HEALING BEGINNINGS
“Whāia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuohu koe me maunga teitei”
- Seek out your heart's desire, though if you have to relent, let it be to a lofty mountain
I come from a line of healers, I was taught by my mother, who had learnt from her Māori elders. I always knew I’d be a healer one day. Although I had grown up very spiritual, surrounded by spiritual healers, the first actual healing I performed wasn’t until I turned 25. It was with mum on her best friend, a Rangatira from a Marae in my hometown Ngongotaha. My father had passed away only weeks earlier and I was considering the meaning of life. The experience of feeling the wairua flow through me would change my life forever. It was like waking up the supernatural within me, both exciting and scary at the same time.
During my travelling years, it seemed the further away from home I was, the more informed I was with what was going down at home. I would forever freak my family out with phone calls from overseas, warning them of things that were either happening or about to happen. This continued intuition and my practices of healing that mum taught me, led me to venture into other forms of healing.
I spent a number of years getting into trouble, following naive teachers who felt the only way to teach healing was to open their students up completely … and then weren’t around to close the power down. I learnt quickly I needed structure, boundaries and support of a tribe. This brought me to try Reiki, and for a number of years I had amazing results.
One of my healees at the time was a beautiful man from Ireland, called Pops. He was 70 and had surgery scheduled to remove a prostate tumour. We did healing three times a week for three weeks and his koha (donation) each time was a freshly baked apple pie. His pies were the best apple pies in London. Anyway, by the time he went for surgery, and several kilos of weight gain later for me, his scans confirmed it had disappeared all together. The doctors were completely stumped. They had the before and after scans and couldn’t work out how this had happened. From then on Pops would take me down to the local Stoke Newington pub ‘The Auld Shillelagh’ and introduce me to the entire pub, saying “have you met my healer?”.
In the Reiki community, I was drawn to a rag-tag team of misfits who practised together regularly, we laughed A LOT and continuously pushed our abilities. I loved these sessions, I felt so supported, and so loved … I’d finally understood the meaning of finding your tribe.
Although Reiki provided amazing results and it definitely provided a safe and structured form of healing, it didn’t fill my heart like my Māori teachings had done. Being far away from home, I then called on my spiritual guides - my tupuna and other indigenous souls - to teach me directly. I spent 20 years learning healing this way, and teaching myself deep meditation to receive ancient healing knowledge and wisdom. In Te Ao Māori, we consider this form of learning ‘Toko Iho’.
I recall my trip through Asia returning home to NZ, travelling to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Bali. I decided I would do my own meditation retreat so I found a little house deep in the paddy fields in Ubud and stayed there on my own for two weeks. I would meditate every day for 4 hours at a time (it felt like 30 minutes). I remember at times speaking another language, which I had no idea where it came from, and feeling like I could get lost in this world to the point of no return.
Pretty much from there on I have felt my life been spiritually guided. The times I have listened, the road has been straight, and when I’ve ignored my intuition the road takes an uphill climb. There are too many examples to name them and maybe I don’t recognise going off-track at the time but I certainly know when I’m on-track, as everything all at once takes an unbelievably positive direction.
I worked 30 years in the corporate industry on large IT transformation projects, working in London and all-over New Zealand, being sent to Sydney, New York, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Glasgow, Belfast and Amsterdam. It was an exciting life, but I was always destined to be a healer … it was just a matter of timing.
Moving to Whangarei, Te Taitokerau (Northland, NZ) to take up full-time healing was like an orchestration of movement, flowing to the rhythm of divine timing. The journey started with my mum and I travelling in my bus with my dog, returning to the lands we whakapapa to (descend from). Then unexpectedly being rescued by a friend who needed rescuing, a miracle cure later and that was settled … I had found my new home.
That would be the last of my trips with my mum as she passed six months later, but as divine timing would have it, just as she was ending her journey, a new chapter was beginning for me and Next Level Healers.
Written by Leihia Wilson - Next Level Healers