new connection where you can tune in and grow i'm your host vicky thompson you may be familiar with new connection magazine for conscious living which has been enjoyed by readers in the pacific northwest for more than seventeen years now we're excited to bring new connection to life in your home a new connection we welcome authors practitioners and visionaries to share new ideas for alternative health spirituality and personal growth today i'd like to welcome to new connection colleen benelli who teaches reiki as a lifestyle her unique style of healing in teaching blend monic traditions and techniques with her mastery of usui tibetan and karuna reiki colin is also an artist who's combined reiki craft projects to create moving pieces of functional our coaling welcome to new connection thank you i was excited to hear that you combine reiki with craft projects because it's two of my favorite things put together how did you come up with compiling the two well i made my living as an artist prior to becoming a full time reiki practitioner and teacher and i missed my creativity and i missed my artwork and i really started because i net slippers for a friend of mine who had had a heart attack and i net reiki into the slippers and it occurred to me that i could  everything with reiki that i made and i write for breaking news magazine and craft projects just seemed to emerge from the words and ideas would come into my head and of course one thing led to another and i started making a variety of crafts i provide those on my website as a free service to people just to come and look at the instructions and see if the craft projects are something that they would like to use in their life to so for viewers who might not be familiar with reiki can you tell us a little bit about it and how you imbue the projects with reiki  reiki is a japanese tradition of natural healing and it it works through energy it's a style of energy medicine so energy flows through me from divine sources and reiki actually means spiritually guided life force energy so when i'm imbuing anything with reiki i can just simply this is one of the the projects will be showing in a minute i can simply add reiki symbols into the materials that i'm working with and i set an intention for what the project is going to have sometimes the intention is about something for myself and the home perhaps something that i'm hoping will be broadcast into my home through the project other times i have scarves and things that i net that i might make be making gifts for others and i imbue intentions and blessings into those projects i think some of the first work i did was really inspired by gratitude and i i wanted gratitude to be imbued into the pieces so that that would emanate from that work and then as i gave a different pieces to friends of mine or perhaps students or clients of mine i found that i could really work an intention specifically for them with blessings prayers perhaps it's for healing or empowerment and and the project itself would hold that intention and bring it to life in their home or on them and for them well right here we have a gorgeous piece which is fairy regalia and that's the first project that we're going to work on together and what energy did you imbue into this piece as you were making it well piece i work with spiritual teachers and guides in my work and one of the guides and teachers that i work with is my fairy grandmother named iris and what she does is teaches me and in my work she teach us how to see hidden blessings in life one of the days in my meditations you know i heard the idea that  dandelion is this beautiful little flower that we take so for granted we walk by it all the time and yet it shows it's had inside the crack of a sidewalk at that's where it needs to be and it's bright little yellow flower that we actually can eat and and so it occurred to me that we have so many hidden blessings in our life that we don't notice i live on thirty acres and sandy so i'm surrounded by nature and and i'm very much in relationship with the natural world around me and so the fairy regalia really was originally inspired by some of my shamanic work and i created my own regalia that looks just like this that i wear and the wings are seven feet tall and i have a headdress and what you brought today i brought today which we market and it was such a perfect match i knew it belonged with this and so if you can imagine that the regalia that i w little awkward to put on my wings and my dress actually look like this but the wings are again seven feet tall and seven feet long so i knew they certainly wouldn't work for this right this  meditations and my own personal healing work i realized i'm going to go ahead take the and as you're talking i'm going to go ahead and hold that beautiful example of another fairy regalia that you've done and it looks like you get very creative with colors and very creative with your materials that you use and love the gossamer leaves that you have here well i have to say one of the ways that my mind works as i see things and suddenly they become wings and you know it's it's interesting to me how ideas will inspire and and pop into my mind but then i decided after i had made my personal regalia that i wanted something that was a tabletop that would remind me and my own home to look at those hidden blessings look at the things that i'm grateful for notice so small things like a dandelion shining up through the crack of a sidewalk and and really remember you know the extraordinary world we live in well it looks like we have some wonderful materials o here that we could show viewers how to make their own very regalia you bet and i'd like to also say that i have the very detailed instructions on this on my website ricky lifestyle dot com  because i want to i do want to provide that for people and the instructions are free and they're very detailed and clear and very easy and so i'm going to just do this i'm i'm going to do this quickly and people will have to wonderful we have a bunch of amazing supplies here to put together the very regalia so why don't you go ahead and step us through it ok first of all i want to say that it's easier than it looks and the complete instructions for it are on my website and they're free and easy to download so and we've been putting that up on screen so people would like to go and check out your website which i have to say you also have many other amazing crafts there so there's just a plethora of things to