Juanita Lepage MSW, RSW, BHP

Counselling & Energy Healing (289) 812-8089 Hamilton & Burlington

Energy Healing Articles

New Hamilton Location

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It is always bittersweet to change locations. I have enjoyed my time at 16McMurray street in Dundas, and I will especially miss the fish tank and the Dundas locale. That being said, I am excited to share my new location as of June 17 at 430 York Blvd in Hamilton at the Hamilton Centre for Personal Development. It is a beautiful space that I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

I will be keeping my Thursday Burlington location for now.

The new space is located at the corner of Locke street and York Blvd in Hamilton. The parking entrance is off of Locke Street, and there is free street parking too.  It has easy access to the 403, being just minutes away.

The building is shared with De La Sol Yoga Studio, Studio Zee Pilates, and so much more. My entrance is located on the York Blvd side. Just go up the one set of stairs and I’m there. If you need wheelchair accessibility, please let me know and I will share the details.

I will continue to be available Mondays and Wednesdays. See the link for hours and details.

Hamilton Centre for Personal Development Open House

If you want to see the new space or anything else that is offered in the building, there will be an open house on June 14 from 6-9pm called the Night of Light.

Heal: The Body’s Capacity To Heal Itself

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It’s always so exciting when scientific research deepens and enters into new horizons. Kelly Noonan Gores created a thought-provoking documentary, Heal that highlights research that shows that our bodies have the capacity to heal from life-threatening prognosis. She weaves in stories of her own journey and other women and men she has met who are either starting their healing journey or have healed from their disease. It is now available on Netflix.

Research is showing that our bodies have the capacity to heal from any diagnoses. She interviews Kelly Turner, Ph.D. (author of Radical remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds) who has found 9 things that people have in common in situations where they have healed from life-threatening prognosis.

9 Things That Research Has Shown Are Connected To Healing

  1. Radically Changing Your Diet
  2. Taking Control of Your Health
  3. Following Your Intuition
  4. Using Herbs and Supplements
  5. Releasing Suppressed Emotions
  6. Increasing Positive Emotions
  7. Embracing Social Support
  8. Deepening Your Spiritual Connection
  9. Have a Strong Reason for Living

Kelly notes that only 2 of these items are physically related – #1 Radically Changing Your Diet and # 4 Using Herbs and Supplements. Ongoing research is being done to look into tangible steps for the emotional and spiritually related items.

The movie also explores how some people heal, and some people do not and how painful this can be when a person has invested time, money, energy, and spirit into their healing journey. Often times individuals can either judge themselves, or feel the judgment of others (if they are members of the complementary health community). The journey towards healing or acceptance of an illness is a very personal one to be met with curiosity and compassion. For more of my contemplations on this read my blog post
How Energy Healing Helps Heal Physical Illness.

I liked how this movie also pointed out the importance of working together with the medical community. As a person who has worked in a hospital, and who also has children who have the hospital staff to thank for both life-saving care and healing for minor injuries, I know from first-hand experience that both medical and complementary health care have their place. You can read more about the importance of both in the highlighted blog post above.

Even if you don’t have an illness, one can see how incorporating any of these 9 Things in our lives would be beneficial to our health. Which of the 9 Things are you already incorporating into your life? Or have you found one to be especially helpful for you?

A Simple Guide On How To Use Sound Healing To Improve Our Health

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For my birthday this year, I asked my husband for a crystal singing bowl.  You can see me playing it in the photo above.  More and more research has been showing the physical and emotional benefits of healing through sound. Benefits can include reduction in stress, better focus, reduction in pain, and so much more.  We can experience the benefits in an indirect way when we attend church or a concert or we can seek out specific types of sound to accelerate healing in targeted areas of our life with a sound healing practitioner.

I hope this article helps you reflect on where sound has been healing for you in your life and gives you ideas to explore sound healing in a deeper way.

Sound Healing With A Group

When I was a kid, I went to church twice every Sunday.  A lot of my experience at church was boring as a child. There was always a congregational prayer listed as an item on the agenda for the service. Before I knew what the word congregational meant, I thought it meant long and boring. As an adult of course I can appreciate that it was a prayer for individuals in our congregation, but as I kid I did not.  So where am I going with this? What I want to highlight is that amidst the boring parts, the thing I loved the most about church was the music and singing. My favourite memory was every Christmas when the congregation sang the song Glory to God with the organ and the piano.  It always moved me to tears when I heard the passion and heart from a group of 200 people.  The congregation sang it in English or in Dutch.  Here is one version below.

