From Reiki to Pranic Healing
From Reiki to Pranic Healing
My journey into energy medicine began with Reiki training in Michigan, where I first felt the profound connection between the unseen energy fields that surround and permeate us. Guided by a naturopath who revealed the importance of energy in holistic health, I embarked on a path that deepened my understanding of the subtle forces shaping our physical and emotional well-being. This calling led me to study Pranic Healing under Dr. Mary Clark in Encinitas, California, where I became a certified Pranic Healer in 2014.
Pranic Healing expanded my ability to perceive, cleanse, and energize the biofields of others, working with prana—the life force that sustains and rejuvenates us. My time teaching Pranic Healing in San Diego was a profound experience,
enabling me to share this empowering modality with countless individuals seeking balance, clarity, and healing.
Pranic Healing
Pranic Healing is a non-touch energy modality that harnesses prana, or vital life energy, to cleanse and energize the body’s energy systems. By addressing energetic imbalances in the aura and chakras, this practice allows the body’s innate ability to heal to flourish. Pranic Healing works on the principles of removing diseased energy and replenishing with fresh prana, making it a powerful complementary approach to physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
My Expertise and Devotion to Your Well-Being
As a certified Pranic Healer and teacher, I am deeply committed to helping clients realign with their natural vitality and inner light. Each session is a co-creative process, honoring your individual needs and unique energetic blueprint. My approach is intuitive
and rooted in integrity, always holding a safe and sacred container for transformation.
Whether you’re navigating physical health challenges, emotional blocks, or seeking greater harmony in your life, I am here to guide you through the powerful tools of Pranic Healing. Together, we’ll create space for your energy systems to flow freely, unlocking profound states of balance, resilience, and self-awareness.
The Power of Energy Medicine
Reiki + Pranic Healing offers so much more than relief from pain or stress—it is a pathway to self-empowerment and wholeness. This practice connects us to the vast intelligence of the universe while grounding us deeply in our own truth. Through the cleansing and energizing techniques I’ve cultivated, I help clients discover their limitless potential for self-healing.
Every session with me is an invitation to release what no longer serves you, replenish your energy reserves, and rediscover the clarity and vitality that are your birthright.
Let’s explore the power of Energy Medicine together—where energy becomes the bridge between where you are now and where you’re meant to be.
For sessions or consultations please click here
Xoxo
Turning the Wound into Wisdom
How Movement, Breath and Sound can Positively Influence Trauma
Trauma
Essentially, everyone we come into contact with is traumatized in some way or another; thankfully people are becoming more aware of trauma and are open to talking about it & how it affects people’s daily lives. Trauma exists on a spectrum and therefore no one’s trauma is better or worse than anyone else’s, because it doesn’t matter what happened- what matters is how your system experienced it. Unprocessed trauma shows up in everyday life by overreacting to small things, feeling numb or disconnected to life, your friends or even your own body; it manifests as chronic tension, self sabotage, perfectionism, trouble with trust, and of course the big two: anxiety and depression. Trauma lays the groundwork for a fractured identity, addiction, self harm, can cause attachment issues, affect development (especially if the trauma happened in childhood,) lead to C-PTSD, the list goes on. If you don’t suffer from these things, I’m sure you know at least 10 people who do, and if you don’t it's because they’re better at hiding it than you are at perceiving it.
Trauma is not only physically stored in our body, it actually changes our brain. Neuroscience shows in a traumatic event the parts of our brain involved in memory formation and time are affected, and as a result perception is distorted. Talk therapy is great (as sometimes our ability to communicate shuts down to trauma) but we know now that isn’t enough because of how it affects the brain AND body. When healing, we have to re-integrate both hemispheres - left (logic analytical) and right (emotional or creative) and we can do this through movement, breath and sound therapy. Walking with arms swinging to create a cross body movement, binaural beats, alternating nostril breathing, chanting and humming, drawing, and dancing can all help integrate the brain and body.
Somatic therapies are necessary for trauma recovery and trauma-informed yoga, breathwork and sound + energy healing can be fantastic when it comes to healing the body and integrating the hemispheres. Yoga helps reconnect the body-mind in a safe way, breathwork calms the nervous system, dancing can discharge trapped energy, and safe consensual touch can heal attachment wounds. Being in nature and meditation can restore a safe connection to your body and visualization can help with trauma healing due to its potential to create new internal experiences and regulate the nervous system. Listening to sound frequencies that oscillate left and right, humming, toning and chanting can all stimulate the vagus nerve.
