Surprise, surprise!  When I asked my clients and friends what they feel ages them, the majority of the 175 folks that replied said it was stress.  Yikes!  That’s a pretty unified answer.  But what exactly is stress?  What does it include?

According to the dictionary, stress is physical, mental, or emotional strain or tension.  I see, feel, and hear stress all the time in my hands-on Asian bodywork and healing arts practice of 20 years.  In fact, my own journey to be free of stress while working in the corporate world is the reason I came to become a healer 20 years ago.  Stress often shows up as aches and pains in the bodies of my clients.  Extreme tension in the area between the shoulder blades and the spine seems to be the #1 place where most of my clients feel tension.  The left side represents more of an emotional component of stress, whereas the right side tells me that the person is just doing too much.

Over two decades ago, I myself experienced stress so badly that it nearly knocked me out.  I was a mom of two toddler-aged daughters, a wife, and an employee during the tech boom days in Silicon Valley.  I had an engineering degree that I put to use, along with my people skills, working in sales engineering.  Anyone who has done any kind of sales knows that meeting the demands of customers can be very stressful.  Sales might be extremely rewarding financially, but it also can put a strain on one’s health.  What is it that they say?  You sacrifice your health to bring in the wealth, then you spend all of your wealth trying to get back your health.  Well, I was clearly on the road to living out that journey in my early 30s when I hit a wall with my energy.  I was not only sick with a cold that I couldn’t shake, but I was flat out exhausted.  I felt old and wondered how I was going to get my energy back so I could take care of my girls. Finally, a co-worker (who is now a client of mine) referred me to a practitioner who did what I do today for my clients.  I remember the first time that I received this work, I felt like I was getting my life back.  I had already been eating pretty well with organic groceries, but I improved my lifestyle even more by receiving energy healing.  It was this that gave me the energy to go back to yoga and dance classes.

Before I started receiving energy work, I went for deep tissue massage to help me alleviate physical tension resulting from trying to hold it all together as a working mom, balancing family life and work.  Massage just didn’t do the trick though.  It felt great while I was receiving it, but the relaxation only lasted as long as the session lasted.  When I discovered energy healing, I noticed that the benefits began to hold in my body for at least a week.  When I learned how to work on myself at home in between sessions, the practitioner’s work held even longer.

Looking back on pictures of myself taken in my early 30s, I realized that I was not only heavier, but I looked older than what I actually was in those days.  Today it is a blessing that I am able to have the energy, vitality, and stamina that I had in my 20s at almost 54-years-old.  Many say that I look like I’m in my 30s, but I’ll tell you why I am even more grateful for coming across this work…it set my health in the right direction.  That’s priceless.

Here is a list of things that energy healing did for me:

• The burning I felt between my shoulder blades and spine went away.
• My breathing project, which many doctors labeled as asthma, also improved to the point of being virtually gone.
• While I was still working in the corporate world, lab results indicated that my cholesterol levels were high. Once I started doing this work, my cholesterol dropped to healthy levels, and I never had to go on medication.
• My immune system improved tenfold, and I rarely got sick!
• When my daughters were young (and I used energy healing on them), they rarely got sick, and we pretty much only made well-care visits to their pediatrician’s office. Their pediatrician questioned me about how I was able to keep them healthy because we no longer needed sick appointments for most of their school-age years, when most kids’ immune systems are compromised.
• Less trips to the doctor’s office meant less money out of our pockets for healthcare.
• The burning soles of my feet went away. My energy not only increased, but my stamina improved as well, giving me the fuel I needed to exercise with dance and yoga.  Today, I hike almost daily as an accumulated result of receiving and doing this work on myself.
• My eyesight improved slightly (I had been wearing glasses since I was 8-years-old). Only recently in the last few years have I needed reading glasses when wearing my contact lenses.  Most people require readers in their 40s.  This is something that I am still working on improving with the integration of other ancient healing traditions such as sun gazing.
• My female hormonal system improved tremendously, and I no longer lost most of the month “getting ready” for my next menstrual cycle. Even today, being menopausal at almost 54-years-old, I don’t experience the hot flashes, night sweats, and insomnia that most women my age experience.  I enjoy a harmonious set of hormones all month long.

These are only some of the ways in which energy healing has helped me and my family.  Even though stress was my catalyst, I am forever grateful that it led me down this path to health and harmony.