Reiki Master · Frequency Channel · Author

I Found This By Accident

Which is, I've come to think, how most people find the thing they were actually for.

In 2001 I had a job at the Brainerd Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce, in central Minnesota. Part of that job was posting our members' events to the community calendar, which is about as mundane as work gets. One of the listings that came across my desk was for a Reiki I and II class.

I typed it up. And then I kept reading it after I'd finished typing.

I'd just moved back to Brainerd from the University of Minnesota Duluth, where I'd been studying Interdisciplinary Studies — ancient art, history, and literature, with most of a comparative religion track alongside it. I was going to be an archaeologist. That was the plan.

But I wasn't studying any of it for a career, not really. I was studying it because some part of me refused to believe the story we'd all been handed. Not one story in particular. The whole arrangement. Who gets to hold authority. What we've agreed money is and does. Which gods got written down, and which goddesses got buried.

I didn't have language for any of that yet. What I had was a conviction that I was meant for more than the shape I'd been offered, and a suspicion that if I went back far enough I would find where the real thing had been covered over. So I went looking. Ancient art. Old religions. The Wiccan circles I was surprised to learn existed in my own town.

Reiki was one more place to look. I took the class that fall, mostly out of curiosity, and I have never entirely stopped since.

The long apprenticeship

Nancy Lennon and Julie Blanchard attuned me. They carried me through first and second degree, and then through third in May of 2004. On June 21st, 2008, Julie attuned me to Master.

Julie became one of my closest friends after that. Not a teacher I checked in with once a year. A friend, for thirteen years.

She died on July 21st, 2021, of pancreatic cancer.

I think about her every time I attune someone. The line runs through her, and everyone I pass it to carries her name forward, whether they ever got to meet her or not.

That's eighteen years as a Master, and twenty-five since the first class. The line I was attuned into runs unusually close to Dr. Mikao Usui — most practicing Reiki Masters stand fifteen to twenty transmissions from the source, and I stand nine to ten. That isn't a claim about my ability. It's a claim about paperwork.

So here's the paperwork.

See the full lineage, teacher by teacher →

The other rooms

Somewhere in the middle of those years I became a novelist. Thirty-some books now, published across three names: Carissa Andrews for paranormal and urban fantasy, Carissa Knight for contemporary romance, and Carissa L. Andrews for nonfiction. For a stretch I taught other independent authors how to build a career out of it.

People sometimes ask how the books and the Reiki fit together. They fit the way any two rooms in the same house fit. I've spent my whole adult life in the space where research and intuition stop arguing with each other, and it turns out that's the same room whether you're writing a novel or holding a field.

What happened in 2025

By May of 2024, something had begun coming apart. I couldn't have told you what.

I'd been teaching a lot in the years leading up to it. InkersCon in Texas. The Idaho Writers Guild. And in November of 2024, I taught Quantum Manifestation to indie authors at the inaugural Author Nation conference in Las Vegas. I was standing in a convention center doing exactly the thing I had worked for years to be invited to do.

The subject alone should have told me something. I was in front of a room of business-minded writers teaching them about manifestation, which is not a craft topic and it isn't a marketing topic. It's a spiritual one. I had already crossed over into this work without noticing I'd crossed anything.

I thought I was choosing a session title.

And what I felt, standing there, was: this is not my place.

Nothing was wrong with the room. I simply wasn't in it anymore.

The following April I was sitting at home looking out the window, not doing anything in particular. Thinking about the state of the world. About where humanity seemed to be heading, about how money actually works, and about why it felt like nearly everyone I knew was living underneath something pressing down on them.

Which is, I realize now, the same question I'd been asking at twenty-two with a stack of library books and no vocabulary. I'd just stopped expecting an answer.

That's when Aureya started coming through.

I could not write it down fast enough. It didn't arrive as a concept I was developing — it arrived with a coherence already in it that I hadn't put there. Codes for a different way of receiving. For money that moves without corruption. For a kind of worthiness that doesn't require a single performance first.

Who is the Oversoul of Aureya? →

What took me longer to understand

The arrival and the collapse were the same event.

I had been doing shadow work for years. I had been meditating. And I still didn't recognize what was happening while it was happening — I was in the descent. Everything was falling inward, and I read that as failure, because from the inside that is exactly what it looks like. My tower moment, for roughly the nine hundredth time.

It was only afterward that I could see the shape of it. I had been walking Inanna's gates without knowing their names. Setting things down one at a time, not by choice, and arriving at the bottom with nothing left to hold up as proof of who I was.

What was actually happening was that I was being turned. Toward this.

A few things I'll say plainly

If you'd like to come further in

Individual transmissions, ritual kits, and meditations live in the Resonance Chamber. For 1:1 work, we meet directly.