Spiritual healing comes in many forms, one of which is Reiki. However, your path to spiritual balance is a lifestyle: it is something you live. Life can be seen as a series of decisions. But how do we make one? And why does it help?
The other day I was at Panera Bread right in the middle of the lunch rush.
Before I knew it, I was shuffled to the front of the line, still lost on what I was supposed to be ordering for myself. But by that point I had committed, and the line was way too long to go stand off to the side for a hot second, so I had to order.
I trusted that I wanted a Pick 2, but I wasn’t sure the Bacon Tomato Grilled Cheese was going to pair well with the Ten Vegetable Soup, or that I wanted to go against my body and consume a heaping plate of dairy, gluten, and meat. But I heard those two choices fly out of my mouth anyway and just went with it.
The cashier followed up with, “Would you like an apple, bread, or chips as your side?” Something I was clearly also not ready for.
“Chips. No—wait! An apple. Yeah, an apple.”
Sound familiar?
Decisions
Life is full of these moments. Moments where we are confronted with choices.
But making the right one is often an annoyance.
We get trapped in this analysis paralysis, where it would be better to make any decision than to continue thinking about it. Because it doesn’t really even matter, right?
When we get down to it, the decision to get the vegetable soup is just that—a decision.
But no matter if the decision is related to what you’re going to do for the rest of your life or what you’re going to eat for lunch, no one decision has more or less power than another. (Only our egos try to tell us otherwise.)
That means your smallest decisions rule your reality just as much as your biggest ones, and you can really take advantage of that.
So what’s the trick to making decisions, then, and why should we start taking those small ones more seriously?
Making the Right Decision
First off, don’t feel guilty about making the wrong decision. Guilt and fear are useless emotions, and they actually pull us further away from ever being able to make the right decisions.
At the end of the day, it’s all just practice.
Inside of ourselves, we all feel forces pulling us both to things and away from things – that ‘this is right’ feeling. That’s our intuition.
For me, it’s a solid and confident feeling in my chest. But this was something I had to develop overtime, and I actually had to make a lot of wrong decisions to build trust with that feeling.
Trust breeds confidence, but it takes time.
So how do we breed self-trust?
Baby steps. Being a decision-maker is in the details: choosing pizza over spaghetti, watching 2 episodes of Bob’s Burgers instead of one, going to bed early.
Maybe once in a while we’ll make the wrong choice. But choosing the wrong decision strengthens our intuition if we look at the “consequences” as an experiment and not a life-threatening situation.
If we pay attention to these little experiments, we’ll notice we have a whole portfolio of which feelings we followed, which ones we ignored, what worked for us, and what didn’t.
This is one way we can manifest our personal intuitive skills and our ability to listen to them, and when we’re tuned into our intuition, being a decision maker is a no-brainer (pun totally intended).
Being able to ‘hear’ our intuition is similar to strengthening a muscle. We must make decision after decision, allowing ourselves to freely experience the outcomes without attachment to what is “right” or “wrong,” and interact with this subtle feeling in our heart, our gut, or wherever else it shows up for us.
The more we tune into those signs our bodies send us, the stronger they become. But this strength is developed only through the continual interaction with this feeling.
The big picture: It’s this same strength that carries us along our spiritual journey.
In the moment: It’s a single, individual decision that adds a small, yet significant, amount of self-trust, creating strength.
Making Decisions Spreads Positivity
Soon our own trust becomes our own power.
People are drawn to people who have confidence. That’s the same confidence that is bred by trust and the same trust that is bred by dancing with the ‘this is right’ feeling inside each and every one of us. (That includes you, too.)
This is how we make things happen for us, instead of to us. See, the more decisions we make, the more people let us make decisions. They naturally look at us as a leader, and we’ll be able to get everything we ask for.
It is this that spawns the great thinker of yester-year like Voltaire to speak such wisdom as “With great power comes great responsibility” (1829).
Power attracts followers. Power that is bred through the continual interaction with one’s intuition; the same intuition that we practice ‘hearing’ through making decision after decision and listening to ourselves.
And the cool part is, we don’t even have to have it figured out—we don’t have to know what’s on the other side of our decision. We’ll just trust it’s the right one, because we trust ourselves.
It gets easier.
The Power of You.
You are the most knowledgeable person about yourself. It’s easy to want to follow others, and too often we follow those sources outside of ourselves. But if we want to find and live our pure joy, the only person we should turn to is ourselves.
We have a perspective unique to ourselves, made with ourselves in mind.
If we seek pure joy, we must not be led. Rather we need to go inside ourselves to find the decisions that bring us the most joy. What is right for one person is not right for another—no two people can have the same experience.
That means someone else’s decisions come from a perspective completely irrelevant to your own experience and will not serve you.
Full Circle: The Spiritual Journey
Developing this trust, strengthening this decision-making muscle, finding it within ourselves to make a decision: these are some of the many proverbial steps in our spiritual journey.
A spiritual journey is path of healing; one can say that spiritual healing and a spiritual journey are one in the same. They are a lifestyle, a mantra, a set of intentions, and a list of personal accomplishments. In some sense they are however you define them: that is the power of you.
However, this journey happens within you, but you are not alone—it takes a village. Many of us have a journey that brings us wisdom to take to the rest of the world. What I seek to share is something that was shared with me: Reiki.
Reiki is a Japanese energy healing technique that allows your mind and body to relax deeply so your mind is able to shift from survival mode to healing mode. That’s where you gain confidence, clarity, and answers to questions and circumstances that have been draining your personal power without your permission.
It’s the same thing that transformed my life from a depressed and anxiety-ridden one to a peaceful, confident one. I am living the life of my dreams because of Reiki, and I have been called to help others do the same.
If you are curious, want to know more, or just want to share your experiences with me, please post a comment, send an email, or sign up for a session here.
Remember,
Seek answers from within, strengthen your intuition (i.e. your decision-making muscle), and learn that it’s okay to trust yourself. It’s all just practice.
And if you ever find yourself confronting failure, I have written about how I approach overcoming it, here, and I encourage reading it!
The power to effortlessly change your life is in plain sight.
Take advantage of it.
Baby steps!
Lauren
Lauren Mudrock 