1. I AM NOT HERE TO HEAL YOU.
It's sad to realize that even in the alternative healing world, the standard Western model of disempowerment has crept in. Most of the time, you walk into the office of your ND, OD, herbalist, whomever, and they evaluate you, give you a treatment of some kind, and have you come back until you either feel better or you give up.
I know, cuz I tried this model when I started out, both as a patient, and as a healer. We all do.
So I realize I'm going to ruffle some feathers when I say this, but I want to be very clear: That's just not how healing works.
True healing from chronic conditions, the kind of healing where the symptoms go away and don't come back in some other crazymaking form, MUST come from inside. Before any external treatments can work, the inner Hell Yes of "I have the power and the responsibility to heal me" has got to be rock-solid. Which is the reason my clients and I focus on uprooting and clearing out all those itty-bitty "I can't," "This isn't possible," "I'm not enough" voices, early on in our work together.
Cuz I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that every one of us with chronic conditions has had to deal with some level of "I can't" when it comes to our healing, if only because we've tried 50 different approaches already. And we need help resolving that "I can't" so that our inner Hell Yes can be rock-solid. This may be the single most important part of our work together.
With all that said, don't get me wrong. I love receiving massage and reiki, and working with experts, and I'm grateful for everything those amazing people can add to my experience. But I never lose sight of the fact that MY HEALING IS MY JOB. And if you & I are are going to work well together, you will need to take that on for yourself, as well.
Because here's the truth: that Western model, while it tends to be pretty effective for things like acute bacterial infections and broken legs, is pretty much useless with a lot of chronic conditions (yes, I said it), and it's incredibly disempowering to the patient, because it puts the power of diagnosis, treatment, and healing, all in the hands of the practitioner.
And I don't want your power.
So let's be very clear: I am not here to diagnose, treat, or heal you. Not only is it impossible for anyone to heal another person, but that's not the kind of world I want to foster or create.
I am here to teach you self-healing tools you can actually use, and then to support, guide, validate, and witness your transformation as you gain your freedom from chronic illness, and become the most healthy, vibrant, and empowered version of yourself.
2. THIS WORK IS NOT WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED "NORMAL."
If you're not comfortable with some pretty "woo-woo" and unconventional ideas, please do not reach out to me. Because I am in no way normal.
I see energy. I have conversations with people's emotional bodies. I invoke the Ancestors. They show up.
In our work, I'll use words like "trauma" and "spirochete" and "infection," but make no mistake - my world is the world of energy. Everything from the thoughts going through your mind as you're reading this, to the scar tissue from when you cut your finger 30 years ago, has energy (or the lack of it) at its core. And energy changes fast. That's why I love working with it.
The potential to create change using these tools is utterly limitless. You can stop a headache in its tracks, take the pain out of a burn, calm nausea, quiet indigestion, clear brain fog, and create magic in a million different ways, when you know how to work with the energy at the heart of the physical universe. In the most literal way, working with these tools is awe-some.
That said, I go to a lot of effort to keep myself and my work grounded in the anatomy of the body, and in the real-world experiences of your life. It's easy to get lost in all that limitless "woo," and I am committed to helping people like you make real changes in your body, here and now.
My bottom line is always "does it help you feel better?" Karmic vendettas and old childhood traumas can be fascinating and exotic to romp around in, but if at the end of the day you're not starting to gain some relief from your symptoms, we're wasting both your time and mine. And as far as I'm concerned, chronic illness has already taken enough time away from you. I'm here to get you back to living, as quickly and safely as we can.
3. THERE'S NO AVOIDING THE EMOTIONAL HEAVY-LIFTING
I know I don't have to say this to you, but I'm going to just put it out there. Painful sh*t happens. And it happens to all of us. And it always hurts. And most of the time, the unresolved energy of the painful sh*t that happened years ago is at the root of our symptoms that refuse to heal.
Which is not to say the painful thing that happened when you were 8 caused you to be sick now. What I've seen though, is that unresolved emotional energy acts like a speedbump to your body's healing processes.
And look - when it comes to emotional energy, we live in a pretty messed up culture. Our world tells us "If you're a man, you can feel these emotions but not those. If you're a woman, you can express this much negative emotion, and that much positive emotion, and anything outside of that is either dangerous, childish, or crazy." And god forbid anyone, ever,express anger, right?
It's completely insane. And it's part of what's making us sick.
In order to get healthy again, we must go into those "Emotional Danger Zones" to reclaim the parts of ourselves that got cut off when we stifled our rage. When we downplayed our joy. When we agreed to the micro-death that says,"fine, I will be less, if being true to what I am is going to cause such problems."
But unlike many traditional therapies, the tools we use in this work don't require you to muck around in the emotional swamp for years. When you're working with the energy of the emotion, and not just the story of the emotion, things change fast.
So yes--we have to go there. But in this work, we don't stay there long.
4. YOU're most likely gonna CHANGE. LIKE, MAYBE, A LOT.
For some of us, one of the gifts of chronic illness is that it awakens us to aspects of ourselves we'd never have dreamed up. I was a journalist before I got sick; I had no idea I had a healing gift. Discovering and developing that gift has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. And I can almost (but not quite yet!) say I'm grateful for the 10 years of debilitation, because going through that experience changed me forever.
But it's not always a wake-up call. I've known people who've come through years of chronic illness, and gone back to the life they had before, relatively unchanged. And I am thrilled for those people.
I'm just not one of them.
It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that chronic illness grabbed me by the ankles, hung me upside down, & shook me out for ten years, until I was ready to do the work my soul came into this life to accomplish.
That transition was not easy, and I didn't do it alone. Over the course of several years, I pieced together a tribe, finding people to mentor and teach me to use the gift I was discovering, people to support me and help me understand WTF was going on with me spiritually and emotionally, and still others to build a sense of tribe and belonging in this new identity as a healer.
If you are one of those people for whom chronic illness is a wake-up call from your soul, demanding that you do something MORE with your life, I get it. I get how threatening, and disorienting, and thrilling, and imperative that call for transformation is, even when you have no idea where it's leading you. I get how lonely, and isolating, and stright-up weird it feels. I get it, because I lived it.
Which is to say that you're my people. And not just because I dig anyone who's brave enough to answer the mysterious call of their soul's desire, but also because we need one another. All of us who are stepping out into this unknown future need people who get us.
The part of the journey that you & I can do is to unlock the limitlessness of your potential by teaching you to heal your own body. Because believe me: once you've done that, you'll know, in the most concrete way possible, that you can work miracles. And you will never be the same once that knowledge lands.
...ARE YOU STILL WITH ME?
Cheers! Cuz here's what you can expect from me...
free trainings and tools every week, which you can actually use to start changing how your body feels RIGHT NOW, usually followed by...
invitations to my various classes, communities, and, when my schedule allows for it, one-on-one work.
