The Story of Ursidae
In December 2013, I traveled to Des Moines, Iowa to complete my initiation into Reiki III.
The lineage I trained with was intensive and discerning. Many thresholds were crossed before one was considered ready for the next phase of development.
Similar to martial arts traditions, a student had to demonstrate or present a question that let the teacher know they were experienced with the foundation and ready to take on more responsibility and develop more skills.
I started my journey with Reiki in 2001 and by 2013 I studied with my teacher until she transitioned in 2007, and then committed to strict tutelage with her only master student who had high demands of her students as she did for herself.
By the time I completed my first Reiki III initiation, I had audited over a dozen Reiki I trainings, nearly as many Reiki II courses, an additional Reiki IIB course, and every extra class that was asked of me by my teacher. I wanted so much to be like her and I sought her approval. We’d met when I was a teenager and I attribute so much of my growth as the direct result of the thousands of hours I spent with her as a student, as a recruiter, and as a devoted cheerleader to her, if I am being honest.
My attraction to the practice of Reiki felt like a calling at 17 years old. The word lept from a brochure and I signed up for a Reiki I & II weekend course. My first teacher shared with me that she saw Reiki moving through me and out into the world. That was 22 years ago. I approached Reiki in desperation to heal myself.
In 2013 I was an adult. I was a few years sober and in recovery. Until that year, I never thought I would be anything other than a student. I never thought I was worthy of the gifts of the finer vibrations of Reiki III and the teachings that accompanied them. When I realized that I was being taught through a Vajrayana perspective, it felt like my path was so obvious. I took refuge in Tibetan Buddhism in New York City in 2011 after leaving a four-month retreat intensive in Vermont. I took the name Dorje Padme: “Indestructible Compassion” or “Diamond Lotus.”
In December of 2013, I was living in NYC with an important partner to me, and we bonded over our affinity for bears. I filed an alias on my passport:
Dorje Padme Ursidae
I returned to Brooklyn after my training and a feeling, a knowing inside of me emerged.
It was time to get into the world and be with people.
I began seeing clients in exchange for money. Before this, all my Reiki sessions were offered in the form of bartering. Early sessions included my mom’s friend who had broken her neck vertebrae in a riding accident. My grandmother. Any friend that requested it. For many years it felt like a dormant entity within me. No one asked for it or they were confused about what Reiki is or does.
In 2022, I started referring to Reiki as trust. No translation I’ve found to English fits the feeling. Universal Life Force Energy. Great Spirit. Great Energy. God Energy. Spiritual Power. Energy Power.
I realized how disconnected we had become culturally, that the words we once used to name the unknowable had been rinsed from our language. Reiki was being sold as a product, sold as a multi-level marketing, misunderstood and underappreciated because of the miscommunication and mishandling in America.
In 2007 it was there to welcome me into early recovery and remind me of why I started the healing path. It was there in 2009 after a year-long relapse and helped me get through some of the most intense secondary trauma. It was there during my Yoga teacher training and all the tears involved in learning how to be with my body for the first time. It was there on a Halloween Full Moon at my first silent yoga and meditation retreat in 2009 that I prayed and begged for my healing from codependency and addiction. It was there that I finally gave up alcohol; found a Tibetan Buddhist center in Manhattan and learned to sit with myself and practice meditation. It was there in all the rooms of recovery. It was there when I moved to the retreat center and activated when someone was in need. The recommitment to myself that came with my retreat experience exposed me to who I am and to the sleeping force, the instrument of peace that was within me.
We all have access to this universal life energy, this force of trust in the flow of the universe, the great sweeping energy of change, the dynamic chaos and order of existence. Being trained in Reiki only allowed me to see this more and helped me to reveal it in others.
In 2013 I started offering astrology in conjunction with my sessions, but would never have considered myself an astrologer. I recall speaking to my mother (the REAL astrologer) and I would whine that I only wanted to do energy work.
“Astrology IS energy work,” she said to me.
That certainly shut me up. My bear-ents-in-law helped me acquire my first travel massage table -- a Battlecreek o.g.. that was metal and awkward and I will never part with it. I went to people’s apartments, did Reiki on couches, and floors, astrology and divination readings at kitchen tables and in yoga studios. I was a Studio Manager by day and a healer by night.
Brooklyn dissolved for me as a path. It was around the Lunar New Year in 2015 that I realized I couldn’t stay there. I’d been checking out chaplainship programs, and visiting naturopathic schools in New England, I was examining all my options to shift, and spirit spoke to me.
“You will never be happy here. Go and complete your training.”
I hated it, but what wisdom spoke to me was right. I would never be or have enough there at that time. I wouldn’t be satiated.
So I left. Again. And my return to the Midwest was a sobering pile of years of difficulty. My relationship with my teacher was strained. My relationship with my career and who or what I thought I was. Yet again, my relationship had become my identity and without the context, I felt lost, and I grasped a lot over the next couple of years, looking for something to hold onto.
