Fourteen years ago this week I left law school to follow my heart in my worklife. The day after my newlywed husband, Alex, and I moved to Half Moon Bay, CA, we wandered into a little store filled with books, music, and gifts dedicated to healing. Alex threw me a smile, “You’re going to have to come back here later when you have three hours.” I could never have predicted that my return to Oneisha Healing Tools later that afternoon would initiate a five year apprenticeship.
I didn’t understand the magnetic force that connected me so immediately with Oneisha. I just knew I had to be there with the owner teachers, Maggi and Margareta. We agreed that I would begin working at Oneisha in exchange for growing my heart’s intention: to learn how to help people heal themselves.
While I didn’t know much about my new teacher’s practices, we were kindred in our connection to women’s spirituality, transpersonal psychology and respect for earth based ways. Maggi and Margareta’s teaching didn’t emphasize seeing the future or reading auras. Instead they asked me to delve into my own unconscious material while serving customers who entered the healing realm that was Oneisha with compassion and awareness.
Maggi, Margareta (now Meenakshi) and later Jennifer, taught me how to create a conscious container. For us, creating an intentional healing space meant lighting a candle, burning sage and invoking the elements of earth, air, fire and water when we opened the store for business. It also involved becoming aware of how my feelings, thoughts and energy impacted customers and the store itself. At the same time, tangible issues like arriving on time, re-stocking items, physically cleaning the store, and coordinating schedules were also central to Oneisha’s solidity–and something to “study” as evidence of a “leakiness” when systems crashed.
Soon other people felt called to a similar relationship with Oneisha Healing Tools. The teachers established a work exchange apprenticeship that also included individual and group healing sessions. Over a course of five years, we grew to eight apprentices.
Maggie and Margareta integrated personal process work with spiritual teachings. When I arrived for my first individual session with Maggi pregnant (with my future daughter) her blue eyes narrowed and she announced, “This is not a coincidence. This pregnancy is part of your apprenticeship.” For the next 9 months I learned how my body could be a sacred space to grow awareness and healing alongside my baby girl. With Maggi as my spiritual midwife, pregnancy and childbirth became a wild ride of initiation into trust and surrender.
Fourteen years later creating a conscious healing space within myself and in service to my family, friends and clients remains foundational. I can look at any individual, relationship, group or organization through the lens of fostering a sacred space to see how I might support its solidity. The healing tools may look different than a candle and sage, but the essence of service with awareness and compassion remains true.
How do you create sacred space in your life? What are your tools of awareness?
