Tana Saler

Purifying tainted love.

Half of their audience laughs. The other half cringes.

The personal development teacher is driven by passion and purpose, determined to leave this world better then he found it. When he teaches, he comes alive: his work is a labour of love.

But his love is tainted by shame.

Shame has been with the teacher since early age, imprinted in him through the adults' harsh voices or fists, and to this day he hasn't fully made peace with aspects of himself, his body, or his ways of being. Not good enough, not tall enough, not thin enough, or not enough endowed - shame is a deeply-seated unforgiving kind of pain, at times too much to take.

So shame gets buried deep somewhere away from conscious awareness. And it gets a life of its own, showing up as the harsh critic who points the finger outwards, towards the flawed others.

Shame leads to overcompensation: self-doubt becomes arrogance, self-loathing becomes self-absorption, weakness becomes a skill and strength to compete against others and win.

The teacher becomes vegan, and shames meat-eaters for posting images of bacon breakfasts on Facebook.

The teacher becomes carnivore, and now shames vegans for their loud advocacy.

The teacher eats commercial sweets and shames those who eat restrictive diets - deems them as weak.

The teacher minds his food now, and shapes up; now he shames those who aren't shaped up, and calls them names.

His love is tainted with shame, the pain of which he tries to escape by shaming others for lacking that which he himself accomplished. His discourse is a mix of love-driven life-applicable advice and instructions, together with a portion of put-downs, sarcasm and harsh criticism aimed at the ones who do not fit his current focus of virtue.

Half of his audience laughs, the other half cringes.

The ones who cringe leave. He thinks they leave driven by jealousy for his success, when they simply leave driven away by demeaning narratives.

I know shame, it shows up when I cringe to this teacher's discourse. When shame arises, a part of me wants to strike back so I won't feel its pain. A wiser part of me gets me to sit and feel the shame as fully as I can, so it won't linger. So it won't show up through me where love seeks to show up.

Sitting fully present with shame is a purification process. Feeling the pain, the contraction in the heart, the frown, the heavy shoulders, allowing the knot in the throat to intensify until it won't intensify any more - this is the process of mindfulness meditation, a purification of the soul from anything that taints the love which seeks expression through one's life's work and relationships.

Stay present with the shame, and spare the others from it. Own it, so you won't project it.

I think of the great teachers I know who never speak ill of others, whose love uplifts, inspires and enriches every single person in their audience. I aspire to be one, and please, please, please, if you ever hear me say anything to divide, shame and put down people, tell me so I can make amends.

The quality of your life depends on your ability to observe.

It's interesting that the school system teaches deduction but not observation. Kids learn to recite things by heart and parrot them for tests. They learn to quote others, and to accept information on the account of its source (who said what) without filtering the information through their own direct experience.

When decision making is made based on regurgitated opinions quoted from experts or authority figures, the decision could be dead wrong, irrelevant to you, and costly. How do you know if something is good for you or not? You ask your external authority or notice your own embodied response to this or the other course of action?

When I am Queen of the World, all schooling system will teach mindfulness, which is, in other words, the art of paying attention. Notice one's own self, from feelings to thoughts to speech to behaviour, notice the others, and notice the environment.

Addressing well-being has to major camps: the academia camp, and the observation camp. A joint stiffness, for example, in the academia camp, is given a name in a dead language, and treated according to books and a curriculum established by the curriculum makers and their own interests.

A joint stiffness in the observation camp is met with inquiry: what is this stiffness like, in location, intensity, temperature, texture, and frequency? When does it occur, which time of the day, and what triggers it? What makes it better? What makes it worse? When did it start? What happened around the time when the joint stiffness started?

Observation leads to integrative approaches to well-being and life, in general. When you learn to "connect the dots" of correlation and causation through your own direct experience, you develop strategies to navigate life and well-being to greater fulfilment, autonomy and freedom.

"This method doesn't work" is a statement often regurgitated from thinkers devoid of direct, embodied experience.

You know what works for you and yours, when you pay careful attention. Awareness cannot be taken away from you - it can be impaired by fears and other strong emotions, by substances which interfere with your nervous clarity and hence perception, and even by gaslighting if you are susceptible.

Anyone who teaches you how to observe has your best interest at heart. Awareness is the blade that cuts you free from the strings of mental submission, and the ultimate navigation guide through life.

This is for my fellow Reiki and energy healing practitioners.


Another Reiki practitioner asked for my advice: she offered distance Reiki healing to her friend, a woman who works in the medical field. The woman replied: "I'd like to try it, but first want to understand how it works". The Reiki practitioner was at loss, anxious to give an abundance of examples of cases where distance healing proved effective.

That didn't work.

I'd like to spare you the similar frustration with a few tips, some of which I learned after making every communication mistake you'd imagine.


1- Do not speak Chinese to those who don't speak it. Speak in terms that your potential client can understand and relate to. When you address people with a scientific background, stick to the facts. Speak about what you have observed in your practice: "When I treat someone with energy healing, I feel this, see that, my client feels this and that" etc.


2- Show, don't tell. As a healing art practitioner, you are not a scholar (unless you are, my bad!). Offer a demo for first-hand experience rather than lectures.


3 - Know your limitations. If you are not able to quote scientific experiments with healing arts (they exist and have been published in books and papers), say: "I can't explain to you how and why this works, but can offer you a treatment and you might be able to feel the energy or not. Would you like that?"


4 - Don't persuade. I wish someone (Tad?) told me this years ago and spare me the chi waste. Your best clients are already open and receptive, or at least on the fence but open and curious. "Would you like to try and get a sense of the energy? Yes, great, no, also great."


Energy healing belongs to thought paradigms that have no or little validation in science. When I am told that "Reiki is pseudo-science" I argue that in fact, it's an art, not a science. And art is in the eye of the beholder, and subjective.

To skeptics who challenge my trade I tell that my work is comparable to the one of a clinician, rather than an office or laboratory researcher. I long ago stopped arguing with skeptics in order to persuade and am happier since.


I encourage you to show rather than tell. You have an unfair advantage if you have body awareness and good communication skills: when you guide your client to observe their breath and body-felt sensations, your client is more likely to notice the healing energy. If they come to you without awareness, you help them cultivate it. It's a win-win.

The shadow of shame is arrogance and contempt. All efforts to insult and put others down are in fact aimed at keeping a distance from one's own shame. Shaming others in order to not feel one's shame: you can see this in clumsy communicators and seasoned teachers alike. The separate self will do everything to maintain a good self-image, even if that means alienating others.

It takes self-esteem to lift people up.

Map to navigate life purpose

A map to navigate love

This is a metaphor: the lamp is a vessel for the Light - it's plugged to the Source. The small bug on the screen is a self-limited belief, a limiting thought, an unprocessed emotion, an internalized limitation from outside of the self - in other words, something that obstructs the light.

That which obstructs the light gets projected on the wall, and appears bigger and scarier than the obstruction.

Projections appear as events, symptoms, discords and such other external hiccups. Attempts to resolve the external problems without tending to the internal obstruction are like using correction fluid on a mirror to wipe out a mole.

Shadow work means shining the light of awareness in all the dark corners of the mind.

Feedback from a participant in a Mindful Relating class that was the afternoon part of a day retreat.