Welcome to episode #50 of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. In this week’s episode I spoke with Jaime Smith, a reiki healer. Her hobbies are playing the guitar, reading, and hiking.
Top Talking Points
- The importance of continuing to grow in your life.
- Learning how to put aside what you previously thought in order to change and grow.
- The meaning of life is combined human consciousness.
Resources & Links
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Connect With Jaime at earthetherhealingarts.com
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Episode Transcript
Ryan
Hey guys, it’s Ryan real quick. So my mission with the Morning Upgrade blog and podcast is to raise the awareness of morning routines and personal development. And I now have two products that are also helped me with this mission. The first product helps you start a 20 minute morning routine. And the second product is a book that outlines how to use personal development to upgrade your life and business. You can get full details on both products over at morning upgrade.com. Thanks for letting me share and now on to the show.
Announcer
Welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.
Ryan
Hey, Jaime, welcome to the Morning Upgrade podcast. How are you?
Jaime
Hi Ryan. I’m well how are you?
Ryan
Doing good. Doing very well. Thanks for asking. So why don’t we start off by you telling everyone who you are, what you do for a living, and what your hobbies are?
Jaime
Okay, great. Well, hi, everybody. My name is Jaime Smith. And I work with energy as my nine-year-old like to say what that means is I’m a Usui, Reiki Grandmaster teacher, and I act as the conduit for the flow of universal life energy, otherwise known as cheap, to facilitate healing and those that are looking to find relief from malaise and disease and really looking for an alignment in mind, body, and spirit. You know, when you say what do you do for a living, you think that’s instantaneously the job, the nine to five, and this is my living in every sense of the word. So what I do for work is also what I do for fun, you know, this is my grind and my hobby. And what I do is infused into every aspect of my day. And, but when I’m not focusing on helping people, people heal through Reiki, I am usually playing guitar or working with my Tibetan singing bowls or gongs and taking care of my beautiful children, and doing a lot of yoga and hiking through the woods, I find it to be very relaxing. So it’s rejuvenating to be out in nature.
Ryan
How did you find Reiki?
Jaime
I kind of stumbled upon it. I was going through a phase in my life where I felt that my face wasn’t serving me well, and my community wasn’t really serving me well. And I think it comes to a time in someone’s life where they really need to turn inward. And I was looking to feel better in a way that wasn’t going to require me taking pharmaceuticals or paying money into a copay. And, you know, I stumbled upon Reiki by accident, and it was the most beautiful accident that’s ever happened.
Ryan
Excellent. Can you do Reiki on yourself too? I honestly know very little about it. But can you do it on yourself too?
Jaime
Yes, absolutely. In fact, as part of my morning routine, when you go through a Reiki training, the first level of Reiki is to be able to perform Reiki on yourself. So when you’re getting an attunement from a Reiki Master, it allows the energy to open up and flow so that you can heal yourself. So you’re given different hand positions to learn. And then in Reiki to, you’re then able to do that work on others. So absolutely, yes, we can do it for ourselves.
Ryan
Well, you mentioned your morning routine. So now we have to go there. I would love to learn more about you how you start your day off when you take us through that?
Jaime
Yeah, absolutely. So my morning routine actually starts at night. You know, I’m a very firm believer in how you wake up, it’s how you start the day and how you wake up is often dependent on how you close the day out from before. So, you know, I’d like to start my morning routine by closing out my day. And that includes, once I’m done doing all the mom thing, you know, I kind of sit down with a pen and paper and just practice gratitude. You know, I listen to my inner thoughts, and I write down you know, three things. One thing that I’m grateful for is one thing that went better than expected and one thing that just made my day. And you know, getting into that mindset, you know, helps to keep things positive. A lot of times if you’re going to bed with stress and anxiety, you know, your sleep is very disrupted and on the lines of disrupted sleep, the body produces melatonin when it’s ready to go down. And TV and cellular devices. Mobile devices have a blue light that disrupts melatonin production. So I actually have a hue light system here at home and I turn the lighting to a warm tone of red tint. That way my body can start winding down naturally. And that way when I go to bed, I am going to bed when my body is ready and when my mind has been cleared for the day. And then when I wake up in the morning, I do the same thing with a pen and paper I set my intentions for the day everything that I would like to accomplish fully knowing that if I don’t get to everything that I’m going to be gentle on myself and going through that day. And then once I set that intention and clear my mind once again. A lot of us wake up with a ton of anxiety because we have so many things that we need to get done. And, you know, what’s important to realize is that you only have today and just for today, you are exactly where you need to be. So it’s how you process that energy and that emotion. So once I’ve cleared my thoughts and kind of set my intention for the day, and then move in and take those thoughts, I’m a card reader, I do tarot and oracle cards. So I like to kind of do a mind-body-spirit check in with those. That’s part of my inner knowing self-discovery process. So I’ll have whatever intentions or concerns that I have set forth in my journaling in the morning. And I’ll seek to find answers to those questions. And once I have provided myself with a general understanding of the thought process I need to go through, I’ll then take that thinking and then ease that into my yoga routine. So I’m really working on the mind-body-spirit in multiple facets. And I usually take about an hour in the morning, before I start my day doing everything else to just kind of focus be present, be mindful, a lot of the times that it’ll entail practicing meditation, or to, you know, doing affirmations or mantras with the use of mala beads. I’m very gentle with myself and allowing not to have a vaguer very rigorous routine, but just allowing the flow of the energy to come through and, and for me to embrace what is needed that day. So there’s no very strict routine, you know, I’m a firm believer in the 8020 rule. So the top 20% of your day, you can get 80% of the work, and just kind of letting that flow without having a sense of control is really what sets me sets me up for the day.
