I Stopped Whispering - My Coming Out

‍I Stopped Whispering

On thirty years of professional doubt, one Reiki certification, and the day the veil stopped caring what I believed.

I have spent my entire adult life being paid to doubt. ‍

I joined the Air Force at nineteen. I built a career in risk — force protection, counter-terrorism, critical infrastructure, and the last decade in aerospace, where my job is to look at beautiful, complicated systems and ask what could possibly go wrong, then prove it. Verify. Corroborate. Assume nothing. My brain is a lovely, ruthless filing system: claim, evidence, assessment. It has fed my family and, more than once, protected things that matter.

Please understand: that is the spirit in which I tell you everything that comes next.

That Pesty April: In April of this year, I got certified in Reiki. I’ll be honest about why, because the honesty matters. I added it to my certifications and offerings because it fit under my somatic wellness umbrella, and if I could do more to help my clients heal, I was up for it. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Reiki’s effects. I just didn’t know much about it.

Then came the day of my Level 1 Reiki training — and my world changed forever. There is truly no going backwards from it.

HOW. DID. I. GET. HERE?

GLASS WINGS & PERSISTANT GUESTS I stepped into that Reiki class, with ZERO idea of what was to come.  Imagine my surprise, when at the end of a very long (and ummm…interesting) day, we had the chance to practice what we just learned on each other.  OF GLASS WINGS, AND HEAT….As I gave it a go, I felt a FIREY HEAT emanate from the recipient of my newly-learned skill – ok, cool.  Energy has heat.  But, IMAGINE my surprise when, as I stood behind this person, I “SAW?” (me questioning myself in that moment) – GLASS WINGS UNFURL from that person’s back up around their head? Ok, cool – I am a creative.  I’ve got a good imagination.  And then IMAGINE my surprise when…I “SAW” a sophisticated, older woman with constant eye contact – as though to say to me – YOU BETTER PAY MIND – hanging out behind the shoulder of another in the class.  That imagination of mine.  And then IMAGINE my surprise when she WAS BACK, and she spoke to me through song – over and over and over.  For weeks.  Until, finally I decided to come clean and share what occurred with the people who seemed to be the recipient of the message.  I drew what I saw and I wrote what I heard.  And I shared.  IMAGINE my surprise when they both confirmed they knew exactly WHO and WHAT I shared.

‍Here is what happens, in the plainest language I have: when I practice Reiki — and sometimes simply when I speak of it or I plan a session— I SEE things. A figure standing patiently beside a woman, waiting to be noticed. A color moving through her. Wings of glass unfolding from a man’s back and a silver thread wrapping him in safety. And then I HEAR it — a message arriving, often through music, in a language somewhere between sound and knowing.

‍The ANALYST TOOK OVER

I did exactly what a careful woman with a risk-analyst brain does with something like that. I questioned and looked for bias.  I also asked myself for signs I might have a brain tumor – good news – not a brain tumor.

I observed. I documented. I started to draw what I saw and write what I heard, and I kept it close, the way you hold raw data before you’re willing to call it a finding.  I kept it. 

And then the data refused to behave.

Every single person recognized what I drew. Not vaguely. Not “oh, that could be anyone.” The grandfather, down to his glasses. The mother, down to the way she held her head. The presence a woman had felt beside her for years and never once named out loud. Again. And again. And again.  The living connections I somehow SAW – proof of beautiful invisible threads that link us to our loved ones, soul to soul.

There is a version of me that could have kept that in a drawer forever — professional, composed, whispering it only to the people who had already paid to sit across from me. For a while, that’s exactly what I did. But you can only witness that so many times before the whispering starts to feel like a disservice — to the ones who came through, to the women who carried the proof home in their hands, and to myself.

I work with women every day and I ask them to speak their truth. I could not keep asking that of them while swallowing mine.

MY COMING OUT

So — no more making the tower my own version of a closet to hide in. I am clairvoyant and clairaudient. I see, I hear, I draw, I write, and the people I read keep what comes through, forever, on paper, in ink. It took persistent energies not willing to sit quietly “in the waiting room”, a friend and client calling me out on my lack of belief and desire to hide in a turtle shell with all of this, and moving past my own somatic response to fear of judgement - to say that sentence in public. I am saying it now with a warm, proud heart, in a year-long Reiki Master Teacher apprenticeship, as a doctoral student in Somatic Psychology — because apparently the analyst in me isn’t done asking how any of this works, and I have decided she never has to be. She and the gift can share the tower. They already do.

If you want to know what this looks like in practice, it lives in my studio now — in the energy work, in the art made of light, in everything the tower has become. Come see for yourself. The door is open and the tea awaits. The tower itself breathes and has it’s own beautiful history of women who met ill fait in awful unjust conditions.  I am honored to share the space with their energy and I often wonder if they are there – cheering me on.  Sometimes I feel their breeze whisp past my shoulder or my hair.

‍YOUR OWN, BEAUTIFUL POWER

HOWEVER THIS LANDS WITH YOU, please hear this. I speak openly now for the lifetimes of women who simply could not - and for those abused, killed, ridiculed, berated, made to feel small - the women that came before me, the women silenced now, the girls learning to find their voice. Here is the part of this letter I care about most, and it isn’t about me. If you have ever felt something you couldn’t explain — a presence, a knowing, a song that arrived at exactly the wrong-right moment — and you filed it away because good, sensible women don’t say such things out loud: you are not crazy. You are not broken. You are not too much. You are a person who noticed something, and noticing is not a malfunction. Your truth doesn’t require anyone’s permission slip — but if you’ve been waiting for one anyway, consider this it.

SALEM, MA HITS DIFFERENT NOW ‍

Next month I will walk the streets of Salem, Massachusetts for a second time — a town where, not so very long ago, women were killed on the strength of whispers about exactly the kinds of things I have just told you in print (even if the women weren’t saying it or even if they weren’t doing any of it). I get to go there as a tourist, and then I get to come home to my studio in a famously haunted tower and keep saying all of it out loud, with my name attached, in the light.

A Mother, A Daughter & A Messenger

A mother who never had a voice - her energy stood by my side to say to her recipient “You are not alone, I am here with you. And in that moment of sharing with the recipient, I felt three women, across realms, together in a room healing - me, the messenger, the mother and her energy, and the adult daughter who wondered if the mother was with her. Indeed, she is.

That is not something I take for granted. That is a privilege three centuries of women were denied — and I intend to spend it loudly.  If you come to me and trust your energies in me, I will meet you with integrity, humility, and gratefulness.  I consider us partners in your journey.

I see it. I hear it. I draw it. I write it. Together we do the knowing.

No more whispering.

— Shannon

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