I wanted to sleep so badly, but some part of my inner essence sought wakeful and conscious connection with the wisdom of the ‘old woman of love and harmony’. The old woman wanted to speak with me as my soul did with her – but I had been too busy. The details of life were equally calling to be accomplished. Deadlines and more deadlines.
I didn’t really recognize the ‘old woman of love and harmony’. She came in the night and in the darkness. She came in the hours at the same time when the ancestors gathered to speak with those who listened. I lay there, eyes open. Darkness around me. “Look deeper,” the old woman of love and harmony said. “Your truth lies in the heart.”
Obvious, I thought. Everyone knows this. I told myself I’m already living my truth. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know that I had to go deep into the part of me I most sought to put behind me and avoid.
She (this part of me) came to me in the middle of the night, the old woman explained, so that I could more clearly see this part of me I denied. Her light could shine on this part with great contrast, so I could see the inner face of this part I denied. “Why? Why do I have to see this part of me?” I asked the old woman. “There can be no good in going back to retrieve this essence of me. There is no one who sees value in this part of me.”
“But you must,” she said with the purest of love and harmony flowing from her eyes and extending from her hands. Her hands touched my mind and my heart together. It was such a transforming touch, so gentle and loving. My body breathed deeply in relief and freedom. “You must see the value of this part of you,” she repeated with an ancient sense of knowing.
But it’s just a part of me, I thought. How could it be that important. No one had ever truly validated this part of me before. No one cared for this talent from me before. Why do I need to go back and claim this part of me? And why in the middle of the night? Why not come in the day when I am already awake and can be more alert to problem-solve?
“It will not cost you anything to go and speak with this part of you,” the old woman of love and harmony said, as though reading my mind. “Of course, it may cost you your sleep tomorrow night, if you do not attend to the part that is seeking your love at this hour.”
Begrudgingly, I decided to speak with the part who I deemed was being both a nuisance and withholding the truth from me. My truth. The truth that I thought would let me finally be fulfilled and happy.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Speak kindly to her” the old woman gently prodded me.
I realized I would need to speak in the manner the old woman was speaking with me. I tried again. “What do you really want that you awaken me in the middle of the night?” I asked with all the kindness I could access within me.
“Love,” this part said. I sensed a deep yearning amid a deep and old sadness.
“Love?” I inquired. “Like you want me to have someone love you that isn’t loving you right now?”
“Yes,” this part answered. “I want you to love me.”
I breathed in and noticed my breath. I breathed out and noticed my breath. I could feel the emerging resistance to know this part and to listen for what she really wanted. I wanted to object. I wanted to create stories, rational and believable stories about why her request for be loved by me was unattainable and unworthy of my attention and effort. Does this part of me not understand how daring and discomforting her want for ‘love’ is?
And yet the divide, the lack of love and harmony, the lack of unity in the diversity of our wanting had 
worn me ragged. Too many nights awake. Too many nights visited by the old woman and her light. Too many moments of frustration and despair because I couldn’t manifest the life I was supposed to be living in my mind.
Unbeknownst to me, another part of me was listening to our conversation. She quietly and kindly interjected, “maybe there is another life you need to be living. Maybe the vision in your mind is no longer the vision of your soul. And if this is so, then how can you know this vision if you do not have love for this part of you, regardless of your past with each other? You must value this part of you which you have habitually denied. It’s the only way through this chronic inner conflict that wears on your mind and energy and power.”
My heart softened. I recognized my resistance, my objections and even my fear that wanted to barricade the softening. It’s an old and familiar part of me, a default state of defensiveness. A meta state of protecting my ‘rightness.’ But with the presence of the old woman of love and harmony, my heart softened. I knew I would be safe to love.
“You have my love,” I gently whispered to the part of me seeking my love. “Breathe with me,” I told her. “Just breathe with me and breathe in the state of love”. Though I had learned this phrase many years ago, I couldn’t imagine speaking it softly to this part of me in the middle of the night. But here, in the darkness of the new moon, I suddenly experienced the value, the true and beautiful value of this part of me I for so long had denied and despaired of in my mind.
The old woman joined me. We started breathing love. “Breathe in my love,” I repeated to this part of me. She must have done so because suddenly my inner world lit up. It was as though the whole room lit up. I looked out the window to see the night’s light, but I was reminded it was a new moon. It was completely dark out. The light came from somewhere within. So radiant. So warm. So filled with love.
And so I asked this part of me, “Now that my love is available to you, pure love is accessible to you – as you only need to breathe it in with me – what do you want that is even deeper and more important?”
I paused.
“Heaven on earth” this part of me said. I stumbled around to find a thought. I was stunned. “Heaven on earth” she repeated calmly and firmly.
