New Leaf Mentoring … new thought. new health. new life.

Posts tagged ‘Healing’

Reiki, Camping & Healing; A Natural Connection


From 2002 to 2012 I lived in a truly magical place. Our one acre lot sat nestled amongst 30 acres of rolling hills and forest, perennial gardens and open space. We had more than a dozen ancient spruce sentinels majestically standing on guard over our property, wildlife – from squirrels to deer- roamed freely in broad daylight, birds chirped, sang and warbled all day long and yet my home was on the edge of town within walking distance to all amenities. My husband even put in a golf green and tee deck for a 60 yard practice hole. It was perfect. A Slice of Eden. I wasn’t the only one who thought so either.

I had worked from my home for about 8 years when it dawned on me quite unexpectedly that it was possible to add a new dimension to my work with my students. My property suited me well. Clients and friends had always enjoyed the gardens and property waiting for appointments or for meditation circles but it was that one particular morning after my meditations that I considered the possibility of my home becoming a healing/educational retreat place. It was rustic, it was natural, it was peaceful and it was time to share it!

There was a feeling on those grounds of being held. Of being supported. Of being hugged by the trees. I thought at first I was the only one who felt it and then I started noticing the melting that happened in people’s faces and posture as they sat on the patios. Despite their issues, despite their pain, there is a space here where it can be let go – even if only temporarily. Healing ground! Sacred space!

Focusing on What’s Right and Sacred

My property, my work, my family, and my life are sacred to me. The quality of our lives is determined by understanding what we hold sacred and how whatever that is holds presence in our lives. In the end it’s all about how we stimulate and encourage the sacred to be ambient and radiant throughout our lives. In a sacred attitude we are generous, mindful, respectful, honest and compassionate. When you add Reiki or any other powerful healing intention to the mix you create a magical opportunity for transformation.

There is a tendency among energy workers/healers to hunt out and heal issues. But after all these years working with clients in all sorts of difficult health situations I know of another way that is infinitely less painful and more successful than focusing on the issues. In focusing on the health of the body, on the vitality in life, and on the inherent light that resides in all manifestations of life we empower our potential and right to health, and in turn dispel the darkness. When we embrace peace, joy, life force energy we displace and transmute stagnant energies of pain. When we surrender to the health in us and forgive ourselves for believing that we are defined by our pain and losses, we heal. When we enter deep rest we initiate deep healing. Like begets like.

Immersed in nature we learned to experience the unlimited vibration of health. We experienced first hand the indomitable spirit of never-ending growth and potential. The vibration of nature is celebratory, exultant, and pervasive. There is a well-spring of health within us that is in perfect attunement with the vitality of nature. Nature is all about surrender and acceptance of what is, when we allow ourselves to be engulfed we learn to give over our ego and meet our true spirit. And so a weekend for Reiki practitioners was born; a weekend of being supported by nature to fully experience our own innate potential to be whole and to be healed in peace.

All things in life change and eventually we left our beloved home for new adventures and other places but the Reiki Camp continues to this day on the second weekend of September. Join us to experience healing with other like-minded individuals in the presence of Nature.

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Healing

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For the Love of Cats…I’m starting to purr! Help!


I have cats. Waayyy too many cats! Striped ones, solid coloured ones, bi-colours, and in more shades of gray than you can imagine. There are predictions being made around my loved ones that I will become that crazy cat lady with the wind chimes that does tarot cards in the old house on the edge of town. Hmmm…it’s hard to argue with that since that pretty much sums up my life already. I’m just not crazy…yet! I think…

But in the meantime what can you do? It is what it is! So yes, in the meantime I have too many cats. But seriously they’re lovely! Each one unique in personality and markings, each one with a lovely, generous nature.

My Favorite Teacher Was A Cat!

Cats, especially kittens in a litter, are endlessly amusing. Cats are remarkable teachers for us mere humans – ask any cat. They have no doubt in the superiority of their species. When we learn from the habits and behaviors of various animal and bird species we can refer to this practice as animal medicine. The commonly accepted teachings from cats are about independence and self-love. But, I can tell you from my experience of living in the midst of a colony of cats the teachings go way beyond self-love.

