Friday, June 25, 2010

I Don't Know How to Be a Spiritual Professional

In a business meeting this week, my friend asked me to describe my vision of my energy healing practice. She is a successful massage therapist and asked some very pointed questions about what I am doing to grow my own clientele. My answers were vague at best. I share her office, using the space for 5 days at the beginning of the month while she is at Chinese medicine school.

She asked where I saw myself in 5 years, and I, the obsessive planner, realized that I am more of an obsessive dreamer than planner. I have been checking off the marriage, babies, homestead list, but as far as my practice, I am a bit lukewarm about it for a variety of reasons.

When I first began energy work, I saw it as my gift from God'dess to the world, and I was reluctant to profit from it. I started giving it away, and then doing it for donations and trade. After a few years, I began to feel like the scales were unbalanced and started feeling okay asking for more in exchange. I eventually got to a place where I am completely okay with making a decent amount of money in exchange for my work; I have other gifts as well, and if this one funds my ability to build with the others, that works for me.

When I do the work that I do, I go into a deep spiritual state, not quite a trance, maybe more of a fugue. I open my intuitive and visionary senses wide and all kinds of knowledge, insight, and imagery comes through. I am very good at what I do, but really, it is not me. It is God'dess (or the Divine, for my non-pagan clients) who works through me, I am but a sensor at the other end taking note of the flow of information. Because it is not me, it is hard to connect doing that work with something as left brained as selling, promoting, and making a living from that work.

When I think of myself in five years, I will probably be doing energy work in some form, and it makes logical sense to have a decently thriving practice. But I somehow have trouble seeing it as central to my passions. It is more like something I do on demand, almost instinctively, like breathing or talking with God'dess. It is too much a part of me to think of it as a product to be sold.

I am not sure how best to strike a balance with all of this. I think I will prescribe for myself an abundant and fulfilling clientele ritual and then some basic advertising and the set up of trades with other healers. I'll let it flow from there while I continue to ponder.

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