On this week's podcast? I am speaking with Jillian Power and Karen Harrison about a couple of articles that they wrote in the Reiki News magazine. Jillian wrote an article in the spring issue about working with trans, transgender and gender nonconforming people in your Reiki practice, and Karen followed that up with an article about working with LG LGBTQIA plus Reiki clients and students. And I thought that the audience would love to hear from both of you.
So thank you so much for being here with us today. It's great to be here, Pam. Thank you. I wonder if I could ask each of you just to introduce yourselves and and tell us a little bit more about yourselves. Karen I might ask you to start. Okay.
I am a licensed Reiki master teacher with the International Center for Reiki Training and co-director of the licensed Teacher training program. So I think of myself as a talent scout for Reiki teachers, looking for people that would like to work with the International Center. And then I'm also a marriage and family therapist, a professional counselor, and a certified sex
therapist. I love that. Thank you, Karen. And Jillian, can I ask you to introduce
yourself? Yes, Pam. My name's Julian Power. I am a holy fire career Reiki master, having studied under Karen through my Reiki journey. I in my day job, I work as the Chief Technology Officer for a US based national nonprofit that litig, litigates and advocates on behalf of L G B T Q I A people and people living with H I V. And my wife and I operate a farm to market business, growing organic vegetables for market. And we also have two teenage daughters, so our lives are very full. Very full.
Oh. Guys, before we get too far in, I just wanna let our listeners know about some of the things we have coming up at the farm. I have an RMA course, which means level one and two, followed by masters coming up in July on Camp Abell, where the whale course is. We'll also be going whale watching during that class. So if there's anybody listening that would like to join us, please check that out. And later toward the end of July and beginning of August, I am teaching.
Animal Reiki, level one and two, as well as an animal Reiki master. And again, in September, I'll be teaching the same course, both of them on Campobello Island and with some whale watching tours thrown in. But sometimes we actually do see the whales just sitting here in the living room during class. They're right there on the water. So we're really excited to have you join us if that speaks to you.
I also want to just invite everybody to join me in a brief invocation today, activating your Reiki energy. So I'm going to invite everyone to bring your hands together in gas show if you can, and if it's safe and appropriate, close your eyes, taking a deep breath, and just activating your Reiki energy.
Activating your Reiki symbols, and our session today is in the interest of allowing us to understand the perspective from a community that is often marginalized or overlooked and often not well understood. So I'm very grateful for Jillian and for Karen for being here with us. I invite you to open your heart today as you listen to the ideas and experiences of these Reiki masters.
And also consider some of the people in your own lives who you might be able to support with the beauty and the love that is Reiki. Invite you to open your mind to different possibilities and opportunities that could arise. Open your emotions, especially the emotion of compassion and compassionate understanding, and also open your spirit for. As Jillian points out in her article, or as Karen mentioned, that Karen Keg had said at the level of spirit, we are all one. There is no gender.
Thank you for being here today, all of you, Aquias and Namaste. Beautiful. Thank you. I never quite know what's going to come through, but Karen, I noticed your article first and just because I was a little bit behind actually on my reading of the Reiki News magazine, so I hadn't yet got to the spring issue and I flipped the summer issue open and saw your article on working. With LGBTQIA plus students, and I immediately knew that I wanted to talk about it on the podcast.
But one of the things I love about you, Karen, is that when you make a mistake, not only do you own it and learn from it,
publicize it. You publicize
it. Yes you do. And you laugh at yourself, but you use it as a teaching opportunity. And so can you tell us a little bit about the mistake that you made that led to that article?
Yes. So I had a gender nonconforming student in my class. Non-binary and used the pronouns, they, them, and I had not asked everyone else for their pronouns. And then during the class I did not use they, them or universal language I was referring to. She, him. And, I did not ask the student how to handle it. I guess I'd just gotten behind and out of date on some of my counseling tools. And the student on the evaluation wrote that they felt misgendered all weekend.
And I thought, wow I need to get myself up to date. I need to correct this because I really do wanna be of service to a wide variety of people and. People of all genders are welcome in my classes. I have the pride flag on my website, which Jillian helped me to know an update to the most current version. So thank you Jillian for that.
