“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” said Anais Nin. I never dreamed how much my life would expand when I took my first Reiki class. People always thought I was courageous before Reiki, but as I look back on the incidents that people commented on, I wouldn’t say they were courageous. Most of them were just stupid.
I once snorkeled into an underwater cave in the Riviera Maya. I thought my friend had gone inside, but he informed me later that he was simply motioning to it to show me. He didn’t want me to go into it. “What if there hadn’t been an air pocket inside? You didn’t know what was in there!” They thought I had drowned. I popped up in a tiny “cave” beneath the porous rock where my husband and those who didn’t want to snorkel were standing. I could hear them above me: “Where’s Karen? Have you seen Karen? Where did she go?”
I was yelling from within the cave, “I’m in here! I’m in the rocks!” But no one heard me. The next thing I knew, someone grabbed my ankle and pulled me under the water forcefully. I barely had time to gasp a huge gulp of air. My friend dragged me to the surface just as I ran out of air. That was one of the closest calls I’ve had while traveling, but I have been in some harrowing situations that I created myself because I’ve never had a good sense of self-preservation. I’ve always been curious to see what lies around the bend, and that adventurous spirit has gotten me into trouble quite a few times in my life.
Some of my family and friends think I’m courageous because I was the first in my family to go to college and graduate with a master’s degree (neither of my parents graduated from high school). Some think I’m brave because I survived a tumultuous childhood. But all of those things were not done from a place of courage. I did most of the “gutsy” things in my life either out of fear that I wouldn’t survive, or I did them to get love and admiration from people.
That’s not courage.
The root of the word “courage” comes from the Latin cor, which means “heart.” So truly courageous acts are those that come from the heart. And I couldn’t fully act from my heart because it had been broken so many times. I had built such a wall around it that I couldn’t hear its steady beating of truth. My head was full of opinions of others. I’m an empath and a highly sensitive person. I grew up in a violent home. I’m very good at sensing what others want or need, and I can tiptoe around a volatile situation with the grace of a doe. I could take action to protect those I love. What I couldn’t do was find my genuine courage, my true heart.
When I took my first Reiki class in 2012, things began to shift in my life. I traveled through England by myself in 2013 in order to take my Reiki Master class with William Rand in Glastonbury and get my attunement in Stonehenge. I had never traveled by myself in a foreign country (at…
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