The Vagus Nerve
Let’s talk about the Vagus (latin for wandering) Nerve for a bit, as it plays a key role in trauma recovery. The vagus nerve is your only cranial nerve that winds all the way down to your lower torso. I like to think of it like a magical thread inside our body. Vagal tone is measured from the health of the Vagus Nerve: high vagal tone means your body can relax quickly after stress, low vagal tone means it can’t. There are 3 options for Vagal tone: Safe (ventral), Activated (sympathetic) and Freeze (Dorsal Vagal.) When we are safe our magic thread (aka Vagus Nerve) glows white, when it is activated it becomes anxious and red, and when it’s in a freeze response it’s slow and frozen, like the color blue.
Increasing Vagal tone matters because it helps you bounce back quicker from stress, it helps you sleep and digest better, you feel more balanced and connected, and lastly your immune system becomes strong. So how do you build vagal tone?
Movement
Yoga Twists
Cold exposure
Massage
Dancing
Breathwork
Deep slow breathing with exhales > inhales
Meditation and mindfulness
Laughter
Sound
Humming
Chanting
Singing
Therapeutic Sound Healing Sessions
Not surprisingly, all the things we can do to build Vagal Tone are all things we can do to regulate our nervous system - which is the foundation for integrating and healing trauma. If you’re reading this and you’re like ‘Jess I’ve had a pretty blessed life,” then I would be delighted for you, however, some of the trauma that we store in our body comes from a pre-verbal time. What do I mean by that? Maybe we were left for 5 minutes as a newborn, because our parents had to run to the bathroom… but 5 minutes to a baby is eternity. As a newborn we can’t be mad (we don’t even know what that is yet) at our parents. But as we age into childhood and pre-teen years we remember the feeling of abandonment, but we still can’t be angry with our primary caregivers because without them means certain death. So as we get older we internalize the abandonment and anger we felt towards them and we feel shame: the core emotion in trauma. These Samskaras (impressions from the past) “leave subtle impressions and unconsciously affect our habits, self perceptions, expectations or disposition.”
Creating a Safe Place Through Movement, Breath + Sound
In the safe space created by practicing yoga, doing breathwork and having crystal bowl meditation sessions or tuning fork therapy we often feel emotions unexpectedly arise to the surface - I have lost count the amount of times I have cried on my yoga mat or in crystal bowl sessions. Yoga, Breathwork + Sound and Vibrational medicine is a sacred invitation to re-establish the safe, connected relationship you have with your body and meet yourself exactly where you are at.
Yoga, breathwork and sound gives an opportunity to rebuild the trust that was broken especially when working with a proficient practitioner. The moment a bad* emotion visits you (like shame or anger) they can gently hold space or even mirror while you process what that emotion is teaching you. With yoga, interoceptive awareness opens up pathways for these Samskaras (secret underlying memories) to be received and processed and released by the mind. With breathwork, we create spaciousness in the nervous system allowing life force to move through and dissolve patterns of tension. With sound healing + vibrational frequencies, we bypass the logic brain and speak directly to the body’s innate intelligence, restoring harmony where dysregulation once took root.
In yoga, we know the hips hide fear, anxiety, sadness, and a lot of sexual trauma; shoulders carry burdens and the weight of the world, and can become rigid when we are unable to let go. The lower back and hamstrings hold guilt, repressed feelings and pain of the past - typically regarding relationships. The knees are joints of ego and pride holding the inability to bend and be flexible. Neck pain is stubbornness and refusing to see the other side of the story. In sound healing we know the feet carry you through life and carry the cadence of your step (is it a trudge or a dance?). The throat is your truth and communication and connecting or bridge to your divinity. Working with the chakras is what helps us understand this world of relationships. Memory can be felt through a pain in the body which can be seen in a chakra and is an indicator to release through movement and intentional breath. Take a breath.
“and i said to my body.
softly.
‘i want to be your friend.’
it took a long breath.
and replied
‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
Remember, healing is not about getting rid of the shadow or “getting over it,” or pretending there is no trauma, or trying to escape our reality. We heal the body by integrating all of our experiences and coming home to it. Loving all parts of ourselves and turning the Wound into Wisdom.
As a trauma-informed yoga teacher, breathwork coach and master sound healing practitioner, holding space for you on your healing journey is a most sacred blessing to me. I would love to help guide you turn your Wounds into Wisdom. Please Contact me and let me know how i can best serve you.
