Musings from the Spiritual Path

I remember in 1991 when I first visited Seattle on a family vacation how radiant and lush the landscape and views were.  I had travelled many parts of the globe by then, and yet touching down here at that time, I felt a deep sense of home.  The land whispered to me, “Come back”.

It took eight more years, a marriage, a divorce, a graduate degree and being introduced to Reiki before I was ‘ready’ to begin to grow roots here.  This internal preparation with external transition was the first manifestation of my spiritual journey.

The first decade in Seattle was about clarifying my vocational vision and stepping into the role of leader in establishing the Reiki Training Program.  Along that path I explored  much of the NW back country and became attuned to the seasons and weather here.  My artist self gained traction through various creative pursuits.  I travelled through Asia and South America with expanded awareness of other healing traditions.

Personal relationships ended, deepened or started anew.  My Reiki work and fellowship began to expand with the publication of my first book and guided meditation CDs.

Over this last almost-decade, a whole new spiritual path has begun.  It did require me to professionally ‘own’ both my counseling and Reiki paths with the state’s requirement of licensure.  That path has provided me with a whole other world of gratifying healing work and experience I never would have gotten from the Reiki path alone.

My home went through multiple transitions from becoming a public workshop and healing space for students and clients into a humble but creative ceramic arts studio.  Family health crises dominated these years, but developing sober strategies enabled an ability to drop further into witnessing.  Despite those tragedies, travel also occurred, to the Mediterranean and all throughout the Baltic.

Again, personal relationships ended, deepened or started anew.

I’m taking a moment today to just catch my breath, looking back with clarity and looking forward with fresh and curious eyes as to what lays in store.  I couldn’t possibly have predicted any of the profound experiences I am grateful to have had when I first walked this land.

I am prepared to be surprised at what comes next.  In gratitude for the journey…..

Image credit

Copyright 2017 Eileen Dey Wurst

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Approaching Zenith Part 2

Continued from Part I

She took my hand and looked up at me.  “My name is Lily’, the 7 year old, one-eyed Brahmin priestess replied in a calm and gentle manner.

Her hand in mine, Lily guided me to the top of several stairs going above the street.  We stepped onto what looked like a large brown oval doormat.  It felt solid.  Then it quietly began to hum.

The doormat dropped down slowly.  A few inches above the street, it quietly levitated forward.   Surprisingly I remained standing as it started to move forward slowly.

Lily commented, “The Pedestrian sends an ultrasonic signal to your inner ear to assist in maintaining balance’.

“I’m sorry, what pedestrian?  That one there in front of us?”, I questioned, nodding ahead to the  man/woman  floating on another oval.

“We are standing on the Pedestrian”, Lily replied, calmly looking at me. “It’s the way you move through and exist in the City now.”

Attempting to catch my breath, “Lily, I’m sorry, but you are going to have to give me some time to get used to this New Way.  It was a just a few years ago I walked into that restaurant.  Now I am flying through the same street and everything looks like The Jetsons meets Blade Runner.

My heart was pounding as we glided along in the air, my hair to fluttering alongside my face.  A Reggae beat and tune started to emit from the floor mat.  It was repetitive, cool and soothing.  The music immediately started to calm my heart and relax my breath.  I could feel myself more comfortable and a thought dawned on me:

“Let me guess, Lily, the music is specially calibrated to adjust to my heart rate and recognizes when to broadcast more soothing rhythms for the passenger, right?  I am technically floating on a Surround Sound Fitbit.” I shook my head and sighed in disbelief.

“Yes, you are being biochemically altered to a slower heart rate by the interpretive music interface on the Pedestrian”, Lily chimed.

We floated along some more and as we glided further down, I noticed that fellow ‘passengers’ were rather healthy looking, but that there weren’t any homeless people amongst the group.  Passing a park, it was clean and people were out enjoying themselves.

“Lily, where are the homeless people?”, I hesitantly asked.

Lily responded, “All the research and development of wireless-enabled wearable technology lead the city to mandate that citizens and tourists purchase Pedestrians in order to live, visit and/or work in the city, thereby eliminating the excessive homeless population that was here when you went to sleep.  SEATTLE AUTHORIZED CIVILIAN USE or SACU was the acronym for the designated boundaries of the city of Seattle.  Each individual Pedestrian could interpret the borders of the city via WiFi interface.

I again felt that tightness in my chest and sense of overwhelming astonishment.  I felt and saw with wide eyes what had become of the society I had known.  I looked around at all the people and children who were floating along with me or floating toward me on the other side of the street.

