I told myself I was going to give away nothing. This was a test of authenticity—his, not mine. He had been recommended to me by my friend Kathleen who had discovered the wonders of the Heart of Oneness Center, right under my nose, a place I was curious about every time I had walked past it on my way to my favorite Thai restaurant. When it comes to these alternative “approaches,” I’m no trailblazer. My friends test the waters first, and then based on their experiences, I feel a little more comfortable.

Tim had sent me a gorgeous bouquet of roses for my birthday just two days before. He had sent me other such gorgeous arrangements, but this one will have lasting meaning because it was the first bouquet I could smell, one day shy of my one-year anniversary of my traumatic brain injury. I had been smelling the scent of coffee for the last few weeks and a couple other things but nothing consistently. I had tried to stimulate my sense of smell with acupuncture for the weeks immediately following my severe concussion, but when the acupuncturist tested the “life” in the olfactory nerve, correlated to a specific spot on the ear lobe, it was dead. In spite of her attempts, she couldn’t budge it, even though she was able to help me get my energy back, just in time to combat the biggest emotional battle of my life. Conventional medicine offered me nothing but time, and acupuncture offered a belief in the unknown. I can go there because I’ve had to go there. I had nothing else.

My sense of smell has been as keen and important as any of my other senses. I’ve equated the same amount of pleasure from smelling acres and acres of orange blossoms in the Greek countryside as I have drinking in a beautiful sunrise along the beach in Hawaii as I have listening to the sweetest sounds of music or laughter. Losing it has been a form of cruel deprivation. I have a blind cousin and we’ve had those conversations about whether it’s better to have never seen or to have had the gift and lost it, and like many others, he voted on the side that ignorance is bliss. He doesn’t know what he’s missing… That turns the whole premise of “better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all” on its ear, but in that instance I do believe that for those of us who choose to see the glass half or more than half full, it’s our experiences in love that shape who we are. Loss is an unavoidable thread in the fabric of love. 

After the pivotal rose delivery, I phoned Melissa, my acupuncturist, and told her I had been thinking about giving acupuncture another try. I had just gone for my yearly check-up and my doctor told me that there was no conventional therapy to stimulate smell, so I might as well try an alternative therapy again. Melissa agreed that to have a sign of reawakening was a good starting point, much better than the flatline with which she started. I’m still amazed at how serious that injury was and just how long it has taken to heal from it.

In the meantime, after Kathleen’s experience with the Healer, a Reiki practitioner/spiritual healer/psychic, I decided I had nothing to lose by meeting him one time.

I wasn’t going to tell him much, and I didn’t need to. I figured that as a Reiki practitioner—something I had never done before—I had nothing to lose by telling him about my loss of smell, so that’s where the journey began. We spent about 15 minutes on the massage table. Reiki is the spiritual practice of drawing energy from the practitioner to the person seeking it, or so I thought. There are points along our body—the head, shoulders, arms, hands, stomach, knees and feet—that are lightly touched during the session. Lying down on my back with my eyes closed, he started at my head. He lightly cupped his hands around my face, and bam! I noticed two things immediately: His hands were ice cold, and I was hit with a blast of scent. He never told me what it was, except that he had placed just one drop of essential oil for peace and calmness on his hand. He told me it was subtle, but it was anything but subtle for me this day. I suspect it contained Patchouli oil, incidentally a scent I never much cared for, but today I was a humongous fan.

He was still cupping my face when I felt this tear stream sideways out of my eye. I warned him that it was coming so that he wouldn’t be surprised when he felt wetness in his own palm. To this he said the powerful words: “Sever the cord to things that no longer serve you.” The dam could not be held back now and I spilled the grief of emotional and physical injury until I felt cleansed. The more I purged, the hotter his hands and the stronger the scent became. All I kept thinking on that table was that I was becoming a butterfly, shedding the uglier skin of my past that no longer served me. The heat from his hands was amazing, kind of like the transfer of heat from a hot pan to a potholder. I thought he was transferring heat to me, but when we were done, I learned just the opposite: My goodness, my positivity, my energy, my capability for love, my openness was the heat source and he was drawing it through me. I was experiencing a transformation, my Renaissance, my rebirth. The power was my own.

When we were done with the Reiki session, we sat together.  He asked me my name as it was on my birth certificate. It was important for him to know how I came into this world, my full birth name minus any acquired aliases. 

I wasn’t interested in doing any kind of palm reading, but based on the Reiki energy work we had just done, he thought it would be good to use cards. He had stacks and stacks of different cards and picked maybe five decks (out of maybe 10 or 12 at his disposal) to work with. 

He asked me to shuffle the first deck and I drew three cards. The first one was Courage. Wow! I was listening. I was present. He asked me about my strong reaction and I explained to him that the two things I value most in others and in myself are courage and honesty. He told me I had an abundance of courage; I was not shackled by fear or uncertainty. I had courage to face my future and I believed inherently that risk brings reward.

The next card I drew was Truth. There was an image of a woman looking ahead to a bridge. He interpreted the meaning to be that I had faced the facts and rather than getting weighted down by them, I chose to pick myself and move forward. Lots of people get stuck at the fork or the bridge, lamenting and doing futile wishful thinking, but not me. I took my knowledge and chose to move forward.

The next card was Integrity. There’s that strong desire for honesty, living one’s life ethically and morally. Another wow. I drew more cards: next came Authenticity. To this he said that I live my life authentically, honoring who I am and expressing myself in the most authentic way. I’ve been told this before, more in the last year than at any other point in my life. Some of that I attribute to the liberation associated with being 50 and the rest I attribute to the openness I’ve shared through my writing, especially in the last year. I’ve written some very personal things shared with a precious few, exposing a part of myself never shared with anyone before.