Cats are heartful, self less creatures and endlessly demonstrative in their love. They are far less independent than people like to think they are. People like the idea of having 1 cat but cats like the company of their own kind. As much as they like their independence, they love being within the snuggling distance of other cats. They are excessively affectionate animals with a strong social order within their colony. They have many rituals that center around looking after one another. They groom each other, they hug each other, they cry for each other, they wrestle ferociously and play tag together. The older ones teach the younger ones how to behave, how to hunt, how to stalk, how to have respect for the elders in the group. There are strict rules and penalties for stepping out of line, anything from boxing to swatting to nipping. But cats are guileless, they never hold a grudge. When they warn or punish each other it is done without creating fear. They set a clear boundary that the others respect without question but in the next second they are back to purring and loving each other unconditionally, so long as the lesson has been learned. Cats are tenacious and demanding in their needs. They are alert and on watch every second, highly sensitive to the energy around them and always tuned in to their environment and all that is happening within it. Their natural curiosity often leads them to the brink of disaster, but in the end they just grow and learn and carry on to live another one of their 9 lives. Yes I believe there is a lot we can learn from living with and observing cats.

Reiki Cats; Whose Treating Who?

All my cats have been ‘Reiki’ed since the day they were born. I actually think cats do Reiki naturally. There have been times when I am very aware of my cat being more attuned, more in harmony with universal energy than I am in a particular moment. They are always willing to give a treatment. They are instinctively hardwired to know where to place their paws (as well as the rest of their bodies) to facilitate healing. I often have cat assistants when I’m doing Reiki sessions. They are natural meditaters too, they can sit in posture for unlimited amounts of time, fully conscious, fully present, yet un-distractable from their meditative state. They create a space of calmness and peaceful acceptance for whatever is, and everyone who has the pleasure of having a cat for company is bound to be entrained into the same peaceful, unconditional energy very quickly. I think I’m actually starting to purr and find myself wanting to frolic in the garden! Oh no!

Sharing the Love

But all this said folks – we have a serious problem on our hands with an exploding cat population. The local humane societies are completely and totally overwhelmed and over run with cats and kittens. They need your support for their spay and neuter programs, for food, for litter. If you have it in your heart to adopt a cat please don’t hesitate, they are the worthiest of friends, faithful confidants, endlessly committed to your happiness and well-being. If you can please try to help these societies out. Any donations are welcome. The populations of stray and feral cats is escalating at an alarming rate. It may not seem to be your problem, but it is in fact a societal issue.

I love my cats, and they have all been loved well, but this doesn’t mean that I can’t give several of them up to good homes where they will continue to be loved as much as they want to be. And believe me the sooner the better! We honestly have too many!! (The picture at left only shows a few of them).

I am blessed in the love of my cats and I am purrfectly willing to share that blissful state with you! As soon as possible – that’s just the kind of reiki master, wind chime and cat lover I am!

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Reiki

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Let’s Build an Enlightened Dream!


I’ve been getting a lot of emails to join prayer groups for the healing of the oceans, the forests, the earth; and just when it seems to me that people are starting to actually wake up, I get other emails that say ‘the gods are angry’, ‘the earth is angry’, ‘these catastrophes are happening in areas where people have been evil for too long and god is teaching a lesson’. They reek of judgment, fear, and projection. If we want to help our earth and ourselves people it’s time wake up and get real! These mind-boggling catastrophes are caused by human error, negligent practices, unbridled greed and lack of foresight. The earth changes are part of the earth’s journey through the stars. There is no mystery. The earth is not angry (though I wouldn’t blame her) and the gods? Well… no comment!

