Frans plays with Dolls

Good morning!

Or is it?

I was awoken (even in this hermetically sealed glass cage of a hotel room with windows that do not open) to the sound of sirens hurtling past. I could hear them for a long time, as others came and then others. I reluctantly got up earlier than I had planned to make sure the hotel wasn’t on fire. (It wasn’t.)

But where the hell AM I? You’d think I were back in the Bronx! Here, even in the middle of happy Mall-land Virginia, everything can go upside-down, too?

Most definitely.

In fact the one thing we CAN be sure of is that things go sideways in our lives again and again. And again. 😉

So even though my hotel was not on fire this morning (where the heck are those fire evacuation instructions?!), somewhere not too far away from here, SOMEbody’s life is being seriously disrupted … or more

And isn’t that the way? We are calm, sleeping even, moving along in our lives on a sort of autopilot and then – WHAM! – something happens that brings us back to attention, but QUICK!

There are two possible reactions to those “attacks”, if you will: we can play the victim OR we can search for the lesson (there is ALWAYS something to learn!) … and then get up, brush ourselves off, and get on with our (sometimes drastically altered) lives.

I write this while packing and readying to leave Fairfax after a three- day re-sitting of a Reiki Teacher class with the internationally reknowned (and refreshingly, resoundingly goofy) Frans Stiene. My teacher. I think I’ll keep him.

I think I’ll stick with him because Frans suggests goofy, brilliant things like, “Play with dolls.”

Not Barbies mind you (I wouldn’t be sticking around) … Frans was talking more about Weebles: you know, like in the old TV commercial: “Weebles wobble, but they don ‘t fall down?” 🙂

Those (pretty lame) dolls were round at the base and weighted so that, no matter what you did to them, they wouldn’t stay down. (I tried.) 😉

Frans’ point was that if we stay grounded, life’s sirens don’t floor us. How to stay grounded? One way is by working at a part of reiki practice which helps us develop a greater connection to the earth, a solid foundation of stability, a greater focus and attention. A part of the practice that helps us to stay present – to stay awake – so that when the sirens come, we aren’t falling out of bed and tripping over the sheets. Hell, maybe even when the sirens come, we aren’t even very surprised…

Because, as I said, the sirens always come. And I definitely want to be a Weeble when that happens: grounded and flexible, able to bounce back instead of lain flat out on the floor, pretending to be helpless. (Because we all know deep down that we are NOT helpless, don ‘t we? That perhaps we are not only NOT helpless, but powerful beyond measure … I’m just sayin’ …)

So even though I am leaving Frans today and probably won’t see him for a long time (it was two years since our last visit in France, and he lives in Australia where he and his wife Bronwen have the headquarters of the International House of Reiki), I think I will play dolls along with him from here on in…

Staying awake and focused will ease the experience of the drastic occurrences that sometimes bring us (me) back to attention so harshly. And if we STAY attentive, if we DON’T go into autopilot but stay present, maybe life won’t have to wake us up so harshly.

Like in my family when we were kids if we didn’t wake up, my Dad might sometimes pour cold water on us. After a while, you learn to wake up, no? 😉

Awake and grounded from Fairfax to New York…

Kathryn Hudson is a Shinpiden Reiki Level III graduate of IHReiki. Read more from Kathryn at Kathryn Hudson Today. 

Kathryn Hudson