Introduction — My Story

How I Came to Dynamic Reiki Therapy

I did not set out to create Dynamic Reiki Therapy.

For much of my life, I did not even know I was searching for anything.

Looking backward, I can see that I was.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist household. Christianity was part of the environment around me, but there were things I saw and experienced within religion that did not sit well with me. I could not reconcile some of what was being practiced with what I felt spirituality was supposed to represent.

So I rejected it.

Or perhaps more accurately, I rejected the version of it I had encountered.

Then I went out into life.

I served in the military. I traveled. I experienced beautiful things and painful things. I knew happiness, sorrow, disappointment, love, change, uncertainty, loss, excitement, and the many other emotions that come with simply being alive.

I met people from different countries, cultures, ethnicities, religions, philosophies, and ways of understanding the world.

I listened.

I observed.

I experienced.

But I never completely attached myself to any particular explanation of life.

Something in me was still looking.

I just didn't know I was looking.

The Package

Then something unusual happened.

My mother had recently purchased a house, and a package arrived there addressed to me. My name should not have been connected to that address yet.

It contained religious material from one of those Latter-day Saints television offers.

To this day, I do not know who requested it.

Maybe my mother did.

Maybe someone else did.

I simply do not know.

What I do know is that I opened it.

And I read it.

Something awakened.

Not because I suddenly accepted everything contained in those materials, but because something inside me began asking questions again.

The search became conscious.

Fortunately, one of my cousins—who was also one of my good friends—had developed a practice of prayer and meditation.

I remember asking him a very simple question:

How do you pray?

That question became the beginning of something much larger.

We began reading scripture together. We prayed. We meditated. Eventually, prayer and meditation became part of my everyday life.

Then we found a church in upstate New York that deeply resonated with me. It was a Spirit-filled Christian church grounded in Bible teaching, but what mattered to me was not simply the doctrine.

I began to experience what I was reading.

I accepted Christ into my life.

I was baptized.

I prayed.

I meditated.

I journaled.

I studied.

I filled notebook after notebook with observations, scriptures, thoughts, questions, and reflections.

Spirituality was no longer something people were telling me about.

It was becoming experiential.

Something Began Moving

During that period, I also experienced what my Christian tradition understood as the gift of tongues and the movement of the Holy Spirit.

And something happened in my body.

When I prayed or spoke in tongues, I sometimes felt an energy rising inside me.

It could build from somewhere deep within and move upward until it felt as though I were overflowing.

It was powerful.

It was physical.

And it was unmistakable to me.

When I asked what it was, the answer I often received was simply:

“The Holy Ghost.”

That description was meaningful within the tradition I was practicing, but it did not completely answer my question.

Because the experience began changing.

At first, I noticed it primarily while speaking in tongues.

Then I experienced it during meditation.

Then during worship.

Eventually, I discovered that I did not have to be in church at all.

I could be almost anywhere.

And I hesitate even to say that the energy would come upon me, because over time that stopped describing the experience accurately.

It felt more as though it was already available.

I was learning how to become available to it.

That distinction would eventually become one of the foundations of DRT.

I was not creating something.

I was learning how to stop interfering with something that was already there.

When Life Fell Apart—and Became Clear

Years later, my external life changed dramatically.

I was laid off.

I was going through a divorce.

By almost any conventional measure, it should have been one of the worst periods of my life.

Yet something unexpected happened.

It became one of the clearest periods I had ever experienced.

There was pain.

There was uncertainty.

There was enormous change.

But underneath it was a strange clarity.

Even happiness.

Something had been stripped away.

I eventually transitioned to Phoenix and began another chapter of my life.

I searched for a church but never found one that resonated with me in the same way the church in New York had.

So spiritually, I entered what I can only describe as a pause.

Life continued.

I remarried.

I worked.

I lived.

And eventually I reached a place that many people quietly reach.

I became stagnant.

Not miserable.

Not necessarily unhappy.

Just accepting.

Maybe this was simply what life was.

The Door Opened Again

Then I had an experience with plant medicine that radically challenged that assumption.

I am not presenting plant medicine as a requirement, recommendation, or spiritual shortcut. I am simply describing what happened in my own life.

For me, that experience opened a door.

It left me with an overwhelming recognition:

There is more here.

Not simply more information.

More reality.

More consciousness.

More possibility.

And I realized that I had barely begun investigating it.

So I started searching again.

But this time the search was much broader.

I listened to spiritual teachers such as Michael Bernard Beckwith. I explored teachings attempting to bring spirituality into conversation with consciousness and science, including the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza. I read and listened to Eckhart Tolle and others who emphasized awareness, consciousness, and presence.

Then the circle widened further.

Buddhism.

Taoism.

Indian and Eastern philosophies.

Meditative traditions.

Energy practices.

Mystical Christianity.

Ideas about consciousness and the nature of reality.

I was not looking for another religion.

I was looking for the pattern underneath them.

The Pattern Beneath the Traditions

And slowly I began seeing something.

Different traditions used different names.

Different symbols.

Different stories.

Different practices.

Different cultural languages.

