Words We Live By: Where Energy Healing Meets Academic Assistance

Hi! I’m Lina!

Welcome to Words We Live By!

I am a world traveler and a teacher and an enthusiastically curious lover of learning in all forms; the slogan of my Medieval and Renaissance Studies concentration at Carleton College, offered by Hugh of St. Lincoln, was: “Learn everything, and you’ll find nothing is irrelevant!” I like this motto a lot. Maybe a little too much. I take seriously the gifts that the “rational knowledge” of contemporary sciences and arts  have to offer. I love a good chat about a beautiful painting or puzzling philosophical treatise or historical inquiry or literary device. I prefer to discuss ancient philosophy, but if you’re in to the continentals or analytics, I dig that, too. Books and podcasts about medieval history and oceanography and legal quandaries and plant/animal consciousness and contemporary movements in eastern and western medicine are my favorite. I spent yesterday afternoon puzzling over Donna Haraway’s concept of the “Chthulucene” because it’s really fun.

I am also a yogi/healer/shaman/channel/ light-worker.… whatever you’d like to call it. I embrace forms of knowledge that are beyond the mind and “multiple-world” approaches to healing the mind-body-spirit dimension of things. I trained in the Shipibo tradition of plant medicine — specifically in the Mahua/Lopez lineage — for six years and I have completed advanced trainings in ministry, meditation and Hatha yoga. I chat with plants and animals and spirits and guides and angels. I hang with ghosts of the dead and souls of those yet-to-be-born. I read auras and “tune-in” to energy bodies and sing with trees on a regular basis. I believe we can communicate to each other through our dreams; travel astrally beyond our bodies; heal our hearts by focusing on them with deep, loving, gentle attention.

To some of my rationalism-junkie friends, this is a little nuts. (My pals from Harvard Divinity School totally get it, of course.) And some of my friends from my “spirity” communities are often not “down” with my complete reverence for academia and modern science and things like psychotherapy and vaccines.

I’ve learned how to embrace holism and materialism; the “traditional” and the “nontraditional”  (and, what, truly, is “traditional”? Whose tradition?); the rational and the irrational and the beyond-rational. I embrace all worlds. All ways of knowing and being in this world and in the many-worlds that are and have been and have yet to be.

I embrace all these approaches to being because, to me, they are all faces of God.

Honestly, I believe all people possess “channel” capabilities because all people are human. All people can communicate with Spirit and connect with their guides and angels and concepts of the divine whenever they want. All people can be healers and light workers. But not many people remember how to listen. Not many people remember how to tune into the divine consciousness that opens them to their own innate abilities to heal themselves and approach all things with reverence, devotion, and true embodiment of Divine Love. We were all tuned in to Spirit as children. But, oftentimes, our abilities to “tune in” get lost somewhere along the way. We forget how to be.

In my practice, I help kids remember how to be.

I help them tune-in — and tune back in — to their connections with their higher Selves, Spirit, Divine… whatever you’d like to call it. If they’re already connecting with Spirit on a daily basis, I teach them how to cultivate that connection in a way that serves their highest growth and healing and blossoming into their mission(s) here on Earth. If they’ve forgotten how to tune-in, I help them remember how by helping them remember who they are.

Sometimes, we forget who we are.

We hold stories in our bodies about who we are based on how we’ve experienced the world or how our ancestors and present communities have/had experienced the world. Those stories can be based upon false premises and conditions that have nothing to do with Life itself. They often need some serious re-writing.

I help kids do this re-writing. I do this to help them remember that they are Divine Love incarnate. When they remember this, they learn better. They sleep better. They experience joy in color. They don’t worry about so much. That’s because, really, there’s nothing to worry about.

Really, there’s nothing to worry about.

I believe the cultivation of divine consciousness is an essential element of education that is missing from contemporary schooling. Contemporary schooling is all about the mind. Even when we are talking about things other than the mind, we still use the mind as the tool for investigation of the not-mind things (this was definitely the case when I worked as a boarding-school religion teacher). That’s like trying to open a can of tuna with butter knife: getting there, but still not quite right. There’s no real awareness of how to do things in a different way; most teachers are trained to be really good at tuning into the mind — and not very good at tuning into much else!

I’m here to change that. I have extensive knowledge of approaches to learning that set the mind aside, and I think current movements in educational reform — especially pertaining to social and emotional learning — could use a few tools from this toolbox. Contemporary approaches to SEL are “missing the boat” because they still approach problems through the lens of the mind. With mindfullness.

We need something more than mindfullness. The collective mind of contemporary education, both in the public and private spheres, is full enough already. Too full, I would say. We need a way to help kids attune to a sense of presence without bringing things back to the mind. The mind is not the only center for acquiring knowledge in the human system.

We need heart-openness.

We need ancient wisdom.

We need connection to Spirit.

We need loving attunement to Self-with-a-capital-S.

And we need these things in the classroom.

Kids need to learn in school how to connect with divine consciousness. To the loving source-of-all-things that is also in themselves. They need to learn how to tune into their bodies; notice when the mind is doing all sorts of unnecessary gymnastics; and assure themselves that they are always loved and never alone. No matter what.

No matter what.

This needs to be taught in educational communities through direct instruction and through the tiny details of the ways in which our institutions operate.  We can’t leave this to the realm of contemporary psychotherapy.  We need to build it into our practice as educators.

So, How do we do this?

Words We Live By is an answer to this question. After years of watching kids suffer unnecessarily in the education systems I served, I am building a set of responses to this important predicament of how to educate our children for the coming world, one client at a time. I use knowledge of energy healing modalities to help kids tune into their innate connections with the realms of the divine, so that they can approach learning and life with boundless joy. I help them cultivate everyday practices that support the development of gratitude, devotion, and forgiveness within their spirits, so they can experience the liveliness — the alive-ness — that life has to offer in all of its beautiful dimensions.

Devotion, gratitude, and forgiveness: these are the seeds that blossom into boundless joy and sweetness and compassion, and they are not taught, truly, as ways of being in schools that I’ve encountered in the US. To cultivate these seeds, I use methodologies from both my rigorous academic training at premiere institutions and my training as a yogi-curandera. The next few decades of this century are going to need approaches to education that embrace the fullest capacity of the human being — not just the rational capacity of the human being — and I am eager to be a part of the creation of this new and important approach to healing our education systems.

This is not a matter of hope.

This is not a matter of avoiding impending suffering.

This is a matter of simply creating human beings who know,

viscerally,

the always never not present

blessing

that is themselves

that is the Earth

that is the divine.

In Gratitude and Faith,

Lina