And I don't want to misgender people, so I really needed to brush up on my skills and I just asked myself all the questions that I thought that I should know about and then answered them in the article.
I think I, I loved it. And then I was so glad you then pointed me to Jillian's article. And how long have you guys known each other? Have you guys known each other for long?
Maybe coming on a decade?
Okay. Yeah I think so. Cause I remember teaching your little girls Reiki when they were four and five. Yes. Now they're
just so cute. Yeah.
I love it. I love it. Thank you. Jillian do you identify as transgender? Is that how, tell us a little bit about your journey and how Reiki, assisted you. How has it supported you in your self-discovery and healing? Can you tell us a bit about that?
Like many trans people we're, we realize at a, we realize on some level at a young age that we're different that we. That we don't feel comfortable in the gender assigned at birth. And we see the full spectrum of people of the full spectrum, of age at which people come to terms with that sense of difference. All the way from children that are three to people transitioning when they're 65, 70. There's an entire, there's an entire spectrum of experience here.
And I tried for about the first 40 years of my life, rather valiantly to play the role of. Of, of, living as a man. And it became increasingly difficult to maintain that. I even to the point where I'd gone from a period of my twenties when I had been doing in very intensive spiritual practice, I was meditating three hours a day. I was very very very devoted to, to, to a yoga path.
And that even that didn't hold because the level of sadness that I was carrying really started turning me inside out. And there was a period of my life where I declared myself as a Vly atheist and. Came to realize that was a coping mechanism for not really dealing with my genetic dysphoria. And in, in 20, around 2012 is when I first started really approaching it and coming to terms with it. And at that point, Reiki came into my life.
The first person that I ever saw for Reiki was the person in our neighborhood who ended up having the same name that I had picked for myself very early on in my transition. And I remember a Reiki session with her where two, two things happened. I had an experience of. Of, of essentially my spirit coming out of my body being above where I was, laying on the table, and for the first time, experiencing my feminine essence in its pure spirit form.
And then I had to go back into the body and it was just with a lot of sadness, oh, here we go back into this again. And the other experience that I had was of con Yen's presence coming into the session in a very profound way. And she was with me throughout throughout the delicate times of my transition. And, coming to understand, k is the female form of Avalor Kapha, where there's, a clear understanding that this Bodhi energy can manifest as male and female.
And so these are some of the early experiences with Reiki as I embarked on my transition journey. And then I was in a very senior role and it was a very delicate process to come out and to navigate the publicity of coming out the public attention, et cetera. And, There were so many situations where I used Reiki, both for myself and for the situations, and it really paved, really smoothed the way for a lot of very scary conversations.
I was able to move into those conversations with a lot of peace and a lot of groundedness. Because you're advocating for yourself in a very extreme way, right? Yeah. You're advocating asking for people to accept something which is not easy for a lot of people to get their heads around, I expect, that knew you were Yeah. Correct. Probably correct. Yeah.
Wow. I'm so grateful that Reiki was there for you. At those times it sounds like it made a big difference, and I know that must have been very difficult to go through, so thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. It's, I, the, I heard a wonderful, I heard a wonderful quotes on a podcast just last week from a teacher that I really enjoy, Ram Dev, bill Baldin. And, he made the point on the podcast that the nature of the earthly existence is that it has just enough friction for us to awaken other plans of existence, have too much friction. Other plans of existence have too little friction.
For me, I was, I've always had a very keen sense that having a transgender identity was almost a seed that I brought into this life that would create enough friction within myself to want to seek answers, to want to seek awakening. I love that.
And seeing that and accepting it and then working with Reiki to clear the path internally, but also to support oneself through the fragility of transition is absolutely critical because bear in mind, transition can be, Especially for someone who's formed a strong ego. You've, at a certain point in your life, you've formed a, you've formed a certain identity, right? Sure. Transition is like a type of ego death.
You mentioned that in your article,
right? You're actually dispensing with a whole identity, and in the midst of it, you're creating a new identity. You're bringing forth a new identity and you're, you're going through a period where you're actually maintaining two identities. Before I was out everywhere. I was one person at work, and I was one person at home. That's very, it's almost oid. That must be a big confusing too. It and but without having something that grounds you. It's a very difficult place to navigate.