Hesitantly, I asked, “So everyone flying around us had to, um, PAY for their Pedestrian, to be here right now?!”, I exclaimed.

Lily nodded, “Yes.  The citizens petitioned it to the New Mayor, and it was enacted just last year.  To prevent fraud, each Pedestrian is registered and operates biometrically with their own unique user identity.  Everyone around us has to have a legitimate home AND work address AND proof of income to be here right now”.

To be continued soon….

Copyright 2017 Eileen Dey

 

Approaching Zenith part 1

This is the first part of a short story inspired by a dream I had just last night.  It starts out in present day Seattle.

I had a lot of bags I was carrying, and was having difficulty with managing them as I was walking down the street in the International District of Seattle.  As I was walking a storm was approaching and a tremendous downpour occurred.  I went into an Indian restaurant for shelter.  It was very festive and people were welcoming.  The ambient lights were pink, green and gold.  Many people were dressed in traditional garments, saari  and tunics.  The curry and saffron aromas were pungent.  There was sitar music playing in the background.

A young Indian girl, in a long spring green dress, about 4 years old, came over to me and was quite cute and let me hold her (she stood on top of me), her mother was there and looking over, approvingly.

The girl asked me, ‘Do you want to sleep?’.  I said ‘Yes, I am quite tired.’

And 3 years later I woke up.  The girl was now about 7 years old, still standing over me, now in a royal blue dress and said to me on waking , ‘Well, that took awhile’.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but now she only had one eye, and it was very dark and piercing.  The other eye was seen shut.  I realized she was more of a brahmin, a priest, than a young girl.  She had put a spell or charm on me.

The Indian restaurant was the same, it was festive with the same low lighting, sounds and smells.  But there were some new people there dressed in more  modern tight clothing.  Men and women looked ‘blended’ to me.  It seemed transgender had apparently become the norm.  There were men who had anatomically become women and vice versa.

Patrons were dining and going about their business.  The fact that I had just woken up after 3 years didn’t seem to be a big deal to anyone.

I asked the girl if I had been in the restaurant the whole time, she nodded yes.

Then I had the panicky thought that my friends and family didn’t know where I was or what had happened to me.

I got up, and felt quite dizzy, and also noticed my contacts were still in my eyes!  I took them out and the girl gave me drops to clear them.  When I put them back in, I could see clearer.

As I walked toward the exit to the restaurant, I was filled with dread.

I opened the door and saw that the street I was on was now lined with tall apartment and office buildings.

The Indian restaurant seemed to be the only such establishment left on a block of seemingly gray and dark brown buildings.

A bus floated above the street a few inches, quietly passing by.  On it’s side it read ‘Take the next shuttle to Mars’.

The little girl came up beside me and said, ‘Let me show you the way’.

To be continued….

Copyright Eileen Dey 2017

Witnessing Silence

The physical and emotional memories of the ear infections I got as a kid are now processing themselves.  It’s trauma and pain I’ve blocked out for most of my life, partly because those illnesses are a part of childhood, partly because I don’t want to remember what they were like.

But now, as an adult, after suffering through this season’s flu, I’m moving through a healing journey that is bringing up these old memories.

I don’t have a memory of my first ear infection, but I am sure if I did some deep bodywork, it might come up.  I remember all the ones that came after, because I knew what was in store for me:  Hours and hours of having terrible pain in my ears, loud and relentless sounds of the beating of my heart through my head.  The outside world would sound distant and far away.  I could hear sounds, but they were so muted.   I would feel locked in, alone and scared.  It was tough.  Each infection lasted days.  Mom helped, taking me to the doctor, getting the medications.  But the feeling of being shut out from the world, because I couldn’t hear, because I was in pain used to just bring me to a state of almost emotional detachment.  It was almost too much to bear each time.

Currently, I am left with a temporary hearing deficit at about 50 percent of what I normally hear following this recent illness.   The ear pain wasn’t as great as a before, but the silence that I am hearing is familiar territory.

Only now, with twenty plus years of a spiritual practice, the emotional detachment I am experiencing is actually a relief.

I could choose to grieve this loss or I can embrace it at part of a new experience.  I don’t know where it will lead, and I’m not fully recovered from my illness, so this all may resolve in a week’s time.  Or not.

I realize how much my senses have enabled me to navigate this reality.  Without full hearing, I have more freedom to actually move through the world.  I am spending less time having to interpret and figure out sounds, whether conscious or not.  There is a lot of noise in this world, I realize, and not being able to hear it all is quite peaceful.

