I’ve practised hands-on healing since 2004 in Victoria, Edmonton, on Cortes Island and in the Kootenays.

I’m also a musician, with a BMus from the University of Victoria (voice and piano) and an MA in Music from the University of Alberta (choral conducting and musicology). Besides writing my own songs and teaching individual piano and vocal students, I currently conduct Kuimba community choir in my beautiful hometown of Kaslo, BC. I love to dance, run on trails in the forest, and spend time with my two awesome kids and amazing partner. I’m a certified permaculture instructor, gardener, and climate activist, deeply committed to caring for the astonishing, divine being that is our shared planet Earth.

Tamara’s Story

 

I’ve had a long journey with pain.

I’ve always been moved by a primal desire to know and share what’s true, to see things as they are.

As a child, relationships within my home were often unsafe. With a predisposition toward sensitivity, this spurred me toward a deep commitment to emotional healing as well as a strong, often preconscious attunement to other people’s feeling states—states that actually live in our bodies. It gave me plenty of inner work to do; it also contributed to a host of chronic physical health challenges like asthma, hereditary migraines, and eventually fibromyalgia. And it layered in complex ways with my soul-level need to heal the world, because I know that what’s inside us and what’s around us are ultimately the same, and that none of us are free until all of us are free,

These strengths and challenges have drawn me over and over again to a healing path, as I’ve sought deeper and more lasting ways to heal and felt a strong internal push to share what I’ve learned with others.

 

learning to breathe

 

In my youth, I spent many years studying, performing and writing about music—in love with the truth that’s in beauty—meanwhile managing my asthma and migraines using conventional treatments like bronchodilators, steroids, and painkillers. (I have a lot of doctors in my family and a healthy respect for science and for allopathic medicine, though experience has taught me to recognize its very real limitations.)

While I’d done a lot of emotional work to process my trauma, none of it had even begun to touch on what was going on in my body, which is really where trauma lives. By my early thirties, I was on ever-increasing high doses of inhaled steroids—and I still couldn’t breathe. I knew conventional medicine had nothing more to offer me except more steroids and stronger painkillers, and by then I was pretty familiar with the side effects of those.

At that time, I happened on an amazing book by famed qigong practitioner Dr. Kenneth Cohen, The Way of Qigong. Having left my academic and musical career, for once I actually had time to practice what I was learning instead of just skimming it and moving on to stuff my brain with more information. I spent an hour or two each day practicing the exercises in the book, as well as other internal energetic practices that came to me spontaneously once I started paying attention to my body from the inside, and I was able to reduce my asthma medication to almost nothing within a couple of months and eliminate it altogether within a few more.

This was my first experience of the healing power of awareness, and it was huge to be breathing freely for the first time since my early teens.

diving into healing

 

Inspired by this direct experience of the healing power of the mind and of connecting body, emotion and spirit—an integrated approach that’s intrinsic to the ancient Taoist practice of Qigong—I moved on to study acupressure and medical qigong in greater depth, first at the Canadian Acupressure College and then with Qigong teachers Noel Taylor and Wendy Lang (as well as some classes with Ken Cohen, author of the book that had helped me heal my asthma). I developed a meditation practice with the help of intensive retreats.

Through my teacher Wendy Lang of the Empty Mountain Institute and her husband Phillip Weber, I was introduced to the practice of channelling higher guides, which transformed the healing services I offered to clients as I discovered that it was possible to do far more than apply learned treatment formulas to physical and emotional problems, but instead to listen directly to guidance about the relationship between what’s going on in a client’s body and their emotions, personal and ancestral past experiences, sense of self, ingrained beliefs and life purpose.

bumps in the road

 

When I was 36 years old, at a time when my life was already in flux with the ending of a significant relationship and major changes in my work life, I was struck from behind by a drunk driver while riding my bicycle, breaking my right leg and causing a burst fracture to the C6 vertebra in my neck. I healed well from these devastating injuries, thanks both to a competent neurosurgeon and to the life-restoring powers of dance and meditative inner awareness practices, but the broken neck also increased my already very high nervous system sensitivity and tendency toward chronic pain.