do it your site thank you yeah  it's one of the things i do for fun so this is easy you're just going to take regular wire a little bit thicker there duct tape it around and to kind of a little bit of a shape and then the adding other wire to it like this just going up and down and across will create kind of a grid so that you can put the flowers into the wing now the flowers i just use a variety of silk flowers these are the ones i picked for this this is going to be a lavender lavender wings and so here's a completed wing and order to do this i've just separated the different fronts and i simply weave them into in and out of these metal pieces and it all gets hidden by the end of so they stay quite well they bend most of them are on wire and so i would just weave them all the way around and then start with flowers for the next one and perhaps then finish off with different lavender pieces and they all weve in and out of this little wire grid and of course you make two of them one for each side and this might be a bit of making a pot holder the way we through your yarn exactly it has that kind of in and out feel some poll and very very easy to do so then we have a dress form now this dress form you can find online  s a just type in metal dress form i typically get my flowers at craft warehouse or michaels has a really good selection of the flowers and it at christmas time often you can get these real glittery one so i often wait until after christmas and get their sales and get the big big glitter things so this this wing then would be attached to the back of the dresser just simply by taking wire in and out and securing it that way and one would go on each side they stay very balanced as you can see by the finished product here the next step is to give the give her address and to do that and i'm just taking water with a paint brush and a gel made medium you can use even magia podge works really well and you want to get the paper a little bit wet this is hand made paper that i've to match the particular flowers that i'm working with and you literally just paint the different strips i cut it into little pieces and just paint the different strips on and again i'm making a big mass which is half the fun i'm rather there's nothing splotched on the floor it's half the fun when i have a big explosion all around me i know you're having a great day so then you just completely fill the dress and you can see that it dries actually somewhat hard this is a when you're putting it on you think that all those little strips will show but they don't they they blend into one full piece and it looks like in using the natural made paper you get that beautiful fiber look well and you know fairies are natural beings so they're likely to wear dresses out of natural fibers now when you turn this around you can see that there is paper also on the back of the weighing so remember i told you you didn't have to be really good and detailed when you do the back of it because it's all going to be covered with paper anyway so then that's really all there is to it it's that simple and i place her in my home and it's a bright color right now she's sitting next to the fireplace and reminds me to remember my small hidden blessings and of course the big hidden blessings as well which is a beautiful message and i think this is a great reminder with just the flowers the colors and i love the dress forms they're something that i've always wanted to have a dress form so i'm definitely going to have to try this one at home it's a fun project i actually have a really large dress form that i'm making out a christmas fairy and she has solver and red and  well again i made my living as an artist before i started with practicing reiki and i was always a fiber artist so i did a lot of knitting and the knitting with reiki began with the slippers that i made for my friend with with who had just had a heart attack and the next piece that i did was on a trip that i took to tibet and nepal it was a spiritual journey and i began knitting the memories of the trip and to the scarf and again that theme of gratitude really showed up on the whole on the whole journey the different people the tibetan people are just absolutely beautiful and warm and and i remember seeing them just smile at us from the fields they'd wave us in at us as we went by i was in the  with in the meditation room of the dalai lama and one of the monks had blessed me and he placed a scarf around my neck and i was listening to the buddha there and just meditating and praying and and being and are of this is this place that i found myself and and i felt like i received a message from the buddha and i heard the words in my ear it is in the thank you that soul speaks and that touched my heart very very very it was it was so beautiful and sitting here as you're holding the scarf you can really feel that energy i'm looking at it and it's it has intention and we travelled from lhasa through the himalayas for four days to the friendship highway to nepal and one of the things that i really noticed while i was travelling in nepal and tibet is all the people were prayer beads and they would walk and talk and they worked and they continued to hold those prayer beads and they would pray the entire time they they did everything they did and it it really struck me that so often we think of our spirituality as something we do and then we go to work but i watched them i do their spirituality as just every minute of their life and so it really really taught me a lot and i began knitting a whole lot more and of course how many scarves can i have and i was introduced to the prayer shawl ministry which is a style of knitting that people do to provide scarves for cancer patients and hospitals and it occurred to me that i could knit these scarves for children and you've got some right there which is a beautiful size for a child in very bright colors a scene that would uplift them but also really be very soothing for them and as you know as you touch them two children are so tucked i could see a child just touching it and just feeling it and really being healed by it absolutely i i know it well being and i stay very neutral about what i'm asking for so that it can blend with any belief system of any child and i just knit their wellness and their happiness and a child's wonderment of life into the scarf and visions of dragonflies and rainbows and it's it's a wonderful practice and i've found that i can do my knitting while i'm doing