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Guest Post: A Level in Reiki by Misha

May 3, 2018 by Claire Fitzpatrick

In March, I tought my first Reiki 1 class. I tought my first Reiki class at any time, anywhere.

Sometimes the Universe gives you clues. The Universe began giving me clues in the form of questions by my patients, friends, and colleagues about the nature of Reiki.

There is a lot of misinformation floating about the Internet and the world about its nature, and its process. In truth, I didn’t understand the nature of Reiki until I was introduced to it.

Knowledge vs attunement

I was attuned in 2005 and 2006 by two separate Reiki masters. The first was a younger, Western teacher who gave me little to no introduction. The second was a Grand Master of the original lineage, who was fiercely strict about the seriousness of the training and who came from an Eastern point of view (Indian).

Both tought me a lot. Neither tought me what I needed to experience on my own. And that’s the thing. Because we are each a different energy signature, Reiki is going to be different in each of us.

Reiki 1 is your Reiki

Reiki 1 is “my” Reiki, as much as my silent oberver is me. So Reiki 1 is the attunement to your Reiki, that which your silent observer understands and with which it can commune.

I am a Western-trained chiropractor. My education is rigorous and physical, and requires a keen and astute knowledge of the human body and its processes.

Reiki does not require this, per se. But for a Westerner, understanding the energetic nature of life is. And this is often difficult for Western minds to wrap their heads around.

The good thing about Reiki is that you don’t need 4-5 years of anatomy, physiology, neurology, chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, biomechanis, kinesiology, and chiropractic training and internship to use it to help improve your life.

Reiki 1 It is something that people can, and likely should, use every day for themselves. One needn’t go further than Reiki 1 to improve their lives, and by extension of the self, the lives around them.

Not cheaply achieved

It took me many years to understand and use the power of Reiki 1-3 to its best benefits. During this period, I did not feel ready to share my trials and errors.

Until the questions started coming last winter, I just quietly used it and learned from it.

Then that little voice in my head, the one with the good ideas that are also uncomfortable ideas, started poking me. “It’s time.”

My two students

When recruiting students, I often recruit through discouragement. I find that, if you make something less romantic, and reveal that it will actually take some work and will shift you as a person, one weeds out those who are not really interested in the product of study.

So after a discouraging introductory process, two people remained who wanted to know more.

So I tought my experience and my perspective of Reiki 1, and I had the blessing of attuning them. It was a very moving experience for us all.

Misha, one of my students, wrote about the experience in a candid manner that I would not have been able to express in 2005. I thought it was important to share, for prospective Reiki students and Reiki teachers alike. So I asked if It would be all right to post here, and Misha graciously accepted.

The following is a blog post that you can find on Misha’s blog:

A level in Reiki

Misha

2018-04-07 11:23

A few weeks ago I received my Reiki level one attunement. From conversations I had later, I learned that most people are vaguely aware of it as “some kind of laying on of hands” at best. I’ll first give a short explanation, and then tell you about the experience.

What?

So, what is Reiki, without going into as much detail as the two days of class I had? First, what’s energy work? If you’re into meditation at all, you’ve probably encountered some guided meditations that asked you to move your breath into parts of your body where your airways don’t go. What you’re moving around isn’t literal air but a type of energy. There are many types of energy other than “breath”, which all feel different from each other. Reiki is one of those, and comes from an outside source. There is a methodology to use it to assist healing in the broadest sense of the word. A set of principles to live by is part of the methodology (order and wording vary):

Just for today, I will live the attitude of gratitude.
Just for today, I will not worry.
Just for today, I will not anger.
Just for today, I will do my work honestly.
Just for today, I will show love and respect for every living thing.

I like the “just for today” part a lot, it’s very… mindful actually. It also means a bad day isn’t a complete disaster, one can always try again tomorrow.

Why?

I was curious about Reiki because I learned some energy work as a child (and figured things out on my own from there), but don’t remember who or where from. I wanted to know if that perhaps was Reiki, and now I know the answer to that is “no”. I also want to learn energy work and meditation methods that are known to be safe, because I will be able to help others with those. Of what I figured out on my own, I know for sure that some practices are unsafe, but not what is actually definitely safe for everyone’s mental health.

What was it like?

I decided to go into it with a clear and open mind, in other words I did not try to learn everything in advance on the web. This did mean I didn’t know about the three weeks of daily one hour and a half practice on oneself after attunement. If you want to learn Reiki too, you have now been warned of that 🙂 .

Lots of coincidences!

The first day was my birthday. A friend wrote to me in her birthday card that she hoped there would be many attractive women for me to practice on. I later told her I would be practicing on someone extremely sexy for the next three weeks.The second day was new moon, to be more precise the day on which the (invisible) moon sets after the sun again. I try to celebrate that day every month, something about new beginnings, I’ll write about that another time.When I found out my now-teacher is a Reiki master and asked if she was planning to teach soon, I didn’t know she had not done so before. She did have lessons planned because someone else had asked her! If I understood correctly she rejected a few potential students for not being serious enough, leaving just me and the other.Learning anything together with one other student is a special, intimate experience, especially when it’s someone you instantly like and quickly develop a feeling of understanding for. I hope we become friends.

