Right now is a scary time. It's also the only time there is, which doesn't mean it's somehow sliced apart from the past and the future. You're made of them. Your actions are significant precisely because they're inseparable from the past and the future.
This is how I think it works. In what you might call the absolute dimension of things, or the Tao, if you're that way inclined, or the unconscious, if that's the way you roll, everything is happening at once.
This sounds pretty abstract from the point of view of everyday life in which certain very concrete things usually need to happen in a certain order to keep the show on the road. But bear with me, it's actually as real as it gets.
On a personal level, think of it this way. What happened to the baby you 'once were'? Has that baby gone somewhere? Actually, that baby is you, now. There's no cut off point. Similarly for the you that will be in the future, however long you live. Now what about your DNA, where, in whom, did that start?
long distance healing
Reiki healing offers a window into this kind of time. When I 'send energy' to somebody long distance, I'm not really sending a packet of something to another location. I'm plugging into the aspect in which the difference in location between 'giver and receiver' becomes irrelevant.
Within the experience of giving or receiving life energy, the difference between the person giving and the person receiving also melts away. This doesn't mean you become another person, but that you experience only the energy, which both of you are essentially made of. This is exceptionally relaxing and being exceptionally relaxed is empowering. Basically all the mental stories and emotional patterns which distract you from the energy at your disposal go quiet for a while. The energy is just there. It tends towards wholeness, course-correction, according to how things are in the snapshot of exactly that moment.
therapy in non-linear time
Therapists know about shifting time too, the way in which when some aspect of your experience is healed, your past experience actually in a sense changes - it functions differently in the present for you, now. You are no longer the same person who had that childhood. You've intervened in the narrative.
And we need to intervene in the narrative on a world scale right now (as we always did) because the logical conclusion to the chains of cause and effect that we've set in motion is not conducive to our survival, or that of countless other species. We've already reached the point of no return by all measurable measures of temperature, of carbon deposits, etc. Human interference in earth systems, driven by selfishness and short sightedness, by feeling separate from the system and superior to it, and acting in accordance with extremely short, personal time scales, have led to a situation in which it's already happened – the earth which we form a tiny part of is now an inhospitable place for many people, and that's increasing exponentially. This is the basic set of conditions for all the violent and oppressive events in the snapshot of the human world right now.
To intervene, in a situation which already seems hopeless, requires relative actions, and lots of them – it requires us to vote while democracy still exists, not wait for an ideal candidate, to invent new economies not based on endless financial profit and growth, new technologies to deal with our energy requirements as a species, to support the diversity which is a sign of the health of all ecosystems, from the garden to the workplace, to look after our immune systems and each other.
And to get the energy for all those relative actions which might seem hard, pointless, or never good enough, we need to plug into the absolute dimension of things, the level on which all is energy, and there is plenty of it, and it's indestructible. The level on which, in fact, all is well.
Sarah Luczaj, PhD
therapist, writer, artist, reiki master, creative regenerator and co-founder of terrealuma.
offers online reiki healing/chanting sessions, here