And there was silence. No words. No thoughts. Some images of Nature restored, of children laughing and playing, of people swimming in the rivers, of animals plentiful and unafraid, of ceremony and feast celebrated. A moment of bliss entered my inner world.
The ‘other’ within me, the irreconcilable diversity of the ‘other’ had come into love and harmony with me. A unity prevailed in this inner state of heaven on earth that seemed beyond understanding. I knew the old woman had something to do with this moment. She had gifted me some kind of healing, a magic I couldn’t quite grasp. The old woman of love and harmony winked, pulled the covers back up around my neck and I fell asleep. In love and harmony, I fell asleep.
Shirley Lynn Martin, from the “Reiki Stories of Healing” series
As I read and observe, weep and grieve for all the hatred spewed across the globe in heightened and carelessly aggressive ways, it tells me how deeply we carry the past in our consciousness, ‘ghosts in our heads that wish us dead’. Forgiving ourselves, our ancestors, others around us, our enemies is no longer something we’ll get to some day (when I’m less busy, when the kids are gone, when I’m not working full time … ). That some day is here and now. The cost of all this poison is making us so sick, making the planet so sick that we cannot justify bringing it forward into our future with us.
If you want your life back, then learn to forgive. If you want your health back, learn to forgive. If you want to be free from your loneliness because you ran away from all your connections, then learn to forgive. Forgiving will bring you your life, because forgiving is the essence of loving another.
When I liken this affirmation to the flow of water, I can easily distinguish when I am aligned and in the flow of my true nature – or when I am stuck in the mud or an overgrown algae swamp, as reflected in the mental struggling and uninspired thinking circling in my mind.
Kindness is more expedient to the path of inner peace than is the rumination of anger and fear. So is opening to love and releasing emotional attachments to what no longer serves or is functional. Kindness serves as a graceful existence. Peace matters is a path, a way of being that “I don’t want to take because the work to experience it requires ‘giving up too much’,” says the ego.
What a glorious holiday weekend we had here in Ontario. I trust you took the time to enjoy it with family and friends, or perhaps you got some much needed solitary time. It is hard to believe that we are already into August, although this is a month I look forward to every year (I always plan to get away somewhere in August – looks like it will be a short trip to New York later in the month).
WHAT does the act of forgiving actually mean? HOW do I forgive in a way that is useful and liberating?
Not only is our climate crisis calling to us, so is there a crisis of our social fabric — a moral and cultural crisis, and even a spiritual crisis as we see hate and religious intolerance on the rise. This is often when clients seek my help … when their house is on fire. They are in crisis — emotionally, in their values, even spiritually.
safe and, to take care of what is first needed. This is clearly the first task of self kindness. Taking necessary action to preserve life and give ourselves breath. Find our calm so we can take action to upright ourselves again, to get out from under the overwhelm.
Your boundaries, whether energetic, emotional or spiritual need to evolve and reflect what is needed to keep you healthy, whole and safe, even in this environment of ‘the house on fire’. Your boundaries need the strength and flexibility to navigate the complexities of human tasks at hand to put out the fire (whether in our minds or on the planet) and rebuild a sustainable human community on this planet.
So that’s what I’m supposed to keep in front of me— Love. And my dreams that are filled with love. Not the definition of love. Not the concepts. Not the science of it. But the experience of love in all my relationships. And the vision of life being better than it is for all my relations.
Keep love in front of me. A mantra. And suddenly or slowly and gently, I’m recognizing:
That’s as simple as it gets. That’s all I do in my Reiki meditation. You might think that is easy enough to do. What it requires, however, is releasing all and every need for control of outcome. And that is a most difficult thing to do each and every day. As I practise ‘surrender, open and receive,’ I become more honest. The layers of defenses, hurts, karma and fears all begin to fall away. I encounter my true nature, my authentic being, my diamond soul … naked, revealed.
This past fall, I have supported others in their grief and losses and have also experienced my own. Facing the death of loved ones is a certainty, a reality of life from which we cannot be spared. In fact, every fall and winter season, we are given the opportunity to prepare ourselves for this experience of death and letting go. The leaves fall off the trees. Plants go dormant or die. Wildlife patterns shift with migrations. Temperatures drop and people move indoors, a form of preparing for the darkening and wintry days.
The grace I have experienced has gifted me with the deep inner knowing that as Father Thomas Keating says, ‘in the death is the resurrection’. And Leonard Cohen sang ‘there is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in’. In the grace of the Universe, death is the birth to new life. It is the path of transformation. The water, the fire, the air/breath, all return to the Source to be utilized in all of creation’s pure spirit.
This year of my life I have lived in community with all of you. You each connect me to my truest self, the place where I can drink from my holy peace. And so I invite you to this year’s