When Wrong Turns Are Right

Sometimes we find magic at the heart’s edge.

When I was twenty-five, I traveled to Arizona to be attuned for Reiki, level one. My Reiki teacher lived in Phoenix. I sought her out specifically because she was only three degrees of separation from Dr. Usui, the person who first discovered Usui Reiki Ryoho atop Mount Kurama in Japan in 1922. As a young person in my twenties, I was very impressed with this teacher’s lineage being so close to the source: Usui taught someone directly, that person taught someone, and then that person taught my teacher.

“You have a lot of energy in your hands,” was a thing I had heard often as a child, usually from people at church. As an adult I left the church longing for a spiritual community that would be more embodied or experiential and less institutional or doctrinal. There were elements of the church of my youth I would miss, but I found those again in other, more accepting and authentic human connections. And I never forgot what people said about my hands.

After receiving the instruction and the energy attunement from my teacher in Phoenix, I drove up to Sedona, one of the wonders of the world, and a place rumored to have mysterious things called energy vortices of the earth. As I drove, the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands grew hotter and seemed to burn. The sensation became so strong it was painful. As I drove, I cried. The harder I cried the less certain I was about why.

There was something small I was sad about — a girl I had a crush on, although she reciprocated my feelings, had recently told me she wasn’t ready to enter a relationship with me. But the news seemed more positive than negative. I held hope that she would eventually feel ready, that I could wait. And yet, I cried and cried, as though all the sadness and heartbreak of all my life, and more than that — all my ancestors’ heartbreak — was surging through my body from the bottom of my feet to the tips of my fingers and the top of my head. It was overwhelming and deeply cleansing.

When I arrived in Sedona I looked for Boynton Canyon, which someone had told me was the most powerful energy vortex. I took a wrong turn onto Coffee Pot Drive and drove up it for a while until I realized it wasn’t right. Looking at tranquil houses along the street, I fantasized about one day living in one of them.

When I found Boynton Canyon, a spot off trail called out to me. It was a small plateau up the side of a mountain between two peaks. There, alone with nobody in eye nor earshot and nothing but wilderness for miles, I took off all my clothes. Something about being barefoot and bare skinned against this wildest, most raw panorama of deep red earth, trees growing out of rocks with braided, twisted trunks and branches, flowering cacti, and craggy crests was all I needed just then. I sat in silence and meditation feeling the heat and energy in my hands holding me there, so still, so present, for such a long time. Hours. Until daylight left.

In the new year of 2023, I was returning from a trip to Japan. I had travelled to Mount Kurama and meditated in the same spot as Dr. Usui. In the airport, I bought a memoir by Jeanna Kadlec called Heretic. The sucker for religious trauma stories that I am, and as well written as it was, I read fast and breathlessly. Kadlec’s religious upbringing had been much more wounding than mine. She had been evangelical and very devout, then had to come to terms with her queerness after marrying a man. Still, I related to so many aspects of her story. Particularly, how she continued to spiritually seek even after rejecting the religion of her youth. She asked a profound question: What are our options when the secular doesn’t feel sufficient but the traditionally religious doesn’t feel safe? She wrote about how it felt like a redirected conversation — one that asks continual questions.

Since that first Reiki level one attunement, I had gone on to get level 2 and then level 3 and master training. And at the end of 2022, there, on a mountain in Japan with my eyes closed, a symbol burned itself behind my eyelids. It was so bright and vivid, I moved to get my phone out and take a photo of it, but then remembered my eyes were closed. Later, I saw a photo my girlfriend took of me in that moment. I am seated atop a tree stump with upturned palms. Stretched across the forest floor, bulging and snake-like, were the thick roots of the trees surrounding me. Cupped inside the gently curved palms of my hands was bright golden light. The sun streaming through the trees shone directly on me and into my hands, filling them in this way with light.

Just before taking that trip and reading Heretic, I bought a house on Coffee Pot Drive in Sedona, roughly twenty years after that first fateful wrong turn. Now, I visit Sedona regularly and bring my kids. When my younger son was six years old, I took him to that same plateau between two peaks I’d found when I was twenty-five. We found so many heart shaped red rocks there, and the other side was a sheer cliff, so he aptly named it Heart Edge.

We heard music not too far away. Just on the other side of one of the crests is the famous Feminine Vortex of Boynton Canyon, where a man climbs a small peak to sit atop it and play the flute every weekend. What I knew about him was that he carved heart shapes out of red rocks and handed them out to people as gifts. I had heard him playing many times, but I had never met him. I told my son we should hurry and try to meet him before he was gone. On the way, my son found a near-perfect heart shaped rock to gift him, and we made it just as he was descending from his perch. We introduced ourselves and my son gave him the gift. He reached inside his bag and pulled out two of his carved hearts, offering them to us.

“I used to find them, but then I decided it was just easier to make them myself. How special and magical that you find them so easily,” he said. My son rattled on excitedly as only a six-year-old can about how many he had found at our special place and how he had therefore named it Heart Edge. The man listened carefully, looking thoughtfully at my son. Then he looked deeply into my eyes.

“He came here to be with you,” he said. There were more words, something about how we should trust our hearts because they would always steer us well, but I was too captured and stunned by his first statement made so confidently, I didn’t quite hear it all.

The energy in my hands, the magic of Sedona, the phenomenon of the small human I made holding heart shaped red rocks— these are the elements that redirect us to conversations that ask questions. A sense of magic and community, an experience of the miraculous—those strong but soft pieces of Earth—together with the embodiment of self-love all connect to compose my spiritual life today.