I can hear people speaking  to me in person so that I can continue to do my work, to teach, to counsel, to assist.  Phone calls are harder.  The clarity of the voice is not there as it is in person.  Music is harder to tolerate because the note ranges are much flatter, and the familiar songs sound kind of ‘canned’ or ‘tinny’.  Live music seems better, the ability to ‘feel’ the sound helps me hear it better.

But I am newly walking in this more quiet world.  As I continue on this unexpected journey, I will be curious to see what other observations I witness and experience.

If you’ve had experience with an illness-induced hearing loss or any resources you think would be of assistance, please feel free to share.

Eileen Dey Wurst Copyright 2017

1 Minute Mind Cleanse

I invite you to take this time to go deep within.  Take a breath.  Honor this moment and this pause.  The world at large going on around you is still going on, regardless of how you feel about it.

I stumbled across a beautiful project that is a collection of positive words from around the world.  Take a look at some of these concepts.  They offer fresh perspective.

This is what you can control: what occupies your thoughts.  What is feeding your thoughts?  External stimuli?  How does it effect you in this moment.  Come back to that pause.

This is not a way of backing out of the reality that is our new world, our new America.  But it is to say, where are we focusing our energy on.  What are we getting obsessed about?  I write and post this on social media with the hope that you will read it and it can offer an opportunity for your own mind to take a break from all the other news articles, posts, rants and feelings that are swirling around you.

If you keep projecting out into the future you are technically ‘future tripping’.  It’s a very slippery slope.  You project your hopes, dreams fears out into the future and you start to make it so.  Thoughts are things.  With enough focus, you can eve create your own future with your thoughts.

So it’s very important at this time to have more purity of thought.  Meditation is one way to achieve this, as is self-Reiki.  Feeding the mind with other words, phrase, images.  It requires the act of unplugging from the main currents of information.

Words have vibration.  My hope is to create words that promote loving-kindness and offer a safe harbor from the other words, phrases and thought forms being generated at this time.

Special thanks to Dr. Loma’s project of postivie lexicography.

Photo credit  Copyright 2017 Eileen Dey Wurst

Hippie in a Hazmat Suit

The first year Obamacare was offered I didn’t have to pay for insurance because of my income at the time.  As my practice has grown, I’ve had to adopt and pay a low monthly fee with a high deductible.  Emergency coverage it’s called.  Many of us who are practitioners have it.  Is it ideal?  What’s the alternative under our current health care system now undergoing massive change?  Pay almost one-thousand dollars/month for a premium insurance carrier.  How does a self-employed wellness practitioner making a low-middle class income year afford that?

I’ve wrestled with that issue long before Obamacare.  I haven’t really had to use the emergency coverage.  I’m basically a pretty healthy person with a pretty healthy lifestyle.

I work in the wellness profession and usually do monthly trades with other practitioners for services as needed:  acupuncture, massage, cranio sacral, etc.  I pay out-of-pocket for dental services, use Planned Parenthood for Ob-gyn, take vitamins and herbs, do lots of Reiki, etc.

And then I got the 2017 flu.  It’s made me re-think my health care structure.

I’ve suffered major losses in my family and life over the last 3 months and combined with subsequent airplane trips out-of-state, I was probably setting my immunity up for some failure.  Here’s my interpretation of this event and how someone with basic emergency medical coverage navigates such an ordeal:

Thursday 1/19 Ground Zero:  Flu explodes in my body causing massive shaking and chills, fever, sweating and nausea throughout the day.  Only by contacting 4 Reiki practitioners I know to send me distant Reiki combined with a crystal-infused heating pad and some aceitomyophen did the chills seize for some time.  I was completely bed bound.

Friday 1/20 Calm before the storm:  Awoke feeling strangely refreshed, like I had a whole body cleanse.  Tired, but not sick like yesterday.  Reiki is powerful, so I assumed I was well enough to go into work, listen to the inauguration and persevere.  I was tired and rested that evening.  I assumed perhaps this was a 24 hour flu.

Saturday-Sunday 1/21-22 Powering through weekend:  The weekend I had two workshops scheduled that had been rescheduled before due to family crises. So I was going to complete them regardless of how tired I felt.  I was able to manage my symptoms of cough and fatigue only because I knew Monday I had off to rest.

Monday 1/23-Almost complete rest day.  Off cold medication for the whole day, so lots of coughing, but giving immunity chance to repair.  Tired.  Low appetite.  Started to notice ear draining fluid.  Some concern as have had a history of multiple prior ear infections resulting in compromised ear canals.  Should I go to doctor?  Not sure.

