What an Individual Healing Session Looks Like

Individual healing sessions can be any combination of mindful movement, guided meditation, chakra healing, crystal healing and reiki, depending on what you need in the moment.

Each week, we begin with a check in. You tell me your successes and challenges around using the self-care tool I’ve shared with you the week before. You also tell me your noticings: a difficult conversation that felt a bit easier than it would have in the past, a boundary you set with someone, an afternoon you took to just nap.

I listen carefully and reflect back all the changes you’re bringing into your life because this work is subtle and happens deep down. It’s not like working out and seeing muscles build before your eyes. Spiritual muscles are different. So each week, we celebrate each step, big and small, together. We tweak things to make them work for you. Nothing is forced. Our humanity is welcome.

Since most folks arrive to their weekly session stressed, frazzled, overworked, having combatted Bay Area traffic or public transportation, we do some breath-guided movement to come out of our head and into our body. This also helps folks reconnect to their bodies as many of us feel very disembodied, living more in our heads than in our bodies.

I lead you through guided meditation (this could include breath awareness, gratitude, chakras, visualizations, whatever is called for in the moment). Finally, I set you up in a restorative posture (again depending on what you need that day). Restorative postures bring deep release of muscles and emotional blockages.

At the same time, I place crystals on your person, and do reiki on you to clear out any physical or energetic toxins and bring balance to your system.

You leave the session feeling deeply relaxed and charged up for the rest of your week.

True Self-Care Is Not Instagram-able

How often do we see photos of a super relaxed, bronzed woman meditating against the Caribbean sea, her wispy (most likely blonde) hair blowing in the wind with the hashtag “selfcaresunday”. 

Or a perfectly dressed person sipping a cappuccino at a white-walled cafe decorated with one tastefully macrame-d plant holder, looking off dreamily into the distance: #selfcaremoment.

True self-care moments look like this: you really want to snooze your morning alarm, but you know that will take away the 10 minutes you allotted to your morning meditation. So you sit down, not facing the Carribbean sea, but your slightly cluttered living room. You do your best to ignore the hairball you can see under the sofa, tempted as you are to just spend these 5 minutes sweeping the floor. You close your eyes and you meditate. 

True self-care is not cute. It is not always pretty. Not when you do it daily. Self-care is effort. It is commitment. We don’t always see rainbows and hear harp music before or after. Sometimes we remain cranky after our morning sit. 

But in coming back to our practice daily, even if it’s ugly and imperfect, we maintain the all-important connection to our selves. This connection, this overall grounding that we cultivate with a daily practice means that in those moments when we experience set back, or get triggered, we will come out of it with more ease and skill than if we don’t have a self-care practice, or a sporadic one that we turn to only in times of crisis.

Self-care takes work. Effort. Consistency.