Healing for Mutual Enlightenment
I was not someone who had a sensitivity to feeling energy. Despite years of practicing and teaching yoga, I knew about chakras intellectually but had not really felt them. My intellectual mind always felt stronger than my intuition, which I didn’t quite know how to access or trust. So, when I was first attuned to Reiki and I felt the energy and the goodness of it, I knew that I would need to practice in order to make use of this gift I had been given.
Luann Jacobs, who attuned us and taught our first Reiki Level 1 training, lived far away. I wanted something local and weekly and turned to my dear friend and energy healer, Katherine Dufrane. I didn’t really know what she knew, but I knew she had something to share. She agreed and we set up a structure that turned out to be one of the main turning points of my life. She said, “Yes, I will act as teacher for our small group this first year. After that we will take turns leading the group. Let’s call it Healing for Mutual Enlightenment.” “Sure,” a small group of us said and we started meeting every week in our HME group.
Katherine started the group by teaching us about the Contemplation Process that we use to this day, both in our lives and our teaching. It is one of the most welcoming and revelatory practices that I know. All parts of us are invited to “speak up,” and we give time and attention to anything that wants to be known. In this practice the mind is not vilified as it is in some traditions (hence the term “monkey mind.”) Instead, we know that the mind often has things it wants us to know and we offer it time to share its thoughts. We also know, and this isn’t always acknowledged in a mind-centric culture, that other parts of us have knowledge that goes deeper than our minds. So, we ask our heart what it wants us to know, and then ask the deepest place we sense within us. We get a kaleidoscope of information and knowing of all kinds, and this was the beginning of my intuition training.
With contemplation as our first guiding practice, we learned what it was to practice in community. In a group, we all contemplated an agreed-upon question then talked about our experience and insight. Each one of us held a piece to a puzzle depending on the question of the day. Then as we went to the Reiki table to take all the questions and knowings into Reiki, a kind of magic showed up that seemed to synthesize everything we had contemplated and put it all in our bodies.
We had many simple and exciting experiences together with Katherine as our guide. True to her word, she handed over the reins of the group to the rest of us, and somehow we took turns leading the group. By “leading,” we really meant asking a question for the day, and we all had plenty of questions.
And because we were all clients of Katherine’s at times, we got curious about something she was doing in those sessions. Not the usual kind of doing where she would try and fix something that we thought was wrong with us. That was not her style at all. She somehow knew to guide us to our own inner wisdom with a few simple questions. To ask an important question, and then realize that I had a knowing within myself was revelatory and celebratory. This experience concurred with what my yoga teacher taught, that we had everything we needed inside. I had little tastes of that when I was with him, but when I was with Katherine, it was obvious and embodied. Some part of me DID really know at least a beginning of an answer to whatever I was wondering or suffering about.
Naturally, we started asking her what she was doing. What was this non-doing that made such a difference to us? I say “non-doing” because she never imposed her ideas of what should happen. Never. She only elicited our experiences, our deepest knowing. But still, she was supporting us in a very particular way and had a few really interesting questions she kept asking, so we pressed her to teach us this.
She called it a marriage between Reiki and Clean Language. Clean Language is a therapeutic practice that uses a set of specific, non-directive questions developed by David Grove. He used it in his therapy practice to support people with PTSD. Katherine studied with him, and he supposedly said never to touch people when using Clean Language. She also studied with Barbara Brennan (a renowned healer and trainer of healers). Supposedly she told Katherine never to talk when doing sessions. And, Katherine, in her wisdom, began exploring combining the two. It was a miraculous and felicitous experiment that we all worked with over many years. Katherine was back to being our teacher, and we all had things to share from our own experience. As always, the wisdom of the group was important to the learning of all.
When Katherine died, Linda and I decided to take on the job of codifying this practice so it would not be lost. After much contemplation time together, we decided to call it Dancing with Dragons. The usual mythology is for the Hero to vanquish the Dragon, but our experience had already taught us that Dragons have important wisdom for us if we give them our curiosity and attention. We loved the image of dancing together rather than fighting. And so, Dancing with Dragons (DWD) was born.
We have taught several rounds to beginners and have had an ongoing group that has been meeting regularly for years—another version of Healing for Mutual Enlightenment. And coming back to HME now--when we work together in the way that we do, the healer and healee are not so different. We all mutually benefit from working together, whether in a pair or small group. Noticing body sensations is the main key to unlocking the wisdom present in all of us, and we are curious about it, even the parts the healee would like to change (e.g., pain.) Still, something revelatory and interesting always happens and the being with, instead of fighting against is powerful beyond any words that I have. And the ability to sit with another without offering advice, without naming anything as wrong, is a powerful tool that radiates far beyond the Reiki table.
