Hello!
My name is Eden and I am a Reiki master teacher,
Meditation guide,
And forever student.
And today we are opening up a space for Reiki to explore the theme of wholeness.
So if wholeness is something that you are seeking for yourself today,
If that's an intention that's been on your heart,
Then this is for you.
So wherever you are just starting to get comfy cozy,
Finding a place familiar to you to lay down,
Often in bed,
On the sofa,
Or on a yoga mat on the ground.
And just starting to let your physical body settle in.
We'll take three deep breaths into the body,
In through the nose,
And out through the mouth.
In through the nose,
And out through the mouth.
Shoulders move away from the ears.
In through the nose,
And out through the mouth.
Head is heavy,
Letting go.
And together we will just open with a simple body scan to start tapping into that physical wholeness.
So bringing your awareness first to the very crown,
The top of your head.
And just letting your awareness wash down over your head,
Releasing the space between the eyebrows,
Letting the eyes rest in their socket,
Letting the nose be long on the face,
Like the spine in the body.
And the cheeks fall down,
The cheekbones,
The jaw releases,
And the chin tucks ever so slightly to elongate the spine all the way through the back of the head.
The shoulders move even further away from the ears through relaxing,
Not by forcing,
But just relaxing.
And maybe they move towards the back of the body a little bit too.
Opening the heart as we send the next round of breath here into the upper chest.
And then that next round of breath into the ribcage,
Watching it open and close.
And that next round of breath low into the belly,
Belly button reaches to sky and then to spine.
And washing your awareness down your arms,
Your elbows,
Your forearms,
All the way through the palms and the fingertips.
And letting that natural gentle curl come to the hands.
And letting that awareness wash down the back and into the hips,
Unwinding all of those complicated muscles and ligaments and tendons here.
And relaxing down through the hamstrings,
The quads,
The calves.
And letting the toes splay out just a little wider as the legs fully release.
Taking a deep breath in and out,
Soaking in that physical relaxation.
The spaciousness created just by your awareness,
Your asking of the body.
Bringing your same awareness now to the breath.
This piece of our physiology that links the physical,
The mental,
The emotional,
And just tracing the breath in and out of the body.
Releasing any desires to judge or to shift or change.
Just noticing the quality of the breath right now.
Maybe the breath is long or short.
Maybe it's shallow or deep.
Also remembering that those words are relative to your past and current experiencing.
Noticing any textures of the breath.
Maybe there are little hiccups in certain places as the breath travels down and out.
Really zooming in here on every inch,
Every millisecond of the breath.
Nice and slow.
No rush here.
Perhaps noticing where the breath is naturally traveling to.
And where the breath seems to be avoiding.
None of us are perfect.
Noticing,
Releasing judgment,
Releasing expectation,
Just being here with the breath.
And having quantified the breath,
Now asking and seeing what has already changed or shifted.
Since I turned my inner eye to my breath.
Maybe it's deepened.
Maybe parts of the breath have smoothed.
No wrong answers here.
Just noticing.
Noticing the power that exists in awareness.
In witnessing the system.
In the scientific community,
We call this the observer effect.
Knowing that as we start to watch something we're curious about,
The thing inherently changes.
Perhaps you've heard that spiritual phrase,
Where attention goes,
Energy flows.
It's the same thing in a slightly different language.
I'm just sitting with that inherent power that you have,
Regardless of what you see in your system,
Regardless of what you feel in your system.
The power of awareness is always here.
And what if just being brave enough,
Curious enough,
To keep looking could be enough to instill change?
We cannot change what we avoid.
Just as we also can't embrace what we have if we don't see.
What if just the seeing was enough?
We didn't always have to be full of joy or gratitude or abundance.
To benefit from the act of seeing.
Because inherently,
You,
Your capital S self,
Are the one who witnesses.
You are not these emotions.
You are not these memories.
You are not these sensations.
You are the one who witnesses them all moving through your mind,
Your body,
Your life.
So while all of these pieces inform you and make up the you that exists in the world today,
They also aren't you.
There's a separation here.
And once we can step into this gentle separation between self and experience,
What we really do is join the fabric of the universe.
The wholeness.
Because the part of me that's the same as you,
That's the same as every other human,
And perhaps even animals,
Depending on your belief system,
Is the witness.
This part of spirit that helps us be more of us,
While also makes us inseparable from other,
From the world.
So I invite you,
As we move forward into this session oriented around wholeness,
To soften into your witness state.
Almost as if you are watching your emotions,
Your sensations,
Your memories,
Your to-do list in a movie theater,
Or all of those other pieces just pass before you.
And yes,
Sometimes the show is so enrapturing that we forget that we're separate from the joy,
Or the pain,
Or anything in between.
But with practice,
We can more easily continue to step back into that witness,
Observing everything as it moves past and through.
