Crying, as a Spiritual Practice

It often starts with laughter, laughing at the absurdity, the suffering, the beauty of it all. One might call it a type of reverie, being lost in daydream, a brief visitation to another realm. Images whirling by in my mind’s eyes. I see my twin daughters in a slow-motion silent film from birth to now, at the precipice of adolescence, and tears begin to form. I feel a great grin overtake my face. I am in so much love reminiscing on the journey of motherhood.

Then my elder kin, mother, aunties, uncles enter the scene. Gratitude washes over me and fear too because I know the time is coming when they will exit stage left and walk out into the bright light of the spirit world and leave me here to fend for myself. More tears start knocking on the door. I surrender to them. Laughing and Crying, loving, and letting go.

By now, my heart is cracked open and other images begin to flood in. And, I cry for that deranged woman on the corner by the supermarket swaddled in a pile of trash; the tent village being bulldozed and wonder where will they go? Who will help them? Then the wars bombard me. I cannot abide the bitter bile of state sanctioned murder, bombs, or incursions. My little girls come to mind. I feel terror and gratitude and sorrow all at once. That I should be so lucky to have the life I have, yet acknowledging I cannot recline in my own comfort as others burn in the fires of war.

In the sobbing, I begin to sense that these are not only my tears. These are all our tears that I am crying. There is no more laughter just the brutality of this divine human experiment, experience, and history. I see the ruts the in the energy field, the well-worn roads and habits that diminish the potential for change and newness, peace, and reconciliation. I am in an altered state. Limp from the release. A calm, washes over me. I take a few deep replenishing breathes. Often, I am in the shower crying with Mami Wata; she soothes me and takes my pain away. I pray for healing.

Crying as a spiritual practice calls on us to embrace our empathy, to confront feelings and situations that we’d rather avoid or repress. Crying as a spiritual practice is expansive, healing and can offer wisdom. We cry for those who cannot when we cry as a spiritual practice. Reiki to the People. May humanity heal.

Energy 101: Lessons from a Wayward Mystic.

I teach Energy Medicine in a variety of settings: in classrooms, corporations, even live on stage.

The Mighty Power of Love

It was a balmy April. I was rushing to pick up some soup from the Vietnamese restaurant in my neighborhood. My twin toddlers were home sick demanding pho. Approaching the restaurant door, I noticed a familiar indigent woman panhandling. She was a middle-aged black woman with a pretty face which had maintained a certain softness, despite the apparent harshness of her situation. We made eye contact. I smiled and gestured that I would give her something on the way out.

While inside, I noticed the woman had begun yelling. Her voice bellowed an uncontainable rage that sucked the air out of the space surrounding her. Hers was the profane language of degradation; it rushed out of her with the wild force of stampeding cattle who had just escaped the cages meant to imprison them. Out, out poured venom and hate and shame. It shocked me because in past encounters, her demeanor was usually calm, even serene, despite being tinged with a palpable sadness.

I paid the bill, collected my bag and went to her. “Are you okay? What happened?” I asked. She pointed at a white man sitting in a shiny new car. She said some words I couldn’t really make out about how he had disrespected her. I offered condolences and told her I was sorry to hear she had been offended. Then the most unexpected thing happened.

The woman collapsed into my arms and began weeping. I felt the weight of her suffering pressed up against my sternum. Her head hung limp, resting in the crook of my neck. She moaned and sobbed my shoulder wet with tears. What was I to do, but hold her, love her the best I could in this intimate, and unexpected moment between strangers. I kept whispering in her ear, “It’s okay. It’s okay honey. Let it out. Cry it out. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry...” all the while invoking Reiki wisdom for guidance and strength.

We stood there like this for some time. Her body, made limp by her lamentations, wilted against mine. As her crying began to wind down, and her breath made that panicked gasping sound it makes after a long bout of bawling, she lifted her head. I felt a chill run down my arm as her warmth receded and exposed my saturated shoulder. She wiped her eyes. I took a breath. I knew the twins were waiting. I knew I had to leave and there was nothing else I could do except maybe give a few dollars.

In that moment, I experienced a curious set of emotions which were hard to pinpoint. There was a sense of helplessness, but not exactly. I knew that I had given what I could; she was on her journey and I was on mine. I knew that I couldn’t bring her home or fix her or her situation. On the one hand, I was powerless; but on the other hand, I felt something else—a different type of power, one that had nothing to do with money or materialism.

