Becoming a Master Practitioner of Reiki

Postcards from a transgender life

I’ve done it.  I am now a Master Practitioner of Usui Reiki.  For those who have followed this blog from the beginning, you will perhaps remember the near psychedelic experiences I had two plus years ago with the “blind” yet seeing reiki healer.  Incredible experiences that left me high.  Two sessions, close to 11 hours.  It was incredible.  It was also enough.

She also judged.  She did not approve of sex reassignment surgery and gave me white pine tea, which was intended to kindle the inner male…and certainly worked against the teas and other things my ex-Mistress had led me towards, which were helping me to cultivate the feminine.  She also revealed her scary pro-Trump politics at the end of the second session—the looney who made me turn my back for good on the Republicans.  I know I shouldn’t talk politics, not least because this is not a political blog, or is it?  Anyway, here goes.  

Politics is a filthy, cynical business.  But it is symbolic.  And the person who sits in the chair, whether President, Supreme Court Justice, or Senator, should honour the chair.  For the most part, Presidents have done so.  Or at least tried to do so.  Plenty would argue that Bill Clinton dishonoured the office.  Almost none would disagree that Richard Nixon dishonoured the office.  Donald Trump did so with glee.  Who needs the toxicity?

Becoming a Healer

What is a kinky, transgender person like me doing as a healer?  Who will even come to me?  I shall be finding out.  This is not the only modality that will be a part of my practice.  Nutrition and Medical Herbalism are the two others that are in the mix.  One other, a multi-year commitment, is on the way.

These are all practices that I will be able to generate a small income from into my dotage.  My next career.  It will take a good while to build a practice.  I might get bored.  But I am good at it.  The energy flows with me in Reiki, and the unnamed other practice seems to come naturally to me.  I’ll let you know what it is when I put my shingle out.

But I am tempted to add spankings to the mix.  An extremely well-known dominatrix sidled up to yesterday in a night club and started chatting with me.  She was hot, too hot, from her latex outfit.  She looked stunning.  

We had met before.  I was flattered that she recognised me.  She had told me then to ‘put on some warm clothes’.  I was flouncing around in a wisp of a dress and it was quite cold out.  I get cold easily, so I was cold.  She was wearing a really thick sweater and was plenty warm—she was off duty.

“I’m a dominatrix,” she said.  I knew exactly who she was.  “I’ve been spanking people upstairs, but it isn’t any fun, it’s too short.”  It seems she enjoys really taking it to her charges.  Well, I was on my best behaviour and didn’t say a word, but I was thinking how luscious a spanking would be.

As time passes, I recognise that BDSM for me is a religion.  The women I see who administer fun or punishment in equal measure are priestesses.  Some become friends and companions, others not, but that is the role they play in my life.  Ditto the FSSW.

Being Selfish

It feels like self-love is the hardest love of all to feel.  It is so easy to love others.  It is so easy to need others, to want others.  But the foundations are week.  We become slaves when we need something from someone else.  And while there can be kinky fun in that, it is not healthy.  I understand that now.  It is sad to bury that.  It is sad to feel it slip away.  The essence of wanting to feel like a baby where it involves someone else is exactly that feeling.  An all-sense source of pleasure.  You can call it something else.  You can perceive it as something else.  But most of us have it in one way or another.  It is very hard to never develop any form of co-dependence.

I see the people I see in the world of sex work not to get off, but to grow.  Getting off is so easy, and in a way far simpler and less complicated when it doesn’t involve someone else…but what I cannot do is be pushed to the edges of myself without someone else’s help.  And this can involve all manner of erotic, psychological, physical, spiritual interactions.  But this is what I seek.  It is also why I am a relentless explorer.  I don’t want to do the same thing twice.  It’s fun, but new is better.  And my maddening habit of saying to the dominatrix, what I will enjoy is what you enjoy is so pleasurable in part because it is scarier for me—it is an unknown and also without expectation, which makes it safer to explore without the risk of judging whether you liked it or not, because that doesn’t matter as much.

I know a lot of clients have elaborate fantasies, and that these must be catered to for repeat business.  I can’t do this.  It feels too self-indulgent.

Letting go of Shame

The most powerful step I have taken in my life is the release of shame.  The refusal to carry it.  Yes, you can be acutely ashamed in the moment, perhaps embarrassed, because of something you have done, which can be apologized for.  But lingering shame is the toxic kind.  It speaks of self-harm, not self-love, and is diminishing.  As I have let go of shame I have also opened up, and so many people in my life have responded in kind.  Taboo and off-limits topics have become possible, and so many of my friendships have blossomed as a result.  Ditto my relationship with my children.  