Finding stability when everything else is destined to change.
Everything.
Accept your capacity to witness.
So settling in even more now.
As I usher in the Reiki symbols to clear this moment,
To clear this space,
To clear all of these ties linking us in this moment.
And as I place the power symbol in this space,
Over your energetic system,
There's this kind of energy of it wrapping around,
But not permeating through and in.
Like the power that's been reached for is external,
From the outside in.
This balm,
This solution that has worked in the past.
And now it's time for this power to move from the inside out.
So just letting the power seep into the system.
And as we anchor it into the solar plexus,
In the ribcage,
The seat of our personal power,
Our ribcage,
The fire in our belly that drives us.
So taking a slow,
Deep breath into the diaphragm,
Letting the ribs open and close.
And taking a few more just like that.
Nice and slow,
Nice and long.
Being sure to also fill up the back of the lungs by the spine,
Where the ribcage and spine join.
A forgotten part of our lungs,
Of our support system.
Sending breath there now,
Too.
And just noticing how wide your breath goes,
Starting to map out the edges of the inhale and how far it goes.
Maybe you can also feel the inhale down into the belly.
Up into the chest,
Along the spine.
Just noticing the edge.
If you were to draw a line in the body where the breath ends.
And with the next minute or so,
Experimenting what it might be like to imagine pushing the breath just beyond that line.
In all directions.
Maybe imagining or even feeling,
Sending the breath lower into the hips,
The thighs.
Maybe up into the shoulders,
The throat,
The mouth.
Maybe softening that edge so much that you allow yourself to imagine or feel.
And the breath moving all the way down to the soles of the feet,
The tips of the toes.
The palms,
The fingertips.
And the crown of the head.
What is it like,
Or what would it be like,
To feel the breath inside the entire body now?
Allowing or imagining the breath everywhere with each inhale.
Softening,
Opening.
Letting that line between real and imaginary drop with the presence that you have with your body.
Relaxing any muscles in the face that have tensed back up.
And with your next exhale,
Gently letting that focus go.
Letting the breath flow in and out as it so pleases.
And letting that inner eye,
That awareness,
That witness to relax again.
To rest.
Finding that place of calm awareness within you.
And moving on to usher in the mental and emotional Reiki symbol.
Receiving any messages it would like to share with us today.
And the mental and emotional energies have kind of separated into the head area,
The crown,
And then down in the root,
At the base of the pelvis.
The root being this place of necessity,
Of survival,
Of our baseline needs,
Being human,
Existing in this world.
And the crown being this place where our thread to the rest of the world,
The universe,
Exists.
Our spirituality.
We're just holding the energy in these two places,
Letting them swirl,
Letting them build.
So we can start to wind them back together,
Knowing that operating together and not separately compounds the capacity to elicit change and presence.
Change and presence.
Change and presence.
So starting to imagine that your inhales now move into the body through the soles of the feet.
The inhale travels all the way up the body to the crown of the head.
And then the exhale moves out the way the breath came,
And down and out through the feet.
Inhale through the soles of the feet up to the crown.
And exhale back out,
Down through the feet.
No need to rush the breath,
Letting that breath be your guide.
And staying here for a few minutes.
Maybe this breath starts as imaginal.
And perhaps over time you can soften the body and the mind so much that you start to feel the breath,
The energy,
The awareness rolling through you in this way.
Again,
Softening that line between real and imaginary.
The power that exists in your system,
In your being,
To blur this line.
The power that links desire to whatever is right here.
The thing we want,
The thing we can imagine,
To the thing we have.
Strengthening this thread with this breath.
Softening any little muscles in the face that have tensed back up,
Taking a few more rounds of this breath right here and nowhere else.
And with your next exhale,
Gently let go of the breath.
Letting that breath pattern go.
Feeling the breath move in and out as it so pleases.
Feeling the cool air come in and the warmed breath leave.
And then gently moving back into that restful witness state.
Softening and opening.
And over the whole system,
There's these kind of two spring-like coils perpendicular to the body.
Both in the midsection of the body,
Around the chest,
Around the sacral solar plexus.
And the message coming through is about desire.
And how tough of an emotion desire really is when we look at it.
Because it is always anchored to something that's not here.
It's anchored to the past.
It's anchored to the future.
And more often than we'd like to perhaps admit,
It's anchored to a different dimension.
A different timeline.
Full of should-haves,
Could-haves,
Would-haves,
What-ifs.
And when desire is anchored there,
It sucks some of our life force energy out of our present system.
And really,
It does not serve a purpose.
It does deserve grace because we are human.
Built for connection,
Metacognitive,
Capable of imagination.
And our power exists in the here and the now.
Never the there and then.
This difficult dance of taking aligned action while releasing expectation.
Because the recipe,
The formula,
To get whatever we desire is never as clear as we'd like to think.
