Massage therapy is the base on which I'm going to build my practice as a healer. I figure that, at least at first, I will get a part-time gig as a massage therapist at an alternative health care type place and develop my personal practice during my off time. So far so good. The real issue is my who-who-what and finding my right people (or, more accurately, helping my right people find me). But really, I can't find my right people and I can't fully figure out the who-who until I figure out the what.
Ok, in non-favorite-bloggerspeak, what I mean is that now that I've decided I want to be a healer. I have some other things to think about. The big one is figuring out just what kind of healer I want to be. That's a really big one. And the difficulty is that I'm like a kid in a candy store right about now. Although I have my Reiki Level One certification and I'll get Level Two this month, I'm not sure if that's the direction I want to go. Or the only direction I want to go. There are so so so many different kinds of healing (beyond traditional Western mediciney type stuff) such as (in no particular order): Acupuncture, Acupressure, Ayurveda, Shiatsu, Rolfing, Pranic Healing, Chios Energy Healing, Aromatherapy, Aura-Soma Therapy and Past Life Regression, to name just a few. I'm always picking up books and reading articles and websites about all the different modalities. I love Reiki. I love massage. But it seems like maybe there's something more or different that I'm needing to find.
The other thing I need to think about is what kind of people do I want to help. Even though it might seem counter-intuitive, it makes good business sense to specifically define your target market. I could just hang a shingle, so to speak, and announce that I'm a healer. And then try to heal whoever walks through the door. The problem with that is (as the very smart Mark Silver teaches in his who-who-what article) potential clients won't really know what it is I can do for them. And I won't really know who is a potential client. My right people and I could be passing each other like ships in the night. But if I define my services and the types of people it could help, then it's like sending out a beacon to all my right people and letting them know where to find me.
Although I know this will evolve as I learn more about my skills in this area, my gut instinct is that I can help women in life transition situations - going through a divorce, career change, empty nest. I also think I can help women in abusive relationships. This feels like a tough one for me - for reasons that deserve their own post. (Mostly having to do with whether I have the right to call myself an abused wife since it was mostly "just" emotional abuse. More on that crap another time.)
Part of the impetus for this post was having read Havi's latest brilliant piece of writing in which she says that when you commit to a mission stuff starts to happen. That's the way the universe seems to work. When you put your dreams "out there" and make them concrete, the universe takes the blueprint and starts building. So, with this post, I'm committing to my latest mission: Discovering the kind of healer that I am, the people I'm meant to help and how I'm going to help them.
There you go, Universe - do your stuff. Let me know what I can do to move this thing along the path, ok?