Yeah. It's a very, it's a very difficult place to navigate. And you can get very lus in that. So again, Reiki throughout was exceptionally a helpful in, in, in grounding me and bringing peace to quite a scary time where you're taking care of yourself, but you're also taking care of the people around you. Cuz they're, in a sense, they're transitioning too with you
Yes. I suppose to your
new items, right? Correct. And they're and for loved ones, they're letting go of the relationship to your prior identity and they're learning to love and see and accept this new identity that's emerging. It
occurs to,
but for it never thought of it. But there might be some grief in that of course, because there is so much less go. Of
course, of course. But the upside to it is that for people who open theirselves to the experience I'm saying support, family and other people around it, is they actually get a vantage point into the, let's say the supremacy of spirit because they get to see a person manifested through different genders, but there's something within them that doesn't alter
they get witness somebody becoming their authentic selves.
That too that too. And it in a sense, it's a teaching about. About how yes. Soul is. Soul is before gender, but soul must enter gender to be manifest in the world. But soul is there
throughout. Exactly. And that's something I wanted to bring up. The fact that people who are familiar with Holy Fire Reiki are aware of the brothers and sisters of the light. And in their truly enlightened form, they exist in a place beyond gender. And that, that they often have to take on form and gender in order for us to be able to relate to them. But it always amazed me that people. Got so upset or up in arms or, controlling about people who just wanted to express who they were.
I never understood why it was my business I that you want, I think you just need to be who you are and I think that's a beautiful thing and I don't understand why anybody outside of you would need to have any control on that. I guess I never understood that. But,
There, there are a lot of power structures in the world that rest upon the incident of duality ex.
There you go. And Reiki is beyond duality and perhaps that's why it is supportive. And helpful. Helpful in in, in Yeah. Expressing that authentic self. And I was going to talk about pronouns, but Jillian I wanna keep going on this theme a little bit more. Have you ever had any common misconceptions or challenges as a transgender PE person seeking Reiki and how can we as Reiki practitioners be more welcoming and create a more welcoming space for different gender identities?
The first, the first piece of advice is do the work yourself. We're at a point now where there is so much material available. 10 years ago when I was transitioning, there was not a lot of material to offer people. Yeah. There's just an abundance of it. And you don't even have to read a book. There are so many great movies and documentaries. There, there's so many people that are out that have told their stories that it's, it's just there.
It's it's very much with like the work that people need to do to understand the stress that people who experience racial discrimination go through. If the work is not on the person that's part of the minority group. No. The work is on the work is squarely on the person in this context who's the he who's offering the healing, right? And it. But it's, but I think that it's liberating. It's very liberating work because we as humans, are very bound up within our gender roles.
We ascribe gender to a fetus before it's born, often just based on a scan, even before we pick a name for the child. The child is born, they take one look at the genitals and that's it. Your path is set, right? You're, it's, you're in this line, you're in that line, and it says nothing about it. It says nothing about it. I, here, I'll use an example. We just went to look. We need a new puppy out. A beautiful dog passed away a week ago and we decided that we want to get a new puppy.
And we went to meet the puppies from the letter. They're one week old. And the, the person said, if you want to pick a name, it's great. Cuz then they'll use the name to start helping train the puppy before we take it. And then we, and then he's sometimes it's hard to name a dog because we want to see the personality before you pick a name.
So even with an animal, we understand that the act of naming the animal needs to allow for some time to observe the character and the personality of the animal. But we take one look at the child when they're born and put them on this binary track. Wow. Yeah. I, but everything that we know about the uni, everything we know about this world is that there is a vast diversity of sexual and gender expression across species. Yes. Across species.
Yeah. And whether it's two gay penguins in the, in Antarctica, taking turns to, to look after the penguin egg, there's so much out there. We see fish that change sex throughout their thing. It's there, it's everywhere to be seen. But somehow as humans, we're like, oh no, there's only this. Yeah. It's pink. It's pink. Pink or blue. Pink or blue. Nothing in between. Sorry.
Thank you, Jillian. Karen, I'm gonna, I'm,
oh, I just wanted to comment, as I, I listened to Jillian, I just, I admire your bravery and e courage and I just, I can't even imagine what it's like to have gone through what you have gone through, the strength of character, the dark nights of the soul, that I'm sure that you have faced the level of criticism and contempt from probably many people and just difficulties at, in the work environment and in life in general.
