Behind the Scenes of an Intuitive Business

I just got the message that I need to strip my one-on-one work with clients down to the studs and rebuild my offers and how I share them from the ground up.

This is scary but exciting.

In this moment, mostly scary. Change often is. That liminal space between what you know, what you thought you were doing, and whatever will be next. It’s untethered, which is freeing but can also feel like free fall.

When you do etheric work that could be labeled something like channeling or psychic or mediumship or energy healing … there isn’t really a prescribed way of going about it. You have to practice, sometimes for years. You have to experiment and discover your unique gifts and flavor and who you can best support and serve. You have to see what people get out of your work, how it feels, how it supports them in their lives.

I learned I was an empath and a channel in 2013, when I was 35. I practiced for years, mostly on lovely blog readers (I’d been blogging since 2006) who were willing to be my guinea pigs. I started with written channeling and then moved into spoken channeling for individuals and later for groups. Then I began doing distance healings on friends - and clients, once I felt confident. I soon moved into recorded group energy healing. All self-taught, all based on experiments.

What I learned:

• The way an energy healing works on one person is not the way it works on another person, because you receive the healing you need, not what I want to give you. (I learned that the hard way because the distance healing that put one person straight to sleep will activate a kundalini awakening in another, something she wasn’t expecting at 10 p.m.)

• A two-hour group session, especially when it includes 1:1 work with each participant, is way too much for me. I would need to rest the entire next day.

• My group healings seem to be as effective as the 1:1 healings. (Yay, channeling!)

• If I do an intensive with someone, I definitely need to rest the next day. This is part of what the investment is - because it’s not just one day of my time, it’s two or three.

• Twenty minutes of energy healing seems to be the sweet spot, both for results and my energy.

And I’m still learning.

Now that the “start over with the 1:1 healing work” message has come through, I’m entering yet another phase of experimentation.

As often as I’ve experimented in the past, it’s still an uncomfortable place to be. Especially when it means my entire business model might shift … again. (There are only so many website pages a person wants to write in her life, and I may be at my max.)

But I think there’s a lot of beauty in iteration and listening to the nudges that want to send us down new or at least slightly different paths. Let it be hard. Let it be scary. We can handle it. We can do hard things.

Lots of love,

Amber

---

If you’d like to be part of the experimentation process, I’m going to be taking on new clients at a lower price scale as I feel into this new iteration. If you’re interested, schedule a free call and we’ll talk about what you need and how I might be able to help.

Snake Patrol

I have a snake in my abdomen. 

It started out as a gnarly tar monster coiling around in my stomach, holding onto pain.

Yes, finding a multidimensional black tapeworm in your innards is just as much fun as it sounds.

I met my sticky tar snake in a therapy appointment when we were investigating some suppressed feelings, which is a thing you do in therapy and is also just as much fun as it sounds.

As we sat there on zoom, because pandemic appointments, I opened a door over my belly button for the snake to slither out, taking all the heavy blackness with it. I started feeling lighter and lighter and as the black smoke turned to gray fog and eventually dissipated, all that was left was a small silver snake.

My heavy black horror snake was actually this cute little silver snake bloated with suppressed emotion.

Now my little silver snake friend helps me monitor my energy - specifically, how much I’m absorbing from other people. Then he helps me boot it out of my system. I just have to check into my stomach and see what’s there. If it’s a little silver snake curled up in the corner, I’m good. If the silver snake is clouded by fog or storm clouds, I have some stuff to let go of. If the snake is looking black or bloated, it’s time to do some clearing.

Often what feels heavy and overwhelming, like it would be a bad idea to poke with a stick, is simply something that was trying to help us out and got a little lost along the way. Maybe it took on more than it could handle. Maybe it needed some help and got ignored. Maybe it just needed a rest.

Sometimes monsters turn cute when you give them some love and attention.

Trust Walk Hangover

Last week, I went on a trust walk.

I didn’t know what that was either. But when someone I sort of know says, “Meet me at a random park and let’s do a trust walk!” I am the type of person who says, “Hell, yes!”

One of the advantages of the empath / sensitive situation is that knowing who to trust is not my problem.

