My Journey as a Healer

Extraordinary healing stories

Had I not learnt the skill of healing I might not have encountered so many magical things. 

I was taught to use my hands to heal.  I came to know how to send my awareness through my fingertips, into the body like a river otter following the waterways, breaking through damns and restoring flow and connection.  

I did this for many years and learnt how to push my senses beyond their edges into the place many people call magical, mystical and impossible.  I learnt there’s room for growth beyond what we’ve been taught is normal.  I learnt that following possibility even when it felt like just an inkling led me to important healing.  

That’s me, bottom right, in my last year of studies at the British School of Osteopathy:)

In my years of treating I have felt many extraordinary things.

When I first treated trauma my vision went strange.  The room around me started to shake.  Eventually the walls and furniture stopped trembling and the client told me she had just had an abortion.  The plan at the outset was for me to help her recover from neck pain.  She hadn’t mentioned the termination.  Many times after that first occurrence the room would tremble through my eyes and I began to understand it would settle when the trauma in the clients system had resolved.  Nobody told me that would happen in my healing practice.  

My first year out of osteopathy university I could tell if a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl just by putting my hand on her belly.  It was as obvious as if I was seeing the baby.  Then, after 6 or 7 months I suddenly couldn’t tell any longer.  I felt humbled and curious as to what I might mean to have a gift just for a little while.

I am an accidental healer.  I wanted to be a painter or a writer. My mother told me firmly, “No.  Artists make no money.  You need a profession”.  I disagreed entirely but didn’t feel brave enough to sign myself up to art school.  I quietly understood what she meant and wasn’t sure I was much of a painter or writer anyway.

My mother mentioned ‘Osteopathy’.  I’d never heard of it.  A friends daughter was an osteopath and worked for a football club and made a good living.  My mother knew me well enough to choose something slightly alternative.  Osteopathy was in the same genre as physiotherapy and chiropractic but had some esoteric edges.  I had become a yoga teacher the year before and liked esoteric.  I settled for this new direction and sat down, for five years, to study about the human body and how to fix it. 

Early in my studies I had a treatment with a wisened old osteopath who dismissed my complaint about my knee for something he said was far more important: My eyes.  At the time I thought my eyes were fine (these days in bifocals I know different), but he lay me down and began to prod the back of my head.  He didn’t say a word.  After five minutes I was shocked to see a search light sweeping across my inner vision.  My eyes were closed.  There was no real search light.  The light was inside of me but somehow outside of me.  I was terrified so I opened my eyes but still I said nothing.  The treatment ended.  I left feeling scared and strange but amazed.  That night I sat down to meditate with a candle flickering infront of me.  For the first time I could hold my gaze steady.  I hadn’t known it was something that other people could do.  My normal was how my eyes always had been.  

Looking inside the body with the hands and mind is sometimes a slow kind of healing.  The body circles around things slowly narrowing in, gathering enough inner energy to make change, tentatively bringing old wounds to the surface and cautiously engaging.  I have to play tricks and mind games.  The old wounds are like children hiding in fear.  You can’t shout at them to stop hiding.  They retreat further.  You have to pretend they are doing just great in their hiding spots all wrangled and tangled and restricted.  You have to tell the body with your hands, ‘It’s ok.  Everything’s just perfect.  You’re safe.”  And then you wait with this mindset and your senses acutely aware of every nuance until eventually something starts to change and then, at last, old patterns with the feel of fossils (sometimes literally a compression between bones that’s been there a long, long time) shift and sigh and vibrate and wriggle and blood flow returns and the inner breathing happens and then the body reorients and I find I am led away from the problem back to the whole person and a feeling of balance.  

Here’s my son, ready for his treatment in the studio on the top floor of our home where I do treatments, paint, teach nature classes and yoga. (learn more about weekly classes with me here)

I never stopped exploring my artistic side.  I discovered I could be a great healer but I wasn’t ever entirely happy only doing healing work.  I needed to write.  Later I discovered I needed to paint too.  And I needed to sing.  I also needed to tend my garden and do my movement.  

I’d love to know what your many talents are? Are you one thing by profession and many things outside of that? Do you have yearnings to follow a passion you haven’t fully explored yet?

Here I am. The other day. Sunset at my local beach, Playa Yankee.

With love from Central America.

Lucy

p.s. Weekly classes with me starting September online are open for registration as of TODAY. Extraordinary healing promised:) LEARN MORE ABOUT WEEKLY CLASSES WITH ME HERE