The slew of sickness in my house and my body continues. How I wish I could write as I normally do. You can’t miss something until it’s gone – even temporarily. And so my writing brain – I miss thee. My foggy cold-ridden brain offers no substitute for your eloquence and rhythm. It bumbles and fumbles through the day and barely staying up after the kids long enough for me to eek out a few words onto the screen. So with that, I’m going to shut it down, rest it so that it will somehow pass the baton back to you in the midst of slumber.

When I took my Reiki certification, my teacher told me how we can give Reiki to not only living beings (people, animals, plants) but also we could give Reiki to things with electricity like cars and computers. And Reiki can be shared in person or from a distance and even cooler, to the past and the future as energy does not know space or time. 

These new thoughts gave me full permission to think of energy working in a very flexible way and to make this work my own. 

While our brains can compute some pretty awesome things, they also tend towards the linear and logical. They seek patterns and want to make sense of things. When a new thought or experience is introduced, it has to recalibrate. At that point, one of our many biases may even reject the new information as valid.

I can point to a hundred things from my upbringing that made Reiki something that intrigued me vs. repelled me. And it was those memories that accepted the information that my teacher shared with me. However, if I didn’t have those experiences, I’d like to think I would have welcomed the information with a curious mind. 

In this age of so many falsehoods, is it better to be open to new information or to be skeptical? I’d say that being open is better because I trust myself to be able to make sense of the information once it’s received and integrate or reject it as needed. There are new discoveries everyday. It’d be a shame to cut ourselves off from new ideas because we don’t trust our discernment. 

As I lay in bed for the fifth night of illness in my house, I must recognize that our health has such a determining factor on what we are able to do. So many of us see our physical body as almost an obstacle or an inconvenience to doing all the other things we want to do.

However, we cannot ignore it away. Our body’s state of health is a huge determining factor to the rest of our lives. Its power feels finite and almost non-negotiable. I must work with my body or I won’t be able to do anything at all.

Yielding to our body’s influence and wisdom seems an appropriate response. This is not a case where powering over makes sense.

Yielding to power in this case is not a weakness. It’s an acknowledgment and a partnership.

How does power feel in the body?

The answer is different for each person and can shine a light onto what we actually think about power. While our minds can contort every which way to come up with an answer, our bodies don’t lie.

My body gives a gritty feeling with a slight constriction in the throat and a bearing down of the body.

When I think of empowered, a totally different feeling comes up – a light bursting from my center, expansion and feeling very grounded.

A great way to determine word choices is a check in with the body.

The one thing humans will never be able to overpower is death. 

Of course, we are trying our hardest to avoid it or prevent it. 

We don’t talk about death. It is tucked away from conversation until it becomes unavoidable. We don’t want to be reminded of death. Elders are housed separately. Even something as innocuous as dead leaves are swept and carted away. We don’t respect death. We see it only as the absence of living, a lesser state of being. 

What is more powerful than the elephant in the room that no one is talking about?

Will we ever be empowered if death is invisible and unacknowledged? If we never make sense of it? If we never face our mortality? Or that of our loved ones? 

I think not.