I just did a reading for someone. Via skype. First time in many many many months I've read like that for someone.
There's another few long-time clients who have me do readings ever so often for them, but it's mostly listening. This one was a full-out, all hands on deck reading complete with energy clearing and moving - a real healing - one of the brightest in all my years of doing readings.
An enormous part of it was the person I read for. She and her new man. Both of them high energy, thoughtful, accomplished, compassionate. They didn't come with inflated ideas of witchery psychic whatnot. They just let the energy flow.
When she reached out and asked, it took me two days to respond. Because I don't do readings any more. I was told during that first vine session back in 2012 not to charge for sessions, and then was told in another to stop doing client sessions altogether.
So I went and got a public health govt job, and now I work for a start up on a mental health app. And though they have both been good jobs that I've learned a lot from, they never even approached the edge of the beauty and expansive Yes I experienced this morning.
It's what I was built to do. This complex moving of energy. This assisting others in their healing process. Sure, I do it in my current job, but not like this. Not even close.
And the folks that I still do readings-lite for never feels very good. I'm not charging anything, so there isn't an energy return, just giving. Most requests I simply don't respond to. But the ones I feel to, I tell them about the vine's directive, and they say okay, but can we still do a session?
I keep thinking that these folks will realize that the lack of true exchange cheats them out of any real healing. That they'll send a gift or something. But they can't see what's happening. Just ask for more when they want a fill up.
So my real job has been to slowly back away, to remove myself from these folks, one at a time. A process that's been going on for about eight years now. And so a lot of people are pissed off at me. Ex clients, ex friends, ex family, ex bosses, ex boyfriends, ex neighbors. Which as an empath kind of sux.
But that's the point isn't it? To move away from the sux, and toward the radiant.
How long would you keep going to work if they stopped paying you? Or stay in a relationship so one-sided? Wouldn't the real issue be that you keep showing up to that sort of work, that sort of relationship? It better be dang good of the rarefied kind for that to energetically work out.
And so I get up at 6 am every morning and go to a job where they like my work, but they find me weird and actually don't like me very much so my days are surely numbered. But I get paid pretty well so will stay until it's time to move on. So yeah, what most of the working world deals with.
And then I have a session like this morning. And remember the sort of real healing work I can create and be a part of. Radical truth telling, received. The dance I love so much.
When she first reached out, she asked about pre-paying (as I took down all the payment stuff from the website which is still up which is very telling). I said that if she found the reading helpful she could paypal whatever she felt to afterward.
I'm curious how the energy exchange will pan out as these are folks highly attuned. Whatever they choose to do will be very telling for me. Light up a small path forward for me perhaps with healing work.
Because hearing Mother Ayahuasca tell me to stop charging or seeing clients was a blow, but I'd been struggling since the beginning around making a living from the work. I've come to see that in general, being in business for yourself means that one common aspect is that people will try to cheat you out of cash, or at least get the price down as low as they can. It's a cultural disease focused on hoarding resources.
But the rage that's been leveled my way, the lies and weirdness, the hammering belief that healing work, spiritual work, should be for free, given from a pure and loving heart with no expectation of remuneration of any sort, and my inability to untangle the knot of it, meant that I could never make a living from it. I made three heroic attempts. But there is healing work. And then there is the business of it.
My new personal practice is to look for places I can give freely. Where I genuinely expect nothing in return. It's educating me around what this feels like, what the boundaries are, how people receive. So that I can better know what to ask for and when, because most people just want to take. They don't know any better. They believe they're drowning, but the water is only 6 inches deep.
So now I'm coming down from the energy dance of the session. Coming back to my life, and the work that I do.
What work do I really want to do? What work can I do that I can make a living from?