Evolution of an Energy Healer

For the first seven years of my career I was dedicated to theater. I studied as an actress and director, spending seasons in New York City, Boston and the Berkshires. In 1999, we'd finished a production of West Side Story where we employed the city's “youth at risk" to play gang members (remember Sharks vs Jets?).  This production was feature on CBS News' 60 Minutes by Steve Croft, who won a Peabody Award for this story.

After negotiating with board members, SAG unions, and CBS executives, I decided to move from theater to the economic steam train known then  vas the “dot com boom” seeking corporate success.

My income tripled but my spirit struggled in a profit-driven setting. So, right before September 2001, I left the dot com world to pursue my growing interest in the healing arts. When 9/11 happened ten days into my new life, I was suddenly jobless with no prospects. In desperation, I opened Magical Child Theater Arts. The name was inspired by an archetype defined by Caroline Myss her book Sacred Contracts. According to Myss’s philosophy on the composition of the human spirit, the Magical Child “sees the potential for sacred beauty in all things, and embodies qualities of wisdom and courage in the face of difficult circumstances.”  Myss cites Anne Frank as the embodiment of the Magical Child archetype. No question about it – I had found a name for my program to offer acting classes for children. I soon found a home for Magical Child Theater Arts through my town’s recreation office. By November 2001, I had 40 students and a waiting list. There was an insatiable need for beauty and art and wisdom and courage in late 2001. Yes, I taught theater – motivations, tactics, obstacles and objectives. I also shared my lessons on vocal training, stage combat and physical comedy.

But the truth of it all was in the name. Those magical children were rescuing me and teaching me. I learned in the middle of life that meaning doesn’t sit at a goal line. Being rich in life is being full with whole-ness on the journey. Life is not linear and rigid but more of a collection of experiences that bring us closer to knowing the consciousness of our soul – closer to waking up. “When you age, you don’t just get older. You are every age you’ve ever been,” my yoga teacher recently said in class. The children helped me remember who I’ve ever been. During my years teaching theater, I evolved into a busy energy worker. And by energy worker I don’t mean that I work for GE or install solar panels or maintain windmills in Wyoming. I’m the sort of energy worker who practices healing arts through the subtle energy field that surrounds all living beings – a field that has been mapped for thousands of years. Historically, energy has been depicted as everything from spinning wheels of light (chakras) to a glowing cocoon of heat (aura) to the multi-layers of consciousness (koshas). Even the halos depicted in religious paintings are said to be inspired by the glow of heightened energy around a holy person’s crown. 

Even I myself can be skeptical because I can’t see it, and no one ever told me about this stuff as a child despite that three of my grandparents were medical doctors in intimate contact with the body’s energy field. In some ways, my working with energy feels completely authentic, and in some ways my work feels shockingly out of sync with how I used to understand the world to operate. I thought the world was physical but with a hidden biochemistry and biology. I thought that intangibles were merely thoughts and memories. I thought things that were real were only things you could touch. But I’ve found a way to touch the energy field. When I work, my hands feel heat, a magnetic pull and subtle shifts right around the body. Let me explain: magnetic means the sensation of being pulled toward an object or repelled from an object - my hands can feel that pulling or repelling away. Meanwhile, my heart filters waves of joy and grief as well as impressions beyond words. My brain is somehow activated to connect meaningfully to the world of images stored there. My client’s energy field communicates to me, like we’re playing a big game of charades but with very few rules.

There is always information, a message, an impression to support the body. It is an inherited gift for all of us – a gift for you because you live here. Some energy workers can actually see the energy field. Some scientific instruments can measure it. This whole planet is pulsing with radio signals emanating from every molecule. Life force is real. In fact, I’ve found the human body itself is a conscious channeler of life force energy. I wonder if we are the only species that can choose to connect to the wisdom, vibration and intelligence of this energy. It’s both a responsibility and a burden to have such free will. For certain, our bodies are our instruments that transmit and receive energy. We’re both complex and pristinely ordered on a cellular level, and – it turns out – occasional tuning is essential.

While I have studied with healing arts teachers from the East and West Coasts, the lessons I’ve learned from my young acting students opened my eyes to the sacred beauty of all things. The children in some of my stories are now much taller and have graduated from college. I wouldn’t recognize them if we passed each other on the street. But we were all younger once together and for brief magical moments, I was a child again with them.