Let’s try to look at things a little differently. We’ve been asleep, not because we haven’t been serious about the escalating level of crisis in our world, but in the ways we have been dealing with all these issues. We blame, we hate, we rage, we sign petitions, we engage in war. We’re expressing powerful emotions of anger that aren’t doing anything except perpetuating more powerful expressions of anger, fear and rage and sadly killing millions of species of life on our planet every minute in the process. The global fear and outrage is part of the nightmare we currently find ourselves in. Remember like begets like.

So wake up!! The nightmare can still end, it must or we will all be trapped in it. It’s imperative that we learn to focus all our collective energy towards the dream we have for ourselves and our children.

The clock is ticking and we are quickly approaching the end of a massive time cycle. This is a natural course of events, nothing unusual at all. We have already gone through 4 of these 5,125 year cycles, we are currently ending the 5th and heading into the 6th. It is part of what is known as the “precession of the equinoxes”. It is the journey Earth traveling through the heavens as marked by the placement of the constellations of the zodiac. We are leaving the Piscean Age and beginning the Aquarian Age. Each age is marked by a key development which had significant influence over that time. The Piscean age was marked by the event of Christianity and has 2 fishes facing opposite directions as it’s symbol. It’s been an age of dualism, opposites, ownership and conquering. The Aquarian age however, is an age of oneness, unity and holism. And this clearly presents the task ahead of us now.

We can no longer assign blame and point fingers for the problems at hand. What happens to one, happens to all. We are one mind, one consciousness and we have one future. We need now to get together and practice patience, tolerance, respect, love and acceptance. The possibility to heal our world lies within our ability to heal ourselves and ultimately, how well we will be able to release ourselves from fear and the limiting, debilitating effects it has over our free thinking minds and henceforth our ability to solve problems.

As our Earth travels its elliptical path around the sun and now reaches its furthest point away from the center of its orbit, the magnetic pull on the earth is at its weakest creating a wobble in its axis. The earth has been steadily shifting on its axis and it is being predicted that a complete polar magnetic flip may happen. All these planetary changes seem to mirror the madness happening to the people on earth. Wobbly intentions, lack of direction and commitment, lack of meaningful relationships.

People…it is time to dig our feet into the soil and get grounded, make a strong commitment to Earth and life on earth, and start developing a focused relationship based in  love and compassion for one another, all life, and the earth. We are one. Don’t Pray for the earth as though you are worried for her survival,  your own life and the life of your children, pray instead by communicating and holding glorious visions of beauty, health, wisdom, balance, peace, light and faith in her and our potential. In love there is the possibility for new understanding and true problem solving. When fear and blame are abolished solutions can arise that were previously hidden. Only then can we hope for a new light filled beginning. The solutions for a new world rest in your hands, in the visions you hold in your mind, and the love that is born of your heart.

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Healing

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Emotional Responsibility


In the healing business you can expect to hear a ton of stories about the pain, suffering and abuse people endure. It’s a vital part of the healing process for people to share their stories and release repressed and suppressed emotions out of their bodies and energy fields . Many alternative and complementary modalities are based on doing precisely just that; releasing repressed emotions out of the body. Held in emotions of shame, anger, grief, worry, fear can play havoc on a body’s immune system and eventually lead to a whole host of physical problems. And although it is shocking to hear some of the outrageous things people are capable of perpetrating against one another it never fails to amaze me how easily and willing we are to hurt someone else. It’s not just the act, but the desire to cause hurt comes so easily to so many people.

It seems to be human nature that when we hurt we need and want others to feel the same pain. It’s that old adage: Misery loves company. But bottom line it is grossly unfair and spiritually irresponsible to draw others into our negative emotion cycles. We don’t have the right to make others miserable because we don’t want or can’t find the way to resolve our own emotional pain. If your intention is to heal your wounds and you are willing to trust another to guide you back to the land of the positive then share as honestly and as openly as you can. But if all you really want is to feel validated in your misery and insist on recruiting sympathies against the person you are mad at you are abusing your confidant. Of course in that moment you don’t really get how abusive it is, all you’re focused on, in that moment, is the need to spread the grief. Wallowing in pain however is a dead end street. It gets you nowhere. And you will find that eventually you will be standing nowhere all alone!