The thing that did ground me was my time working at one of the oldest Health and nutrition stores in the country where I worked under a Naturopathic Doctor and interacted with a diversity of health disorders and the people navigating them. The thing that grounded me was meeting my companion hound dog, the Dragon. Relationships weren’t working, I broke and had my heart broken so often in the pursuit of partnership, navigating my thirties in my hometown. It wasn’t until 2019 and a distant journey to the other side of the world that I realized what I wanted to do more than anything was to write. I leaped into a new chaotic space and just as any other time I let go of the reigns, Reiki showed up for me. I was seeing clients out of my home. I started working with KIN, an antique jewelry and mystical shop in downtown Des Moines. It was the owner there who pulled me out of my shell and had me start offering astrology readings.
I felt such joy and liberation - I was doing exactly what I felt I was meant to do. I was working at this amazing crystal shop that plugged me back into my early childhood pouring over glass bowls filled with stones, following my babysitter, an astrologer into metaphysical stores. Being at KIN plugged me into community and purpose. It was during this period I began producing a new moon and full moon report each month (continued @kin.dsm and via the moon mailer) became a practice and discipline in learning how I interpret astrology. In the fall of 2019, I met and consequently fell in love with my partner, Tree. Our relationship blossomed at a time when our future was unknown - they were a journalist ready to leave Des Moines, and I was a spiritual counselor ready to go west and study astrology in Oregon, Washington, and California.
Well. 2020. Our plans dissolve for life to happen and unfold.
I wrote more than ever in 2020. Instagram became my window to the outside world and the internet coffee shop we all stopped into daily to see how the rest of us were doing. I took a long-honed skill in a technique of absentia (distance) Reiki, which allowed me to continue to see clients virtually. My teacher stopped teaching and my partner took a job in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I agreed to join them, hound dog and all.
Milwaukee allowed for some greater introspection into my mental health as well as navigating other health scares. Reiki was there for me during biopsies, diagnosis, and surgery. Pranayama work and japa practices with Haley Niichel (Breath of Rebellion) helped me regulate as I tried to sort out the next steps. I traveled to and from Des Moines, 6 hours each way nearly every month to see clients and hold residencies for what I called The Transformer.
It was during this period I began to build endurance in working with extended periods of running energy through my body, learning to do it without tiring, learning to remain in presence and focus for sometimes ten-hour days. I was running different frequencies of Reiki for days, back to back. Seeing clients out of my apartment was the honing of my skills, developing my style, and my relationship with intuition --this was the period that I began developing mastery of the more subtle skills that would ultimately prepare me to teach by building the ability to hold space for many people and hold larger amounts of energy in my etheric and energetic makeup.
Around this time, Kosa Spa located in Madison, Wisconsin (recently named one of National Geographic’s top spas in the world, I might add!) began hosting me as a guest practitioner. That relationship with Kosa helped and healed me in more ways than I can count.
It was due to Shilpa’s friendship I learned more about business management. I learned about my innate skills in consulting and when she invited me to assist in supporting weekend retreats, I realized that I was at a powerful point in my path. It was due to this connection with Kosa that I met Angie who told me about her Reiki teacher. It was at this time I let my teacher know that I was ready to learn how to teach, and it was during this period that our twenty-year relationship came to an end.
It has been difficult for me to share about this relationship publicly. In the past, I was her recruiter, bringing students to class just due to my enthusiasm. It was when those students asked me about our relationship that the excited teenager, the hungry young adult ready to learn was eclipsed by the wisdom that ours was a complicated relationship.
I am earnest when I say that she is a brilliant scholar. She has read more books and endeavored to walk the walk of a teacher. Her community was very small, and it would shift every couple of years. When I was introduced as her student of twenty years, I realized that it is rare for a student to remain in a relationship for that long. My mother would support me in saying that a Ph.D. student would not take so long to graduate, any apprenticeship, or the like. Our astrology revealed a karmic connection that played out in our dynamic. She was an additional parent, another authority in my life that I aimed to please, and I gave her a lot of power that impacted my relationships, and my life choices, for good or for bad, and banged on the wound of me never feeling like I was worthy or enough.
It took me twenty years to finally see it. That she would never complete my training because I would never be enough.
Leaving that relationship was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I was so hurt. The details of the end are not for me to share, but I knew that I had made the right choice for me. Not because she was a bad teacher, but because we were not in the right relationship she had spent years teaching me about. We were not exhibiting the principles of the teachings she bore into my heart and soul through the course of our time together. I was under the impression she was the only teacher who could complete my training, and I was devastated when I could not find anyone in my lineage alive or teaching that I could finish what I had started at the turn of the 21st century.
