How I became an energy healer and developed my energy work practice

In my last blog I talked about how I, a self-described “super logical” engineer, developed an interest in energy work. To summarize, two big things happened helped me open up to it: 1) I experienced it myself and 2) I found out that a couple really smart, grounded in science people that I knew believed in it themselves. That blog post concluded with the end of my Costa Rica retreat, when I realized that I had an energetic wall up that impacted my connection with others, and vowed to get rid of it. If you missed my previous blog and want to start this story from the beginning, click here.

My journey picked up as soon as I got back to Houston, where I was living at the time. I realized that I should probably experience Reiki myself before getting certified in it, so I hit Yelp and Google and wound up booking a session with a guy named David. After sending a couple friends his address and my location along with instructions on how long to wait to hear from me before calling the police, I headed to his apartment with a bit of hesitation. Not only did he not murder me, I felt immediate relief in David’s presence, before the healing even began. 

He asked me why I thought I had never really connected with a partner even though I was in my 30’s.  I had never asked that question before, and it was clear to me that it was largely because I didn’t allow people in to connect in that way. David told me that his guides gave him the word “trust”. I’m sure the question What are guides? popped into my head but the truth of what he just said was more important. We talked about my wall, and when he told me that it was from a trauma earlier in my life I tried to argue that I didn’t have any trauma which he shut down pretty quickly. I can’t say much about the healing session itself; I didn’t feel much, but I still knew that it helped me, somehow. I left with affirmations to assist me in opening up my sacral and heart chakras and a ton of motivation to get rid of that energy wall. (pssst: if you live in Houston and prefer to do your energy healing in person, you can find David here.)

After a couple of healing sessions with David I signed up for his Reiki Level I certification class. 

I can’t pretend that a lightbulb went off in that course- some of what we learned sounded quite ridiculous to me and if I’m being completely honest, some of it still does.  But the techniques work, and as I neared the end of my 30 day commitment of doing Reiki on myself every single day I knew I wanted to lean further in to the shift I was experiencing.  I signed up for Level II and continued doing daily healings, now incorporating distance healings which my friends were super happy to volunteer for. I never made a conscious decision to stop practicing daily, but as I got distracted by my move to California it kept slipping my mind my daily Reiki sessions became a distant memory. 

Before I left Houston I sought out that super smart scientist who helped get me into energy work and told her what I was up to. She told me that she wasn’t surprised because my energy was much different than it had been when we first met. I interpreted her hand motions to mean that it was calmer and less sporadic, something that I was happy to feel too.  I asked how I could continue this work, since it didn’t seem like Reiki healing was the end-all-be-all for me.  She had me meet her in a little conference room where she told me about Donna Eden and showed me some of her techniques.  I was amazed how my body would practically fail me when she’d look at me a certain way (which “just so happens” to be a way that men look at women often), and how I could fix that by running a finger up my midline.  There was something to this stuff, and I was going to learn more about it!

I arrived in California in the middle of March, and on my first day at my new office they told us all to take our laptops home and stay there. 

I was sharing an AirBnB with the owner and sick with worry about my parents who were just a couple hours’ drive away, so I decided to move in with them for a “couple weeks” that turned into three months. This was an amazing opportunity for so many reasons that I’ll probably share at another time, but one big one was that I had my mom to practice on as I worked through Donna Eden’s course.  My mom wasn’t super into energy work but she loved me, and more importantly, she was super bored during lockdown, so she went with it.  I really struggled with the muscle testing but we still experienced some cool benefits together, including the power of Donna Eden’s daily energy routine.  One of my favorite memories of that time was my mom and I doing the DER together during my mid-afternoon energy slumps.  I’d come looking for her, laptop in hand, and we’d giggle together as we locked ourselves up and “threw away the key”.

Fast forward to the summer of 2020.  I moved up to Hermosa and no longer had anyone to practice on.  I’d also decided that Donna Eden’s methods weren’t going to be my big contribution to the world, but I still kept up with the DER, appreciating its impact.  Other than that I wasn’t really doing any energy work, but I was starting to meditate longer and longer as I expanded my mindfulness practice, and I started Tara Brach’s self-guided course on mindful awareness. I imagine I’ll talk more about the impact mindfulness and meditation had on me in another post, but what matters for this story is that the increased awareness I had developed led me to finally really receive that the oil industry wasn’t for me. I was seriously considering raising my hand for a layoff during the upcoming company reorg, and signed on with a life coach to help me sort it all out.

During one of our last sessions together my coach asked me if I had ever thought about “connecting with my guides”.  I told her no- that I didn’t know much about it but was open and interested in it.  Being open and interested was a big shift for me- I hadn’t felt spiritual at all at this point (yes I was into meditation and energy work, but that was because of science). 

I took down a note on “maybe learn to connect with my guides” and went about my day.

When I was checking email that evening I saw one from meetup.com. The “Healer’s Round Table” was hosting a weeklong course on Connecting With Your Guides.  I just about lost it. My coach and I had talked about how when you’re open to things, opportunities start finding you. I see this happening all the time now, but back then I had started experiencing it a little bit, and never this blatantly or with such a quick turnaround!!! I signed up immediately and forwarded the email to her, I’m sure with about a bazillion exclamation points.