So I just wanna honor and acknowledge, Just the beauty of what you're sharing and who you are and your path and. It was I've been there through a little bit of it, with you. Yeah. I'm just amazed and think, boy, could I do that? It's I don't,
I don't think so. Yeah.
It's boy, it must take a really mature soul, to walk
the
path that you've
walked. Thank you, Karen. It's it's it's curious. My, my mother's name was Theresa of Avalara, Theresa de Valla, after Saint Theresa of Avalara, and my father's name was John and St. John of the Cross was who wrote The Dark Night of the Soul. And St. John of the Cross was a student of Saint Teresa of Aval. Oh, wow. So the so these are the parents that I picked for myself. These are the names of the parents that I picked for myself.
If you've come across any other work by Murra, by star she's written extensively about Saint Teresa of Avalara and St. John at the cross and their and their spiritual connection and relationship. So beautiful.
And I, this can I, a, were your parents supportive, Jillian of you, or
My father was deceased already. And my mother was supportive. So there's a really interesting thing here as well, is that it has been my observation that mothers know. Yeah. And my mother said to me that she could never turn me out of love. She needed some help with getting her head around it intellectually. Sure. But the bond between mother and child is such that it, and I'm very grateful. It's not always like that. That's Yeah. Absolutely.
I will not say that, but I have seen on preponderance in my experience that mothers know and mothers will accept. I've seen this with friends that are gay, seen this with friends that are trans. The mother's there and then the father sometimes takes a bit longer to come around. But they do as well,
yeah, that makes me happy. I actually was speaking with someone in our, in my region who runs a program to support gender non-binary individuals. And she surprised me. She informed me that quite a few young people or enough young people certainly in, in our region are turned out of their homes. And they come out and I just as a parent, can't imagine that. I don't really understand it. But anyway, it's, I do know it happens.
This is all too common. This is all too common in many parts of the world where there's no, there's no. There's just no framework for understanding this naturally occurring variation within the human population. Yeah. There's no framework for understanding this or supporting it. It, there are societies where those frameworks exist right there. Many of the First Nations, it's just going to people there.
Many of the First Nations people around the world have a two spirit, have a Sei, have a sense for it. Two-spirit as sometimes the word that's used I don't use that word for myself because I, I feel that's appropriate appropriating. Though, though I do resonate with the term, but I won't use it for myself. I resonate with it, but I won't use it.
And there, there is a, when it comes to energy work I think that there is a, there's a great gift that this experience, this identity does bring because we, many trans people can be bridges. When I was transitioning I had this very keen image that I had been living on one side of a very big road that I'd be living on.
One bank of a very big river, and that in transitioning, I was getting in a little boat and I was crossing to the other side, to go and join the camp on the other side where I really wanted to be. But I had to make that journey many times. And in doing so, and in doing so, you actually in a sense build a bridge. You become like a fairy person, who takes people across the river of gender.
That image. Wow. That's very
cool. Yeah. And I do, I feel that very integrated, right? Like I I've maintained a lot of my friendships with men and I'm able to still able to understand and relate to their. Experiences, and I also can relate to women as well. It's both and in many regards.
I love that. Jillian. Wow, this is such a great conversation. And for my next question, I'm gonna start with you, Karen, but Jillian, I'd like you to chime in as well as Reiki practitioners. How can we educate ourselves and overcome any biases? Even sometimes we may not even be aware of biases. How can we do that? When it comes to supporting transgender and non-gender conforming individuals? I think we have to start
with ourselves and look within and examine our own biases, and to the extent that they're there, work on healing them. And that starts with compassion for ourselves. The more that we can accept ourselves, the more we can accept others. And Reiki is very good about compassion, particularly the co una Reiki, which means compassionate action, right? So activating Reiki and finding any parts of ourselves that has, judgments or opinions that are not supportive and helpful.
Any prejudices that we have. And we may not be aware of those, but, if you befriend some people in the L G B T Q I A population and get to know them and, try to think what it might be like to walk in their shoes to understand them. And when I interviewed I think it was Jay Jackson, who's a gay man. He said think about would you be comfortable being seen with, someone who is non-binary or a gay or lesbian person or, gender queer.
