What is the process by which things change?

In my adulthood, the process I undertook was more internal through my personal experience and evolution during many hundreds of individual bodywork sessions I experienced as part of my own self-care and self-discovery.   Each session was both transportive and transformational.  Some sessions were purely for pain and stress relief, but most were to facilitate further understanding of who I was, how I had been shaped by the upbringing and legacy of trauma in my family and gave room the evolution of new forms in both body and mind.

These sessions cumulatively changed and shifted my perspective on life and facilitated movement for my own life goals.

I established many pioneering and creative systems, created healing environments and communities, and recorded my work in books, articles and guided meditations over the twenty years of my Reiki career.  Each achievement had it’s own movement and development process. 

All of those achievements started with a thought.  Actually, before the thought, perhaps, was the very subtle proprioceptive movement of something wanting to emerge. 

Julia Cameron in her Artist’s Way book says “As you move toward a dream, the dream moves toward you.”  As I would receive inspirations in those subtle movements that were emerging, I would jot them down in my ‘idea file’.  As I researched the idea I would begin to move toward the dream as it moved to me.  Eventually, a project, product or process would gain shape and I would have my area to focus on.  I would find the resources to assist in making those ideas reality and one began to build upon the other.  That was my way of operating during this latter part of my career.

Becoming open to this new direction I’ve been on in beginning the PhD program, has been another type of process of movement.  As my professor Don Hanlon Johnson has said, there can also be “movement in stillness”.

As the pandemic brought the world and the Reiki work I was doing to a near standstill, I went deep within my own self, at first to grieve.

It was a very quiet, desolate, barren space of grief for the world I once knew.  The only movement I sensed was of any last pieces of the familiar falling away in a cast-off manner, like leaves on an autumn tree nonchalantly falling to the ground.  I felt called back to nature as the pandemic intensified.

I literally engaged in raking and mulching those leaves during much of the pandemic, dedicating the hours of time I now had not running a Reiki school into the pursuit of native plant restoration in my community and backyard.  As I moved my body to bend and flex in cultivating the land, I was creating a new path forward for myself.  I couldn’t see it at first, but the more I cleared away, the more it was revealed.  That is the same process now as I engage in readings, research and writing.  As I get my thoughts and words down at first I don’t have any idea on how it’s all going to make sense.  But I keep writing and editing and cutting and pasting and eventually, something sensible and coherent begins to form.  A new process, different than the one I relied upon decades before.  I am open to receive this new movement!

Copyright 2021 Eileen Dey Wurst

Photo credit: © Juergen Roth. All Rights Reserved.