REI CHOU – Energy Medium & Innovator

POH-FRANK

I also had the honor to do one of your energy sessions with you, and it is really kind of shifting things, and I think the rational mind cannot understand it. Maybe you don’t have to understand it from a rational standpoint – you said in one interview :”You gotta feel it to heal it”

REI

So to your point, we try to understand so much with our minds and that only goes so far. Our minds are great at pattern recognition and making stories about what we experience . Like for example a stop light – when a stop light turns green, I walk. The brain is really good at all these things that keep us alive from a day-to-day perspective.

However, the brain/neural system runs through the entire body. So I like to say that the brain actually exists throughout our entire nervous system. It extends out to your fingers and to your toes. 

We don’t often realize that what you exercise strengthens. So whatever pathways you practice again and again, whether that’s thinking that I’m not safe or thinking that the world is beautiful, our brain and our physiology, our neural system throughout our entire body is reinforcing whatever patterns we are circling.

Your body and your mind connected as one have been doing that ever since you were conceived. The body is this great scorekeeper of our life’s experiences and all the stories that we’ve made about our life.

But again, this extends throughout the entire body.  So when we rewrite something, when we realize that a pattern or story we’ve created is no longer helpful to us, like if you keep dating the same person and ending up in terrible situations, it’s like, OK, what is the story there? And how do you rewrite that? Ultimately, that story lives in your body. It lives in your somatic, emotional, and neural structures all together as one.

You can think about that reality over and over, but that’s only part of the puzzle. “Feeling it to heal it”  involves engaging any understanding of reality through the body, through the emotional body, and through the mental mind structure to really acknowledge what is true for you in your body and mind, to experience and express it so that the pattern can be rewritten. We need to acknowledge it to release any of the emotion there and to build new neural pathways.

That’s why it doesn’t necessarily work to just say, “I am beautiful, I’m beautiful, I’m beautiful.” Until you feel that in your body. Then there’s a full bridge from every part of you to this new belief, to this new reality. Otherwise, there’s this disconnection of different parts within you. 

That’s what the idea of wholeness is about, embracing all parts of you, including the part that thinks, “I’m not beautiful,” and saying, “OK, we feel that. There’s a sensation there, an experience of reality there.” And then what? Where does that want to extend out into instead of being siloed ? What can that connect to now?

POH-FRANK

So when you do this energy work, you obviously help people to feel. There’s something I read about portals, where you combine movement and art to help find these deepest prayers and desires. Is this something you developed, or where is this coming from? Portals? And maybe you can explain it for the non-energy experienced people, what the whole portal concept is all about?

REI

Like we said, we have all these beliefs in our bodies. With the energy work I do and with movement, we have for example something that’s contracted, like something out of fear or out of scarcity or grief or suffering – we close down, we contract to protect ourselves. Often, that’s how these beliefs get stored in our bodies. We start to hold things in different places. Then we don’t want to feel it because we want to keep ourselves safe. We don’t want that thing to come up again. But when we do that, we close down our consciousness.

So there’s no consciousness in these spaces where we feel these beliefs. Ultimately, a lot of energy work and healing work is about bringing love, consciousness, awareness, and light into all parts of us. Like we were saying before, “the feeling it, to heal it”, when you start to bring light and awareness, consciousness to these parts that have closed down, they start to open. As they open, there’s more breath, there’s more awareness, you may feel what’s been stuck down there, but on the other side of that, there’s more space and more possibility.

When we bring divine energy into the body, it helps the body open up around all these places that have been closed. That’s why we have the experiences we have during energy sessions.

We cry, we feel beauty, or we feel ecstatic, or we feel angry. All of this is just the divine moving itself through all these different spaces in the body. When you bring movement to that, it can help bring expression to what is stored and closed down in a similar way to what  Kundalini yoga does.

You keep opening your chest, and eventually, those pathways start to open. When we move, when we dance, there is a potential to invite the divine to move through the body and bring awareness to different parts of the body that have been closed down. It also helps to find its expression through the physical form. That’s where all divine dance yoga comes from, the divine expressing itself through the human body.

When the human body is lit up by Kundalini, by oneness awareness, the body responds in certain ways that are common. A lot of people report in heightened states of meditation, their palms feeling hot, which is essentially where Reiki comes from. 

POH-FRANK

But the interesting thing I experienced with your work was there was no movement. There was just music. You basically worked with music and there was not even deep breath work. It was like you shifted with hand movements the energy in the room. So there was no dance, people were laying down. So I’m just wondering, how can you channel this energy? People had this experience without even moving?

REI

So part of what you noticed was that I was moving. There can be great periods of stillness with awakened energy for sure. But even when I first started channeling, I noticed my hands would move very slowly, but then eventually they started moving more and more, and it wasn’t because I was moving them, but because the energy was moving.

I’ve done sessions with people who have popped into backbends, and they’ve said, I don’t do backbends. If there’s a contraction or belief or something that wants to move, there might be some shaking, or the body might be trying to move that out of the system. 

You might feel really cold because the parasympathetic nervous system is in overdrive and working. So there are all these different types of experiences that can come. But once there’s a level of surrender that’s made available, oftentimes you’ll start to see some of the more divine expressions of the energy.

Even if it’s just having your palms up, that says something. Having your heart arched, that’s the heart expressing something through the body. Now, the session that we did was more a passive surrender expression of the work. 

But we also work with each other collectively-  what’s called systemic constellations. This idea that we exist in systems, we don’t exist alone. So when we are drawn to someone, just like in life.

Serendipity happens . That starts to happen in a physical space, especially with dance workshops, people start to heal each other. People start to offer exactly what someone else needs because the system is informing everyone’s surrendered movement together. And then where it starts to get really interesting is when we start to do that not just for healing each other but for sending an intention or prayer for something that we want to see in the world.

So we’ve done portals around peace in the Middle East, portals for a sustainable relationship with the planet. In these cases, we start to dance with and for what we want to see in the world. We step into that together and allow ourselves to be moved to express this bigger intention.