But beneath many of them I kept encountering themes of unity, surrender, presence, love, awareness, consciousness, and relationship with something greater than the isolated self.

That observation changed the way I looked at Christianity as well.

I began returning to biblical teachings with different eyes.

Instead of asking which tradition was right and which was wrong, I began asking:

What are they pointing toward?

That question became much more interesting to me.

The Law of One material became another major philosophical influence during this period. Its portrayal of existence as fundamentally unified and its model of spiritual evolution gave me another framework through which to contemplate experiences I had already been having.

I did not simply adopt everything I encountered.

I compared it with experience.

I questioned it.

I sat with it.

I looked for resonance.

And gradually I began to suspect that humanity's spiritual traditions might represent many different cultural attempts to describe encounters with something fundamentally whole.

Human beings then build institutions around those encounters.

Institutions create language.

Language becomes doctrine.

Doctrine can become identity.

And sometimes the original experience gets buried beneath everything constructed around it.

So I became increasingly interested in going beneath the construction.

Back toward experience.

Back toward Presence.

Then I Found Reiki

That search eventually led me deeper into meditation, sound, vibration, and energy practices.

I learned sound healing.

I deepened my meditation practice.

I studied Reiki and eventually became a Reiki Master in three different Reiki disciplines, including Usui Reiki.

And Reiki gave me language for something I had been experiencing for years.

That rising energy.

That electricity.

That sense of something moving through me.

That experience that had appeared during prayer, tongues, meditation, and worship—and had eventually become available almost at will.

I recognized something familiar.

I had encountered the movement long before I knew the word Reiki.

Reiki did not create the experience.

Reiki helped me recognize it.

That realization became enormously important.

Because if I had experienced this before Reiki training, then perhaps the training had not given me the energy.

Perhaps it had given me a framework through which to recognize what was already present.

That question became foundational:

What if connection is not something we acquire?

What if spiritual practice simply helps us notice what has never stopped moving?

That understanding would eventually become central to Dynamic Reiki Therapy:

You are already connected.

AUM

My exploration of sound eventually brought me deeper into AUM—also commonly written OM.

I began contemplating the idea of primordial vibration.

Science describes an early universe emerging from an extraordinary beginning. Spiritual traditions have long used sound, vibration, breath, and word as ways of contemplating creation.

And a question formed in me:

If there were a first vibration—

a first movement—

a first expression—

what might that original resonance be?

For me, the answer became AUM.

I do not present that as a scientific measurement of the beginning of the universe.

It is a spiritual understanding that emerged through my own contemplation and experience.

AUM became my language for original coherence.

Wholeness.

Presence.

The undivided field from which everything arises.

Everything we experience—our personalities, histories, beliefs, fears, cultures, bodies, relationships, and identities—becomes a particular expression of that greater Whole.

The deeper I went, the less interested I became in escaping those expressions.

I became interested in recognizing the Wholeness moving through them.

The Tools Were Not the Destination

Then another realization began changing everything.

Meditation was not the destination.

Reiki was not the destination.

Sound healing was not the destination.

Breathing techniques were not the destination.

Chakras were not the destination.

They were tools.

And what were the tools doing?

Again and again, they were bringing me toward the same place:

Presence.

When I became present, interference softened.

When interference softened, I could feel the movement that had always been there.

The same movement I had encountered years earlier during prayer.

The same rising current I had experienced while speaking in tongues.

The same spaciousness I had discovered in meditation.

The same flow I later recognized through Reiki.

Different doorways.

Something underneath them felt remarkably familiar.

That realization changed my relationship with spiritual practice.

Instead of asking:

How do I make the energy move?

I began asking:

What am I doing that keeps me from noticing how Life is already moving?

That question is much closer to DRT.

From Attraction to Resonance

The Law of Attraction also became part of my investigation.

But eventually I became less interested in the popular question of how to attract specific things and more interested in the mechanics underneath the idea.

If experience and consciousness are related, how?

If attention matters, why?

If our internal state changes our experience of circumstances, what exactly is changing?

And if everything arises within one underlying reality, what does resonance have to do with the way we experience that reality?

Those questions led me deeper into frequency, distortion, projection, coherence, and presence.

I began thinking of the human being not merely as a physical body with a spiritual component attached to it, but as a whole field of experience—mind, body, and spirit participating together.

The Law of One uses the term mind/body/spirit complex. That language resonated with me because it refused to separate the different dimensions of human experience into unrelated pieces.

DRT would eventually emerge from my own attempt to understand this relationship experientially.

Not as another religion.

Not as a replacement for Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Reiki, or any other path.

And not as a claim that all traditions are identical.

They are not.

DRT emerged from something much simpler.

I kept encountering the same invitation:

Come back.

Become present.

Listen.

Allow.

Notice what is already moving.

Dynamic Reiki Therapy

Eventually, all of these threads began meeting.

Prayer.

Meditation.

Christian mysticism.

Reiki.

Sound.

Breath.

Chakra awareness.

Presence.

Resonance.

The study of consciousness.

The recognition of Oneness.

And decades of living—joy, grief, relationships, mistakes, travel, work, loss, discovery, and ordinary human experience.