Can’t avoid that spirit work

I try not to talk about spirit work. I really do, because I don’t want to encourage anyone to try it. Yes, I learned very much from it, but it has also been incredibly upsetting at times. Unfortunately, it’s so interwoven with energy work that I had to come out of that closet, because I couldn’t predict if anything weird might happen (it didn’t).This got me the question “why do you do that?” twice, which is difficult to answer in the moment. Imagine you find a puppy with a broken leg and take it to the vet. Nobody claims the puppy, so you pay the bill and adopt it. You now have a dog. If someone asks you “why did you get a dog?”, well, why did you? One can make up explanations after the fact with words like “compassion”, “kindness”, “sense of justice”, “sense of responsibility”, but I think it’s healthier to leave those words for other people to describe me than to make them part of a self image I use to reason from to decide what to do in any situation. When I find a task, no matter how odd, that clearly needs doing in front of me, I do it.

Day one

We were taught a lot connecting Reiki to western science and mysticism (not sure if I’m using the right word there). It felt like being back at university. If one is not an energy worker yet, all this would help to accept Reiki as something that could be real. For me, it was still very interesting.

Day two

This was a day of showing the method (hand positions), personal conversations, meditation, and the attunement! Also, dinner 🙂 . Reiki feels wonderful and warm, and intense when first getting to know it.

The next days

Life can become wild after Reiki attunement, I certainly had a few rough days in which things changed for the better in friendships. It’s hard to say if there’s a cause and effect, because things weren’t calm in the week before either.I can say with certainty that I feel better. Meditation is a bit easier, and my preferred posture is now one that fits feeling comfortable in my environment. Straight back, low shoulders, small steps, exactly what I remember being corrected into and being unable to keep up. Posture, body language, can be caused by how one feels. It’s useless to try to correct the symptom without addressing the cause.

And now?

Reiki level 2, for sure, sometime. First, I think I found a reasonably short track for going from informally knowing about mindfulness to being a mindfulness trainer. It’s on a different end of a spectrum, but again it’s a known safe practice to learn so I can help others.

Sometimes Healing Hurts, Pt. 1

January 30, 2018 by Claire Fitzpatrick

“There is no process that does not require time.” — 6th Chiropractic Principle, Ralph W. Stevenson, D.C.

Did I ever tell you how I came to chiropractic? I actually think I have, but I’ll tell you again.

I was a dumb teenage kid and I got into a lot of car accidents. I walked away from them, but my car did not.

Unlike a car, I have the ability to heal. That’s why I took for granted that I was okay.

But I wasn’t okay. I had jolted my spine into misalignment. I just didn’t know it because I didn’t have pain.

High school gave way to college, and college in North Carolina meant that I had to run two miles in twelve minutes in order to graduate.

“Um…what?”

Two miles in twelve minutes. Running.

That was PE 101. We called it PE run-oh-run.

(I actually just went to my alma mater’s web page to see if this is still the case. Oh my gosh; you kids have it so lucky. You get to do everything from shag dancing to integral yoga to fencing now! https://uncw.edu/shahs/facetofacelabs.html)

In 1984, at 18, I was a pack-a-day smoker who imbibed beer, wine, and double Big Macs and Whoppers on a regular basis. My regular breakfast was Captain Crunch on a pillow of soft-serve ice cream. My idea of a healthy lunch was chicken salad on toasted white bread. My idea of fun was head-banging at the local live rock bar, watching General Hospital and Mighty Mouse, and playing drinking games with the other meatheads like me.

I most certainly didn’t run.

I barely walked. Needless to say, I had a damn hard time moving my rear-end.

Something began happening to me, though. My left leg went numb.

It was the darndest thing. There was no sensation in a section of my left lower leg. I could pinch and punch it, but nothing.

I went to see the doctor about it, who recommended an orthopedist, who recommended a physical therapist.

Wrong target. Wrong therapy.

Three times a week for three months, I received electric stim and ultrasound on my leg. For three months, there was no change.

Then, it was winter break. I went home to New York and all was well.

One day during the trip, I took a bus to the City with my mother. We were going to visit my sister, who managed a Pizzaria Uno on 2nd Avenue at the time.

My back was achy. I remember it getting worse and worse all the way to the City. By the time we got to the restaurant, my pain was so great that I had to go to the bathroom. I was hyperventilating. Then my legs gave out.

I was face down on the black and white tiles of a Pizzaria Uno bathroom in New York City, 1985. That’s when chiropractic came into my life.

When You First Realize How Much You Need A Healthy Spine

My mother gave me some ibuprophin; eventually, I could stand — wobbly — again. My mother brought me to her chiropractor, who took xrays of my spine.

