The first seed that sprouted into my awareness, hatched on a walk. I’m almost always walking or bathing when soul seeds take root.
I was coming home from a psychic development circle on a sunny day in 2013. Midway through the estate that I crossed through to get home from Haggerston station, a divine knowing about a book entered my mind. The picture of it was such a different one then. I was still working as a photographer, and I had this deep spiritual awakening rising through my whole life. That first book was a collection of images and channelings - I wanted to call it Postcards From Spirit. This was that fascinating time of potential before instagram had made it big. The idea to pair images and spiritual writing felt new. I assembled this book over the next couple of years, asking friends and subscribers of my blog to share their questions, and then I’d channel the answers along with a piece of artwork. A little while later I received a newsletter from my dream publisher about an oracle deck by the same name, newly released by another author. I gave the book a new title then I’d slowly delete text and write new words, and then delete and add and so on, always opening the same document to recreate again.
A few years later and I live in Crystal Palace. In the park is a hill where I had sat with a stack of bright white paper on my lap, getting the next incarnation ready to submit to this same publisher. With a red pen, I made marks to the text while waiting for my mother to arrive, listening out for the familiar sound of her suitcase wheels rolling along the pavement. She’d help me with the final proofread before I hit send on the submission email. Between 2013 and 2017, I had lived a lot of life. I had also become a Reiki Teacher who was allowing herself to be on the outside what she was on the inside. The manuscript came back with lots of suggestions but not with an offer, and I put it aside for a little while, knowing it needed to die again before it could come back to life.
Early into lockdown (version 1) last year, I had this marvelous thought while brushing my teeth. “This is when I finish the book!” I had started writing like a writer during a significant visit to India. I wrote through my grief after a miscarriage, through another pregnancy, through my husband’s dark days of depression. I had written on countless park benches while my son slept in the buggy next to me. I wrote in the early days of my Reiki practice after the high of seeing a client, I wrote through loss and through epiphany and through every up and down of life. I wrote to heal and I wrote to return to myself. I wrote to connect to my truth and hear my soul. And then I wrote while the whole world went into lockdown. This book documented a journey of being human. It would just about survive the unforgiving edits I’d make once a year when chopping 30,000 words at a time. The slim material that remained was a skeleton of truth, revealing the essence of what it would become. Only a few sentences were left last spring when I decided to finish the book I had started seven years before. All in this same document, I watched this being grow into the truest and most beautiful version of itself. It finished where my journey began - with Reiki. It’s a book about consciousness - a book about being human - about being the whole embodied Self. The manuscript expanded and contracted like my soul’s womb. I was born as more of myself each time.
And here she is. In her welcomed completeness, alive and growing wings. She’s stepping out onto the branch away from the nest, closer to the wind that is calling her. She’s no longer mine.
When I return to writing a manuscript, it will be an entirely new document that I open. A blank white rectangle will appear instead of the familiar list of contents that had been waiting for me all those years before. For a moment I will pause to take in the totality of this unknown being. And I will step into the void to create something new. From the formless echo of that blinking cursor will come letters and dots that express my soul’s fire.
I can’t wait for The Reiki Way to arrive in your hands! As I type this, it’s less than three weeks away from the release date. If you order the book before it launches on April 28th, you’ll receive these gifts of gratitude (from my heart to yours):
An invitation to The Reiki Way book launch
Two guided meditations
Wallpaper of the Reiki Precepts for your phone, laptop, and desktop
A chance to win a free remote Reiki Session with me
A one-month free membership to the Soul Fire Collective which includes a monthly group mentoring call, a book club for The Reiki Way, and meditations to support your awakening
Thank you to everyone that already ordered the book and made it a bestseller in the Reiki category of Waterstones for a hot minute! I’m so grateful!
For more info and to pre-order and receive these gifts, click here. Yay.