Dynamic Reiki Therapy grew from that meeting.

I did not wake up one morning and invent DRT.

I recognized it gradually.

It emerged from asking the same question again and again:

What remains when I stop interfering?

And the answer kept returning me to Presence.

This is why I teach that Reiki is not something you possess.

It is not something I can give you.

It is not something a teacher owns.

The teacher can offer a doorway.

The practices can create conditions.

The breath can orient attention.

Sound can reveal resonance.

Hands can become places of listening.

But ultimately the practice returns you to something much more intimate.

Something that was present before the teacher.

Before the method.

Before the book.

Before the searching.

You.

Not merely the personality you have learned to call yourself.

The Presence within which that personality, that history, that searching, and even this story have appeared.

For me, that Presence is AUM.

And Dynamic Reiki Therapy is the method that emerged as I learned to recognize and experience it.

What the Journey Became

After years of searching, experiencing, questioning, practicing, and reflecting, I eventually found language for what had been unfolding in my life all along.

What began as a personal spiritual search gradually became something larger.

Not a religion.

Not another belief system.

Not something I wanted people simply to accept because I said it was true.

It became a way of helping people encounter these questions through their own experience.

I can describe what emerged very simply:

The AUM Within → a living practice of presence.

The Living Book → teaching that grows through lived experience.

Dynamic Reiki Therapy (DRT) → the method.

Learn → Experience → Reflect → Integrate → the rhythm.

The ecosystem → ways of living and experiencing the teaching.

The purpose → not telling someone what to believe, but helping them discover through their own experience.

That last part may be the most important.

I spent much of my own life being given explanations.

Religious explanations.

Spiritual explanations.

Scientific explanations.

Metaphysical explanations.

Some resonated deeply.

Some did not.

Some opened doors.

Others gave me language for experiences I had already encountered.

But eventually I realized that another person's explanation could never replace my experience.

And I do not want DRT to become another explanation that someone is expected to accept.

That would contradict the very journey that brought me here.

The teaching must be encountered.

You learn enough to become curious.

Then you experience.

You notice what actually happens within you.

You reflect on what arose—not simply on what someone tells you should have arisen.

And then you integrate what you discover into the ordinary experience of being alive.

Learn → Experience → Reflect → Integrate.

That is the rhythm because, in many ways, it is the rhythm I had already been following throughout my own life.

I learned something.

I experienced it.

I questioned it.

I reflected on it.

I carried what remained into my life.

Then life taught me something else.

And the cycle began again.

This is also why I call this a Living Book.

The teaching cannot be complete simply because words have been printed on a page.

Life keeps happening.

Experience keeps revealing.

Understanding keeps deepening.

And sometimes what we thought we understood changes when life gives us a deeper experience of it.

The book therefore becomes part of a larger living teaching—one that can grow as experience grows.

And The AUM Within is larger still.

It is the living practice of Presence itself.

DRT provides a method for entering the experience, but the method is not the destination.

The Living Book provides teaching, but the teaching is not the destination.

The ecosystem provides different ways to learn, practice, experience, reflect, and integrate, but the ecosystem is not the destination.

They are doorways.

Ways of returning.

Ways of remembering.

Ways of creating enough space to experience for yourself what words can only point toward.

The destination—if we can even call it one—is the recognition of what was already here.

Presence.

Wholeness.

AUM.

The Search Turned Inward

Perhaps that is why my journey had so many different doors.

I kept looking outside myself for the thing I was trying to find.

Christianity gave me one doorway.

Prayer gave me another.

Meditation another.

Reiki another.

Sound another.

Other traditions gave me language and perspectives that helped me see from different angles.

My life itself became a teacher.

The joy.

The loss.

The relationships.

The failures.

The unexpected beginnings.

The moments that made sense.

And the moments that did not.

All of it became part of the search.

Eventually, though, the search began pointing inward.

And that is where The AUM Within truly began.

Not with the discovery of something new.

With the recognition of something that had been there all along.

That is why I am not asking you to believe what I believe.

I am inviting you to experience.

To pay attention.

To question.

To feel.

To reflect.

To live with what you discover.

And then to return and experience again.

Learn.

Experience.

Reflect.

Integrate.

That is the rhythm of the Living Book.

It is also, when I look back, the rhythm of my life.

I learned.

Life gave me an experience.

I reflected.

I integrated what I could.

And then something else appeared that invited me deeper.

I believe the teaching should continue in exactly the same way.

Not:

Believe me.

But:

Experience for yourself.

Not:

Follow me.

But:

Become present enough to recognize what is already within you.

Not:

Here is the final answer.

But:

Here is a doorway. Walk through it and notice what you discover.

Because what I eventually discovered after all those years of searching was not another religion.

It was not another philosophy.

It was not another teacher.

It was not even Reiki.

It was Presence.

The Wholeness beneath all the movement.

The quiet something that had been there in prayer.

In meditation.

In worship.

In Reiki.

In sound.

In suffering.

In joy.

In stillness.

In ordinary life.

I had been touching it long before I knew what to call it.

Today, I call it:

AUM.

And the journey of learning to recognize it within myself became:

The AUM Within.