Ryan
Do you do it seven days a week?
Jaime
I try. I try. Sometimes it’s not always easy, being a single mom of two, you know, on the weekend that it gets a little tough, you know, it’s like a kind of a bit of a circus act, but I allow for five days a week at the minimum. And if I can get it in with my kids, then that’s an added bonus. So I like to just kind of be easy and try to see how far I get each day. And, you know, if I can’t do yoga or meditate a certain day, then I’ll certainly take the time when I can to do my journaling and just kind of writing down my thoughts that really goes a long way.
Ryan
Yeah, I’m the same way as you I mean, I try I do it seven days a week. For me, sometimes I miss occasionally. But sometimes it’s not necessarily a morning routine. It’s like a part morning, finish up in the afternoon type routine. So as long as I check off all the things that I want to do in the morning throughout today, most of the weekends. That’s good enough for me, like you said, the 80-20.
Jaime
Yeah, absolutely. A great way to live.
Ryan
So what is it about personal growth that interests you so much, you put time into your nighttime routine, your healing your morning routine? What is it about personal growth that interests you?
Jaime
I think it’s just the ability to connect the dots. You know, I feel I’m a lifelong learner. And so I take on an almost academic approach to personal growth, I read a lot of self-help and self-growth books. And I think it’s just amazing how everything is just so interconnected and builds upon each other. It’s like this amazing trajectory, that that really is just so rewarding. I have a quote that I love to live by. And this has been something that I’ve kind of really stuck with, for the majority of my adult life. And it’s a quote by St. Augustine. And it says that if you would attain to what you’re not yet, you must always be pleased by what you want, or where you are pleased with yourself. There you have remained, keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing. And you know, what this means to me is, you know, personal growth is not becoming stagnant, not really being fully displeased with where you are, but always wanting more for yourself. And, you know, I just kind of let the growth come to me Where where is needed, you know, I don’t have a very specific path that I’ve set forward for myself, I just allow it to happen. And it’s amazing how once you look back, and I guess that’s why they say hindsight, 2020. But seems like everything has always happened for a reason. And I’ve said exactly where it needed to be. So I find it incredibly interesting and so rewarding to see how, when you’re working on yourself, and you know, this personal growth, there’s just this beautiful synchronicity to all that you do, and I’m all struck by it.
Ryan
Yeah, it’s like a journey that never ends in a good way. You know, it’s, it’s just very, it is like a journey as the best way to describe it. Let’s talk about your business. Jamie, what have you had the most success with? I know it’s a new business, but what have you had the most success with in terms of growing it or just resolving challenges?
Jaime
So you know, there’s definitely been a lot of challenges, you know, having an intangible service and having service that requires people to really just put all of their conditionings and traditional societal socio-economic and, you know, even religious belief systems aside, I think that it, you know, I’m in the changing business. And, you know, we both know that it’s hard to make a change, right. And, you know, both personally and professionally. And so, you know, the business that I work with is I have to get people to kind of take that step forward of faith, right. And it’s always a challenge, really just getting people to say, Okay, I will let go and believe that this is for the best, and the traditional business models of trying to, you know, actively sell my service and actively sell myself, it doesn’t always resonate well. Right. I think there are a lot of people that are very wary when it comes to this type of business. So people associate spirituality or they associate, you know, Reiki healing with voodoo or psychic or, you know, whatever they have conditions they have placed on their understanding of this, and it’s really kind of have to skew the skeptic. And so what I found to be most successful, is to just let the work speak for itself. So I’ve kind of thrown out all the business models and go-to-market strategies that I have started out employing and just started really just going by word of mouth and just letting people experience for themselves. That is just the profound impact that healing can have on their mind, body, and soul. When you have someone that comes to you, that has had shoulder pain that’s been unresolved for over a decade, and physical therapy and pharmaceuticals just start cutting in and one session, they walk away, feeling absolutely no pain, they go back and they tell their family, they go back and they tell their friends, and building this internal network of people that not only become loyal customers, but evangelists has been tremendously successful and getting my business and getting my word out there.
