My Journey as Healer: What the Calling Is Really All About

By Cyndi Dale

As a little girl, I had a single goal: I wanted to grow up to be Mary Poppins. I couldn’t think of anything better than to fly into others’ lives with a kit bag of potions to make the “medicine go down” better.

In a way, I’ve achieved at least the spirit of that dream. Well, I can’t fly and I don’t have a talking umbrella. And the magic? I’ve found that it’s actually much more mundane than miraculous, but it’s the basis of a calling that many in The Shift Network community share.

I’ve worked with over 70,000 students and clients over the years, but I didn’t first set onto my life path to be a healer. I was much more self-oriented than that. I simply wanted to figure myself out.

As a child, I could hear ghosts. I felt others’ feelings in my own body. I could see colors around others, and figured out what they meant. If my mom was red, I knew she was angry. If my dad was a bright yellow, he was happy. A dull yellow? Oh dear.

I thought I was normal. Go figure! My family just thought I was daydreaming. During my teen years, I was apt to agree with them. What teenager wants to be strange? The more I doubted my intuition, the more unhappy I became. It wasn’t until I saw a therapist at age 20 that I had a label for my “daydreaming.”

“Maybe you’re not only (fill in the blanks: codependent, obsessive-compulsive, etc.), but you’re also psychic,” said my counselor.

A label! I had a term for the voices I heard in the night and the snapshots that flooded my mind’s eye. What could I discover about this way of being?

I was fortunate enough to fall into a class about chakras and healing. I heard about the group word-of-mouth. At that time, ideas like “chakras” and “psychism” were pretty much a one-way ticket to Crazy Town. We met secretly in the basement of a Bed and Breakfast, and I gained more definitions to fill in my personality blanks. There’s nothing like explanations to lower your sense of oddity.

Several odysseys to Iceland revealed to Cyndi the ability of land to teach and heal. More than half of Icelanders believe in invisible elves, but Cyndi found the natural rocks, glaciers, and greenery of Iceland to speak every more clearly. She'd only have to touch a part of the land to intuitively sense its history and the energies it could provide for transformation.

I was also lucky in that I traveled a great deal with my husband of the time to cultures around the world. Within luscious jungles and dry deserts, high mountaintops and winding cities, I met Indigenous healers and shamans. I eventually undertook these journeys on my own, to include places like the cold glaciers of Iceland. What a concept. The gifts of healing were to be respected, not hidden away.

Emboldened by my foreign experiences, I decided to become an intuitive and a healer. Well, actually, a voice said, “Be a healer,” and I obeyed. Looking back, I have to admit that I glamorized the undertaking. I’d finally be extraordinary — like Mary Poppins!

Ah, but the magic of being a healer doesn’t lie in the extraordinary. It starts and stops with the ordinary.

I was clued into that actuality years ago, when studying with a shaman in the Amazonian basin. We’d conduct ceremony at midnight in the dark, searching for the spirit of all-things. A bit egotistically, I was hoping that these journeys would activate my superpowers. How much I could help people then, right?

We wore white clothes. Most of us associate white with purity, so I assumed our garb was ceremonial. Little did I expect the real reason for our ritual color.

Over several journeys to Morocco, Cyndi soaked up ancient wisdom from Berber healers. At one point, she met with a Berber shaman in the middle of the Sahara, who showed her the various ways he listened to the wind and drew mosaic-like shapes over his patients to bring about healing. Yet another revealed the use of charms to cure disease, while his wife showed the herbs she employed to help with the great and small. And always, there were camels to ride and desert campsites to sleep in.

“It’s easier to find you if you wander off in the dark,” laughed the shaman one day.

I became suspicious. Perhaps that act of being a healer wasn’t quite as overly mystical as I hoped.

So, I asked:

“Why are you a healer?”

His answer came quickly.

“Because of the village,” he shared. “I help the villagers to help themselves, so the village can become stronger.” He added, “A sound village makes every villager better.”

When I think upon it, I realize that my most effective interactions as a healer haven’t been filled with displays of fanfare or fireworks.

There was the mother married to an abusive husband. She longed to leave, especially for the sake of their son. However, she didn’t believe she was a good enough person to leave him, because she smoked. Neither did her priest sanction a divorce.

How did I assist her? I shared the message that popped into my mind.

“Next time you smoke, sit on the front steps outside, and light a cigarette for yourself and one for God, too,” I stated. “Then ask God what he thinks about you remaining in a harmful marriage.”

She returned a few months later, having started on a new life. She’d also been granted full custody of her son.

For yet another client, I simply listened to all the reasons that she was scared to call her sister. They hadn’t talked in 20 years, but my client kept getting dreams that something was wrong. I saw an intuitive image of her sister in a hospital room. Thus supported, my client called her sister’s family, and discovered that her sister was quite ill. They were able to make peace before the sister died.

The mother’s fresh lease on life; my client’s healing of long-held heart pain. None of these outcomes would necessarily qualify as “miracles.” But they are loving. They are good. They created more wholeness instead of additional brokenness. I believe they would qualify under my Peruvian’s shaman’s definition of a healer’s job.

And I also think Mary Poppins would approve.
 

Cyndi Dale is an internationally renowned author, speaker, intuitive healer, and business consultant. Her groundbreaking books on chakras and intuition include The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy; Energy Healing for Trauma, Stress & Chronic Illnesses; Energy Wellness for Your Pets; Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Chakras; Awaken Clairvoyance; and Energetic Boundaries: How to Stay Protected and Connected in Work, Love, and Life.

Cyndi, who's been a natural intuitive since she was young, offers these gifts to clients and groups seeking to make real and positive change. Her passion includes helping people open their “essential energy” — the powers and perspectives unique to them. She works with thousands of individuals a year, in the United States and internationally. She believes that once an individual understands their own essence, they can tap into the energies of, and beyond, the world, joining a community of like-minded people who want to better themselves and others.

Cyndi has presented seminars and workshops in Russia, England, Wales, Amsterdam, Iceland, and Scotland, and has led groups across South and Central America and into Africa. Her training encompasses shamanism and healing, and has taken her to the Peruvian, Belizean, Hawaiian, and Costa Rican jungles, the Moroccan sands, the Venezuelan savannahs, and the glaciers of Iceland. Her two favorite workshops to lead are her Apprenticeship Program, a 9-month exploration of intuitive and healing powers; and The Subtle Body Certificate Program, led through Normandale College. She seeks to unify the world’s most vital spiritual messages, encouraging understanding and community among all peoples.

Cyndi works with clients and groups on a daily basis, serving as an intuitive coach and energy healer. Clients are commonly referred by professionals, including psychiatrists, medical doctors, and therapists. She continues to hone her ability to help people discover their essential selves so they can make healthy and positive changes in their lives.