It's never as clear as we'd like to think.
And wholeness exists right here.
Wholeness does not mean that you will stop searching,
Or desiring,
Or acting,
Or pursuing.
It means that you've gathered up the energy that used to be siphoned out to the then and there,
And the what-ifs,
The should-haves,
The could-haves,
The would-haves.
And you've brought it back into the present.
Into whatever is right here,
Right now.
Knowing that we will always shift,
We will always change.
We are always whole because of that.
Which may feel counterintuitive at times.
It might feel like if the work is never done,
If we're constantly changing,
How could we ever be whole?
But that is a trap of the mind.
How can you let yourself be whole right now?
Knowing that does not mean that you leave your desires behind.
But that you can exist right here.
Without those tethers anchored in other places,
And other things,
In other timelines.
When you soften your breath into the wholeness that's here in this moment,
Softening all those little muscles of the face,
Too.
Slow breath.
Dropping your mind into the heart.
Breathing,
Moving,
Thinking from that place.
And taking a moment to let go.
Another moment here to anchor this feeling of wholeness into your body.
Maybe imagining a little tether from this feeling into your palm.
Maybe a seed is planted in your chest.
Just taking a moment to tether this wholeness feeling to somewhere in the body,
Through whatever visual comes up for you.
So that we can access this feeling even easier.
Anchoring it into the body.
Giving it an actual location to land,
For you to turn to whenever you need.
Whenever the desire takes over this feeling of wholeness,
You can turn there.
And once that thread has been created,
That seed planted,
That tether established,
You can slowly start to let go of that visualization and that feeling.
Finding yourself back in that calm,
Witness state within you.
Settling in there even more.
Softening,
Opening.
And feeling called now to let go.
To the back of the body.
This sensing some density here.
And the back of our body often represents our past.
Especially those hard to reach places in the middle and the upper back.
Where we think that that past event or thing or feeling or experience has been fully processed.
But then perhaps something happens and it comes back up.
Maybe you're triggered again.
Maybe you remember again.
Maybe an old emotion moves through you again.
And that's okay.
We are human.
And right now we're just going to work to soften the back.
Where these pieces of our past are still holding on.
Knowing that they'll never be fully vanished.
But our relationship to them can change.
And here can also exist this rose-colored-glasses concept of misconstruing the past as our emotions around an event change.
Maybe we perceive it as better than we ever did before,
Too.
Knowing that is also okay because we are still human.
And truths do change.
Regardless of what is still holding on.
Whether it be something that's been avoided or something that has shifted or something that makes you feel like the grass is always greener.
We release it as we anchor into the present,
As we anchor into the breath.
This breath,
The one moving through you right now.
Feel it.
Feel every tiny little piece of it.
Being right there.
Right here.
The breath pattern here I'd like you to focus on is just a simple one of really filling up and emptying out your system.
So sending your inhales deep into the belly and into the ribcage and into the chest.
And then fully emptying out,
Squeezing the belly,
The lungs dry.
Deepest exhale yet.
And just concentrating on those deep,
Rich breaths,
Both in and out.
Really finding the limits of the breath in your body today and seeing once you reach them,
If you can just soften that limit.
Getting all that stale air out.
And remembering,
Too,
All of that space in the back of the body where you can send your breath.
The back of the lungs,
The back of the chest.
Really utilizing all that space.
Now,
My challenge,
My invitation to you is to keep the breath this deep,
This strong,
While relaxing any muscles that have tensed back up.
Relaxing any muscles that are forcing the breath down into the back of the chest.
Softening in and out.
Can you soften the entire body while still breathing in this way?
Softening,
Opening.
Still feeling the strength in that.
Three more.
Just like that.
The softest and the largest yet.
And with that next and third exhale,
You can gently let that breath pattern go.
Letting the breath move in and out however,
Wherever it so pleases.
And taking a mental moment to witness the body,
The mind right now as it is.
And opening up to receive any messages from the body or mind right now.
What do you hear?
What do you need?
And whatever message came through,
Just breathing into that.
And just like the breath being felt throughout your entire system all at once,
As we did earlier,
Feeling the same with this message.
Letting it integrate into your body through imagining it being held in this way.
Maybe dissolving or sparkling into the body everywhere.
And gently letting that go.
Taking a deep breath in and out to the body,
To this moment that's right here.
And for just another moment,
Dropping the mind into the heart.
And sending your awareness now down to the tips of the toes,
The tips of the fingers,
And the top of the head.
Bringing your awareness to the support system beneath you,
Where your body meets it.
And sending your awareness now out to the floor,
The ceiling,
The four corners of whatever room you're in.
Just sensing where they are without needing to open the eyes.
And knowing there is no rush whenever you are ready to rejoin this dance.
Okay,
Gently blinking eyes open.
Welcome back.