everything else i do and the scarves i designed to be very very easy i'll show you some of the yarns that i use with them there i always net with a a large gauge on this one homespun is is actually a really easy yarn to get it it's carried at all the local stores and it's a simple yarn and i connect with a large needle so i think that's one of one of the tricks and this scarf is one that i've actually started its or it's all tangled i've started for an adult child that i know and it's one of her children children with lots and lots of throat issues so i'm imbuing imbuing it with the wellness for their throat and as i know that i just i say the reiki symbols and i knit intention of wellness for her and good thoughts for her and the ability to speak well and to heal her throat and her  throat and so i just keep keep knitting one of the things i'd like to point out with this that makes kind of a difference as i start off with a smaller needle first because that makes the edge of the scarf kind of curl in instead of flare out so i cast on the stitches you can see on that scar i cast on the stitches with a small needle net about three rows changed to a larger needle keep knitting to the end and then go back to the small needle for three rows and cast off and then i put the the friend john i'm although some of them i leave them without french well you can even see the one i'm wearing doesn't have friend and you were talking about what you would in view there is such a calmness that flows through you and i can feel it as your knitting and it felt like a very active prayer that you were praying you were imbuing so it's reiki but it's also prayer that anyone can do into their craps yes you know knitting is our knitting with reiki is also knitting with intention so a person can do this project and they can knit with intention whether they have reiki or not it's not exclusive to reiki i just think of intentions from the heart and i net and i pray those into it or or even you know not even using the word prayer i can just net the intention of wellness and then i donate them to children and hospitals i take oh gosh i don't know i just keep knitting and dating and knitting and for instance i just took a big batch to st vincent's last week and one of the things that i found interesting was it took me a while to figure out how to donate them it wasn't just so easy as taking the scarves and so i found that donating them was easiest to call the child life specialist i think every hospital you know children's ward has a child life specialist and they're the ones that would receive them they of course i just give them to them i'm not handing them to each individual child because of course that you know that that's not always easy for the people to have me this it but my granddaughter was in the hospital this year and someone had knit prayer blankets for children and i got to see firsthand with her what an amazing blessing it was for her she was so comforted and she just hugged that blanket and of course now it's the blanket she uses for her dolls at home and wrap them up and tells them how how good they're going to feel with their blankets so the scarves have been just a blessing for me as well it's a lot of fun and i took my granddaughter with me when i donated the recent ones to st vincents and she was so excited she was just three and a half and so she was so excited and then we received a thank you note when she was with me the other day and and she just was so like all of that was fun so she got to donate them with me too so it sounds like a wonderful project that you can involve your children and grandchildren into how she can't wait till she's big enough to net zero one where you're going to have a group there with you well we have all of these beautiful scars and when you have beautiful scars you need to be beautiful carrying bags for them so one of the next projects we're going to take a look at is a reiki crap bag i made the break a craft bag and my knitting bag because i was carrying my scarves around in a plastic garbage plastic grocery bag and i thought well wait a minute and so i net this bag and this is the felt a bag and i and you know it was too much to demonstrate so the instructions again are on my website for the bag but one of the things that i wanted to point out with it first of all these hurt easy to make they look complicated and  would like people to know that they can make these it's just knitting in the round and it's great big you throw in the washing machine and you felt it this on the outside is japanese condi and it means reiki so i did what's called needle felting and i'll demonstrate that real quickly because that's easy to do but i wanted to talk about the inside of the of the bag i've actually needle all the different reiki symbols into the inside of the bag so as i was knitting i imbued reiki into my knitting but then i also place the symbols into the bag they're all around it and without showing the whole once just showing you little pieces of it i placed grommets on the outside you can see those and then just some snaps and again they're easy easy to do so they hold my knitting and my scarves and i know that as the scarves are are in between being worked with they're still being imbued with reiki well i can imagine walking by you on the street as you're carrying the bag filled with all these wonderfully imbued scars just a loving energy coming down the street and oh let me show you real can i show you real quickly  how to do the needle felting because it's so easy and people think it's going to be hard and i'm just going to show you on this bag there is a needle like this you take your regular yard stick this is a piece  of stick that from underneath the what you're going to fell ten and this is a special little needle felting the pendleton one mills has a great selection of felting tools but it is as simple as a kind of just punching the yarn into the bag and it's very simple and  looks great and it's easy to do freeform and so i want to encourage people to consider looking at it because it's it's quite fun to be able to learn to write all that well people can find detailed directions on your website absolutely so much for joining us today colleen it's really been wonderful to share time with reiki energy with you thank you i appreciate being here if you'd like to learn more about reiki join us on our website at new connection journal dot com join us next time a new connection where you can tune in and grow