The Support card came up. The Healer told me that I had always been the truest, most generous friend to others, but now I was experiencing those very people reciprocating to me in a way I’d never needed before. My support network reached far and wide; he felt so many people were pulling for me, cheerleading from every corner.

Ah, the Love card. The Healer told me he could tell from our Reiki time together and the appearance of this card that my heart was wide open and there’s someone in my life whose heart was wide open to me. He suspected that I’d grieved the loss of another love and moved onto a powerful new love. Wait—not new exactly, he felt it was someone from my past. Perhaps a high school sweetheart or something like that? What! He told me this love was real, reciprocated, to trust it, and then he asked me to pull another card. Patience. There it is, the thing I struggle with most. He encouraged me to have faith, to trust, to live in the present. This was a lasting love, but it’s going to take a little time… Tim had said the same thing to me when I saw him last: He said that we’ve been apart for so long that it was going to take some time to transition our lives together.

Next I pulled the Pleasure card. He interpreted that for me as a love for travel. Had I the opportunity to indulge that as much as I like? Over the course of 30 years I had done a lot of travel, particularly internationally, but it was something that got back-burnered after moving to Colorado when dual careers hit high gear. We had gotten stuck in a serious rut. The Healer told me to plan some travel as it would be rejuvenating.

The Ear Canal came up. What could that mean? The Healer explained that I held great reverence for Words and Music. Was I that transparent and easy to read? Yes, I was the 13-year-old who had 32 pen-pals all over the country, wrote for the school newspaper, kept a journal, wrote loads and loads of bad poetry, was editor of the high school yearbook, and went to college to study communications.

I was also a music nut, immersing myself in music at a young age, fortunate to have older siblings who turned me on to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Loggins & Messina, America, and the like. I played clarinet, guitar, the saxophone, was in high school marching and jazz and stage bands, and joined music group fan clubs. I was the one who kept outgrowing her iPod capacity and kept the TV screen on when playing Music Choice channels, just so that I could keep up with new musicians. I hadn’t listened to commercial radio in years, instead favoring Sirius XM for targeted channels to match my tastes. Indeed, the Ear Canal held deep meaning for me.

I have to remember that I was the one pulling these cards; I was revealing myself; he wasn’t making things up about me. This was authentic. Another “client” wouldn’t come to The Healer and pull the same combination of cards. This was who I am. He encouraged me to keep writing, to write from a “raw” place, to follow this path…

The Healer told me that even on my darkest day, I was grateful for all that I had. I was one of those people who noticed everything, symbolism everywhere. He envisioned me appreciating nature, relishing my surroundings, even birds. My face lit up. I told him about the bald eagle I saw on my birthday. He pulled out his book about the appearance of animals and their interpretations and asked me to read about the eagle for myself. Eagles symbolically represent Liberation, Vision, Power, Opportunity, Determination, and Focus. 

And since I affirmed my admiration for nature, he asked me to draw from another deck of cards, animals, and I pulled the Butterfly. Another smile. Remember I thought of myself as a butterfly while doing the Reiki? But more importantly, the Butterfly had special meaning for me. It’s how I felt my father around me. That’s his sign for me. The summer after he died, I asked him for a sign that he was still with me and I kept noticing a butterfly hanging around me. It happened so often that I believed this to be him. Last spring and summer when I was suffering so, I asked my dad for comfort. I knew he’d be so disappointed at the turn of events because he loved my ex. That’s when I started noticing a yellow butterfly following me everywhere. One day in particular was striking enough for my friend to notice. We had taken this scenic railroad ride, sitting in an outside car. This butterfly flew around me the entire trip for miles in and out of the car, buzzing around my head. I just looked at her and said, “That’s my father.”

So now that I drew this Butterfly card, what did the Healer think? He suspected that my father and I had the love of nature in common, and it’s true. My father was a farmer. He was in tune to the landscape, the elements, the pull of the outdoors. He, more than anyone in my life, instilled in me the appreciation for Mother Nature. Every Sunday he would pack up his family and we’d go explore some “new” lake in the Adirondacks. And he loved the ocean as much as he did his mountains and lakes. We’d go up to Maine in the summertime, renting a cottage along the beach, where he could shed his workaday worries and I would discover an appreciation for the pull of the tides. Mother Nature cleanses us in ways that other remedies simply can’t. In my eulogy for my dad, I talked about how my father never got to see Colorado, but I felt him there and I know he would have loved it. I had a little ritual of acknowledging him every morning on my way to work as I passed by this small but scenic lake.

The last card I pulled was literally called “Cut the Cord.” This is how our time together began, with the Healer telling me to cut the cord to things that no longer serve me. This was reaffirmed with this card. My brain injury healed and my sense of smell was returning; I could let go of the loss associated with that. I was divorced, a decision I’ve never second-guessed, and then I was blessed with another love. I was cutting the cord to circumstances or people I could not change.  After I confirmed that I was seeking a new career opportunity that would require a move, the Healer told me that leaving my house would be bittersweet, but it would’t be bitter for long. Happiness was mine to have.

Before I went on my way, I needed to satisfy my curiosity. I wanted to know about him, how he came to be a spiritual healer. He told me that he had this intuitive gift as a child, but no one took him seriously as a child. He had an Air Force career and then a long career at Lockheed Martin, but he couldn’t deny who he was any longer and followed this path. Here’s a guy who tried to fit a square peg into a round hole and ultimately allowed himself to reap the virtues of his own gift. Wasn’t that what he was encouraging me, and probably countless others, to do too?