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Among the words guaranteed to push people’s buttons in my daily work, are “spirit” and “healing”. Put the two words together in the combination “Spiritual Healing” and you can muster up an even stronger sense of unease.

Interestingly though, the offence often turns out to be a matter of the meanings people make from the words rather than – as they mean to me respectively - an essential expression of higher connection and wellbeing, concepts that most people have no problem with.

Sarah Peters is a definite “button-pusher”, as she’s just launched The Lightworkers’ College, which unashamedly looks at Spiritual healing and other tricky topics like ascended masters, Gaia theory, lightwork, auras and chakras.

She’s no two-headed weirdo however; Sarah came to making Light Work of it (sorry) having suffered with chronic joint and muscle pain for several years which made her “feel exhausted and very low”.

“I underwent various tests and x-rays for arthritis and every time the tests proved negative and the medics were baffled,” she told me. “Eventually, after much personal research, I recognised the symptoms of M.E. and in those days no support was offered for the condition.”

By chance Sarah found new hope: “A friend was clearing out her bookshelves and gave me the best-seller ‘Mind to Mind’ by the late Betty Shine, a spiritual healer,” she explained.

Betty had apparently had success with healing arthritis, neurological disorders and depression, but by the time Sarah made contact, she had given up one-to-one appointments having decided that writing books, giving talks and healing demonstrations would help more people.

“Since nothing else was going to help me,” thought Sarah, “I asked Betty if she would send distant healing through the ether to me. The result was extraordinary - vitality returned, but sadly only temporarily. I wondered why, and decided to do further research into Spiritual Healing and try it out.”

“I practised Betty’s guidance to ‘tune into Spirit’, using our family cat who suffered with a limp. As I carried out the healing, I began to ’see’ streams of grey energy flowing out of the cat’s knee-joint, he jumped into the air and ran off!”

“Fairly soon after that I had the opportunity of testing it on a human - a friend who screamed out with searing wrist pain. I quickly ‘tuned into Spirit’, and placed my hands over her wrist joints and within moments she was saying: ‘look at those coloured balls of light bouncing around the room’.”

“I heard myself whispering to her: ‘there, you’ll feel better now’ and with these words I felt as light as a feather, tall and elongated and felt myself gliding out of the room onto my bed. Both of us fell into a deep sleep and I awoke to see a huge glowing being of light by the side of my bed, that literally made me gasp for breath - then it disappeared,” added Sarah.

After that her “sensitivities” and spiritual experiences came thick and fast. They were “always fascinating, but very mysterious”. There seemed little explanation for them, so Sarah continued to investigate further by attending workshops and courses all over the UK.

“My life was to take a most unexpected turn at the turn of the century,” she revealed. “New Year’s Eve, 1999, resulted in me leaving my marital home, my friends and my work, to arrive in Devon. A new life, out on a limb, with plenty of time for self-reflection and re-training in various alternative therapies and metaphysical studies, interspersed with ‘tuning-in’ and meditation.”

“A variety of fascinating, but much more balanced, spiritual experiences continued to occur, but still I remained puzzled as to what it was all about. I tried to find answers and continued to seek out those that could help.”

Being far away from specialist college’s and courses left Sarah floundering for a reliable point of reference from where she could continue to explore the “fascinating phenomena of Higher Consciousness”.

“I can now see that by undertaking years of reseach, education, training and practice in an attempt to demystify my personal experiences and gain an understanding of them, I have been taking steps towards creating a credible focus for the exploration of Higher Spiritual consciousness here in Devon,” declared Sarah. Its name: The Lightworkers’ College

To find out more visit: www.lightworkerscollege.com

The idea of going for a scan can create anxiety. Whether for the purposes of routine screening or to double-check a medical suspicion, scans also tend to be rooted in the physical body. So the idea of a metaphysical or holistic scan – to look for energetic blockages – caught my interest.

It’s Kimberley Jones, a Torquay born and bred Art Historian turned healer and artist, who offers this insightful and unusual service under the banner of Quantum Coaching and Healing, and for anyone remotely interested in the connection between the emotions, the mind and health – she’s a must-see.

