Man Wednesdays: "Shedding your old snake skin"

It's Mansday again! Tune in today, for your weekly words of wisdom by my one and only:

"My life is blessed in so many ways.

This last weekend was my first time teaching a Reiki course. My mentor and friend David Gleekal allowed me to assist him in teaching his Level I Reiki course to a group of six wondrous individuals. Of course, professional ethics forestalls me giving any specific details, but let me just say that each of them went on an incredible journey; no one leaves one of David's classes as the same person who entered. I felt deeply honored to have been able to witness, facilitate and take part in those journeys.

Both teaching and Reiki share a common aspect (other than "things Andrew intends to spend the rest of his life doing"). Reiki healing calls upon the practitioner to remove their ego from the equation. You're not making anyone well. Reiki energy flows to where it is most needed and it does the healing, you're just the conduit through which it moves. The recipient is healing themselves, you're just helping to create an environment that is most conducive to that healing.

The same goes for teaching. You can never make someone learn anything. You are just a conduit for the knowledge, and what truths are heard and understood by which students is just not up to you. The student is the one that makes the true effort of learning, of changing their way of thinking, perceiving and being, you're just helping to create an environment that is most conducive to it.

David has many skills as a teacher that I wish to develop in myself. One of them is the ability to not resist resistance. Invariably each class will have one or more students that come to the class with some sort of barrier up, whether they give off a "prove to me that this works" attitude or a reluctance to be there at all. When I encounter this there is a programmed response in me to meet that resistance. (Once again the ego rears its ugly head...) But David seems to have defeated that response in himself. Not that he doesn't care, he cares profoundly, he just knows that it won't serve anyone to do so.

I suspect that he also knows that if someone is paying good money to come to a course, and then shows up giving emotional resistance to it, that is a pretty big indicator of their need for some serious spiritual or emotional healing. Surprisingly, these are the lucky ones. These are the students who have the opportunity to go through the greatest and most beautiful of transformations. When they finally get that healing of something so deep that they might not be able to ever voice it, or so old that sometimes it predates their own birth, they can transform right in front of your eyes. They get on the table as one person and they get off of it as another. Not a different person, just a truly, purer version of themselves. It's like a snake shedding it's old, tired skin and emerging younger, refreshed and new."