One of the disadvantages of the empath / sensitive situation is that a simple ninety-minute trust walk laid me up in bed for a day and a half afterward, about which my trust walk guiding friend said “What? That’s not a thing.”

Things that aren’t usually things do tend to turn into things with me. I don’t really know what to say about that except that I am a delicate peony and hopefully the delicate peony benefits are worth it to the people I care about.

I keep trying to describe this trust walk thing to people and keep doing a semi-terrible job, but I’ll give it a whirl for you.

A trust walk is when you get blindfolded and led around a place with nature.

When you’re in the dark, when your sense of sight is taken away, your brain starts operating differently.

We don’t often realize how much of our time and energy is spent categorizing the things around us. Even as I look around the room where I’m writing this, a room where I live, I notice the steady stream of thoughts, “Oh, there’s my red chair that an ex-boyfriend bought me; there’s my dragicorn staring into a bowl of crystals; gosh, I’m glad I tossed that rug in the washing machine, it really needed it; there’s my tiny refrigerator, maybe one day I’ll have a real kitchen again; there’s my bowl of fruit, I hope the ants don’t find it, crafty bastards.”

When we’re out in the world this reaction is intensified. We’re constantly classifying things in our head - noticing a lamp post so we don’t walk into it, reading the energy of the person walking toward us to decide how open we want to be (smile and make eye contact or eyes forward with a quick step?), tracking where we are so we can get where we want to be and then back home again.

It’s a steady barrage of information and stimulus that, when shut off, completely and utterly changes your experience of the world.

The first thing I noticed when the blindfold went on was that my brain quieted. It didn’t have its usual obvious input and so my senses automatically softened and widened - to hear the sound of the water and the dog collars jangling nearby. To feel the energy of the trees around me and the ground beneath me.

The second thing I noticed was that when my friend tried to guide me physically, it did not work at all. I couldn’t walk in a straight line and we both kept running into things. But if she walked a bit ahead of me and I could just track her energy and her voice, my path automatically straightened out and she could guide me verbally around things like mud puddles and trashcans.

The third thing I noticed was how much my energy tends to whirl above my head or stick in my heart. When my energy started to drop from my heart down into my torso and then into my pelvis, I realized that it hadn’t really ever been there before. It was like my entire center of gravity dropped.

Grounding myself and my energy has always been a huge challenge. Getting anywhere near my body took years - the first energy healer I ever went to said she had to yank me off the ceiling by my ankle. And I flew back out the first chance I got. So getting into my heart was a big deal. Dropping all the way down into my pelvis was a major triumph.

In this entirely new space of feeling and sensing, we wandered around the park. I almost fell down a hill, met a trashcan, kept walking straight into the prickle bushes (I was wildly attracted to those prickle bushes), and got really nervous when other people passed us.

After my blindfold came off - while I was still sensing things more energetically and elementally, and less visually and intellectually - my friend asked me how I felt when I was near her energy.

“How do you feel, what do you want to do?”

What I wanted to do was run away from her and straight into the arms of the nearest tree.

So I did. Because the tree felt safe. The tree didn’t need anything from me.

WELL THAT’S DOWNRIGHT FASCINATING.

And probably explains quite a lot about my relationships.

She didn’t need anything from me either. But in that moment, I realized how generally uncomfortable I feel around other people, because I’m afraid I’ll be required to take care of them energetically and I’m afraid of the effect they’ll have on me.

There was an opening that happened in that moment, one I’m still processing and don’t fully understand yet. But, in fascinating confirmation, the evening of the trust walk, I got a barrage of messages from people. Like something in my ability to relate with other humans shifted, and now they felt comfortable reaching out again.

My trust walk experience was so intense that when I got home, I had to stumble into bed, where I stayed for the rest of the day, barely able to move. The next morning, I woke up feeling like I had an energetic hangover.

My entire system has been coming out of hibernation. I’m rebooting. I’m beginning to see how I’ve been led down a very specific path so I can get where I need to be.

It’s weird and fascinating and makes me really curious about what’s coming next.

Trees are good teachers. Especially if you can’t see them because you’re blindfolded.