Sure I was intrigued to learn that Kimberley “reads” bodily energy with her hands and can feel colours - red, blue and green - which reveal different types of energetic information all over the body. But I was relieved to be greeted by a very normal looking and sounding person when I went for my initial consultation.

“I have sensed ‘energy’ since I was a child - although I wouldn’t have called it that,” Kim told me when I quizzed her about her background. “I just knew what people were thinking and feeling.”

“Growing up I found my sensitivity made it hard to be in the world so I started numbing myself with alcohol and cigarettes at a very young age. I convinced myself I could get a respectable job and perhaps be a ‘businesswoman’, whatever that meant,” Kim revealed.

“Nothing satisfied me and I moved jobs regularly. I buried my abilities deeper and deeper until I forgot about them. I got more and more stressed,” added Kim whose mother it turns out was also highly psychic.

Following her mother’s death in 1997, Kim started experiencing violent psychic events and her abilities were blasted wide open again, far stronger than before.

“I went into a ’spiritual emergency’, a crisis that often leads to a breakdown of some kind,” Kim told me. “I also became physically unwell. Diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in 2000, I became unable to function in any normal way and had to stop work.”

“The one thing that had a strong effect on me during these years was healing. Whether spiritual healing or Reiki, each session led to a huge improvement in my condition and my reawakened extra-sensory abilities.”

“Eventually I was strong enough to start my own research and training, using myself as my own guinea pig,” she explained. “I began by studying Reiki and am now a Reiki Master.”

Soon after Kim trained in “energy mastery” and the “energetics and spirituality of business”, followed by a voluntary apprenticeship to a leading European re-birthing therapist, which enabled her to learn more about how pain, both emotional and physical, is just energy held in the body’s energetic fields.

“This is when I started to see and sense how energy behaves in and around the body according to what we are thinking. It was a huge breakthrough for me,” she said.

Kim has now developed all of her learning into a system called Quantum Coaching and Healing where she uses her abilities as an “energy intuitive” to scan people’s energy fields and offer guidance and healing according to what she finds.

“I have found this cuts through to a truth that is validated by my clients time and again,” she told me. “People are regularly referred to me by their psychotherapist or body work therapist. Your energy fields never lie. They always speak the truth about the deep issues underlying anything you want help with.”

Kim reckons our masks, inherited beliefs and attitudes are like our ‘words’, and she calls the real us revealed by our energy, our ‘music’, claiming that if our words and music don’t go together we get imbalance and eventually dis-ease of some kind.

“I see my job as something resembling a choir master, bringing your words and music together so you can sing your own unique song in the world with health, confidence and joy,” says Kim who also offers support to those highly sensitive to the energy of others at work or at home.

Her Quantum Coaching and Healing sessions involve clients lying down fully clothed and relaxing on a treatment bed. Kim then passes her hands over and around your body sensing energy fields as though she has “eyes in her hands”.

Kimberley’s approach – after an initial and thorough pre-treatment discussion - is a really interesting blend of off-the-beaten-track energy work and hi-tech methodology. Lying on her treatment table, I was at first aware of her ’scanning’, but soon drifted off into a much-needed snooze, comfortable in the safety of her already-healing space.

Before I fell into too much of a slumber however, I saw how Kimberley transcribed the sensations felt and ’seen’ through her hands into coloured shading on an outline of a human body – representing me and my energy on this particular day - on her laptop screen, for later interpretation.

It must have been around 30-40 minutes, when I felt Kimberley’s healing touch on my arm inviting me to rejoin the conscious world. A little fuzzy still, I returned to the consulting area to be greeted by a pretty map of my metaphysical energy and to hear Kimberley’s insights, findings and ideas about what it all meant.

Depending on what is needed, Kim uses healing, visualisations, breathing, relaxation techniques and energy meditations, drawing on her toolkit of training and experience combined with intuitive and psychic sensing.

