It is so easy to get caught up in the stressful busy world we live in and as so many of us are now playing “catch up” after the holidays, it is all too easy to find ourselves running from one thing to the next in order to get everything done. I know that I have been guilty of this on many an occasion.

Just before the New Year, I had a dose of the flu which knocked me for six. It’s very rare for me to take to my bed through ill health, but I was given no choice on this occasion. I used reiki self treatments to help speed up the healing process and also asked a reiki friend to do a healing on me too. With all the hectic weeks at work and in my own life before the holidays, I hadn’t listened to my body which had been telling me to slow down a bit and re-evaluate what was important.

After the reiki treatment my friend did, I was told that when she started she couldn’t feel any energy in my system at all and that if I didn’t slow down I would burn out very quickly!

This pulled me up short and made me re-evaluate what I was doing and where I was heading in my life and what was really important to me.

After much soul searching I have realised that I need to prioritise everything I want to do, which meant having to say “No” more often, so that I can focus on where I want to be and keep taking small steps towards that outcome. I also realised that I needed to use self treatments a lot more so that I was proactively promoting my health and well being and able to cope with everything going on. I had let my self treatments slip a bit because life had become so hectic that I hadn’t made time for it. Until I got the flu, I hadn’t realised the effect of not using reiki had had on me.

I also realised that I need to use reiki more to help me manifest what I really want, which is to be able to give up my job altogether and work with reiki all the time. By taking responsibility for what happened to me and taking action to change it I knew I can heal the situations around me so that I can step into my ultimate goal whilst maintaining my health and well being.

And the great thing is – it worked! In January I have felt much more balanced and relaxed, and have been able to start making moves to leave my long-term employment and start my own reiki practice full-time. Whilst this has been a difficult lesson to learn, the entire experience has given me even more determination to become a full time reiki master Teacher but without ever compromising my health and well being again.

I can’t wait to see what happens in 2009.