I’ve often talked about having a lot of tools in my toolbox to help people in uncovering their authentic selves through spiritual storytelling. Being an alchemist, I like to bring different things together to see how the energies work or how it feels. And the part of my mind that’s still tied too much to our current, capitalist system wonders if having the disparate modalities such as equine work, yoga, and reiki all together seems like a cohesive whole or just a mess. It’s the last part of that sentence “just a mess” that comes from the stories that we’ve internalized, that aren’t our own stories at all. Because for me, it all works together.
The threads that tie them together? Energy and Story.
Horses, like a lot of nature, makes it difficult to be around them and not feel some sense of majesty and wonder. They are large creatures; full grown horses can weigh half a ton or more. Like the weather they have the potential for great ferocity as well as the softest, gentlest nature that becomes a soothing balm to the wounds caused by this world. They are also creatures which humans have imposed their own stories upon. Whether it’s the role the horses played in the expansion of America to the west, to the way that our wild mustangs are treated today, as a culture we’ve placed our own stories on them. They are a part of that heritage of colonialism and unchecked growth, which like a lot of our past we struggle to deal with appropriately, Thinking about today’s horse sports, whether it’s racing, especially thoroughbred racing since that is the one shown most often on the national stage, dealing with breakdowns or aftercare issues, or other disciplines like dressage grappling with the conflict between money and winning and what the true nature of the sport is supposed to entail, these stories are wrapped up in horses, and as horse people, as well as a wider culture, we need to examine them, to find out which ones serve us and which ones only serve to harm.
There’s also the story around reiki and yoga. Though there are gurus who played a large role in bringing yoga to the west and in using it to counteract the narrative of British colonialism in India, the truth is the West, with its desire to pathologize illnesses and put the focus on healing on the individual, rather than on the community, has changed a lot of yoga. It has added its own stories to it, again, stories that require us to grapple with a problematic history and what yoga and yoga philosophy means in our modern age.
Reiki is much the same way. As someone trained in the Usui reiki lineage, there are the stories that are told about how reiki came into being and how reiki came to America. There’s also been recent discussion within the reiki community about cultural appropriation and how we can use reiki while also giving credit and paying homage to its Japanese roots.
Story ties these things together. The stories we tell ourselves and the stories we internalize all go hand-in-hand, and it’s important that we understand these stories and unravel them so that we can create restoration, not just with ourselves but with our communities and the practice itself.
Both reiki and yoga work strongly with energy fields and universal energy. As part of yoga philosophy, the energetic bodies and their structures, including the nadis and the chakras, are taught, and reiki allows us to tap into universal energy. Horses also have an energy, and it is said their heart field is much larger than our own, which allows them to help ground and connect with our energy, and by being around us, they help us ground and connect as well.
Within my work all three of these things go together. It is the interplay of story and energy that help us to discover and connect with our authentic selves, and through this connect with our spirituality. We are not meant to be isolated, cut off from others and from ourselves. By understanding story and energy we can reach out and expand so that we can step into who we want to be.
