Ventana Monthly ~ Reiki Demystified ... thank you Ventana
Alternative medicine always encounters friction, especially in the Western world. But around Ventura County, the Japanese healing art of Reiki is starting to flow.
October 2008
By DeWitt Smith - Photo by Pierre & Gary Silva
You may heard of it, or even know someone who swears by it. But what exactly is Reiki?
And that’s what makes it seem odd to many Westerners—Reiki is confounding because it involves the way a person’s energy flows through their body.
Administered by gently laying on hands, or moving them slightly above the skin, Reiki is still viewed as an alternative practice, unlike acupuncture, which has become so mainstream that health insurance now covers it.
But this is California, where alternative anything finds a home, and around Ventura County the numbers of people practicing and benefitting from Reiki are growing. It all comes down to experiential: How does it make you feel?
Laurel Lyons has been a Reiki practitioner for eight years. Although she’d never heard of it before 2001, she knew about Chakra Healing and Reflexology. Then, at a local fair, she tried a free Reiki session.
“It was remarkable. There was a change in how I felt. There was a calmness and awareness,” says the Ventura resident. “After this Reiki session I felt very balanced, energized but not hyper. So I started researching.”
Her research led to more intensive studying and she went through three levels of training, most recently completing her Master Level Certification in Karuna Reiki®. (Karuna is a Sanskrit word that translates to "compassionate action.")
It’s been a steady process for this single mom whose bout with thyroid cancer twenty-one years ago put her on the path of alternative healing techniques. She started with meditation and then gravitated to the Native American practices of herbal healing. Because of her personal experience, Lyons now offers Reiki sessions to cancer patients at St. John’s Hospital in Oxnard. “I feel a connection with them,” she says.
But Lyons wanted to do more than practice Reiki; she wanted to teach. She still has a day job as a construction manager for a national company, but these days she also educates students in her home in the Ventura foothills. On average, she says, students study for a year. “The room is large and open, with two huge picture windows that open to my back deck,” she explains. “The décor is sage green, Chinese red and earth tones. Nature is the artwork".
Reiki-An
Alternative Therapy
February 19, 2010 by Mark
Recently I was invited to have a
Reiki (pronounced Ray-Key) session provided by a practitioner.
Reiki is an alternative or holistic healing therapy that originated in
Japan around 1922. The word Reiki means “mysterious atmosphere” or
“spiritual power” when translated and all I can say is that it feels really, really
good.
It takes place on a massage table
and the practitioner basically works on your energy by lighting touching and
almost touching you while you blissfully float away in a meditative state.
There’s no way I can do the subject
justice as someone who knows little about Reiki. I do claim to be a student of
meditation and relaxation practice and find it so important for stress relief
and for training your parasympathetic nervous system for increased well-being.
That said, I’d recommend a session
for anyone wishing to gain insight into the field of relaxation and meditation
or who’d like to experience 45 minutes of absolute bliss.
from the article ... Working to counteract the mounting stress of electronica are people
like Reiki master and intuitive counselor Laurel Lyons
(www.laurellyons.com), who advises people to slow down, take a break
from electronics, and simply breathe. It’s the sort of tonic
increasingly being prescribed for people suffering from information
overload. “We are delicate creatures,” Lyons notes. “We are also
contemplative beings; a measure of stillness is essential to our
well-being. When we are overstimulated, we forget our highest
good, our personal boundaries, our limits. Life falls out of balance.”
This is an exceptionally good article (link is posted below) that Jim Scolari has written. Please honor my friend and read the entire piece and seek him out, his profound wisdom is not limited to this moment in time.
Thank you Jim.
Awake in the Dream World : Workshops illustrate how
lucid dreaming can benefit lives
By TYLER BLUE, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
for the Santa Barbara News Press
from the article ...The first workshop was so well-received that two
more were
scheduled for June: one in Santa Barbara and the other in Ventura. By
this time Mr. Hilton had built up the confidence and presentation savvy
to become a facilitator himself. When Mr. Ball followed a job
opportunity to Hawaii, it opened the door for Laurel Lyons -- a Reiki
master living in Ventura -- to step in as a facilitator for both
workshops.
A lifelong lucid dreamer, she has deep faith in the
ability
of dreams to bestow valuable wisdom. "We all want to grow. We all want
to have the clear vision of who it is that we are destined to become,"
she hypothesizes. "Given the right tools to tap into it, I believe that
the dream gives us that view. We find out in the dream that we are a
great teacher and a great shaman."
Thank you Tyler.
Tyler's full article can also be read on the Dream Medicine page, you will find the tab to the left under the Loving Services tab. Thank you ...