Depression is one thing, but spinning in a bad mood and trying to take every one else down with you is another. We have a moral and ethical responsibility to others, especially the ones we love, to try to stay as positive as possible. I don’t mean being cheerful when you feel angry, worried and confused. Using negative words, being argumentative, picking fights, goading others into being nasty, demeaning others just to vent your aggravation is cruel and harmful for all parties concerned or bitterly trying to convince others to gang up on another. We live in an over stressed society, to add to another’s stress level is incouragable. We need to try harder to be genuinely nice to people. They deserve it. Strangers we meet out on the street don’t deserve to be treated with rudeness, disrespect or aggressive bad behaviour no matter how they treat us. Be the bigger person! We need to treat others with kindness, respect and friendliness.

Another old saying is ‘if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all’ but let’s face it, how can you find justice without complaint? So if you are truly looking for justice ask yourself this; ‘can this person I’m talking to help me understand what’s going on and am I truly looking for resolution – or am I just bitching to anyone who is too polite to hang up the phone or walk away from me while I rant?’ Words and emotions have energy. We use them to create effect in other people. Before you go shooting off your mouth hold some awareness about the power you are wielding. Loose tongues cut deeply – and in the end it will be you that falls with greatest pain.

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Healing

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Fact, Faith & Superstition


So often when I introduce Reiki to someone new who’s never heard of it before, particularily men (it’s the whole left brain thing) they inform me they don’t believe in faith healing. So I tell them the facts. I tell them why Reiki doesn’t require ‘faith’ in order to work and also what the scientific world is now starting to understand about energy and the human body. Then they get on the table.

Having said that I have tremendous faith in my Reiki treatments; I trust them to work 100% of the time. I have faith that there will be change in the client’s life – even if they don’t recognize it right away. Sometimes the changes that come after a treatment are different than what the client expected or wanted to happen, but again I have faith that Reiki – Universal Life Force energy knows best. I also have faith that Reiki will continue to work for our highest good always whether we believe in it or not. And as much as all this faith sounds a bit airy fairy – my faith is based on 15 years of facts, success stories and ‘miracles’.

You see I really am a skeptical person, I have put my Reiki through the paces. It has never made sense to me to blindly trust something that could affect someone else. Further more, since I have no religious conditioning I’ve never had to have blind faith in anything in my life. Everything I’ve ever held faith in had to be proven at some point, before or later makes no difference. If I’m going to believe in something it has to hold water. So I tend to look for the leaks in theories, ideas, people, friendships, stories etc. of course this also extends to my Reiki/Healing/ teaching work. Some leaks can be easily fixed and are worth the effort, other leaks require a complete tear down and start over.

All the work that I do is prone to superstitious undertones. Reiki, tarot cards, meditation, metaphysics, positive thinking etc. Superstitious ideas like ‘healer’s can’t work on themselves’, or ‘ Reiki is witchcraft?’, ‘don’t ask for healing/abundance for yourself’ are taking decades to work their way out of human consciousness. And the new age has also brought a few strange ideas to the table for instance, the other day I met a lady who almost did a backflip trying to erase the word ‘fear’ out of the energy field around us when I suggested that our freedom is governed by our fears, She felt that just saying ‘fear’ would attract fear to her. Very bizarre. She had fear for the word fear…hmm, what’s wrong with this picture. I systematically avoid all superstitious belief systems and rituals based in superstition. My work is for the real world, grounded in facts, with real results.

I have a couple things though I am superstitious about. 1. I always pick up pennies, and if I sweep one up off the floor at home I don’t throw it out with the rest of the dirt. Because superstitiously I believe if I don’t pick it up I am throwing away good fortune.  2. I never throw out any cards, notes, or letters that have been signed with Love; again I don’t want to throw wishes of love away. 3. I have never thrown a book out in my entire life; I won’t throw knowledge or words away. Hmmm… maybe I’m just a packrat?….nah!

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Metaphysics

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