She’s good and she’s accurate. Coming from a very loving and supportive place – and not in any way ungrounded or annoyingly new age – Kim really gave me something to think about and a number of useful tips to help me through what she saw as my energetic blocks. I’ve always thought the body never lies, and Kim’s energetic extension of this theory takes things a convincing step further.

Kimberley Jones’ Quantum Coaching & Healing is available in Totnes and Netwon Abbot. Call 01803 868282 for more information or a consultation. Or visit: www.quantum-coaching.co.uk

I tend to stick to natural health, holistic living and personal development when it comes to subject matter for this site, so the idea of looking into tarot is something of a departure and, quite frankly, a territory into which I thought I’d never venture.

A new shop in one of Newton Abbot’s main streets attracted my attention however; one that opened up for business in the run up to Christmas last year, called “Say it with Angels”, offering Reiki and tarot training among a collection of angel-related merchandise.

Now this would be an odd and daring occurrence in Totnes, let alone Newton Abbot, but to proprietor, Reiki trainer and tarot card reader Rhiannon Faulkner, it’s just something that had to be done following the success of her first retail premises, doing something similar, in the equally unlikely setting of a local garden centre.

Sure enough, it wouldn’t have been right to just press my nose against the window – I felt the need to walk in and introduce myself and check out exactly what possessed someone to create such an improbable business. Of course, I didn’t phrase it quite like that, and much to my surprise I encountered a very down-to-earth, friendly and heavily pregnant shopkeeper – with a difference.

I immediately noticed Rhiannon’s newly published book taking pride of place – “My Journey through the Tarot,” which her publishers describe as the “fas cinating story of Rhiannon’s personal spiritual journey. Using the tarot cards to relate to each stage in her life, from her childhood to adulthood, Rhiannon shows how she got to where she is now - a successful medium, tarot reader and healer.”

Later leafing through my own copy, I discovered exaclty how she “has become stronger through life’s experiences and now sees all of them as a test in the great lesson of life.” She’s sure been through some challenging times and it’s a gripping read that I polished off in two sittings.

Described as “a must for all of those who are at a turning point in their own spiritual journey,” I can see how people relate to Rhiannon’s courage and philosophy, and – as one lady way up country decided to do – drive miles just to shake her hand in recognition and say “thank you”.

Finding out that she is a mother of four girls, and currently expecting her fifth child, I wondered how Rhiannon not only runs her shop, but also has the energy to give private tarot readings, “do” mediumship and offer healing sessions, as well as train Reiki therapists at the weekend. “I even go to people’s houses when asked to remove negative energies or unwanted spirits,” she calmly threw into the conversation.

Her weekly development circles are apparently very popular and she revealed to me that she is “passionate about her work with spirit”. And that’s where it gets tricky for me. I’ve never been drawn to working with those who are – as it were – unseen, yet still active, albeit unseen to me that is!

Thing is, Rhiannon does “see dead people”, and they help her in her work, including tarot, that – before I knew it – I’d booked myself in for. More on that later.

“I want to grow and expand my business throughout the UK, making tarot a more accepted form of counselling and way of guidance,” Rhiannon told me, sounding like a psychic version of Richard Branson. “I want to change the attitude or belief that tarot is working with the ‘dark side’ or is negative or bad in any way. I only work through love and light and with assistance from loved ones in the spirit world.”

“I have always believed in spirit world and life after death, but was brought up in a family that did not believe, with a heavy influence on traditional religion,” she told me. “I came to my own conclusions, and once in a position to follow my beliefs without offending anyone, I changed and devoted my life to working with spirit.”

“I have always had experiences of guides and angels throughout my life. Since leaving school I have regularly had tarot readings to guide me throughout different choices,” Rhiannon explained. “I started to make it my way of life after my divorce and I found I could make my own choices in life.”

“I am passionate about the tarot and I do it because I love it. The tarot and healing has taken over my life and I see my job as my hobby. My guides have led me in this direction and I firmly believe that they are working with me for a reason – that reason being to help other people become aware of spiritualism. Everyday I am learning something new and meeting new people – on this earth plane and in spirit,” she went on to say.

