Leading me to heal a heart I didn’t know was damaged
I don’t recall having heard about energy work, aka energy medicine, until I experienced it. And that’s probably how it had to happen. I was “super logical” way back then in 2019. I wasn’t into spirituality and I certainly didn’t feel like I was energetically connected to other people. My meditation practice was critical, but that was to help me focus (even though I discovered that it helped with a lot of other stuff too). I liked to really understand how things worked, which is probably what got me into engineering in the first place. And while there have been plenty of science experiments that have proved that energy medicine does work, I don’t think we completely understand how. I don’t, at least. Even if I had believed in it, I would never have imagined that one day I would be an energy healer myself. That just wasn’t who I was.
Anyway, let’s go back to May of 2019, as I laid on the table in my PT’s office, convinced that I couldn’t bend my leg. I had been in physical therapy all year, addressing a host of issues, but this one was new and terrifying. The night before I had been doing some really basic, simple PT, when suddenly I was in the worst pain of my life, which progressed until I couldn’t even bend my leg. I was tough back then- playing a tackle sport even. I didn’t freak out over minor aches and pains. But this one was a 9/10.
As soon as I woke up I called my PT’s office in a panic. They didn’t have any openings but told me to come in anyway, which required a friend helping me and my peg leg into the backseat of her car. Once in the office I was helped up onto a table and different therapists and assistants rotated through on their breaks between clients, icing and stimming me and working their PT magic, but nothing was helping. The doctor of osteopathy who shared space their space (and referred me to them) came out to take a look at me and started talking to one of the physical therapists, Eric, about what was up with my leg. She was showing him how my tibia was shifted (or something like that, my brain was pretty overtaken by pain) and had him put his hands on my leg while she rested hers gently on the other side and told him to watch. If Eric hadn’t been there responding to her, I wouldn’t have believed what was happening.
Their hands were barely touching me, and I heard them describing how my bones were shifting back into place.
When she was finished she said “look at that, now our hands have come together” and he agreed in amazement. I was fascinated by what they did but unable to ask questions because the doc shifted into convincing me that not only could I move my leg, I had to, or things would just get worse. She had me bend it a few times with her encouraging me while I gripped down on the table, holding back tears. She explained that I went into a fear response and was trying to protect myself by not bending my knee, but that nothing I did now could make the problem worse except for keeping it immobile. I got Eric’s endorsement to self medicate to keep myself moving through the weekend, and off I went.
After a rough weekend I was back in PT on Monday and asked my therapist about what the doc and Eric did the week before. She casually said “oh yeah she’s really into energy work. It’s amazing what she can do.” This struck me because my PT was NOT some sort of hippie. She was from small town Texas and I had all sorts of thoughts and stereotypes around that back then. If she believed in this, maybe there was something to it.
When I got back to my office I told this super smart scientist I worked with about what happened. We talked about meditation a lot — mostly from a mindfulness and improved focus perspective — but I had a feeling that she might know something about this energy work stuff. I was right. She explained to me that there is science behind energy healing and gave me some references, including The Subtle Body by Cyndi Dale.
If this super smart scientist believed in energy work, who was I to deny it?
The next time I saw the doc I told her that I wondered if the reason I kept having different physical problems was because of my energy. After telling me that she’d normally never talk about this stuff with a patient because they’d think she was crazy, she told me that my sympathetic nervous system was on overload. My fight or flight response was overly active and I was out of balance. She offered to work on it for me, and proceeded to wave her hands above my body as I lay on the table. Now and then she’d bring her hands toward my face and ask if I felt it. When she first did this I felt it from about three feet up. She said my energy field shouldn’t extend that high- it was keeping her out. By the time she finished she could get right up next to me before I felt it pushing back.
I left her office in a very different state than the one I entered in. I was no longer on high alert all the time. I was still tense but less so than I had been, and I was no longer ready to take off running at any instant.
By this point I was sold on energy work.
I wanted to learn how to practice it myself. From my research it seemed like Reiki was a great jumping off point, so I started searching for local Reiki masters but was faced with challenges in that I didn’t trust many people when it came to this stuff (or much else) and I lived in Texas where it wasn’t that readily accessible. An engineer friend of mine shared that she had some amazing energy work experiences at the AmaTierra Retreat Center in Costa Rica. This almost seemed too good to be true — I had been wanting to try out some sort of meditation retreat and a yoga/loving-kindness retreat was going to be held at AmaTierra right after I finished up a turnaround that earn me a full week of comp time. I signed up and in November of 2019, off I went.
The retreat was super impactful. My body didn’t love the twice-a-day yoga- my practice before that had only been a few times a week, but the energy work I experienced from the resort owner, Jill, was something else. I started with a nutritional consult in which she used muscle testing and other techniques to tell me what foods and drinks my body did and didn’t want to receive.
I would hold a card with the name of a food or drink on the bottom of it, where we couldn’t see it, and she’d try to pull my fingers apart while I held them together. If they held fast, that item was supposedly good for me. If I couldn’t hold strong, my body wanted nothing to do with it.
This would have seemed ridiculous to me a few months earlier- it’s definitely not the kind of science I learned in school- but after hearing about my friend’s experience I had enough faith to try it. When we flipped the cards over I was amazed to see how well they reflected back what I’d come to learn about myself over the years. Coffee and dairy were definite no’s, etc., etc. We asked my body more questions about some of the items that showed up in the categories I didn’t want them to be in, like the fish and meat I had recently decided I wasn’t going to eat anymore. She then tested the supplements I had brought with me- I was on a lot! and found that although most of them were serving me I could drop one or two. Score!
Even more impactful was the healing she did for me as I lay on her table.
I’m not sure what she called it, but she cleared my energy and moved it around and told me what she was finding as she went. She could feel that my feminine side, including my feelings and emotions, were repressed, and that it was related to my childhood and would start changing over the next few years (2 years later I can confirm that that was incredibly true). Jill invited me to start exploring this side and told me that it would help make me grow my compassion, which was a goal of mine that I don’t recall sharing with her. She was working singing bowls around me throughout the experience and had me visualize everything I wanted to release: old injuries, emotions, thoughts, etc., traveling out of me and being drawn into the bowl. I enjoyed the whole thing and when it ended I felt lighter, calmer, and as though my heart was energized.
The following night the wine was flowing and I felt much more connected with everyone on the retreat than I had up until that point. I told one of the women that I didn’t feel like she really saw me based on a couple of our interactions. The conversation progressed and she and others shared that they felt like I had some sort of wall or hard exterior up, that was finally starting to come down. I identified with that- in fact I had felt slightly tense the whole time I was there, and it felt very in line with what Jill had told me about my feminine side. I knew that this was what I had been feeling for years, if not my whole life, and that this damn wall was why I always felt tense like I was prepared to fight or run away. I decided right then that I was going to break through it.
