Since it’s my birthday week, I’m taking a break from the blog. I hope everyone is doing well!
Speak Up, Don’t Shut Up
My mother talks a lot. I mean, a lot. I’m not saying this to be mean; it’s a statement of fact. She will start talking and continue for an hour, repeating herself several times and not stopping even when someone leaves the room. As a child, I sometimes witnessed her talking to empty chairs if she didn’t think anyone else was home, not because she believed anyone was in the chair but because she needed to talk.
The problem was, she didn’t believe other people had any reason or right to talk. If someone was speaking and she had something to say, even something completely unrelated, she would talk right over them. If someone else started speaking and didn’t finish fast enough for her tastes, she would tell them they were finished and go on with whatever she wanted to say.
And heaven help anyone who interrupted her, even unintentionally or with something as innocuous as a deep breath.
Putting words together into a form I can speak that others will understand has always been a bit of a struggle for me. So you can imagine that my need to stop and think for more than half a second to form a sentence didn’t mesh well with my mother’s need to fill any silence–any at all–with her own words. Nor did my anger at being interrupted and disrespected mesh well with her belief that she had the right to interrupt anyone, but they had no similar right.
I learned early to shut up. Whether it was with my mother, or with people who bullied me, or with other family members. If I didn’t like something, I learned, I had no right to say a word. If someone treated me badly, I was expected to just accept it. As an adult, in my marriage to my children’s father before it ended, I learned that not only did I not have the right to speak up if he said or did something hurtful or harmful, but speaking up was a dangerous thing to do. I learned not to speak for the sake of my own safety and, sometimes, my kids’.
That “put up and shut up” tendency still follows me, having become so deeply ingrained that sometimes I don’t even realize when I’m holding in something I need to express. If someone hurts me, I often keep it to myself. If I have an issue with someone or something, I don’t say a word.
Of course, that doesn’t solve anything, and often worsens a problem. If I’m feeling angry or upset about someone’s behavior and I hold it in, eventually the lid is going to blow off the pot of anger and resentment. Usually at a time when something that seems, even to me, quite small happens, so no one, including me, can figure out why I’m “overreacting.” It isn’t an overreaction; it’s a built-up reaction from weeks or months of not expressing those emotions when I needed to. And obviously that isn’t healthy or helpful.
I am better about it, thanks to a husband and a partner who both have a lot of patience and have worked to show me that it is safe for me to speak. Because they have listened when I needed to express anger, even if I didn’t do it in a particularly constructive way, I’ve learned how to express it more constructively. To ask for a moment of quiet so I can put words together. To say, calmly and respectfully, “I’m feeling this way and I need to tell you why,” instead of just going off.
Having had to hold in anger, and having been told that “good girls don’t get angry” and other such bullshit, since early childhood, learning to manage anger in a healthy way has been a difficult but vital part of my journey. And I think it’s one a lot of us struggle with when we’ve been in situations where we weren’t allowed to show anger or other negative emotions. If you’ve had to bury something, sometimes it gets away from you–and sometimes you just continue to bury it because you don’t know what else to do.
You have the right to speak up for yourself when someone has hurt or harmed you. When you feel angry. When someone’s behavior is disrespectful to you. You have the right to speak those things instead of swallowing them and pretending they don’t exist. Obviously you don’t have the right to cause hurt or harm to someone else, but you can speak your feelings without causing harm. And not speaking them may be harming you.
Upcoming Events
I’m excited to have a few events and appearances planned over the next couple of months! Please note that these are subject to change, depending on enrollment and other factors, but as of today this is the current schedule.
On Sunday, August 18, I’ll be at Mindful Intentions, 193 River Street, Troy, NY. I visited this store when I was in Troy for my birthday a few weeks ago, and it’s an amazingly high-vibration place. I’m really looking forward to doing a combination Intro to Chios/Chios Level 1 workshop there! The workshop runs from 12-3, and pre-registration is required. Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/350436045904437/
On Saturday, August 24, I’ll be at a benefit psychic fair at Elemental Energies, 27 N. Berwick Road, Wells, ME from 10-5. This store is huge, with plenty of awesome crystals and other things. There will be a number of practitioners at the fair. I’ll be sharing information about Chios and, weather and space permitting, doing brief Chios sessions and demonstrations. Please note: Due to allergies, no outside food is permitted on site. Elemental Energies website event page: https://www.chrisann-jeff.com/events.html
On Saturday, September 7, I’ll be back at Elemental Energies doing Chios Energy Healing sessions from 10-4. Pre-registration and payment is required. Elemental Energies website class page: https://www.chrisann-jeff.com/classes.html
On Saturday, October 12, I’ll be at Elemental Energies yet again for a Chios Level 1 workshop. Pre-registration and payment is required, and it is strongly recommended that participants have a Chios healing session prior. See the above-linked class page for more information.