Go out into the community, get to understand diversity more, ask questions, be curious, be interested and then, do your best to provide a welcoming environment. David Raz in, when I interviewed him for my article, said, people wanna be welcomed and respected and not treated as, different. They wanna be. Honored for who they are. And he had suggested that in addition to the pronouns, you can say that you wanna get to know the person and all of their identities.
You know that all of that is welcome here. The totality of who they are. And they don't just have to fit themselves into a little box, that they might have to, out in the, the rest of the world, outside of the Reiki class, that this is a safe and welcoming environment for everyone and using the pronouns correctly and practicing with it. Because I tell you they, them did not roll off my tongue at all. And during the class I was thinking
how am I supposed
to use they, them? And, and. I don't know. I guess I was hearing my mother's, you can't do improper English, and then it's oh my god. Okay. So practicing with it and finding ways to address your students with, without the, he, she, talk about, class or participants or, your Reiki client. Or just a few ideas I had and, I don't know what what else would you like Dad, Jillian?
Two, two things. I was just in New York at a at the board meeting for our organization that I worked for. And we had someone come in and do some facilitation for diversity training and. They asked everybody a series of questions and asked people to either step forward to step forward if they had experienced that thing, that was being unnamed. This is a group of 30 people exceptionally high performing individuals. Business leaders, you name it.
And the facilitator said, step forward, if you've been bullied, every single person stepped forward. Wow. So as a practitioner recognized that your L G B T Q I A client has probably experienced unimaginable heartache and bullying for who they are. And the sensitivity to that is is table stakes to, to, to creating that space.
So when it comes to things like pronouns, think of being, say for instance for the first 30 years of your life, you've had someone refer to you as her the whole time, and you've now realized that you're trans-masculine and you've started asserting your authentic masculine identity and the incredible effort that it's taken.
In every sphere of your life, from identity documents to every place that you have to change your name, every credit card, every bank account, every passport, driver's license, you name it. It's an exceptional effort that people go through. It's just basic decency to be met. Where you need to be met. Just like we have no issue correcting the pronunciation of someone's name. If we mispronounce their name right.
And there are many names that get mispronounced and someone will say, my name is said like this, and everyone says, and they correct it and they carry on. It's nothing. So the same with pronouns, cuz you are respecting the individual. That's all it is. And for
people who are new to pronouns, Karen, I know in your article you not only outlined what each of the terms meant with L G B T Q I A, which I wonder if you can do that in the context of our podcast as well, but you also talked a bit about pronouns. Can you enlighten us a bit on what you discovered there? Okay,
sure. So you mean just go over what the L G B T Q I A means?
Exactly. Yeah.
Okay. L is for lesbian, G is for gay, B for bisexual, T for transgender Q for queer. It can also, so queer as people whose sexual orientation is not exclusively homosexual or straight. It can include people who are non-binary, gender fluid, gender non-conforming people. Sometimes the cue can stand for questioning means somebody who's questioning their sexual orientation or their gender identity. And then I is intersex.
So that can include a person, Julian referred to before where, you look at the genitals and you may not know exactly what sex they are. They may have sexual characteristics of both sexes. It could be internal, it could be chromosomes. Something that falls outside of the traditional conceptions of male and female. And then A is asexual, people who don't experience sexual arousal. And then the plus is, or, anything else that the earlier letters didn't identify.
Were there two parts
to that question?
Pronouns and then looking at pronouns, how does that show up? Because I have to admit I think sometimes Western, the western part of Turtle Island is, or of North America is A little bit ahead. And I remember from the West, people were coming into my classes and so on with pronouns, beside their name, and I didn't know what that meant at first. It hadn't made it east yet. And can you explain the pronouns and just how to use them and what they mean? Okay.
You've got the, he, him she, her they them for people that don't identify as either he or she. So that would be gender fluid or gender non-conforming. A person may choose to go by a little bit different pronouns like Ze or Zers.
I hadn't seen that pronoun. What is Ze or Zs. Jillian, can you speak to that a little bit more?
