I launched Energy Healing Institute in 2005 to better serve my clients, many of whom are practitioners. Their primary issue? Burnout, overwhelm, taking on their clients pain —emotional, mental and physical, including symptoms of their ailments and illnesses. All energetic. All unnecessary.
Yet, sometimes practitioners shyly admit to feeling special because of this tendency, that their empathic merging was a ‘superpower’ of some sort, helping them stand in a field all their own, and be of greater support and benefit to their clients. Yet over time, the depletion, overwhelm, heaviness and burden leaves specialness in the dust; it becomes debilitating.
Feeling your clients ‘stuff’ = an absence of energy boundaries
Think about how many times you’ve heard about healers in your community who are praised for their ability to feel their clients emotions, physical pain and energy. I’ve spent many an hour with practitioners who described their ability to nearly instantly assess their clients state of being because they felt it in their own body. Multiply that felt-sense awareness over 20 clients per week, month after month, year after year.
What do you suppose happens to that practitioner over time?
A full-time practice is generally 20 clients a week, 80 clients a month, 960 client hours a year, 4800 client hours over 5 years. That’s a lot of time spent taking on and holding, don’t you think?
Let’s look at it another way. Take a sponge and run it under water. Does it continually absorb water or does it reach saturation? What happens to its effectiveness when it’s saturated? Can you wipe down a counter without making a mess? Can you clean a greasy stove?
Practitioners are not sponges, yet the residue in their field from energetic porosity and merging leads to overwhelm, burnout, depletion and perhaps even health issues. How is that serving? How is that effective? How is that appropriate?
Truth is, it’s not. Not serving. Not effective. Not even appropriate!
Burnout & Boundaries
Practitioners who are burning out love to learn energy hygiene. They’ve learned the hard way what it has cost them to be without it, and they’re ripe for change. Their livelihood depends on transitioning out of empathic merging and into boundaried, compassionate practice. The hidden secret? It energizes their income!
One of EHI’s recent graduates from the Astral practitioner program said this:
Learning energy hygiene and appropriate boundaries has completely shifted my thinking, and the way that I approach my client sessions. I’m not awash in their emotions, I’m not depleted at the end of the day, and I’m not burdened with the sense that I have a responsibility to fix my clients. My clients notice it too. They feel more empowered, and that our work together is cleaner and well-defined.
Victoria Leilani, Denver, CO
Example: Energized Income
Here’s one of my favorite stories about a practitioner who energized her income (her self-care, her emotional awareness and her business) through learning and applying energy hygiene. This psychotherapist entered my private practice to get help with her severely depleted energy. Intelligent, highly seasoned, she had reduced her caseload from 25 clients each week to four because she couldn’t sustain the toxic burden of carrying her clients issues and emotions. A single mother, she had deep concerns about how to pay her bills as she was rapidly depleting her savings. She had all the professional, therapeutic boundaries in place, but none of the energy hygiene and boundaries essential to ensuring separation and distinction between her energy and that of her clients.
As she learned to organize her energy, hold the space and facilitate a healing process, the responsibility for the clients issues. emotions and evolution (!) returned to the client, where it belongs, and the therapist’s resourcefulness to facilitate healing and guide the client’s process, her income and joy in her practice was restored. Within 6 months, her practice was back up to its full complement of weekly clients, and her scary financial bleed was behind her.
Are you curious about energy hygiene and how it can energize your practice income?
EHI offers a 1-hour, live, online workshop for practitioners, and for those who are contemplating a career as a practitioner. Together, we’ll ground our understanding of how energy informs experience, and how merging with your clients’ energies impacts your body, emotions and vitality.
We’ll learn and practice simple, effective tools to resolve energy leaks, empathic merging, and to create effective boundaries that hold the work, not the clients process.
From there, you may have everything you need to resolve feeling depleted and overwhelmed in your practice. Or perhaps I’ll have wet your whistle for exploring energy healing at a deeper level. A new cohort is forming for this fall.
If you’re not already a practitioner and you’re contemplating a career in energy healing, there’s no better place to start than with effective energy hygiene! EHI is known for its focus on energy hygiene, and it stands out as an incredibly important differentiator from other programs you might be considering.
Learn more and register for: Energized Income: How to Minimize Burnout & Increase Client Impact
