Meet Michaela Daystar | Reiki Teacher & Mentor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michaela Daystar and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michaela, what do you attribute your success to?
I would say the most important factor in the forward successful momentum of my business/private practice is the willingness to be honest and transparent about my values, the way those values shape how I run my business and who I serve, and the vulnerability required to lead with my heart and values firmly guiding me.

It has meant opening myself up to criticism and challenges by people who do not share my values, and requires being ok with not being liked or accepted by everyone. Eventually, though, when we lead in this way, those who we are most deeply aligned with, and who we are meant to serve, will self-select to join us, and it gets much easier to be who we truly are in such a public way.

What should our readers know about your business?
I started my business, HeartScapes, after a long career in higher education, leading social justice leadership development programs. For nearly 15 years, I helped develop the social justice capacities and commitments of undergraduate students at Mills College and St. Mary’s College of California, and while I was passionate about this work, I was also dismayed at the over-emphasis on the external, DOING aspects of it, with almost no space to support students in their BEING. Most of my students came into my programs with a strong passion to make social change because they or their family had been harmed by oppressive systems. And so they carried that harm into the work, internalizing their pain and anger in ways that further harmed them and their work. Within my roles, I had very little opportunity to support them to address past traumas, to develop emotional depth and resilience, and to understand who we are in relationship to the issues they cared about.

Over time, I realized that my contribution to social change lay in the liminal space between the hurt people experience, and the powerful contribution they are meant to make to our world. I wanted to work with people’s process of becoming whole and resilient. But I had no idea how to do that just a growing and painful realization that I was not doing the work I was meant to.

At the same time, as this realization grew to the point of professional crisis, my personal life was also in crisis. My marriage was ending, and I was starting to come to terms with the harm that had been done to me within that relationship. Understandably, my kids were also lashing out in response to it all. I found myself at a rock-bottom place some time in 2012, when all the things I’d been doing to distract myself from these layers of crisis were causing their own harm. In moments like that, we have a powerful choice point: Sink deeper into self-destructive behavior, to predictable outcomes, or become open to something else, something we have never tried and may not yet know of. I chose the latter, and became very open to trying new forms of self-reflective and healing practices to help shift my miserable reality. Starting with doing a year in Co-Dependents Anonymous, I became willing to work in changing things about myself, which ultimately led me to wide range of practices, some of which served me for a short time, and others of which remain in my life today. They became not only the foundation of my personal recovery, but also the foundation of my current work in the world.

Out of this experience, I built my business HeartScapes at the intersection of SELF-REFLECTION, SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, and SOCIAL ACTION.

HeartScapes helps people who are committed to their precious contribution to the world. Who sense that in order to live our contribution, we need to build a nurturing spiritual practice to help us shed the stress and anxiety of living through challenging times, address the pervasive sense of isolation that persists within our modern culture, and realigns us with Nature’s cycles and the Web of Life. One which also helps us build the capacity to work with the shadowy, mucky aspects of ourselves so that the brilliance of our True Self can shine through.

We do this through the system of Reiki, a Japanese meditation tradition and spiritual practice, taught from the perspectives of its Japanese origins; an incredibly accessible, elegant, and deeply effective pathway to remembering the wholeness of our True Self. At HeartScapes we provide a comprehensive Reiki education that is trauma-informed, culturally humble and rooted in the history and origins of the system of Reiki.

I learned embodiment-based trauma-informed practices through the organization Shakti Rising, and became committed to adapting trauma-informed principles and protocols for Reiki practitioners after studying trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness. As a result, we now offer courses and other resources to Reiki practitioners who wish to cultivate a trauma-informed perspective into their practice.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Ah, this is a fun imagination journey 🙂 I live in Davis, CA, in the Sacramento Valley of California. One of my passions is gardening, sustainable agriculture, and all things related to community sufficiency in our access to local, healthy food. So, I would highlight this for my friend by taking a long drive in the farmlands around my home, visiting farms run by friends, harvesting fresh seasonal goodies for our dinner, and taking in the soft rolling hills that surround this “Breadbasket of the US.”

Maybe we’d make our way over the mountains to the west into Napa for a bit of wine tasting at my favorite winery, Judd’s Hill (https://www.juddshill.com/). Later in the trip we’d head up to Auburn, CA, where the Sacramento and American rivers converge, making for dynamic swimming and hiking along our region’s waterways.

Hopefully during my friend’s stay my favorite local band, Joy and Madness, would be playing somewhere in Sacramento, or maybe we’d catch another band playing my favorite live music venue, Harlowe’s Night Club.

And of course I’d share my favorite local restaurants: Café Bernardo, Mama’s Italian Café, and Burgers N’ Brew, all in Davis.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I love this question, as gratitude is so central to my work. There are so many teachers, mentors and practitioners who deserve a shoutout. The one I want to uplift today is Norma Wong. A former Hawai’i State Legislator, Zen priest, and social justice activist, Norma Wong was one of the first mentors in my life who explicitly applied spiritual arts and practices within social change work and organizations. She introduced me to practices and teachings that would become central to my work, and demonstrated why spiritual and meditative practices are not only beneficial to social change work, but essential. Her work with the organization Move to End Violence (https://www.movetoendviolence.org/), a 10-year program to end gender-based violence, beautifully embodies these principles and is doing essential work.

“The body, mind and spirit are hard-wired together. To act as if they are not is to severely limit our potential.”
~Norma Wong

Website: www.heartscapesinsight.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeartscapesInsight

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnG2vSUxcUdOemBaZqURZ-Q

Other: Reiki Women Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@reikiwomenpodcasts

Image Credits
Ethan Applegarth Michaela Daystar Kierra Hall