Your Day Job Is What?! by Marilyn Barr

 

I’m a spiritual and energetic healer. This conjures all sorts of images in people’s minds. (Cue Witch Doctor songs) I get asked if I took a pilgrimage to the middle of the jungle to live on bugs like Simba in a certain kid’s movie. They ask if I can contact their long-lost great-great-great grandparent or if I can predict their child’s future. I do own a crystal ball, but I don’t use it to tell fortunes. I love herbal remedies, but I don’t prescribe them. I don’t require a sacrifice for healing either – although I have had everything from pet’s blood, to promised unborn children, to animals the clients caught, brought to me. (…and they think I’m weird, scheez).

(Spa-am Native of Muppet Treasure Island Photo from muppet-opedia)

What does an energetic healer do? There are 10 services, but the most common ones are NAET, Reiki, Shamanic healing, mediumship, and past life regressions. My certifications are in Reiki and Shamanic healing (General and Hawaiian). I perform healing rituals, chakra reconstructions, energy grid restorations, past life regressions, cord-cutting rituals, and receive spiritual visions on the client’s behalf. I do not have the gift of two-way communication with those in the spiritual plane beyond my spirit team, so mediumship (bridging contact with deceased people) is outside my abilities. NAET (Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Techniques) overlaps with Reiki healing but utilizes the energetic gates to a client’s energy grids to eliminate allergic reactions. Between my son and I, we have had over 30 allergies reversed using NAET.

(Photo from myomassage.massagetherapy.com)

Can anyone perform spiritual healing? Yes – with training and attunement. The first level of Reiki healing is self-healing and can be learned by anyone. There are weekend courses for those who are curious, but those who feel a calling usually embark on an apprenticeship. (No, you aren’t living with a witch doctor in the woods. My two-year apprenticeship has mostly taken place over Zoom.) Reiki healing is the channeling of chi energy from a universal source to the client using the hand placement and Japanese symbols over certain areas of the body (you should not be touched in traditional Reiki healing sessions). The healer is a conduit like an antenna that collects energetic signals like Wi-Fi.

(Photo from blog.sivanaspirit.com)

The purpose of the apprenticeship is to learn the boundaries associated with going into someone else’s energetic grids. This is more difficult and more important than the healing techniques themselves because they protect the client and practitioner from injury. Because of my Shamanic abilities, I will receive visions with energy, so I must obtain permission from the client about them before healing sessions. I have written a book about a great spiritual practitioner with a respectful attitude towards boundaries, spirit guides, and apprenticeship in Dance to a Wylder Beat. However, I wanted to also write a book about a talented practitioner without these qualities. What if someone had a Reiki apprenticeship but their abilities branched into Shamanic healing and mediumship, but they ignored the call? What if they had grown up in an environment when these talents were thought to be fiction, so they didn’t believe the messages from the spiritual plane? The Universe would give stronger signs until the person listens.

In my Christmas release, The Spy Who Loved My Russian Tea Cakes, we meet Reiki practitioner, Cassie Morgan, and her mentor, Leslie. Cassie is left alone over the holiday season to perform healing sessions for the first time. She is happy to manage the pain of the residents of the nursing home where she works instead of going home for the holidays…or maybe it is the excitement over the nameless coma patient upstairs. Cassie’s spiritual gifts go beyond her training but because she comes from a family of traditional medical doctors who don’t believe in spiritual healing practices, she doesn’t study beyond Reiki healing.

Her unfettered abilities cause all sorts of trouble when they meet psychically open energy gates of the telepathic coma patient. Dream walking, pain transference, and meeting the ghosts from Sergei’s past are just some of the complications Cassie experiences due to her leaky boundaries. Normally this would be uncomfortable, but Cassie learns Sergei is a man on the run. Sergei is a spy, but for which side – the authorities or the Russian mob? Now Cassie knows too much, and Sergei is gone…

The Spy Who Loved My Russian Tea Cakes is the second novella in The Spiritual Spy Duology. The first novella, The Spy Who Was Out Cold, will be free to newsletter subscribers as of October 2021. Join my newsletter here (https://www.marilynbarr.com/contact) to get your copy of The Spy Who Was Out Cold on its release day. The Spy Who Loved My Russian Tea Cakes releases 11/30/2021 (for $2.99) from The Wild Rose Press.