Explaining Myself

(Editorial aside)

‘What drew you to things like Reiki and Tarot?’ I am asked.

I thought I would be answering this question later on, when I reach a place in my memoir where I become more fully myself. But then I realised that what I have in mind will be more the ‘how’ than the ‘why’.

When I reflect on the why, I realise that I am not a person who does things for reasons. (Not the most important things, and not rational reasons.) I never have been. Instead I operate by intuition and follow the guidance I receive.

I had thought the ‘why’ was apparent in what I have written. In a way, the how IS the why: for me indistinguishable, as the ‘why’ is so much a given. I was assuming – as one does – that my personal experiences must be common and widespread. Perhaps, after all, not everyone is conscious of guidance from birth, and trusts it?

It’s not a blind trust. I’m consciously aware of energy, and of different energies. I don't know that I could always describe it in words that would give anyone else an accurate impression, but I ‘get’ the particular flavour of any energy. They don't shout at me; it’s a background consciousness, like an extra sense.

We don't usually stop to think about how amazing it is to be able to see, touch, etc.; we just see and touch. And so I just apprehend energy, as a matter of course. It’s easy to know who and what to trust. Even during the growing-up years when I was ‘shut down' as I’ve described, I had this inner knowing. Sometimes, when I was younger, I ignored the inner voice – from wishful thinking, or from having been taught to be extremely polite – but it was still there.

Impossible to explain to others!

‘My dead friend came to be beside me while I was waiting for my train. He was happy and loving. He was in the shape of a small, square, tightly compressed brown box….’

And then there are the ones – most of the time – with no visuals at all.

(I admit, the small brown box was startling, and I have no idea what it signified; but the feeling of his distinctive energy was the same as it had been in life, and that’s how I knew.)

My personal guides, guardians and angels have their own energy signatures, which include the quality of being trustworthy. So I seldom question my guidance.

It can come in the form of sudden impulses. I don't always discover why it suddenly becomes imperative to use this street instead of that (the one I had planned to use). Sometimes it does become apparent – I bump into someone special just when I or they need to connect, or I come across a shop with an item I’ve been wanting. When it’s not apparent, I think it must be protective, to avoid some accident or mishap I was headed towards.

There are times when I double-check by kinesiology testing, or with a pendulum (usually when the guidance contradicts my wishful thinking). There are other times when it’s essential to act NOW, without hesitation. Luckily I can feel the difference.

I’ve described how various Tarot readers came into my life, and how a Major Arcana deck was given to me by Spirit. So I started playing with the cards. I think I also explained that a Tarot reader I knew did a reading for me in which she predicted that I myself would become highly psychic.

As for the Reiki, that too was a natural-seeming progression, from experiencing Reiki treatments to seeing an ad for Beth Gray’s classes and getting a huge, irrational conviction that this was for me.

When I was guided to do both these things professionally after we moved to Three Bridges, it felt daring but also right.

My personal development work with Landmark Education and my spiritual work with the Andronicus Foundation enhanced my intuitive faculties and my clarity in knowing what was right for me, but life had always been inherently magical even when I tried to suppress that aspect.

My passion is poetry and that has been my vocation since the age of seven. Katherine (the friend I met in the New Age shop at Elsternwick) once said to me, about me, 'Poetry is what you do. Reiki is what you are.' At the time I didn't get it, thinking she incorrectly devalued the poetry by comparison, but now I see what she was trying to convey. Psychic abilities and magic and other-worldly, other-dimensional realities have always been part of the fabric of my life, and of me.

Healing and metaphysical counselling have become secondary vocations. (I have certificates of Mastery in both, including a number of healing modalities in addition to the Reiki which I first learned.) I've always had an innate impetus to heal whatever I could; to ’save the world’ not in a preachy but an energetic / magical / healing kind of way (including of course practical / material / physical ways of looking after the environment). I’ve always experienced the planet as alive and sentient, as much as everything on it.

With such a background, I could almost say there was no ’why’ when I answered the call to learn both Reiki and Tarot – or that this background itself was the why. At the time they were the next things to do, and were quite emphatically put in my way, in a manner I instinctively trusted.

I guess I live my life taking leaps of faith.