Hecate Reiki Studio

08/27/2025

05/23/2025

It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in & out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way. This requires finding meaningful ways to speak of sorrow'.

Francis Weller
Painting by Fredrick William Elwell (1870-1958)
www.teallach.com

03/27/2025

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,” by which he meant that where and how our caretakers were stuck in their development becomes an internal paradigm for us also to be stuck. Frequently, we find ourselves dealing with a parent’s unresolved issues. At times, we may replicate the patterns of our ancestors, or we may rebel and attempt to do the opposite. Interestingly, antagonism to the influences of parents binds just as tightly as compliance. Either way, antecedents confine and limit us. Perhaps this fact is behind the ancient biblical admonition that the sins of a man shall be visited “upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”

Robert A. Johnson 'We'
Photography- the worn steps on the Great Wall of China. Several walls were built from as early as the 7th century BC. Photographer unknown
www.teallach.com

02/09/2025

Close your eyes, or if you prefer, soften your gaze. Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor and support at your back. If you wish to light a candle to set your intention, do so. Bring your awareness to any tension you might be holding in your body. Soften the muscles. Drop your shoulders down. Without straining or concentrating, just relax the muscles and breathe in and out. Allow your tummy to rise and fall with every breath. Opening your heart to the intention.

As you breathe in and out, in your minds eye, begin to wish yourself well by saying these words to yourself.

May I be well,
May I be happy,
May I be healthy,
May I be at ease.

Do this a few times while breathing in and out.
Now turn your thoughts to wishing those you love well. Soften your muscles, drop the shoulders down. Bring them to mind for a moment, and now, begin to wish them well.

May you be well
May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be at ease.

Now bring to mind the people whom you may have difficult feelings about. Those in your personal life or a stranger you don't know personally. Bring them to mind for a moment and now begin to wish them well.

May you be well
May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be at ease.

Do that a few times while breathing in and out.

Now bring your thoughts to those around you whom you don't know well or at all - in your village, city, the shopkeeper, the stranger on the bus, the person walking down the street or is passing your home just now in their cars bring them to mind and wish them well while breathing in and out.

May they be well
May they be happy
May they be healthy
May they be at ease.

Now bring your thoughts out to the wider world, past your local community, to this country and those who live here, wish them all well... wider still...imagine across the sea in all directions, visualise the whole earth and all beings who live here, the animals, creatures of the oceans, wish them all, and yourself well.

May we all be well
May we all be happy
May we all be healthy
May we all be at ease. 💗

Grá mór, Eileen x
(check comments below👇)
www.teallach.com

08/23/2024

The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth, I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together, my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.

Thich Nhat Hanh from No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
Painting by Kaoru Yamada
www.teallach.com

08/20/2024

'Don't hold on to what must die and don't fear what lies ahead. Life/death/life is the universal cycle of transformation that keeps reoccurring whenever there is time to grow and expand. It's a leap of faith one must take, surrender into or sacrifice, in order to be grown into the next version of oneself. There comes a time in your life when the life you have been living is over and you have no clue who you are becoming'

Marion Woodman
Painting by Lucy Campbell
www.teallach.com

08/11/2024

10 Pieces of Unsolicited Advice

♥️ If they leave let them. Friends. Lovers. Let them go. Don’t reach out. Don’t chase them. Don’t try to convince them. If you have to convince them to speak to you, to see you. They don’t want to. Let them go.

They have decided. And their silence, the ghosting, the disappearance is saying everything you need to know. You don’t need closure. The leaving was the closure.

♥️ If you’re wondering how they feel about you, if you are confused, you have the answer. Let go. When someone values you, respects you, wants your presence in their life you know it.

Love is not confusing. It is the thing that is the most clear. It is the thing that puts us at our most lucid.

♥️ When you feel stagnant, when your creativity feels dead, when you are stuck in a rut return to all of the things that are most true to you and seduce yourself. You used to love to draw? Draw. You love art? Look at art. Disconnected? Go put your ear to the ground. Nourish your lunar self the things that came very naturally and that always put a light in your heart. In no time at all you will come home to yourself.

♥️ If you feel lost read the great classics. The Iliad and the Odyssey. Read Rilke. Read a Mary Oliver Poem every morning. You will find your way.

♥️ Make 1% of your 20,000 breaths per day conscious. Whenever you can pause and pay attention to that one big sigh. Breath in and out like the sighing of the tides and let it sweep your mind. Every time you bring your mind to your breath you practice presence. String a few of these moments together and you are more conscious. It will transform you. Trust me.