And now that it is gone, I don’t want it back.  As I contemplate being a healer, I know that the sexual and erotic landscape is the home of so much of our shame.  It is the route through which I was able to release mine, and my co-conspirator, the ex-Mistress seduced, whipped, and role-played it out of me.  Can I do the same for others?

I wonder if I can ever feel submissive in the same way again?  Part of me thinks not.  I am not sure that I could let go in such a complete way.  That lifestyle submission has slipped from me.  I certainly feel it often enough in confined circumstances.  Literally, and figuratively.  I am developing a love of rope.  There are few things that scare me more.  When we talk about being pushed to the edge…

Ex-Mistress strangled me once, and it scared the shit out of me.  It also was intensely arousing and put me in deep sub space in an instant.  But when I talked about it with her, about safety, about my fears, but also that I wished to do it again, I felt I had hurt her feelings somehow, and we never did it again.  This is something that I have done before.  My words are not always as delicate as they feel, and things come out wrong, and I piss people off.  I don’t want to excuse it any way, especially when it achieves the opposite of its objective, but it can…and it doesn’t help to say ADD people have a tendency to be both simultaneously hyper-sensitive (not as in touchy, but as in being able to feel) and hiding or burying of emotion creating a sense of insensitivity.

Becoming a Master of Reiki

As we learn to practice these healing arts, we ourselves can become healed.  I woke up last night after a number of the “activations” (energetic downloads of Reiki energy) and sobbed about something I had dreamt that was not true but spoke to an irrational fear of mine which is linked to a kind of negative personality pattern, an addiction of sorts.

When we learn to heal in this way, we become soldiers of light.  Some people don’t like Reiki because it feels like witchcraft.  It does.  When I took my teacher out to lunch with the Reflexologist who is adding science to my budding life as a foot worshiper, she joked about what happens when you get three witches together over tea (it happened that we were all three carrying two crystals on us…rocks in our pockets).

Being a “faggot”

I am definitely Queer.  I love it.  According to two men, I am also a “faggot”.  What strikes me as odd is that the only two people who have shouted that at me did so when I was in boy mode.  Once, in Miami, walking back home after a blissful experience at the spa—I was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, and the other time, today, on the streets of London, by then exhausted as I was nearing the end of my morning 14k run…and some young thug in sweat pants and sweat shirt, standing at a bus stop with his GF, blurted it out at me in disgust as I ran past.  I am wearing running gear, my hair is pulled back in a pony-tail, so tight to my head.  In his defence I was wearing a sports bra under my running shirt, but in mine, I have boobs, they need protection.  

He had an expression of physical revulsion on his face as he regarded me.  That meant he thought I’m hot.  Pity for the poor boy, as I didn’t fancy him.  Life would be a lot easier for me if I were a “faggot”.  I could be invisible.  It could be my secret, our secret.

But trans is different.  It’s in your face.  I think often about two trans friends of mine…one of whom has not even begun to transition towards female, and who loves men.  Even though they has not started the transition, they thinks of themselves as female, and therefore, straight.  I get it.  Its confusing.  The other one I am thinking of is legally female.  Looks utterly female.  But has a manner, an air about her of being “gay” in the gay male sense.  I don’t know what it is.  But kind of stereotypically effeminate gay.  She has kept her male bits and has kept their functionality.  

She likes to fxxk and wants to fxxk me.  I don’t want it.  Every dick that I have come across in a sexual situation belonged to an abuser.  It makes me very uncomfortable.  I wonder if I would be open to it had I not had this history of inappropriate male touch.  Maybe I would be open to exploring.  But no, I can’t.  I like women.  As a trans-woman, does that make me gay?  Does it make me a lesbian.  I certainly find lesbian women seriously hot.

Being a lesbian

One of the joys of being overtly trans is that women aren’t threatened by me at all anymore.  Not that they ever should have been, but perception is powerful, almost as powerful as projection.  I got dragged out of the queue for the men’s room by a woman who insisted I come with her and use the ladies.  I don’t do that yet on my own because my paperwork doesn’t align.  This matters to me.  There is a period of transition in which I am a ‘they’.  There is a period of transition when I am completely in flux.  But there will be a period when I no longer have my male bits, and my papers will change, and then I won’t be a ‘they’ anymore.  At least I don’t think so.

The feeling of being female is becoming increasingly so real that I almost don’t notice it.  That’s weird.  What my man brain felt like is almost impossible to remember.

I am able to speak to women who I find attractive, who might be picking me up, and be totally point blank about whether they like women or men, and not having that interfere with the night.  If they like men, we can become immediate friends, and if they like women, I can explore whether that might also include me.  It is kind of a winner all the way around.

Am I lesbian?  I don’t know.  I’d like to be.  But I need to take the next step to feel I can really be that.  I can’t wait.