It, in essence it's people looking to be liberated from pronouns entirely, right? Like not to be, to to essentially not make the act of using pronouns gendered use of language, right? It would be a good way to do it. So the look the best and simplest resource to access for this is just pronouns.org. They're really the grounding authority that anybody can go to pronouns.org. And all of this is explained with and explained with how to use it in language.
Just as Karen said earlier, it does take a little bit of loosening the grammatical training for people to use they then fluid, in a fluent way, in a sentence, and to feel comfortable with it and not to be stumbling over it as well, that's some of the work is to actually just practice it.
And, and I work in a, I work as I said earlier, in a progressive queer space and even as a trans person, I have had to do work to ensure that I am fluent in the use of pronouns and I'm using it comfortably and fluently within my language. So I'm saying that to give people space. That this isn't necessarily easy because our entire society is gender policed. It's gender policed in language. It's gender policed in grammar, it's gender policed in clothing, in names, on and on.
And we receive that policing as children. Precognitive. Yeah.
Right. Whether they're decorated in pink or blue and the toys that are given to the children, or they're given toy tracks or dolls. Yeah. And then there's also the pronouns for people who may float between she and they or he, and they. Or other people who just want to be referred to by their name. Yeah. That don't really wanna be placed in a box and just use my name. That makes sense.
That might be they're given name or it might be a name that they have chosen for themselves that more fully reflects who that person sees
themself as. What I think is so exciting and for people to get their heads around is that this gender expansiveness is for everybody body. Yeah. It's not just for trans people. We live it acutely. But there's liberation for everybody within this because if you really interrogate yourself, really ask you, if you really look closely at how you function in the world there are traits to all of our beings that are, that fall across the entire gender spectrum of expression, right?
Look at, look at situations where someone loses a someone loses a partner, they lose a spouse, and they now need to, they're sole parent and they need to take on. New parenting roles that would normally have been divided up based on gender. Parents, most those parents don't question it. They learn how to do it. Cause that's what it is to be a good parent. They don't get, you can't get hung up about because the child needs the care.
This is like some of the videos that I've seen where people, where, you know, I've seen videos of a white person adopting a black child and then doing the work to work out how to help them with their hair. That's crossing racial experiences. Yeah. And we're all able to do it because we all have these in terms of gender. We all have these parts within ourselves.
We're we have both genders within ourselves, hormonally, we all have testosterone and estrogen, for instance, differing levels, but it's all there and it changes over the course of one's life. We know this too. And they all, they shape your view of the world. They can attest to how powerful hormones are. They do shape your experience of the world. But the critical point is that whether you have XX chromosomes or XPI chromosomes you're still. Got both sets of sex hormones.
So it's, so when you look at it plainly without judgment, it's so self-evident was the point that I made it, the point that I made earlier. You just have to look at the world. You just have to look at nature to see how to see the diversity of expression. Yeah. Take for instance, some of the there, there's some intersex conditions where a person might be born with X micro chromosomes. So they're chromoly male, but they have an alteration in their D N A that prevents them from.
Making use of testosterone. So they're born with, they're born with scended testicles in the abdomen, but they develop female characteristics entirely. Female characteristics, and they identify as female. They don't identify as trans in any way but chromoly people would say that's male, but it's an alteration in the expression of the D N A that causes that intersex condition. And, and there's sometimes some of the most beautiful people from a, from an aesthetic point of view.
There's, there's some model, there's some international models out there that have come out as intersex, right? So again, it's this the world for every category we create as humans, the world comes and smashes those categories because the world is saying the picture is bigger. Expand your view, your narrow view is holding you back from seeing the oneness. Rigid duality is delusion. Yeah. Rigid duality is some sorrow. Breaking down rigid duality moves us to oneness
and Reiki is the tool that can help us with that. I think absolutely. Through healing ourselves, through healing our views, our prejudices, through exposing that and realizing that at the soul level we are all one and we are all connected. And there's an interdependence there. And when we realize that and can acknowledge that interdependence, a society doesn't operate well with every person for themselves, we have to work together.
And you know that's some of the beautiful things about the holy fire Three energy about joining people together and unification consciousness
and it's like the auto barn, right? There's, there's no speed limit. With early fire three. It's true. It's very quick. It can do so much. A very quick road to unity.
