Up for discussion this week among our YCReiki Teachers in Training

On Saturday, August 22

How does your everyday consciousness affect your healing practice?
How intimately do you know & understand your body?

We give thanks to Durga for sharing this week's contemplation with us!

As one enters the process of body work, it becomes critical to learn how to see in a new way. As an illustration, I would cite an example provided by Malidoma Some. Malidoma had been away from his village for a long time. At the age of three, he had been kidnapped and brought up in a Catholic boarding school. When he escaped and returned to his home nearly twenty years later, he wanted to get the light going all night. In the West African village where he was born, though the people didn't have electricity, they had ways of creating light at night if they wanted to. Still, at night they might say, "Let's turn the lights off so that we can see." When Malidoma wanted more light, he was told, "No, if we light the lamps, we won't be able to see." As the village elders explained it, you can't see anything real in the daylight. The only thing you see in the daylight is what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story.

It is very much the same way with our body. We need to turn off the light of what we think, or our diurnal consciousness. We need to descend into the night, the darkness that is our own body. When we do so, we discover that it is not neutral or dead, nor is it a space that is just simply there for our consumption and our use. Within the deep shadows of the body, within its darkness, we begin to discover a world that exists in its own right, quite apart from anything we may consciously think, expect, or want. We begin to find that the body has its own wants--in a sense, it wants to be seen on its own terms and within its own frame of reference. This can be a rather surprising discovery for many of us who, as modern people, are so very alienated from the body. We can't imagine the idea that the body might be a living force, a source of intelligence, wisdom, even something we might experience as possessing intention. We cannot conceive of the body as a subject. And yet, to carry out the body work, this is exactly what we need to do. . . .

Reggie Ray - Spirtual Director of Dharma Ocean

Malidoma, as representative of his village in Burkina Faso, West Africa, is an initiated elder. Thru the non-profit, Aviela, he has come to the west to share the ancient wisdom and practices which have supported his people for thousands of years.