Ryan
Congrats to you for having the courage to go out on your own here and follow your dream, follow your passion, many people would shy away from that challenge. So congrats to you on that.
Jaime
Thank you. Thank you,
Ryan
I got a new question to ask you. This is a new question. I want to start asking on the Morning Upgrade podcast and you’re actually the first person I’m asking. So it’s a question I asked myself a lot. It’s actually a question my eight-year-old daughter asked me yesterday, which I thought was really deeper. But in your opinion, what is the meaning of life?
Jaime
That’s a loaded question for a very short podcast. So I’ll try to sum it up, I would say in one word, for me, the meaning of life is unity consciousness. And what this means to me is just being able to kind of take a step back and be present with yourself and, you know, looking at, you know, taking an even further step back looking at what consciousness is, in general, right? If you become unconscious, then your reality doesn’t exist, right? So the consciousness that we experience creates our reality, right? And over generations and millennia, you know, we have been evolving our consciousness as we have grown as, as a human species, and as humanity as a planet. And in my understanding, and in my research, and the wisdom that I’ve grown after obtaining all this knowledge over the years is that, you know, it’s all a level of elevation, right? We’re just evolving consciousness over time and through the time, so you know, we have and if you take a look at different religious belief systems, and different cultural belief systems, even psychological belief systems, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the energy system of the human chakras, the pen sacraments, Christianity, the Judaic, this RFO it’s so there’s, there are so many different concepts of being able to just achieve this certain level of consciousness that allows you to have pure love and enlightenment. And when you strip away all of the teachings, and the conditions in the writing is all for saying, and so at the base level, and just kind of using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a good example, this is something that’s really universally accepted and understood by anyone, as, you know, some type of psychological or business understanding at the very base needs is our survival needs, right? And then that next level up is that needs to kind of create and expand throughout the world. And in looking at the human energy system, our root chakra is our base chakra, and that’s responsible for our basic survival needs. And so each level, I believe, is a different form of evolution, right? And so if you’re operating in a basic level of survival, that you know, life is not facing that is a war consciousness where you’re fighting for your right to stay alive, right. And although we have evolved, you know, over the millennia in learning how this Stay alive. You know, as either the years have gone by, you know, there are some that have elevated the different levels of consciousness that now live and breathe an act of love. And there are some that live in a scarcity mindset. And I believe that the meaning of life is to really look inward for yourself. Because again, going back to consciousness and reality, right, our consciousness is turned off, we don’t have a reality, right? But so the perception of our reality becomes our world, right. And if we’re worried about what we don’t have, and living in a scarcity mindset, or worrying about how we’re going to survive, instead of just letting go and letting the events unfold and letting our soul’s journey unfold as it may, then it creates an incongruency. And that’s what this world is experienced, I believe, for so long. And, you know, so the meaning of life to me is really just letting go of being present in the moment, living a life of love and gratitude, and accepting everything for what it is, there’s so much chaos going on in the world. And, you know, at times, it feels just so overpowering, and chaotic. And it’s easy to get caught up in that wild ride. There are so many emotions that flow through. And it could feel as if everything’s out of control, but just getting very calm and peaceful and just realizing that you are that one drop, that sits in the center of this ripple effect, just moving into this period of peace. If everyone can do the same, right? Then it creates almost a human utopia, where everyone is on the same, the same wavelength, the same path, and we’re all working towards the same thing. That’s the meaning of life for me, is just a consciousness of one consciousness of unity.
Ryan
Yeah, that was an excellent answer. Very thorough. Obviously, you’ve given us a lot of thought. And I appreciate you sharing it with us.
Jaime
Yeah, absolutely. Happy, happy to share more.
Ryan
So Jamie, what’s the best website if someone wants to connect with you? Where? Where can they find more about you?
Jaime
So you can find more about what I do at www.earthetherhealingarts.com. I also have a Facebook page, which is the same. And I do a lot of work on Instagram, that seems to be my main molecule, you can communicate me through there, like and my handle is or these are healing arts. And you can reach out to me through direct message. My phone is listed on my website. I also have an email, it’s the same URL, etherhealingarts@gmail.com. So there’s a number of ways I like to have a purely truly open connection. So there’s no one real way to connect with me. But I think the most defined about me professionally is on the website and the most you’ll find about who I am as a person, and how I integrate who I am with what I do as my passion. You’ll find that on Instagram.
Ryan
Awesome. Thanks, Jaime. I appreciate your time. It’s a great conversation. And thanks, everyone for listening.
Jaime
Thank you, Ryan. Take care now.
Ryan
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