If you have any questions, please contact the venues, comment here, or email me at kim@riverflowhealing.com. Hope to see you!
What Is Energy Healing, Anyway?
If you’re interested in energy healing, or curious about what it is, this post might be for you.
The basic idea behind energy healing, at least as I was taught, is that energy is everywhere. Whether a living thing or an inanimate one, whether natural or man-made, everything has energy. The “everywhere” energy is sometimes called universal energy, and in addition to this type, each person or thing has its own individual energy. For humans, this energy takes the form of a system of seven major energy centers, or chakras, a seven-layer energy field, and a number of minor chakras. (Different systems of belief and explanation differ on how many chakras exist, and some may differ on the number of layers in the energy field. I’m describing what I was taught.)
When someone is injured or traumatized in any way, their energy is affected. This might cause blocked energy flow or holes in the energy field, blocks or other defects in the chakras, or other issues.
In energy healing, the practitioner becomes a conduit or channel for the universal energy. Using this, they’re able to heal or repair the damage caused to the energy system of the client. In turn, these repairs can help relieve pain, illnesses, and other physical and mental issues that are tied to the energetic damage. It isn’t medicine, per se, nor is it intended as a substitute for traditional medical and mental health care. It’s another tool in the health and well-being toolbox.
Several different forms and modalities of energy healing exist. The most well-known is probably Reiki, which has thousands of practitioners worldwide. Chios, the modality I practice, isn’t as well-known, but for me personally, it’s proven more effective and easier to learn.
Chios was introduced fairly recently, but is the result of about two decades of spiritual work along with research and testing by its developer, Stephen Barrett. Most, if not all, the techniques in Chios are exclusive to the modality, and were only included after tests showed their effectiveness.
Chios includes techniques for removing blocks in the energy field and chakras, for rebalancing and repairing the chakras, and for “charging” the energy field. It also includes techniques and modifications specific to certain chronic diseases, explanations of how to modify for children, the elderly, and people with short-term illnesses, and a technique for healing and repairing damage caused in past lives.
Like anything else, Chios won’t resonate for everyone, and it won’t work for everyone. I’ve seen amazing results from it, both in my own energy system through receiving Chios sessions from others, and in my clients through the sessions I’ve done with them. It’s exciting to hear a client tell me about positive changes in their health or emotional state after a healing session, and I love being able to provide that for my clients as well as teach others how to use the modality.
Introducing Your Practitioner
I’ve always been a healer. I just didn’t always realize it. I was about four or five when I realized that if I had a cut or bruise, if I put my hand over it and let my hand get warm, the injury stopped hurting. I tried to explain this to my parents. They told me I was imagining it.
I’ve also always wanted to help others. Whenever I saw someone who was in pain, whether physical or emotional, I felt it, and I didn’t like that they had to feel it. I wanted to stop it. Not that I’ve always know how to stop their pain. Sometimes, especially when I was a child, there was nothing I could do. But I wanted to.
And then there are my “invisible friends.” Not imaginary friends. As a young child, I was very specific about that. They weren’t imaginary; people just couldn’t see them.
They’ve been around for as long as I can remember. Several of them; at one point when I was in elementary school, I think they numbered around forty. All had distinct names and personalities. All told me things that I couldn’t have made up, because I had no way to know them. As I got older, I read in my mother’s women’s magazines that children outgrow their imaginary friends, often by the time they’re in school. I was ten or eleven. The number had dropped from forty to five or six, but even so, my invisible friends weren’t going anywhere.
That worried me. I already knew I was weird and different, where “different” was very definitely not a good thing. The whole hand-over-an-injury thing was something I’d learned not to talk about. So was what I referred to as “remembering something that hasn’t happened yet.” Those things exasperated my mother, upset my father, and gave my peers extra reasons–as if they needed any–to make fun of me. And I learned not to talk about my invisible friends either.
I went through my teens and into adulthood. People told me I was a good listener and made them feel better. I didn’t understand how, but I was glad to help them. My invisible friends kept telling me things I couldn’t have known on my own, like when one of them helped me through a math test in eleventh grade. I had consistently failed or gotten D’s on every assignment in the chapter, and I didn’t understand any of the concepts or how to solve the problems. But with my “invisible friend” talking me through the problems on the test, I got a B.
