I felt like my heart welled up with so much love that I wanted to give to him that felt so mismatched based on how well we’d actually known each other. I’d been in serious relationships where I didn’t feel close to that. I knew that we were together in a past life, and that overwhelm of “oh no this is completely irrational, where are all of these feelings coming from?” was shared. When I’m very triggered in romantic situations, it’s like everything about me that I’ve worked towards disintegrates. I feel like a small fragile child with no “right” in the world— I forget about what I may seem like to others, what I have done and what I have become, and all the foundational pieces I’d built for myself in lieu of the one that wasn’t built for me.

I have a belief that the men I’m seeing are sleeping around. I mean, it’s kind of culturally suggested that men behave that way, but I do feel that it became a real fear of mine after one relationship. But in subsequent casual relationships, when we did have an open discussion far into the relationship, most times they weren’t seeing anyone else except me. It makes me wonder where this fear fantasy comes from and why it feels so real, and maybe it triggers the same fight/flight sensations in me that I grew to know as a child in an unstable home so much that I create it. In the one instance I started to convince myself that it wasn’t real, and looked for tangible evidence that it was false, I was cheated on many times over. So, it feels safer in some ways to believe it now. But the strange thing is, although I never had direct confirmation from him, there were a few intuitive people I really trust who all told me no, he wasn’t, he’s not actually like that, after I’d ended things with him and could start to see clearly again.

This experience triggered something from the deepest, core wounds. I’d never fully looked at them before, the fears of abandonment, betrayal, of literally not existing or having any value, that I would argue all of us have in different ways. I was seeing very clearly, and feeling, all the ways in which I used to give away my power and the treatment I was willing to settle for in a toxic situation. I felt shades of strong anxiety, neediness and desperation that I’d never experienced before because I’d never been in the unfamiliar energy of the chaser. They were parts of me that I never even allowed to exist. It made me see my own avoidance and emotional unavailability to myself. Outwardly I didn’t hit rock bottom, at least no one would’ve thought I did, but internally and spiritually I did. Sometimes the greatest pain is regenerative even if it feels like it’s going to kill you. Because at one point, that feeling of “I’m going to die” was very real if you were abandoned, and I mean these stem from infancy. If we are abandoned we literally die. When presented again as a healing, which mine was, it gives you a chance to update your nervous system to one that recognizes no, you won’t die. In fact, you’re the one who walks away so you can live.

No one else had gotten that deep in my psyche before, and he didn’t intend to. I doubt that he even knows what his effect, or at least, his reflection, did to me. I can only imagine what my reflection did to him as comparatively I have a lot more light in my field than he does. I recognize that it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with me and what I saw in him, what he represented to me. I don’t think I even knew him, but I got acquainted with my own fears and my own shadow aspects that I’d ignored until then. That experience broke me open so that more light could come in because it forced so much healing and integration, and it made me choose me. It made me refocus, recenter, and work on where those weak spots in my self worth still were, that I was distracting myself from through validation I was receiving.

So, my lessons with betrayal have taught me, you don’t always know. There are signs and sometimes they are innocuous- yes, I’ve walked away from situations in which there was no actual harm. And, the opposite is true too. Some people are amazing at hiding and get off on it, and you may find that the dismissals were mistaking oversensitivity for evidence. There are psychological reasons we stay in situations even if we’re being betrayed and our unconscious knows it because it’s self protection. Not just emotionally, but it also protects our investments of energy and time if we’ve invested so much thus far. But one thing is true, that no matter what you go looking for, you’ll find evidence for, so if you go looking for betrayal, you’ll find it.

I don’t believe it’s possible to act from a trusting place all the time especially if you’ve had experiences that betrayed your trust, but I think it’s reasonable to protect yourself and recenter during triggering situations and take some space for yourself. I think it’s important to then clearly distinguish what is your fear and what is your intuition, and sometimes that takes time to distill. I think it’s okay to give someone the benefit of the doubt, open your heart but with eyes wide open.