♥️ Love yourself enough to never chase people. You’re not obsessing and chasing them because you love them you just don’t love yourself enough and you THINK if you could get this person that rejected you to love you it would prove you are loveable. You are loveable. Take all of that care and turn it back on your own heart. And go love where you are welcomed with love.

♥️ Move your body every day. Squat. You’ll thank me when you are 80 and you can get up off the ground. Maintain or develop ankle mobility and hip mobility. Strenghten your legs and your feet. It will strenghten your body and keep you spritely and young but it will also strengthen your ground of being. You will stand stronger.

♥️Expose yourself to beauty daily to cultivate and steward your AWE. Awe motivates participation and participation is relational and relating well will save us all.

Make beauty. Seek beauty. Be touched by beauty.

♥️ Every creative act requires a destruction of what was. The canvas will never be the same. The mother. The earth you dug for the new foundation. Your new life will cost you your old. Don’t stay in the painful familiar only because it is familiar. Risk yourself a thousand times. This is your only chance. And you are worthy of more.

♥️ Pay so much attention to your senses. FEEL your body. The subtle movement of air on your skin. Taste and savor and enjoy your food. Eat well. Notice. Sensitize. Your sensory experience is your quickest path to the presence. It is the way in which you experience the world and your life and your love fully. Cultivate that experience. We are so prone to disassociating moving like robots on automations. Rebel. Taste it. Bring your body with you.

✍️ Selena Garefino
🎨 Unknown

08/04/2024

"Until the culture recognises the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life."
James Hillman

One of Jung’s students, when discussing Pilgrim’s Progress, asked him what his pilgrimage had really been. “In my case, Pilgrim’s Progress consisted of me having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am,” responded Jung.

“The little clod of earth that I am!” A far cry from the spiritual heights of positivism and perfection, the “be more, do more, achieve and know more, have more” mentality that many in the west see as a measure of material and spiritual success. This process of “growing down” is the very antithesis of the soaring heights of knowledge and spirit we assume makes us worth something - and yet it is, and always has been, a very real call from the Soul.

A growing down so often necessitates a "sinking to the depths". If we do not consciously choose the journey, the journey will choose us on its own. The soul, weary and neglected, so often captures us in the only way it can - calling us into sickness or depression, perhaps some kind of fall or terrible grief, or a betrayal - even a lingering apathy; a "Dark Night of the Soul." At some point all the ornaments of self-image will lose their sparkle or even vanish, and it's often with great suffering we realise they no longer contain the meaning the world assured us they would have. Eventually we have no choice but to turn within.

The path of descent, of that “deepening into life” means letting go. At some point we must surrender - let our roots sink into our own darkness to weave and web their way into what lives in that dirt of self - what has been waiting. Here we can discover the deeper realities hidden within our own bodies, our circumstances, our experiences, let the old ways die. In this loss we can make space for Something Greater, for the soul to be reborn. It is from here that we can be re-enlivened like limbs warming back from cold or a lack of blood, returning not with the trappings of the world, but to an enriched, embodied life.

There is a profound legitimacy to this darkness that so often the world just can’t understand, and even sneers at. But it is this deepening that fleshes us out and makes us human. The very word “human” can be traced back to the ancient term for “of the earth" or "ground." Perhaps something like "the little clod of earth that I am." And like the spreading of roots beneath the Tree of Life we must sink into that earth within ourselves, weave roots into our own being, to awaken to the reality that those roots are connected to so many others. For it’s the "deepening down" that connects us to our own soul and to the souls of others - to the very Earth itself. And it is in the "dirt" that we find the true gold, that is: the embodied soul, and what makes us real.

~ Rachel Alana (R.A. Falconer)
Midwives of the Soul.

art | Shanna Trumbly
https://www.shannatrumbly.com/

07/05/2024

'Make no mistake:Your greatest teacher will not be what you expect. Your mentor will embody love, light, grace, and compassion. However, your greatest teacher comes imbued with rage, darkness, fear, and judgment.

It is when you have overcome the trials of your greatest teacher, with the tools of your mentor, you will finally recognise the truth.

You are both of them, and they are both of you.
This is the hero's journey.

Joseph Campbell
Painting by William Russell Flint
Illustrations are scenes from The Odyssey-Homer.
'All her joints were loosened as she lay in the chair, and the fair goddess the while was giving her gifts immortal'
www.teallach.com