Xoxo
Jess
Subtle Energy Research at the California Institute for Human Science
Sometime in the year of 2013 I worked for a company called Psy-Tek Subtle Energy Laboratory in Encinitas, California that happened to be on the same campus of the California Institute for Human Science (CIHS). I was hired by Psy-Tek because I was a Certified Clinical Thermographer, and Certified Clinical Thermography Trainer, which I had been for years at the time working all over the United States offering safe health scans for women who preferred scans without the harmful affects of radiation.
While at Psy-Tek I became trained to research subtle energy using a variety of different subtle energy measuring devices from all over the world. We tested different products, services, modalities and even people - and their effects on their subjects. Different energy healers like Reiki practitioners, Pranic Healers, Theta healers and Biofield tuners would come in and want to know how effective their technique was. Sometimes we tested products like energy patches or Pulsed Electromagnetic Frequency (PEMF) mats or other various things that had been ‘energetically-altered’ to give the wearer a boost in health so that they would feel more vibrant and lively. Sometimes people would just be curious if a new diet or supplement was working and ask us to do a case study for them. Chiropractors, Acupuncturists and other holistically-minded people would have their patients come in to do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ scan to see the reduction of inflammation or the alignment of chakras.
We used Thermography to assess inflammation; Thermography is really just medical-grade night vision and was given from the military to the medical field because they realized the medical capabilities to assess a person’s inflammation as it relates to their body. We know that inflammation is the beginning of any degenerative disease so this scan has huge indications as far as catching disease early. We used this scan for baseline ‘before’ images to assess if a specific product or modality was able to reduce inflammation.
We used a Russian device called the Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) and its successor called the Biowell and its attachment called the Sputnik. The GDV used Russian Technology called Kirlian Photography along with the Korean Su Jok Hand Acupuncture system. When these two technologies were united they were capable of measuring the health rays emitting from the fingertips, and then interpreting the health rays through the map provided through the Su Jok Hand Acupuncture system. The Sputnik is an attachment to the GDV and is able to map coherence in the environment and therefore assess if coherence is going up or down.
Subtle Energy Researchers: Eileen McKusick, Dr. Shamini Jain, Dr. Richard Hammerschlag, me, Dr. Paul Mills and Tiffany Barsotti M.Th, PhD.
At CIHS they had a Faraday Cage and Biophoton Counter - the Faraday Cafe is a copper shielded room to protect from all microwaves in our environment (think: WiFi). We tested the efficacy of remote healing sessions whereas the practitioner would be in the Faraday Cage sending energy out to clients, and vice versa. The Faraday Cage combined with the Biophoton Counter was how we were able to measure and ‘count’ the number of Biophotons (light emitted by a biological organism) emitted by the practitioner or by the client. What I found most interesting about the Faraday Cage is when I went in it I felt like I was going to pass out (I was around 25 years old at the time) - but when older people (50+) went in it they felt a deep sense of calm. I note our ages because this finding feels important - older people had not grown up with the microwaves that surround us daily, and younger people have - to me it was almost as if the microwaves we are surrounded by are a part of us, so taking them away stripped me of something my body was used to receiving.
When I started my Masters degree in Consciousness at CIHS I started using the Infiniti Biofeedback Software to run experiments for my Master’s Program and did research on the healing modality called KALOS developed by Dr. Valerie Gersch. Kalos blends Chinese medicine, energy healing and applied kinesiology to find and address the root cause of imbalance or illness in the body.
Dr. Gaetan Chevaliar, Dr. Hope Umansky, me, Dr. Juan Acosta
Lastly at CIHS we used a device called the Apparatus for Meridian Identification (AMI) which was able to measure the efficacy and efficiency of energy healing on the body in real-time by assessing how the treatment was affecting the meridians.
Working as a Subtle Energy Researcher at Psy-Tek and CIHS was groundbreaking, heart opening and mind expanding. I was able to research many different modalities such as Reiki, Theta healers, Pranic Healers and Biofield Tuners. I was able to work alongside people curious about their health and wanting to measure the effects of their own personal research / treatments and changes in lifestyle. I helped people learn more about the inflammation in their body. I watched how some modalities were more effective than others and watched these results in real-time.
My background is in the medical field and then because of a sickness caused by the allopathic medical model I switched early on to the alternative / holistic side of medicine. My understanding of anatomy and physiology, combined with my knowledge of ancient traditions like TCM and Ayurveda, with the addition of my subtle energy research background make me extremely well-rounded as a healer which is why many people use my services and keep coming back!
If you’re curious to learn more or would like to make an appointment to talk with me please click here.
Xoxo