I asked Reiki if it still wanted to work with me. It assured me it did. The intelligence of this energy had never steered me wrong, and this was the greatest leap of faith I could take: that I was enough. That I didn’t need this person as my mentor any longer, even if that meant being without a guide.
Today is February 2nd.
I filed for a business license under the name URSIDAE on this day two years ago. 2-2-22. This was an Aquarian choice to live authentically and the necessity to rebel with a cause. The individuation that came with that choice was terrifying. I had to listen to my gut and what I wanted without having external verification -- this was the occultist way I had been taught. Saturn was conjunct with the Sun the day I filed the business paperwork, giving Ursidae a sense of integrity I aspire to as a teacher and as a guide.
That same week I signed the lease for a studio in Bay View, Milwaukee. I remember standing in that blank canvas of a space, terrified.
What have I done?
I built Studio Ursidae. I filled it with familiar books and a painting of my mother. I wanted it to be light and spacious, open for possibility and interpretation.
I know now that I put the cart before the horse --I built a space for myself before I had the clients in Milwaukee. My car was stolen (again) and I applied to graduate school in response. With a business loan, I built a dream for me and a space of my own to occupy. I attended my first astrology conference in Seattle. I took another leap of faith and commenced my Reiki training with a new teacher who knew and understood how much emotional baggage I would be bringing with me in completing my training. I wish I could say it was magical, it was otherworldly. It was not. It was just as ugly as my early Reiki workshops had been: sobbing and angry, needing to surface and release what was holding me back, and she was the right person to help me see that I was already a teacher and that I was enough, and that ultimately, I didn’t need her permission or her training to take on the role as a Reiki teacher.
It was there that a fellow student helped me to see the level of patriarchy and white supremacy that had been embedded in my spiritual beliefs. That I had a teacher who was a gatekeeper. That I had been taught to gatekeep. That one cannot own or put the spirit of trust into a box. We can acquire and keep all the books and seek evidence and proof and tell ourselves stories to make us feel safe, or that I was right or correct or in control.
None of these things resonated with Reiki and with the principles I truly wished to embody. I am forever grateful to Takeyla for shaking me awake with that truth.
It was after that summer of training, right before I began graduate school that I remembered what it felt like to be in love with spirit. I remembered why I had started this journey so long ago and that walking this path need not be difficult although it has its prickly moments.
It is in all of this, in this long story of growth that I offer myself as a teacher. I did not take a three-day workshop to take on the name of the master. This journey has been decades long, still evolving and uncovering itself to me. I decided to abandon the term Master and call myself a Mentor or Mentor-Teacher because that feels more accurate in being a guide. I spent a great deal of time unlearning the indoctrination of what I thought was open and spacious spirituality that was just a wolf in sheep’s clothing -- another system trying to put g*d into a box. The deconstruction of alternative or the new age and returning again and again to the primary tools we humans have: perception. Our perception is valid, but it is skewed by our filters, beliefs, patterns, and blockages.
The only way out is through.
As I rename myself and continue to refine how I teach and what I teach, it is my mission to remain in a state of not knowing all the answers.
To be a reflection -- your MIRROR in astrology sessions, to provide the WAVE of energy and shift when you work with Reiki, to see you and offer the TRANSFORMER during extraordinary challenges, I am offering up my transformation as the hot coals for you to ignite your flame. MENTORSHIP in further developing skills as a healer and intuitive. Stepping into the seat of the teacher, the INITIATION in training students in the discipline of Reiki in a way that resonates with my truth and saturates my students with the greatest quality of knowledge I can provide this past year has been a gift. Four cohorts of Reiki I students in 2023. Two students initiated to Reiki Second Degree. It is a profound honor for me to hold space in this capacity and to watch my clients and my students, my colleagues, unfold.
As I finish my graduate degree this spring in Clinical Social Work there is an unknown ahead in using clinical, therapeutic skills in a non-harmful way. Integrating psychology as a means to expand myself to a larger audience-- this is the aspiration.
Living in Baja now (and not knowing for how long) may provide me the ability to meet a different and broader audience should I choose to host retreats here in this beautiful and powerful landscape on the peninsula. Ursidae has taken many hands to create. My gratitude to Somos Studios for shaping the visuals of my website and branding; deep gratitude to my mother who stood by me in my first Reiki Training when I was seventeen and sat with me as I introduced myself as a teacher to my students 20 years later. To my dad for letting me be the weird I wished to see in the world, my sisters for protecting and loving me, and to every client I have touched and connected with along the way.
Thank you.
URSIDAE is available for distance sessions including:
Astrology Consult
The Mirror
Absentia Reiki
The Portal
Reiki Treatment Intensives
3 days & 30 days
1:1 Coaching
The Ferry
Healer Skills Mentorship
The Mentorship
Inquire directly to host a Reiki Training Workshop, retreat leadership, or client session provider.
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