A Musician’s love for Reiki
I’ve been performing since I was about ten years old, to say the stage is my home would be an understatement yet growing up in that kind of atmosphere made it difficult to discern between what everyone told me I wanted out of life and what I learned about myself that would ultimately shape my life path. For the longest time I held myself to the standard everyone else had set for me, a young singer with a voice too big for her body, that was destined to pursue music and nothing else. I took an interest in other things throughout my childhood; art, theatre, writing but always felt like I had to come back to music.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted to hear my voice but didn’t want to hear my words and the meaning behind them, so as I grew, I learned to not make my opinions known. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I thought outside of what others told me. For years I continued this way until I started feeling distant from the music I once held so close. I never went out of my way to sing at home or pick up my guitar to play for the fun of it. It became a chore and a burden. There was something missing in my life and music no longer filled that hole. I found myself no longer looking forward to performing and forced to deal with the energy vampires that left you drained and exhausted. Instead, I found myself wishing my obligation was finished, and I was back home in my sacred space.
During that point, my band’s schedule was filling up and getting more intense, that is until the pandemic shut the nation down. It was like my nervous system was reset, my eyes could see clearly for the first time, and I realized that I suffered from severe social anxiety and had been masking the symptoms for years while I forced myself into the very situations that triggered that anxiety. I used my newfound free time and took up practices that brought me closer to myself and the Earth, learning to care for houseplants, delving even deeper into my crystal and energy work. I meditated more, feeling the peace within and the space that allows for messages from the universe and beyond. I felt the crystals humming with energy in my hand that I could urge them to grow stronger, spreading their energy further throughout my body. I connected with my plants, creating meditations involving their care. I was learning more about my true self and the blocks that I had been holding onto from traumatic moments in my past, but I found I still wasn’t able to bring myself to let them go for some reason.
Once while talking about my inner work with a friend, she suggested that I look into becoming a reiki practitioner. “You are already so great with sensing energy, and you always create such a warm and loving environment around you, I think you’d be a great reiki healer, and I’m sure it would help you in a variety of ways.” At that point in time, I had heard of reiki but had no idea what it was, so I started reading article after article about the various styles and reiki health benefits. I immediately decided it was best to go to the beginning, choosing to study the original Usui Reiki Ryoho seeing it to be the main building block for most other styles. I started with a distance class and practiced primarily with self-healing. I immediately noticed a huge change in my daily mood and energy levels. After a few weeks of daily practice, I also noticed that I was having less overwhelming emotional responses to unexpected things. I began to learn the master level techniques after months of practicing and decided in that moment that this would be a lifelong journey.
Within the next year I focused on studying a variety of reiki styles, Kundalini Reiki and Gold Reiki developed by Ole Gabrielson, Quantum Reiki developed by Dr. Axel Carrasquillo, Usui/Holy Fire® Reiki developed by William Lee Rand, and learned how to do Akashic Record readings. I put hours into my daily practices which allowed me to create strong connections rather quickly. Shifting between the energies, engaging my senses to be able to differentiate between the different sensations they produced.
Once our calendars started to fill up with shows again, I felt a huge drain of enthusiasm within myself. I didn’t want anything to do with crowds yelling “Free bird”, especially the late night load out. The energy vampires were out in hoards after having been stuck at home during the shut-down and I was drained faster than usual on one of our first nights back on the stage.
Thankfully, I remembered learning about the benefits of reiki for anxiety and I fired up my reiki channels. I immediately felt uplifted, like someone had plugged me into a fast charge station. The conversation I was in no longer seemed like a chore draining me of my life energy, and the person who was talking even seemed to stand a little taller. I started to trace the power symbol and the mental/emotional symbol on the roof of my mouth before singing each song and found myself no longer wishing it was the last song of the night. Reiki filled me with strength and passion I once held for performing, bringing me to the point where I get lost in the music. Meditational bliss at its finest.
Practicing reiki and connecting to the multi-dimensional healing energies involved in reiki was what finally helped me begin to release the emotional traumas I had been holding onto. By activating reiki, connecting to my guides in the Akashic records and getting to the root of the trauma, feeling the emotions while imagining myself as someone who is objectively witnessing the situation, finding the lesson that was learned and discovering why I wouldn’t choose to trade that experience for something else because of the knowledge and life experience I gained from it.
It has also helped me to reconnect to my creativity, which for years had been dangerously low for a musician/artist. I’ve been able to reconnect to my true life path of creating, which means that I no longer tie myself to one mode of being. I will forever be a reiki healer, I will always sing in the car, I will always create when the mood strikes me. Now I will heal and manifest the rest of my life lessons and work hard to be successful in this new chapter of my life.
Heather Newman | The Healer’s Truth
December 20, 2021