Tuesday 1/24-Compromised ear now unable to hear.  Full congestion ear/nose/throat.  Fatigue.  Only a few clients to see later in day, but now getting concerned about hearing.  By end of day both ears quite congested.  Contemplate my options, go to ER or Urgent Care (only open in morning).  Decide on Urgent Care because ER would just mean a longer wait.

Wednesday 1/25 5:30am  Still exhausted but head to Urgent Care to get antibiotics for ear infection.  Greeted by long-haired physician’s assistant in almost full Hazmat gear with mask/gloves.  Intimidated.  Realized in that moment that the healthcare structure I had created for myself was not adequate.

Found article online about a window of time during the flu for preventing hearing loss, especially in patients such as myself with compromised ear canals.  My goal for the day becomes to find an otolaryngologist (ENT) who can prescribe me sterioids to reduce the swelling of my Eustachian tubes (ear canals) in order to prevent permanent hearing loss.  I find this out through Google, not Urgent Care.

The Hippie in a Hazmat Suit prescribed antibiotics for my infected ear, so get that going while my friend and I attempt to find the lone gunman ENT Doctor in Seattle available that day.  It’s a needle in a haystack.  So many ENTs, are in partnership with hospitals or clinics, with their own insurance carriers and policies.

I offer cash for services and say I have no insurance to providers because I realize that:  My emergency insurance is a barrier into getting adequate care that is needed immediately.  This is the irony of the whole day

The lone gunman, or should I say lone gunwoman is found, has one appointment open later in the day all the way across town.  She takes cash or check.  The ENT has been doing her specialty for decades.  Within seconds she can diagnose and see what is wrong with my ear canals and writes a prescription for the steroids.  It is the perfect match of doctor and patient.  I pay her $217 cash.  The Urgent Care visit was $135. Approximately $375 with the prescriptions.

And I’m not out of the woods yet.  Today, one week after this whole flu journey started, I have much more hearing back, but it’s only the first day on medication.  I am cautiously optimistic that more hearing will return.  Perhaps another follow-up visit to the ENT is needed.  Hopefully not more than that.

And then lets assume once I am fully recovered, no other malady effects me for the rest of the year.  My out-of-pocket expenditures might be less that $500.

I can afford that and the $250 monthly emergency medical coverage fees.  But not much more. And that’s just me.  Plenty of self-employed wellness practitioners I know do not even have the emergency medical coverage.

What this shows me is that in dismantling Obamacare, one way of thinking how we can rebuild the structure might involve the creation of a Health Savings Account (HSA), as the new administration has mentioned.  Would they be able to put in half, and we come up with the other half?  That’s an idea.   Or, they provide us with $2-10K/year depending on our family size and we pay for the emergency medical coverage (EMC)?  And then, they would need to dismantle all the other private insurance companies.   EMC would just becomes the insurance carrier.  We get to go to whom we want to because for our day-to-day we are paying out-of-pocket with the HSA.

These other private insurance carriers, many of whom I am actually a mental health provider for, are complex, broken, disingenuous systems.  EMC does not work within them.

I am looking forward to a new way of health care developing in this country.

And I’m also looking forward to my hearing coming back!

Thoughts, comments welcome!

Copyright 2017 Eileen Dey Wurst

 

Releasing Ritual for 2017

To transform old energy, I am writing down on slips of paper the things that were obstacles, challenges, frustrations and disappointments.  They go into the pile to be burned.  I’m not saying that I didn’t learn from those things, and will continue to learn from them, but they didn’t necessarily help the forward motion of light and love in the world.  So they are to get turned into something new that can be beneficial to the planet at this time.

For instance, I have had to deal with various mean-spirited and self-centered people this year who take no responsibility for lashing out and dumping their anger onto me.  Being the sensitive individual that I am, I can’t help but be effected.

I have spent my whole adult life as a counselor and Reiki practitioner cultivating compassion and being considerate, to the best of my ability.  However, when someone has been verbally abusive or expressing repulsive statements to me, that is not my responsibility to own.  I define my boundaries and witness their bad behavior from my own perspective.  This is my world, this is theirs.  I am sorry they have not had the opportunity, willingness or otherwise to see things in a different light, but I am not responsible for their bad behavior.

The following is a guideline for how I begin to transform the accumulated energetic debris through the release ritual:

1.  On one slip of paper I write what needs to be released from my energy field.  In this instance: ‘ Bad Behavior of Mean-Spirited Person/People’.

2. Then I say out loud: “I burn away your attempt to harm me and in it’s place I receive the Universal love and light and support that is Reiki”.  I burn the slip of paper.

