Healer Two

Healer Two was created during the same early period of my recovery as Healer One. Like its companion, I had no conscious plan for what I was creating. I was simply painting.

Years later, I would discover something in this painting that completely changed the way I understood both the artwork and the process that created it.

Healer Two contains the Reiki symbol Sei He Ki. The symbol is deconstructed in the painting, but the lines are all there. Sei He Ki is associated with mental and emotional healing and represents the union of Earth and Sky. The Cho Ku Rei symbol, another Reiki symbol, also appears within this painting and in Healer One.

The strange part is that I didn't know what Reiki was when I painted either of them.

I discovered the symbols years later, after I had taken a Reiki course and become a Level 3 Reiki practitioner. I was preparing to show my work at a holistic wellness center in Old Colorado City and was going through my old paintings when I pulled Healer One and Healer Two out of a pile of canvases I had planned to reuse.

That's when I recognized them.

What made the discovery even more meaningful was what I noticed while installing the exhibition. The paintings I had replaced were created by a group called Finding Our Voices, which works with women who have survived sexual violence through process painting. Their paintings were still there, waiting to be picked up, and I noticed that many of them contained the Cho Ku Rei symbol as well.

These women and I had not been consciously trying to paint Reiki symbols.

And yet, there they were.

I don't know exactly how to explain that. I don't claim to have all the answers. But I find it deeply meaningful that people who were trying to process experiences they didn't always have words for could arrive at similar imagery through the simple act of creating.

It makes me wonder if we sometimes know how to begin healing before our conscious minds understand what we're doing.

Maybe there is something beneath thought, beneath language, beneath our conscious understanding that knows how to move toward healing.

I was trying to get something out of me that I didn't have words for.

Maybe some part of me already knew where to start.

For me, Healer Two became a reminder that healing doesn't always begin with understanding. Sometimes we simply begin the process, and understanding comes later.

Sometimes we just have to trust the process.