Have You Always Been Like This?
After a deliciously creative session, my lovely client got off the table and asked:
“Have you always been like this?”
What she was referring to was the unfathomableness of entering into such mysterious terrain with human after human, day after day.
After all: Who does this? Why would anyone do this?
Receiving the potency of her question sent my mind into the very real territory of talking about what aspects of healership I identity with, what parts of me have developed doing this work, and what parts of me were there from the start.
It took me a very long time to call myself a healer. It’s a path that chose me rather than the other way around. I’ve always been a sensitive soul, aware of the rhythm and tides of life, connected to spirit, and observant of the human situation. There has never been a time where I didn’t want to engage in the greater mystery of existence.
Opportunities arose to explore all of life's joys and sorrows but they weren't overtly healer-y. Like many of us I craved an artistic life, which over time morphed into body supportive practices to help me carry the load of my dance injuries. As I began to be in presence with people, I saw that the experience of moving from pain to no pain was mostly not connected with whatever I was teaching. It had to do with this other thing—all the extra sensory perception that was filtering from essence through spirit, through hands, and into the relationship.
While this transition was happening, I entered into two of the most important experiences of my healership—one was a daily meditative yoga practice, and the other was a 3-year training in Integrative Manual Therapy (IMT) with Sharon Weiselfish-Giamatteo, its creator. I’ve done many programs in my life, but it was there that I witnessed daily outright miracles. There is simply no way to rationalize or contain those experiences, other than to say that watching those gifted practitioners was a rare initiation.
What has become apparent to me is that modalities matter, but what matters even more is scrupulous work on my own mental, emotional, spiritual, and personal connections. So while I largely work within the worlds of IMT, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and Yoga, what comes through is much more distilled.
It’s the light that we share. It’s deep respect for humanity and the courage to sit with the very hard and real aspects of human suffering. It’s the love that each and every one of us needs to be healthy. It’s the laughter that keeps the pilot light lit in our darkest times.
So to answer, “Yes, I’ve always been like this, and it’s taken me 50 years to get here.”