I agree. Guys, what advice would you have for somebody for, just to be sure as a Reiki practitioner, as a Reiki teacher, that they are creating the most welcoming environment and able to support their students? I know you've said do the work and study and is there anything beyond that or or are there any thoughts that you'd like to leave us with today before we move into meditation?
I would say If you know that you are, if you know that a client that's coming to see you, or a person that's going to be in one of your classes identifies as trans or gender nonconforming, use the power of breaking intention to say illuminate for me, the wounds of gender within myself. Oh. That I may not project that onto another. That is brilliant.
And do you have any advice, Jillian, for people who are struggling with gender identity and. Ways that they can receive the support and ways that they can use Reiki to assist them as well.
Learn, the one and two levels, one and two give incredible techniques for how to be grounded, how to protect yourself, psychically and emotionally. How to cleanse yourself of some of the difficult energy that you might encounter. Those are all there, right? That's a weekend. To learn some of those, to learn some of those tools. It's one day, two days to learn those tools and you can apply them instantly to. To help yourself be ground, focus on being grounded and use Reiki to give yourself love.
Because many people many people in my view, really struggle with self love and self-affirmation cuz the entire world, and especially now in many parts of the world, is telling trans kids, is telling trans people that they do not exist. That their experiences are to be erased. That they are less than fully participating humans in society. And to use Reiki to know that you are a child of God, that you are loved, that you are a unique, powerful, vibrant expression of oneness.
And to know that with certainty as you move through your journey. That's
beautiful. It is. Thank you. Thank you so much, both of you. Are there any parting thoughts before we move into a meditation today? I was just thinking
about as Reiki practitioners, being mindful of our social media, that we can create a welcoming environment with social media by. Picturing images of gay, lesbian, trans people and famous artists, writers, historical figures, who are L G B T Q I A same with, race and diversity. We want to show images of lot of diversity out there and not just get stuck on, one kind of image. That's a really
good and I would take it further and I would say add a clear statement of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, D E I B to your website and to your materials. That is a good idea. Declare on your, in your media, on your, the way that you're promoting your practice or your teaching. Have that statement, and can you repeat that statement?
Oh so have an explicit statement that include that, that addresses your commitment as a practitioner or as a teacher to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Belonging, okay. That's Diversity is not enough. Yeah. Okay. It's all four of those elements. Belonging. Say it, state it. Practice it.
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you both. Guys, I'd just like to lead us, unless one of you would rather. I'd just like to lead us in a little meditation to end our time together today. I'll go ahead and lead, and if anybody wants to add anything at any time, go ahead and chime in. Okay. So once again, for everyone listening, thank you so much for being here. Thank Karen and Jillian.
And I invite you to close your eyes once again and bring your hands into Gassho and then place them comfortably on your body, wherever you feel guided and just allowing the Reiki energy to flow through you and specifically the. Frequencies of unification consciousness and that understanding that we are all one.
And as Jillian mentioned, if there are any gender biases that exist within us, we invite Reiki to heal them now so that we might be able to meet our L G B T Q I A friends and all friends where they are. And we'll just remain here for a little while today and allow the Reiki energy to assist us in this. And just inviting the light of self-love to flow through us all now and inviting Reiki and self-love to allow us to each, in our own way, become a complete expression of ourselves.
And if you need assistance, As you become that complete expression of who you are, just know that this beautiful energy from source is here to nurture and support you, to listen, heal, nurture, and so allow the light of self-love to flow through you as you become even more fuller expression of who you are. I'd just like to take a moment to thank everyone today who turned up to discuss this topic. Thank you for the beautiful light that you are spreading in the world today.
We are so blessed to be of this lineage of light bringers creating wellness on the earth today, and that begins with each of us creating wellness within ourselves, a HOAs and Namaste and Amen. Thank
you, Pam. It's been an honor to be here. And thank you, Jillian. I just celebrate all your sharing and yeah, this is amazing podcast.
Thank you. And yes, Jillian, we so appreciate you and. For being open and vulnerable and willing to share from your experiences in the interests of helping others. As I echo Karen, I can't imagine what you've been through, but you are so brave and you are so appreciated.
Thank you. Thank you both
Namaste, everyone.
I.