In our embrace, I felt an epic force surging through us—from beyond the tops of our heads, out beyond the bottoms of our feet. It was as if a vortex of light and energy had opened, and a tornado of divine grace coursed through us and bound us together as one great beating heart. It was magnetic, pure and true. As peacefulness encased us and her dirge faded, an emptiness arose, and in that space, there were no words, no thoughts—just love, the mighty power of unconditional love.

May compassion lead us and deepen our innate capacity to love. May we find opportunities to hold a stranger in need. May we awaken our energy bodies and walk in the path of light. This is my prayer for us all.

My Story of Transformation

Part One – The Journey

Mine is the story of forgiveness, gratitude, expansion, and transcendence. That I am still alive is nothing short of a miracle, but not only that, my now aliveness is vital, bubbling, aware and filled with awe. This hasn’t always been the case.

For decades, I was held captive by the trauma, despair and dehumanization of domestic violence. For decades, I was oppressed by the embodied unremembered recollection of sexual molestation that flowed like ice through my veins and attracted rape to me. This was my narrative, a storyline that shaped my beliefs about the world around me, about myself—sullied, broken, inferior, underachieving, victim. For decades, I longed to die and managed to seek refuge in the barren contours of my shadowland where I fed my hungry ghost with heroin, morphine, oxycodone, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol anything that could shut out the distress of this terrifying world. I subsisted in shadowland for some time and yet managed to survive. When the numbing wasn’t enough, the sirens of death called me, lured me with their unrelenting songs of torment urging me to take my own life. Twice I tried, but death was not permitted.

My story does not stop here, however, because amid all of this there was inside of me a sparkler—a frantic and playful sizzling of light jutting forth in every which direction that wanted more, that knew more existed. Inside of me was some other awareness that guided me to places of creativity, expression, color, light, community and love. Overcoming hardships, confronting my addictions came at price. I had to delve into the eye of the storm, and in that chaos, I had to seek out the counsel of forgiveness.

First, I was to forgive the man who raised me, who threw plates of food at my mother’s head, drenching her with shame and humiliation. I had to find a way to let go of the past: 15 years of eggshell walking; 15 years of rage and violence. I had to find a way to let it all go. My attempts were hit or miss and, sometimes I’d find myself circling back to some abandoned shadowland-shack—a debauched detour before a morning of shame and regret. But despite sudden and seemingly arbitrary pitfalls, I managed to have a life, job, home, and romance. It wasn’t until a New Year’s Eve mugging that the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

In recovery, I worked hard on forgiveness and letting go. But to my detriment, I had not ever acknowledged the oppression of my unremembered recollection of sexual molestation. The mugging and subsequent blow to my head, had taken my trauma to a whole new level. It cracked my consciousness wide open and forced me to remember. Pain and grief poured out of me like rushing waters buckling the fragile levies and dams that held me in place. Lost my job. Lost my mind, but in the end, I was reunited with my soul.

Part Two – Reiki

Reiki found me slacklining, trying with all my might to stay perched and balanced on an ever-swaying rope—always mindful of the consequences of the fall. Reiki found me pretending, and in that pretense, showed me a picture of myself that was recognizable yet foreign. Reiki helped me remember where I came from, and how I decided to come to this place, to confront these particular sets of hardships. Reiki reveled the magic and the medicine that permeates throughout me and all my aspects. Reiki soothed me like a balm and expanded my heart tenfold; it stripped away that sense of alienation and separateness and illuminated the ethereal threads that connect us to each other and to this earthly plane. Reiki taught me stillness, peace, and how to wield love like a healing stick letting it guide me to everyday miracles, epiphanies and internal landscapes that shimmer like starry moonlit nights. Reiki taught me how to breathe. Reiki touched me so I could know myself, and in turn, see myself in others. If you are soiled and broken, I will hold you because I too have been soiled and broken.

It is this transformation that I wish for us all—that ability to traverse the dark night of the soul, and yet still rise anew each dawn, luminous with wisdom. That we might find a new and common language with the power to heal, connect, and create that sense of spiritual oneness is my hope for humanity. This is a new era. Much is broken, but healing, with all its fits and starts—two steps forward and three steps back—is inevitable.