We live in a self-healing universe
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about the kind of healing treatments that I offer, so I thought I’d share a bit about my work and my learning journey here.
Over the course of the past 10 years, I have trained in Reiki, Body Dialogue, and Energetic Herbal Medicine. I have also studied and practiced many adjunct therapies such as sound healing, stone medicine, qi gong, and aromatherapy to name a few.
I have completed a “Reiki master level” training on three separate occasions with three different teachers. Each time, my understanding of this modality deepens, and the potency of my practice strengthens. Reiki was the first healing modality I was drawn to in my early 20s. The first time I heard someone talk about “energy”, and feeling the energy in a room, or the energy coming from a person, my whole life suddenly made sense. I had always been a very sensitive person, but I had never heard anyone else talk about feeling energy before. From a very young age I would practice using my intention to reset the energy in a room or to be a soothing and peaceful presence for my family members. When I received my first Reiki attunement, my hands felt magnetic, and the energy between them was palpable, like water. I had never felt anything like that before. Over the course of my studies, I have sought out teachers and texts along the way to deepen my practice. My most recent Master-Level attunement was with Lisa Toney, LMT in 2017. I find that Reiki provides tools for healing and soothing on physical, emotional, spiritual, and soul levels and I find it to be a beautiful and potent modality.
I met Janice Stieber-Rous, the founder of Body Dialogue while I was interning with the Florida School of Holistic Living during my senior year of college at the University of Central Florida. I had been curating a weekly women’s wellness program as a part of my internship with the school and I invited Janice to give a presentation on her work, Body Dialogue. When Janice and I met, we connected instantly. I had been looking for a mentor and a teacher to learn about trauma healing and somatic healing, and Janice had been looking for an assistant to help her with her writing and online teaching materials. The rest is history. We’ve been working together for over 10 years now. Over the years I have assisted her with retreats, workshops, webinars, and countless articles and educational videos. Together we rebuilt her website www.BodyDialogues.com and filled it with practice tools and learning resources. Janice has provided me with intensives to study and practice her work, as well as countless hours of hands-on training and supervision. About four years ago she gave me her blessing to begin using the term "Body Dialogue" to describe my work. Body Dialogue is a practice of present moment awareness, of communicating with our felt experience in each moment, of releasing tension and finding expansion in the body and breath. In practice, we use gentle touch to track patterns of tension and invite greater ease into the body. We use sound and vocal toning as a means of slowing and tonifying the breath. And we dialogue together, exploring the stories held in the body, releasing the pain story, and inviting in more gentleness.
I began studying Herbal Medicine at the Florida School of Holistic Living in 2012 with Emily Ruff. My studies took me all over the East Coast to conferences and workshops, farms and eco-institutes. In 2016 I decided to take these studies to a deeper level by doing a clinical Energetic Herbal Medicine certification at the Blue Otter school of Herbal Medicine in Siskiyou California with Karyn Sanders and Sarah Holmes. During this intensive program, we spent every day meditating with the plants, either with drop doses of tinctures, flower essences or with the plants themselves in the garden and in the wild. We were taught simple and profound practices of sensing and perceiving the world through our heart, and sensing and perceiving another person through our heart as well. We trained in emptying ourselves to be a clear channel, a liaison between people and plant medicine.
Now all three of these modalities have become a part of who I am. In the healing treatments I offer, all three of these paths braid into one.
Currently, I live in the mountains of Southern Appalachia where I practice at Point Acupuncture & Apothecary. I have been working with this collective of healing practitioners for over 2 years now. I work closely with Point’s founder, Alison Colberg, L.Ac. Dipl. O.M. Alison is very much a mentor and a lighthouse for me in my clinical practice and in life in general. I consider her to be a true master-healer and a seer, and she is very generous in sharing her wisdom with me as I continue to grow and refine.
My practice with the Tao Institute, studying internal Taoist Martial arts with Sifu Paolillo and Mela Carreira also deeply informs my healing practice and provides me with the tools for “connecting heaven and earth” so as to be a clear channel during treatments.
My teacher Janice says “energy follows thought” and in Body Dialogue, we understand that we cannot offer an experience that we haven’t embodied ourselves. Therefore, I am in a daily practice of energetic strengthening, cleansing, and grounding so that I can be of the highest service to my community.
I have been using the term “Somatic Energy Healing” to describe my healing sessions.
I work with people on a massage table, fully clothed. We practice arriving into the body, allowing ourselves to surrender to gravity and to being held in the moment. I use gentle touch to invite your body to release any tension, and to unwind the nervous system into an expanded state of presence. Our bodies truly do hold so much, whether it’s thought forms or patterns of moving through the world, we hold onto our stories in our bodies. From my perspective, healing is about releasing conditioning and patterning in order to allow the vitality that is available to flow through the vessel of the body at all times. I believe that we live in a self-healing universe. Every cell, every atom within the body knows how to be well. So we practice getting out of the way and allowing. Allowing the breath to move freely through the body, allowing the body to be breathed by life itself. I use gentle touch and sound to invite relaxation. Together we may practice vocal toning in order to soothe the nervous system and arrive into a parasympathetic state. I use tuning forks, stones, aromatherapy, and herbs in these sessions, depending on what feels called for in the moment to support balance. Sometimes we stay in a conversation throughout the session as you share your experience and process what is moving through you, sometimes I share what I am perceiving on my end, and other times the sessions are deeply quiet and restorative, allowing you to rest into a liminal space. We practice chakra clearing and rebalancing, physical alignment, full body revitalizing and deep listening.
I want to be clear that I’m not here to cleanse your aura or rebalance your chakras. I do not believe that anyone else can do that for another person. However I do believe that together we can create a field that is supportive of allowing universal energy to flow through. Our intentions are so powerful. So I’ll end this article with an inquiry, which is something that I begin every session with and that is this:
My intention for my healing today is _______________.
Fill in the blank for yourself.
My intention for my healing today is _______________.
Please let me know if I can support you on your journey. I am available between 10 AM and 5 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Point Acupuncture & Apothecary in West Asheville.
In wellness,
Madelyn
Comments