As far as my tarot reading was concerned, I can say it was very accurate, affirming and supportive - even though, I must confess, I didn’t go with an open mind. Like many people I imagine, I have been wary of well-meaning, yet possibly misguided or even mistaken mediums and readers who might tell me what I wanted to hear or stuff so general it sounds plausible. Rhiannon is neither of these. But don’t take my word for it if you are moved to find out more.

She’s got just the one head, she doesn’t bite and she’s right down here on planet earth with the rest of us. She’s an ordinary, though unusual woman, with an extraordinary set of abilities.

Rhiannon Faulkner can be found at Say it with Angels at 15 Union Street, Newton Abbot. She can be contacted for readings on 01626 351508 and her book is available via www.authorhouse.co.uk

The word “healing” really seems to push people’s buttons. Just recently, I heard a Radio 4 guest - on one of those hot-air opinion-based programmes - slam anything to do with healing (i.e. “run a mile”) based on the merest mention of the word. Fair play I suppose, it does conjure up images of eccentric characters standing over or behind those in need, with their hands hovering mysteriously in the air, eyes closed and an atmosphere of mystical expectation.

In fact, when I once questioned a person who asked “would you like some healing?”, asking her: “what is it?”, she replied “well, it’s healing,” in a way that suggested everyone knows what healing is and what’s more it can only be for the good. So I do understand widely-held discomfort, but feel I must challenge the widely-held ignorance that tends to go with it.

In the last few weeks, BBC2 did the concept of healing no favours either, with its series “Trust me I’m a healer”. A predicatble stitch-up that’s thrown together a random bunch of “healers” and given them the usual media treatment - opinionated skepticism and understated ridicule - and an all-out effort for a cheap laugh about something most people don’t understand. Of course, making fun of what you don’t understand is something “foreign” people used to endure in pre-multicultural days, but let’s not open that can of worms here.

Sadly in this recent BBC2 hatchet job, the inference, as with most mainstream programme-making is that all healing is suspect, which to any intelligent person is like saying all eating is somehow bad or all medicine is wrong. Healing is an activity which, like eating and medicine, can go a number of ways in the hands of any number of people.

Here’s some help for those who haven’t dismissed it out of hand based on sloppy media portrayal and a few eccentric or rogue practitioners they’ve experienced third-hand on the telly, down the pub or at a mind, body and spirit fair…

There’s “Spiritual Healing”, which the National Federation of Spiritual Healers (NFSH) says is: “a generic term used to describe various forms of holistic healing across the world.” They claim there are “more than 15,000 healers operating in the UK, of which 5,000 belong to NFSH but many others work independently and in their own way.”

Add to these thousands those who do not use the prefix “spiritual”, which might include many complementary therapists not uncomfortable with the term healing (which after all, must surely mean “to make whole”) and you get a potentially huge heal-th boosting army, who get written off by the prejudice that surrounds that simple, yet deeply powerful, h-word.

As the NFSH say, “healers come from many different backgrounds and belief systems. The source of healing energy is open to interpretation and varies depending on the individual.” So for heavens sake, do see for yourself and quiz anyone who calls themselves a “healer” until they satisfy any qualms you have. Because that’s where I would advise caution; anyone who does call themselves a “healer” as opposed to someone who facilitates “healing” should be carefully examined.

Use the 3 ‘i’s that I often recommend - intelligence, instinct and intuition - but please don’t get hung up on a word or your old ideas and pre-conceptions. You colud be missing out if you do. If I’m not mistaken, the NHS has spiritual healing in its vast and diverse armoury these days.

“People who receive healing often experience profound benefits. Healing should always be considered a complementary therapy, not an alternative to conventional treatment.” the NFSH reminds us. “Spiritual Healing can help on many levels as it treats the whole person, mind, body and spirit. Remarkable changes can occur but a physical cure is not always a certainty. (NFSH) healers should not offer false hope.”

Of course they shouldn’t. But that’s not a reason to not give healing a chance. You might be surprised.

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