Conscious Manifesting

My Reiki teachers all said, once we started practising Reiki, we should be prepared for our lives to be shaken up, since sometimes opening to be a channel for healing brings our own unresolved life issues to the surface. This happened for me. After my first Reiki class, it seemed as if there were a big sister looking over me saying: “Okay, so you think you are ready to help others; how can you do that when you haven’t completely healed your own stuff?”

Later, in the months following my first master class, I was given the opportunity to work on emotional healing with my mother. She is in her 80s and I am the only family member who helps her out. Things would soon happen to push the healing of our relationship into overdrive.

In May of that year, my husband and I flew to Europe to meet up with our son and daughter in Croatia and then travel on to Prague where our son was living. What I didn’t know during our relaxing two weeks away, was that my mother had become ill in my absence.

Our trip home from the Czech Republic involved three flights, 20 hours of travel, two nights with little sleep and a nine-hour time difference. Once we reached home, I fell asleep almost immediately. I woke up a couple of hours later to a text from a woman who cleans and does other odd jobs for my mother, telling me that Mom had been sick again while I was gone. For a few years, she had been experiencing serious on and off bouts of symptoms from an autoimmune condition, but she’d been feeling fine before we left on the trip. 

By the time I got to her house, she was very weak, but it still took me three days to convince her to go to the emergency room. Once in the hospital, they gave her IV fluids, did a blood test and then sent her home without any answers. Some days later, when her doctor received the lab results, he called to tell us my mother had an infection perilous for someone her age.

Sleep-deprived and jet-lagged, I was thrust into the mode of caregiver and decision maker. It was rough. She was frightened, cranky and determined to stay home. I was frustrated and worried, wishing for someone to help me make decisions. I was doing what needed to be done each day, but emotionally I was on a downward spiral. The communication between us grew more tense the more ill she became. 

After she was finally admitted to the hospital, one morning I was able to go home to shower. Standing under the hot water, I desperately asked the Divine for guidance. I needed inspiration for how to deal with what was happening. I also asked what lessons between us had yet to be learned. 

Still in the shower, I remembered a book my daughter had lent me to read when we visited her – The Law of Attraction, by Esther and Jerry Hicks. During our time in New York, reading before bed each evening, I’d finished half the book. When we flew home, I’d left the book there. Then, as I was walking through our bedroom, there was a copy of the book on the bed stand. How had it got there? Had I ordered it before leaving for Europe? I must have, but the synchronicity of seeing it in plain sight when I wanted to read it seemed synchronistic at the time.

Where to begin, I couldn’t remember the page where I’d left off and, as I picked it up, it fell open to the section about deliberate creation…

What is the law of attraction? A quote from the book clearly explains it: “Without exception, that which you give thought to is that which you begin to invite into your experience.”

This concept works equally with positive and negative thoughts. You can tell whether or not you are in alignment by how you feel. What this means is, dwelling on something you don’t want to experience will cause a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, a reminder that you are out of balance. Okay, this resonated with me. I was experiencing that sensation of unease; I had been feeling it almost incessantly since I found out my mother was not well.

Over the years, I had read about the law of attraction works from many different authors. I had also studied it in depth in Science of Mind classes 30 years before. It seemed I needed a refresher course, though, because I was sinking deeper into despair every day, facing what was happening.

There is an exercise in the book where, in order to start turning your thinking around, instead of concentrating on all the things that are happening that you don’t want, you first write down one thing you do want. I thought I wanted freedom; so, I wrote this on a piece of paper. I had been the main caregiver for my father and, now for several years, I had also been helping my mother. Journaling, I stopped and sat with the idea of freedom being what I wanted to manifest. Was that what I really wanted? No, what I really wished for were peace, love and joy. That was it exactly.

After completing this exercise, every time my mother and I didn’t see eye to eye, I said my new mantra silently – peace, love and joy. Sometimes I removed myself from her room for a few minutes to give me some separation to focus on my new mantra. In the following days, when I was clearer, I wrote down a more detailed list of what I wanted in my life. Most of the items on the list weren’t about her. I wanted time to keep our household and business running efficiently, to give and receive Reiki and to exercise. I wanted time with my kids and husband, time to read, write and do creative projects. I wanted to spend time in nature because that is where I feel most peaceful. I wanted solitude. 

Of course, I also wanted my mother to be happy, healthy and have all the help she needed so she didn’t feel exclusively dependent on me. From then on, when my heart started to race upon seeing her name light up on my phone, I remembered to focus on my intention of peace, love and joy. Little by little, this seemed to work, and things got easier.

A big chunk of the puzzle to ease the anxiety I was feeling came from a section in the book that discussed the difference between tolerating someone’s behaviour and allowing it. Tolerating comes from a place of negativity because there is judgment, anger, frustration and wanting the person involved to change.

“When you are tolerating, you are not allowing.”

The art of allowing is described as “…I am that which I am and I am willing to allow all others to be that which they are…” Allowing my mother to be however she was, meant I needed to let her live her life the way she wanted to, without judgment, but at the same time I could affirm a different way of living for myself. “When you can look at this world and feel joy all the time, you are an allower.” Reading this section helped me transform how I was reacting.

The miracle, though, was I began to notice my mother was changing as I changed. Over the next weeks, I saw steady progress in how she related to me. She wasn’t as quick to judge. She was kinder and more appreciative of my help.

“If something you want is slow to come to you, it can be for only one reason:  You are spending more time focused upon its absence than you are on its presence. Every thought you think, positive or negative, if you keep thinking it, will eventually become powerful enough to attract the essence of itself into your experience.”

On the list I made after reading that chapter on deliberate creation was wishing I had a sibling to to share my mother’s care with. This was not possible, I knew, but still, I made the wish. Not long after, we found a wonderful woman from a local volunteer centre to take over some of my responsibilities. Over time, they became friends and we had something close to what I’d wished for. And with the help of Reiki, we continued to learn how to interact more easily. The Law of Attraction was a lifesaver. I’m still amazed at how quickly things turned around after I followed the tips for deliberate creation.

Reference Esther and Jerry Hicks. The Law of Attraction. Hay House, Inc., 2006.

Prayer to Life

Carolyn Chilton Casas

      — after the Lord’s Prayer

 

Source of us all, that manifests

in every particle of creation,

sacred be our knowing of you.

Let your nurturing be a paradigm,

your goodness a practice 

to emulate, on our planet

and for the whole of creation.

Give us these fleeting moments,

manna of immense grace.

Tolerate our mistakes

as we bear the missteps          

of others. 

Allow us to understand 

the trials we encounter

are but baptisms

for the sake of evolving.

For ours is the magnitude,

and the fortitude,

and the splendor of existence, 

now and forever.            

 

Amen