There was a time in my life when, from the outside, I was doing what adults do.
I worked. I paid my bills. I built a career. I took care of responsibilities. I had relationships, made decisions, solved problems and kept moving forward.
It was my life.
But looking back, I can see something I couldn’t fully see then:
I had my own life, but I wasn’t living for myself.
I was going. I was doing. But I wasn’t really being.
That doesn’t mean the life I had built was false or that everything about it was wrong. In fact, many parts of who I am today were already there. I was intuitive. I was discerning. I was good at listening to people, recognizing what wasn’t being said and helping solve problems. Those qualities served me well throughout my career in retail management and human resources.
I had pieces of an identity before I had a vision for a life.
We begin with what we know
Growing up, I understood life largely through what I could see around me.
There were things I knew very clearly that I didn’t want for myself. I also had a creative outlet that gave me somewhere to put parts of myself I didn’t yet know how to name.
But I don’t remember having a clear sense of What do I want my life to look like? Who do I want to become? What feels true for me?
I followed paths that were visible to me before I knew how to imagine a path of my own.
That distinction matters to me now.
Sometimes we talk about authenticity as though we always know exactly who we are and simply need the courage to express it. My experience wasn’t that simple.
Sometimes you don’t know what you want because you haven’t experienced enough possibilities yet.
Something can be normal in your environment without ever feeling aligned for you. And sometimes it takes exposure to something different before you realize there are choices you hadn’t known to consider.
Choice requires awareness of possibility.
Exposure gave me perspective
College exposed me to a larger world, but exposure wasn’t the same as self-knowledge.
I continued building my life. I developed a career. I became very capable at functioning within it.
Years later, after the 2008 crash and a period when so much of what I had built fell apart, I began searching differently.
I listened to spiritual teachers. I visited different churches. I read. I took classes. I began paying attention to experiences I had previously been unable to explain.
Eventually, I enrolled in a 12-week intuitive development course taught by several different teachers.
For the first time, I began to have language for experiences that had been part of my life for years.
I realized I hadn’t suddenly become intuitive.
I had always been intuitive.
That realization also changed how I understood my earlier life. The discernment I had relied upon professionally, the way I listened, the way people came to me when they needed help working through something—those weren’t disconnected pieces.
They were pieces of me.
Growth didn’t require me to reject the woman I had been.
It allowed me to understand her differently.
Then Reiki entered the story
During that intuitive development course, several of the teachers told me I should learn Reiki.
At first, I dismissed it. I didn’t really understand what they meant or why Reiki would have anything to do with me.
Eventually, I said yes.
And when I took that first Reiki class, something clicked.
It all made sense.
I sometimes describe that experience very simply:
That was the beginning of me finding me.
Not because Reiki told me who I was.
Not because someone else suddenly had the answers to my life.
And not because I became a different person when I learned Reiki.
Reiki gave me a practice through which I could become more present with myself.
The more I practiced, the more I learned to listen. I became more aware of my own energy, responses, intuition and inner knowing. I began noticing what felt authentic and what I had simply become accustomed to doing.
And perhaps most importantly, I began understanding that I had choices.
Reiki became a path to self-mastery
When I use the word self-mastery, I don’t mean controlling every emotion, always knowing what to do or reaching some perfected version of yourself.
I mean knowing yourself well enough to participate consciously in your own life.
For me, Reiki became part of that practice.
It created space for awareness.
Awareness gave me an opportunity to discern.
Discernment helped me recognize what was actually true for me.
And from there, I could choose.
I began asking questions that seem incredibly ordinary now.
What do I enjoy?
What do I believe?
What feels right for me?
What am I choosing because it is genuinely mine—and what am I doing because it is familiar, expected or simply what everyone else seems to be doing?
Those questions changed my relationship with myself.
I began learning how to be more fully myself without needing to perform a version of myself for other people.
There was no dramatic moment when I arrived at an authentic self and the work was finished.
There still isn’t.
Self-mastery, as I understand it, is a continuing relationship with yourself.
We keep living. We keep learning. We encounter new experiences. Our capacity changes. Our understanding deepens. Sometimes a truth that served us for years expands into something we couldn’t have understood before.
The practice is continuing to listen.
Permission to grow
Years ago, I began putting language around this process through Truth, Integrity, Courage and Love. Over time, that work evolved into what I now call Coherence—the increasing alignment between what we know to be true and the way we actually live.
I can see now that the thread has been there for a very long time.
Becoming more fully yourself doesn’t necessarily require rejecting the life you’ve lived.
Sometimes healing is the process of reconciling who you learned to be with who you are becoming.
Sometimes it is recognizing that something which once supported you doesn’t anymore.
Sometimes it is discovering that something you thought you needed to leave behind is actually an authentic part of you.
And sometimes growth begins with something much smaller:
realizing you have a choice.
You don’t have to know exactly what you’re looking for before you give yourself space to listen.
That is still one of the things I value most about Reiki.
A Reiki session isn’t about me telling you what your answer is. It is a space to slow down, become present and notice yourself without having to immediately figure everything out.
Because sometimes, before we decide what needs to change, we need enough space to hear ourselves again.
And what we hear may simply be the beginning of finding more of who we already are.