I had something called an L5 spondylolisthesis. Spon-dee-low-lith-s-thees-iss. It most likely began with a pars interarticularis defect that occurred on L5 left lamina earlier in life. A-pars-inter-arti-cu…

Basically, I had a break in one of my low back vertebrae — might have happened when I was a kid — that contributed to an instability in my low back. Eventually, one of my vertebrae moved a bit forward over my other one.

Here’s what a spondylolithesis looks like.

I had that picture on the right.

Because my vertebrae was so far out of alignment, the nerves that come out at that level and go down my legs were impinged. Hence the numbness in my leg that the orthopedist and the physical therapist missed.

The problem wasn’t in my leg. The problem was in my spine.

The break in the vertebrae was an old break. The misalignment occurred over time. My chiropractor let me know that this fix was going to take time.

What kind of time?

Months. Maybe even over a year.

My youth would help me beat it, but I had to clean up my lifestyle if I wanted it to be quicker (unfortunately, I didn’t clean up my lifestyle. It took longer).

Because I was a student in North Carolina, he found a chiropractor for me near the college and referred my case there.

But before I did, because it was scheduled, I went for a follow up to the orthopedist and told him what the chiropractors found. He said, “Chiropractors are quacks. Don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they’re doing. I’m going to set you up for six months of traction.”

Hmmm.

Chiropractic adjustments with people who found the cause of my problem or six-months of traction with someone who didn’t even think to look at my spine, who had made no difference at all before I lay face down on a bathroom floor in New York City?

I said TTFN to my orthopedist and began a nine-month journey of 3 times a week care with my chiropractor.

It wasn’t easy. Some days were more painful than others. Some weeks there was no change. Some weeks were all right.

Eventually, I noticed that sensation had returned to my leg. Then my spine got stronger and felt better. I had finally graduated to maintenance care.

Years went by.

Life happened, life happened some more — in fact, 15 years of life happened, and finally I decided that I wanted to be a chiropractor.

That’s a WHOLE other story. More years, more life.

I’ll tell you about it next time.

Guest Post: Jack Tricarico on Tai Chi

June 26, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

I’ve known Jack Tricarico for going on three and a half years now.

Jack is an accomplished painter and poet from New York City. He also teaches tai chi and meditation. He is turning 80 next month.

Since I’ve known him, he has touted the practice of tai chi, and credited it with saving his sanity and his life on many occasions.

I asked Jack to contribute his story, that it would touch the life of someone who needed to hear it; and he very generously obliged.

When you read his story, you may think that Jack is an understated fellow. On the contrary; his personality is big and his talent wide. His work is anything but understated!

I highly encourage you to get to know him and his work. Links are provided below.

By the way: the teacher who introduced Jack to tai chi, Eddie Rodriguez, is also a talented massage therapist on New York City’s West Side,

I refer patients to Eddie very often. A link to Eddie is below as well.

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Jack’s Story

In the year of 1988, while teaching drawing and painting to high school students at an after-school program in Manhattan, I met a young man named Eddie Rodriguez; who, at the age of 17, was already a black belt in karate, and knowledgeable of other martial art systems.

After the program ended Eddie asked me if I wanted to learn karate. I had never practiced a martial art form before then except boxing in my adolescence which I enjoyed, but had no talent for.

After a few months of practicing karate, I became bored and quit.

Shortly after Eddie again asked me if I wanted to learn tai chi, which he thought I might be better suited for.

He was right. At the time, I had a close friend who practiced tai chi also, and it appeared to be a discipline I might enjoy learning because it looked so profoundly meditative when I watched him do it.

Before that, I had practiced yoga for a couple of years and Zen meditation sporadically. I enjoyed these disciplines for both the calmness and the energy they produced.

So, in July of 1989, at the age of 51, I began learning the Kuang Ping form of tai chi, an early Yang style technique, from Eddie.

During this time, I was in the midst of an emotionally turbulent relationship with a woman I was nevertheless rapturously in love with.

Practicing tai chi for a couple of hours daily enabled me to maintain some semblance of sanity throughout this affair.

The practice utterly reduced the stress of the continual conflict that went on, sometimes edging toward violence, between my lover and I.

A year after that relationship ended, I met someone else who I eventually married.

Since then, I have learned 3 more tai chi forms: the short Yang style which I learned from Larry Galante, the Chen style and the Yang style classical sword form which I again learned from Eddie.

I have survived 3 car accidents, which caused spinal, knee and nerve damage, and cancer since then.

Today, at 80, practicing 2 to 3 hours of tai chi and meditation daily, I feel better than I did at 30.

This routine has also helped me creatively more than I can imagine.

I am both a painter and poet. My work can be viewed at: New York Art World, web director Johanna Lisi, and Collaborative Pursuits, LLC, web director Courtney Rogers.

I thank Eddie Rodriguez and Larry Galante for teaching me tai chi. It helped save my life.

Jack Tricarico