While qigong had almost completely healed my formerly severe asthma, it had never made a significant difference to the migraines, which sometimes morphed into full-body pain, increasing as I got older. I knew that meditation practice helped, and I’d found some relief by avoiding a large number of dietary triggers. But still, migraines sometimes made it difficult to manage my daily life and work and undermined my faith in my own ability as a healer.

Having two kids in my 40s—delightful, creative, high energy boys—presented its own set of challenges for my sensitive nervous system. It’s been worth every minute, but the pain has walked with me each step of the way. Then the stress of a very scary mistaken medical diagnosis in 2020 (related to my earlier broken neck), along with the other pressures that year presented for me along with so many others, sent my body into a pain state that was almost constant.

My healing practice shut down because of Covid, and I was forced once again to turn inward to work with what life was presenting me, as the conventional medical system has little to no help available for chronic pain that does more than temporarily suppress symptoms with medications that are toxic to the body in the end. I tried many holistic solutions as well, and while some have helped a bit, none significantly reduced my overall pain levels in a lasting way.

reaching out to the guides

 

Feeling desperate, I returned to the channelling practice I had studied years before, to ask my guides for help. I was surprised to find that the first thing my guides did, the moment I came into their warm and non-judging presence, was to adjust my body themselves. My alignment would shift, tense muscles I’d been unaware of would dramatically contract and then release, and I’d hear a soft internal roaring sound—like you hear sometimes when you yawn—as energy flowed through my whole system from where it was stuck and compacted to where it was weak and depleted.

Because of my qigong, acupressure and meditation training and practice, I immediately recognized the sensation of qi moving to readjust itself. But there was no way I could have consciously planned the routes it took within my body, the connections I felt between different areas that didn’t always look like they were linked on any map of energy systems I’d seen.

What was most astonishing to me was that it reduced my pain. Not just a little—allowing the guides to readjust my body while I focused on maintaining a neutral, non-judging awareness of sensation and on tuning in to guidance was taking me right out of the pain state I was stuck in. And once I’d started the process by spending fifteen or twenty minutes concentrating on it fully, it would continue itself with much less of my conscious attention, and the pain would stay away for hours, sometimes through the whole day.

Better yet, I soon began to notice that my pain episodes were decreasing in intensity and frequency. I just had less pain, and when it did come back, I had a tool to help my body let go of it in a lasting way, with no negative side effects—in fact, the only noticeable side effect was that I felt more clear, more centred, and more able to connect with the truth of who I am and live from that.

If you’ve ever experienced widespread chronic pain and tried one useless solution after another, you’ll know what a big deal that is.

reconnecting to heal

 

Because this practice involves conscious invitation and surrender to the guides, and restores connection both between different parts of my physical body and different levels of my experience—from basic physical sensation through emotions and soul identity to that open, sky-like consciousness that is available to all of us… from the being of pure light to the tangled shadows that dwell within all of us—I call it Guided Reconnection. You can read more about the process here [link].

I’m not completely without pain. I still occasionally have migraine-like episodes and sometimes wake up with pain. But I can interrupt these episodes if I have even just a few minutes to practice, to come into the guides’ loving presence and allow myself to reconnect. This always reduces my pain more effectively than any painkiller, and often lifts it completely, turning what would have been a debilitating multi-day flare-up into a few hours of discomfort. And I have far fewer of these episodes to start with. My overall pain levels have decreased by at least 70%.

Sometimes the fact that I still have some pain has tempted me to turn away from offering healing services to others. But the guides won’t let me. They know the purpose of pain is a call to reconnect—with the wholeness of ourselves, our own darkness and light, with others, and with our shared belonging to an inner homeland, to the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible (to borrow a phrase from Charles Eisenstein). Each step that any of us takes toward this inner homeland eases our own pain, eases the pain of the world, and moves us all closer to freedom.

I offer to walk with you and help guide your reconnection with yourself and with the wise presence within that nourishes you, heals you, and calls you home.