3.  Finally, I say:  “Reiki has no judgement, it only honors and respects the practitioner and receiver.  I allow myself to receive that love and light. It is non-judgemental and only seeks to raise my vibration.  It does not take away from me but adds to my being.  In that I have the opportunity to move toward wholeness.  I promote my own self-healing.  I turn away from your direct attack and step aside into the flow.  In the flow is peace, truth, my essence.  These are eternal and nothing you can do or say can effect that integrity.  This is my power.  You cannot effect my essence.  I am a Divine Being of Light on this Planet and with that knowing of my own personal truth, you cannot prevent me from shining that into the world.  My choice is compassion and benevolence.  I bestow peace and love.  I bestow peace and love.  I am sorry you cannot see or honor that, but I walk the path released in that Truth.”

For each obstacle, disappointment or frustration that is still within my energy field (it’s an extensive inventory for the year, believe me!), I tailor steps 1-3 accordingly.

But as I’m doing the inventory, I might find that there were some of those things that were helpful after all, so they might just need further integration.  And of course, in doing the inventory, there are many things that contributed to light, love and abundance.

I write all these things, the things that still need integration or the things that were very positive on slips of paper and put them in a ‘Blessing Bowl’.  It’s a bowl I have made in mt pottery studio.  In the next year I will be creating bowls for purchase through my pottery studio.

Those statements in the Blessing Bowl receive the Divine Light of Reiko for the new year ahead and for greater transformation and evolution.

Copyright 2016 Eileen Dey Wurst

Creating more Playborhoods

Inspired by this article of the Playborhood concept for kids and neighborhoods, I am reminded of my own experience when I was a kid, growing up in Clifton, NJ, a suburb of Manhattan.

After school was spent over my friends’ house, 3 brothers: Mike, Daniel and Jeremy.  Their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lee had devoted themselves to their children and creating an environment both inside and outside their home where their children and their friends could learn, discover and play.  They were teachers by profession and their love of children was palpable.

In their backyard, Mr. Lee had build a wooden fort, with a ladder to climb u to the top and in the ‘basement’ of the fort was a sandbox.

I remember spending hours in that sandbox in the summer, using a colander to sift the sand to make it as fine a powder as I possibly could.  I was and am always fascinated with texture, nature and the earth.

The brothers would join me for awhile, but they were more interested in climbing up and on the fort, or playing on the swingset nearby.

In the humid heat of a NJ summer, their outdoor pool was also a soothing retreat.

But it wasn’t just their backyard that was a playground on my street, our street itself, St. James Place, also became our world to kick ball, pop tar bubbles in the summer heat or roller skate down.

There were no ‘scheduled’ playdates, they just happened, after school or on the weekend.  We were pretty much left to our own devices.  Our parents would call us in for meals and such and of course, when it got dark, we were expected to be home.

But we had freedom to discover ourselves through play.

In the cooler months, we retreated inside their home to the basement rec room.  There were legos, building blocks, Lincoln logs and in the back room, Mr. Lee had set up his model railroad.

There was also an Apple computer with very early ‘video games’.  There was a haunted house game we would play, but the computer wasn’t the sole focus of what we did.  And of course, these were different times.  We weren’t hooked in to the internet.

It was more fun to create our own worlds with the other toys that we could get our hands on.

I am really grateful for that experience.  I wonder, those reading this, did you have a Playborhood growing up?

For less depression avoid politics

  I know tonight is the final presidential debate.  I would seriously advise avoiding watching the telecast or engaging in social media to keep your own emotional state in balance.

As a counselor, I have witnessed seasonal depression as the seasons change.  However, this year, it is magnified by the divisive politics our country is engaged in.

There are many other ways of learning about what has been going on politically, and I encourage reading rather than watching.

Watching TV broadcast of the debates or worse, edited versions blasted on social media goes directly into your subconscious.  The written word allows us to take time to digest.  Images are like an instant injection of both hatred and fear.

If you are already struggling with depression, or difficulties in life, please be mindful of your media consumption.

This is an extreme act of self-care, disconnecting from any direct and easy link to news.

Dearly Departed 10/30

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$25.00

Sunday, October 30, 2016 – 6:00pm – 9:00pm

In the time that we will have together, psychic medium Roman Delgado will open up to the energies of the departed and pass on messages of healing and closure from the other side to the audience.  Roman Delgado is a psychic medium with over 20yrs of experience working as a psychic. He has a strong background on the healing arts, shamanic healing and folk magical practices. His background colors his style to focus greatly on helping his clients find heal, closure and perspective.

We will follow this special evening with a spooky Reiki circle!

Price: $25.00. 5701 3rd Ave S