I attended every day of that weeklong series and was amazed by what I learned and experienced.  I didn’t really know what guides were, or really believe in them the way some of the people in that group did  (in fact I still don’t know what I believe about it all) but I actually felt one of my guides come in as one of the speakers led us through a meditation.  It was so wonderful to feel that loving presence and know that it was mine.  I started digging deeper into what intuition is and how we can access it and finally understood that it was available to me and something that I’d already experienced! It’s how I wound up at that yoga retreat with a bunch of people I didn’t know when I barely even practiced yoga.  And why I had such an urge to move to California even though it didn’t make the most sense from a career perspective.  And it’s why I knew that I had to leave my job, even though I had no idea what I was going to do next!

With an extra 40+ hours a week of free time I embarked on a spiritual journey. 

I started meditating even more, learning all about intuition, attending all of the Healer’s Round Table events, and really digging into who I truly am.  The hosts of the Healer’s Round Table, the Duo Dragons (aka the “Muscle Whisperers”), offered me a free healing session and I was amazed at what they were able to do for me physically and what that session revealed to me about myself.  Their recommendation and my intuition led me to  a session with Debi McKee, an amazing crystal healer, even though I thought crystals were a silly waste of money.  I walked out of that session into a whole new world.  The wall had finally dissolved.  I was open and vulnerable and it was both really hard and really beautiful. (Note: the wall would re-emerge from time to time before it eventually left for good. At least I think it’s gone for good….I think it’ll take another relationship for me to be confident in that… haha)

I knew that I had to be mentored by Debi but I didn’t know why. Obviously I wasn’t going to become “one of those crazy crystal ladies” and I really, really couldn’t imagine myself using them on clients. 

Whoops.

Despite that, I had this gut feeling that I had to do it and I followed that feeling, spending three months under her tutelage and practicing on myself every single day.  Part of my homework was to do crystal healings on others and I was blown away by their experiences, and by how much insight I had into what was going on with them just by putting my hands near their body and listening to myself.  I still didn’t think that this was something I would do full time, but I knew that it was for me in some shape or form.

By this point I knew that I would be doing virtual client work, so I started experimenting with virtual healings over Zoom. I was so freaking excited by some of the results I was seeing it was sometimes a problem (it turns out that clients don’t love it when you start grinning ear to ear when they confirm that that yes, they did just lose a friend… etc.). And I was expanding my practice every day. By this point I was manifesting spiritual friends (I’m sure you’ll hear more about that in another blog) and one of them introduced me to pendulum healing.  It wasn’t for me at first, but eventually I felt an urge to try it and I was amazed by the results, both on myself and on friends in different states. I began to experiment with using it to clear clients before their live virtual healing sessions, but it just wasn’t as good as either offering on its own. I scratched that method and split the Zoom healings and pendulum healings into separate offerings, which has worked well.

I’m continuing to experiment with different techniques and have found some to be more impactful than others. I allow my guides/intuition/God/The Universe/whatever you want to call to bring them to me, and I test them out on myself and friends before offering them to the public.

One of my favorite methods right now is releasing trapped emotions

I’ve just started including this in my public offerings. My technique combines what I learned from Dr. Bradley Nelson’s book The Emotion Code with pendulum healing. It’s a good thing that I started out doing this work during fully remote (no camera) sessions because in my early sessions it wasn’t uncommon for my jaw to drop, fist to pump, or feet to leave the ground when I’d hear something super specific I found confirmed during my follow-up call. I’m starting to get used to it and can usually keep my composure, but am still amazed at how well this technique works. What’s extra cool about it is that the event that caused the trapped emotion doesn’t have to be relived to release it and IT’S PERMANENT! As much as I have loved bonding with my inner child after her best friend moved away, I am totally cool with not having to go there when my next significant other makes avocado toast without considering the lunch plans I never told them about. Completely hypothetically, of course.

This practice evolved further when I started incorporating it into my Processing and Clarity sessions when it makes sense, and clients* who didn’t think they’d be into energy work have been amazed by results. It’s so cool to not only be able to support someone in finding compassion for their reaction to a situation, but to release the trapped emotions that led to it so they react the way they’d like the next time. (If you’re interested, you can learn more about and book my Processing, Clarity, and full on Energy Work sessions here.)

*Full disclosure: at this stage of my business these clients are quite often friends, and more than once it’s seemed pretty clear that they’re just trying to do me a favor. So it’s extra exciting when they reach out to tell me what an awesome experience they had and that they want to book more sessions!

I continue to do energy work on myself every day and to nerd out over new techniques as they present themselves. That will probably never stop… I love to learn and to develop myself. I’m super grateful for community to share this stuff with (both as a receiver and as a practitioner) and I can’t wait to see what I discover next!

Thank you for sharing this journey with me! Now that I have laid the foundation for how I got here I expect my next blog post to include some more tips and tricks.