Emotional Alchemy // Passion Project Announcement
In the words of the inspiring, late Audre Lorde;
“If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive.”
I’ll be honest, I wear a lot of hats or as I like to call it, “I live many lives”, because there’s a myriad of elements that make up my complex identity.
I write this to introduce myself and to elaborate on what motivates me in this work.
My name is Catherine Monzon, and I am a young Hispanic-American woman of Cuban-Dominican descent.
I am a South Bronx native, living in Midtown, still servicing the youth from the ‘hood I came from.
I am an aspiring Anthropologist and Historian, but deep down I’m just a humanitarian.
I am mystically inclined; an initiate and advocate of traditional African and Indigenous nature-based faiths and a practitioner of Spiritism.
At my core, I am a free-spirited student and teacher, enthusiastically learning from everything around me.
As of 2019, thanks to Glowing Heart Reiki School, I have something new that is now also part of my layered identity. I am an Usui Reiki Master Healer and Teacher.
Wow, I like the sound of that…
I knew that completing my mastership would eventually happen from the moment I first heard of Reiki in 2013. There are very few things that I am completely sure of in this life, but when I first heard of and experienced Reiki, I just knew that I wanted this to be a part of my life and in everything I do. The non-sensible part of this is, I knew this without completely understanding what Reiki was at the time. I loved how good Reiki made me feel and I wanted to feel that way every day. My Reiki practice and teachings stem from my own healing journey.
The need for Heart and Sacral chakra healing is what originally brought me to Reiki, thus my concentration, or some would say my specialization as a Reiki Master, is healing those two chakras, especially the Sacral. A chakra, meaning “wheel” in the ancient language of Sanskrit, is an energy vortex. Each chakra holds different information, controls over different stages of life, bodily functions, developmental consciousness, and more.
The Sacral a complex and multilayered chakra that reins over many of realms our lives. Through this chakra we connect to our ancestors –especially our matriarchs, and heal intergenerational trauma. The Sacral is the home of our subconscious mind so here we also connect to and heal our inner child as well as our shadow selves. This chakra rules over our emotional body and oversees how we process —or neglect to process—emotions. The Sacral is our physical and energetic center for creation and manifestation (of babies and otherwise). This is where we experience pleasure, sex, and develop intimacy.
The Sacral chakra dominates so many different interconnected aspects of our lives that if it is unbalanced it can stifle our growth and satisfaction with life. For example, an underdeveloped Sacral chakra can manifest itself as low emotional intelligence or inability to feel emotions at all, low libido, inability to procreate, shame, inability to experience pleasure, and other negative qualities. On the other end of the spectrum, an overdeveloped Sacral chakra displays itself as over emotional, excessively high libido, prone to addictions, operating from the shadow self as well as other negative qualities.
Healing the Sacral chakra is so beneficial and necessary because it promotes living a more authentic and intuitive life that feels less like a performance. We become aware of and honor our own needs and desires in a compassionate and nurturing way. The person becomes a creator of their reality. Healing the Sacral is pivotal in order to experience genuine pleasure and satisfaction from life.
However, we are complex beings. The Sacral chakra is interconnected and working with other chakras that in their own way are just as complex and layered. To live a well-rounded and optimal life, one should strive to balance and harmonize all of the chakras. Along with the Sacral, I also focus on Heart healing. The Heart is where we develop a deep love for ourselves and everything around us. In the Heart chakra we realize the interconnectedness and oneness of humanity and nature because we are all mirrors of each other, descending from the same source. Here, one balances the mind, body, and soul to experience joy and harmony.
Although Heart and Sacral healing are my concentrations, Reiki in itself is a holistic practice and will heal and work with the participants at whatever level they’re at and provide them with what they need.
In my own journey, I found Reiki twice in my life, both times after my heart was broken. I felt my inner fire shut off. My eyes were dim, voice was meek, and confidence shot. If you know me, you’d know that is not who I am! I was deeply depressed. Both heartbreaks substantially changed me to my core. Reiki helped me make sense of the situation, why things happen the way they do, and how to maintain an open and loving heart despite being hurt. I was living a very cold and emotionally detached life before welcoming Reiki. I was afraid of intimacy, physical touch, and felt disconnected from my own body. Shit, I just wanted to learn Reiki so I can stop being sad all the time and it gave me so much more than that. I feel so many parts of myself reignited, which is something I haven’t felt in years. Everything isn’t perfect now, but through Reiki I have gained the knowledge of how to navigate through my emotions and the waves of life from a place of feeling grounded.
I am very passionate about holistic healing, self-development, intellectual and emotional growth, living my truth, love, learning, and transforming my wounds and experiences into wisdom. It’s a humbling experience when we realize the purpose of life isn’t happiness but gaining experience itself. It gives me great joy to be able to give back to my community and empower others to heal and help themselves. Inspired by my own journey, I want to encourage others to practice emotional alchemy and bloom from their darkness, making gold from what life gave them. I am most passionate about the spiritual and mental decolonization of people of color. I believe through engaging in ancestral reverence, connecting to the earth, and practicing holistic healing we can overcome generational trauma we have acquired and begin to thrive as a community. Through my Reiki offering, I plan to service my community the most by empowering PoC to feel safe, in-control of their healing, and connected to themselves and the Universe. I will do this through offering and teaching Reiki and along with other healing practices.
My concentration on the Sacral chakra will evolve over the next few years. I plan on learning alternative womb healing techniques and developing my own unique intuitive healing session that will blend different practices and styles. Currently I am working on a short informative E-book about the Sacral chakra and tapping into our subconscious (this was my original Mastership Passion Project). I hope to release this after a lot more continuous studying and collecting information on this chakra. Along with womb healing, I aspire to learn more about tantric sex and how sex can be used as a form of healing, enlightenment, and manifestation. Ideally, I’d like to become well-versed in everything Sacral.
I look forward to continue growing into myself and activating different parts of my identity, while discovering in what ways my personal healing journey reflects in my purpose.
Affectionately, those who know me call me Cat, and some have even gone as far to call me a catalyst of change in their life. I am excited to share with the world what I have learned and begin to offer teaching Reiki attunement classes. I am grateful to be alongside this journey with all of you.
Feel free to collaborate, read more about me, get involved, follow my spiritual journey, book a session, or sign up for a class with me through my website https://sacredheartreiki.as.me/
“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.” –Audre Lorde
Catherine Monzon, Level 1, 2, 3a, & Master
Cat believes that Reiki is unique because it gives you the ability to profoundly heal yourself without requiring any tools; making Reiki one of the most universally accessible forms of holistic healing.