I got married. I had kids. I continued “remembering things that hadn’t happened yet.” People kept telling me I made them feel calmer, though that seemed to upset some of them. One or two even told me they were afraid of me because of how I made them feel. That didn’t make sense to me; why be afraid of someone who made you feel better? But I learned to just accept that some people just couldn’t accept me.
I continued wanting to help people without knowing how. And then I met someone who taught me how. He and I became friends, bonding over a shared love of reading and writing, and over time he started telling me about energy healing and channeling. Finally, my life started to make sense. The way I’d made my injuries stop hurting as a child was basic energy healing, done instinctively. My invisible friends weren’t at all imaginary; they were my guides. And the energy healing and channeling my friend did for me helped me work through trauma and abuse from my childhood, as well as helping me grow and gain the strength to leave a marriage that had become increasingly toxic not only for me, but for my children as well.
My life hasn’t been a straightforward progression from there. I struggled as a single mother, and was not always the parent I wanted to be for my children. Issues from the past and from that marriage reared their heads from time to time, causing problems for me and the people around me. I found a new spouse, but wasn’t always able to accept how well he treated me, because it wasn’t what I was used to.
I’ve kept working, though. New skills and tools I’ve found have helped me in my ongoing work to release the effects my past has had on me. I’ve kept working to improve the skills I learned from my friend, and to strengthen my bonds with my guides.
Most importantly, I’ve found ways to use those skills and tools to help others. I’m far from the only person who has experienced bullying and verbal and emotional abuse, or the only person whose past has impacts on their present that they might not even be aware of. I still hate seeing someone else hurting, but now I can see ways to help them deal with and even release their pain, whether physical or emotional. As I learn and grow, I also learn how to help others grow. And that’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was a child. Through River Flow Healing, I’m finally able to do what that little girl wanted to do but wasn’t able.
Breathing New Life
I haven’t posted a blog on here in longer than I care to think about. For that matter, I haven’t done much work on River Flow Healing or any other business aspects.
Life tends to throw monkey wrenches and curve balls when we least expect it. Last year, I thought I was on the right track with this business. I had plans and ideas. I was going to do things the way businesspeople do things.
Except it didn’t work out that way. My plans and ideas weren’t fully formed and didn’t have sufficient structure for me to actually put them into practice. That led to me feeling discouraged and overwhelmed, which led to less ability to effectively plan and structure and implement. While I was wading through that, some situations arose in my personal life that required a lot of my time and energy, and I didn’t have any left over for River Flow.
It’s been several months. I’ve gotten through the personal situations, and conversation with business coaches and others have given me clarity about what this business is actually intended to be. I know where I am, and I’m pretty sure I know where I’m going, though I’m leaving room for more monkey wrenches and curve balls just in case.
So this is the inaugural blog post for the new and hopefully improved River Flow Healing. Stay tuned every Monday for further developments and thoughts.
Thanks for Stopping By!
Today is the last day of the Ultimate Blog Challenge. I’d like to say thank you to the organizers, and to everyone who stopped by my blog!
I’ve enjoyed blogging every day, but thinking of topics hasn’t been easy, even with the tips from the organizers. So I think I’m going to go back to the once-a-week blogging thing I’d been doing. I blog here on Thursdays (except February 1, because I’m giving myself a break), and on my author blog on Mondays.
Hope to see you soon!
My Bucket List
There are a lot of things I hope to do in my life. Some of them are not necessarily probable, but I’m hoping for them to happen anyway. Other things are ones that I can make happen, if I believe in myself and keep trying.
I want to resurrect my writing career. For several years, I was a published author, writing two very different types of things under two separate pen names. A few years ago, a combination of poor sales and some personal life things derailed the writing, and now I’m facing the first year since 2009 in which I don’t have anything under contract with, or even being considered by, a publisher. For the time being, I’m taking it easy and writing just because I enjoy it, but I hope to resume writing for publication.
I want to do public speaking presentations on my message of self-acceptance and the power to change. I was trying to build that from nothing other than some Facebook Live videos, but I found myself having difficulty finding venues to contact and, more importantly, believing in myself enough to contact them. (Yes, sometimes I have trouble believing in myself. I am, as I said a few posts ago, still on my journey.) So now I’m focusing on contacting libraries and schools to do presentations there, while I continue working on the other aspect of what I hope will become a career in transformational speaking.
I want to travel. I’ve done a little bit of traveling in my life, but there are so many places I’d like to go!
I want to sing onstage, with live musicians. So far the closest I’ve gotten to that is karaoke, which isn’t exactly the same thing.
Those are the big things on my want-to-do list. What do you have on your bucket list?