By Rowena Conahan
“I think I want to do what you do, someday.”
The words were out of my mouth before I’d spent even a single second considering them. Appalled, I gazed, eyes wide, at the woman in front of me, a new acquaintance whom I knew to be highly intuitive, an accomplished spiritual healer. I couldn’t fathom where that statement had come from. It was almost as if the words had been spoken to me, as much as through me.
I was in my early thirties, and, at the time, routinely described myself as “buried under babies.” Deep in the thick of bringing up children, I couldn’t imagine myself in any serious professional role, let alone the one I most admired. I’d been exposed to intuitive healing when one of my children, constantly sick, had failed to respond to anything else we’d tried. Homeopathics, suggested by an intuitive healer, had finally turned the ship around, and I was transfixed. In brief snips of time, here and there, I was dabbling with muscle response testing in an effort to develop my intuitive capacities. It wasn’t going well. And to be honest, I wasn’t really sure what I thought I was doing.
The oddity I’d just spoken hung in the air, weirdly bright, though patently inconceivable. It was time for a set-down. Instead, my companion smiled kindly and said, “Yes, I think you will.”
There are moments in our lives in which a wind seems to lift us high enough to glimpse the path ahead, a sparkling trace through the shadows and the hills. I floated up there for what couldn’t have been more than a minute before my arms were once again filled with sticky, cranky sweetness, and it was time to give baths, read stories, and turn out the lights.
In the years that followed I solidly convinced myself that the idea of being a spiritual healer was pure fantasy. Since childhood I’d been fascinated with psychic phenomena, even choosing that as the topic of my first real essay for a middle school assignment, which invited us to research a topic of personal interest. Useful literature on this subject was extremely limited in the library of the small, conservative town where I grew up. But I scrounged a couple of books and dug in.
Whatever I read in those books, it planted in me a belief that if a person had intuitive talent, it would present itself clearly in youth and would be obvious to everyone. My thinking was very either-or. Either you’re born with special abilities, or you’ll never have them. This mental barrier would muddle my thinking for much of the following two decades, years characterized by a tug-of-war between my certainty that I was “not special” and my insuppressible attraction to intuitive work
The next shocking declaration in this odyssey was issued forth by a single word.
Despite my limiting beliefs, I’d spent considerable time studying and practicing intuitive arts. Over the course of a dozen years, I’d learned a great deal about how to dialogue with my body and had enjoyed the rewards of improved health. I’d also become a bodyworker, specializing in techniques that required deep listening through the subtle senses.
These had been years of establishing myself in several community circles. In some of these spaces, I’d worn a mask so fixed I wasn’t even fully aware it was a mask. Our culture prizes logic and a business-like approach to all sorts of human activities and interactions. People whose essential nature clashes with these values learn, very early, to cultivate a persona that will earn acceptance. By young adulthood, I knew exactly how to present myself through the lens of rationality. But now, all that was on the line.
I’d been feeling a tug to share what I’d learned. The idea of a class on muscle-response testing and food selection had been snowballing in my mind, gaining enough momentum that I’d written it all down. I visualized how I’d explain things, how I’d set up experiences so people could feel their own intuition at work. I had detailed handouts. I’d purchased a few dozen identical, tiny, opaque containers to hold food samples. I was excited!
There was just one problem. In order to run this class, I’d need participants. And in order to have participants, I was going to have to tell people about it. And in telling people about it, I’d have to pry off that rational mask and cast it aside. Never again could I project the comfortable fiction that I didn’t “believe in that stuff.”
An email had been composed. It was addressed to a wide swath of people I knew.
I hit send.
That class was a blast. People really liked it, and I loved it. I ran it two or three times, and then I was on to other things, principally, the creation of a nature connection program, which I led for ten years. Nature is my happy place, and it was a constant joy to create an environment in which people could find their footing and feel their own belonging in wild spaces. It was intensely practical work, helping folks make fire, build shelter, gather plants, and flow with the weather. And behind it all, for me, was a spiritual imperative, embodied in this quote, by Baba Dioum, a Senegalese conservationist:
“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.”
But when it came to my belief that nature connection is spiritual work, I was back to masking. People of many different faith backgrounds joined our programs. To me this was wonderful, and I wanted to welcome everyone. I took care to nourish a sense of wonder without evoking religiosity. I believe this worked well. But I felt a growing desire to step forward more openly in my spirituality.
Pandemic scraped its way across my life, as it did for so many, facilitating the conclusion of my years teaching outdoors. I let myself compost a while, digesting experience, and building fertility for something new. I wrote a book of nature-connected stories and activities. And all the while, I was eyeing another spooky threshold.
By now I’d been receiving mentorship with my healer for well over two decades. Two decades of slow, gentle support for my emerging spirituality and intuitive capacities. It’s lovely to be a student, and I believe I always will be. But it was long past time to openly admit that I am a spiritual healer. And so, I prepared more emails, offering land healing, space clearing, and table sessions.
It’s a strange and scary thing to say, “I am a spiritual healer.” Where does such a thing come from? It’s a destination with few recognized pathways. Heading there has often felt like padding about in a darkened room. But I am finally, with increasing steadiness, ready to be a candle.
Rowena Conahan offers massage therapy, energy work, and spiritual healing table sessions in her Ann Arbor studio. Space clearing and land healing are available on location in Southeast Michigan. “Beyond the containers we can see—human bodies, our homes, forests, meadows, and waters—are many layers of history, energy, and feelings that condition how we live in this world, and how the world itself exists. Together, through patience and stillness we can access these deeper aspects and strengthen the web of life.” Learn more at naturespeak.life or email naturespeaklife@gmail.com.
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The words were out of my mouth before I’d spent even a single second considering them. Appalled, I gazed, eyes wide, at the woman in front of me, a new acquaintance whom I knew to be highly intuitive, an accomplished spiritual healer. I couldn’t fathom where that statement had come from. It was almost as if the words had been spoken to me, as much as through me.