Singing with a large group of people can be a very healing experience for both adults and children, especially with a song that everyone loves.  If I were to guess, I would hypothesize that when we sing a song with a large group, our chakras open and our connection strengthens to eachother, the divine, and the earth. Just think of a concert you went to and the feelings evoked as thousands of people sang the lyrics to a song. The first concerts that come to mind for me are with Sarah McLachlan singing Your love is better than Chocolate or the band Radiohead singing Karma Police. I have never seen Coldplay live, but I think it would be a lot of fun to do so. Here’s their hit Paradise at a concert in Paris.

Sound Healing At Home

Beyond listening to great music in our homes, there are things we can listen to in an intentional way to improve mood, decrease stress, decrease pain and vibrationally lift us up as we heal emotional wounds.  Have you ever been in a room and even though no one is in there, you can just feel ickiness or an unfinished argument in the air? Sound can be used to clear a space.

Binaural Beats

Binaural Beats are when two slightly different frequencies of sound are played into each ear creating another sound in your brain. So you put on your earbuds and a different frequency is sent to each ear.  Research has been showing it can improve anxiety, balance mood, decrease pain and more. Here’s an article that includes the science behind binaural beats and 9 different ways they have been helpful for people.

Where Can I Find Binaural Beats?

It’s easy to listen to binaural beats for free.  Simply go to Youtube and search for it and you will find a plethora of options.  Spotify also has binaural beats available in its catalogue and I’m guessing Apple Music would have it too.

Acoustic Brain Research

Tom Kenyon is a psychotherapist and healer (among many other things) who has scientifically studied the impact of sound on healing. Over the years he was a psychotherapist he’d start to encompass sound into some of his sessions.  He started to study the healing benefits of sound. Here is a post to learn more about science of sound healing in general.  Similar to binaural beats, research is showing benefits of reduction of stress, improving relaxation and focus and so much more.

Where Can I Find Tom Kenyon’s Music

You can either get a cd or download his music from Tom Kenyon’s store.

Dreamtime Medicine

I was lucky to meet Callie Whitworth at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.  Every year our school had an evening of artistic performances. Callie always sang, and I wasn’t the only one wowed during our last year when she found something deep inside her and went to where her music wanted to take her.  I’ve tried playing binaural beats & Tom Kenyon’s music to my kids and by far their favourite is Callie’s voice.

Where Can I Find Callie Whitworth’s Music

To listen to a sample of Callie’s music or buy her cd Vibrations in the Wind, you can visit her website Dreamtime Medicine.

Sound Healing Sessions With A Practitioner

Once you’ve started to explore sound healing, it can be a wonderful experience to see a practitioner who devotes an hour to personalize sound healing to your needs.  Once you open this box, you will find that there any many different types of sound healers available in your geographic area.  Here’s a few to get you started.

Toronto

Lianne Graham

Located on Bloor Street West, my friend Lianne has expanded her Reiki practice to include sessions that include the use of tuning forks.  Different tuning forks are used at different points and chakras on the body. Tuning forks combined with Reiki? Sign me up. You can find her at LianneGraham.com.

Texas

Dreamtime Medicine

So Texas is large, but if you’re close to San Antonio, you can find Callie Whitworth and her beautiful studio.  Callie combines Brennan Energy Healing with the sound of her voice. I was lucky enough to receive a session this past spring that left me wishing I lived closer.  You can find her at DreamtimeMedicine.com.

Ireland

John Reilly

For my European friends, if you want an option that’s closer to you, I’d encourage you to try a sound healing with my friend John Reilly in Dublin, Ireland. John is also a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.  He always brought his set of Tibetan singing bowls to each week in Florida and gave sound healings to individuals and groups.  He places the bowls at different points and chakras on the body to create an incredibly healing experience. You can find out more about John at OpenSourceHealer.com.

Hamilton

Yoga & Sound Healing at De La Sol Yoga Studios

If you practice yoga, an easy way to experience the benefits of sound can be a session at De La Sol Yoga Studios in Hamilton. Peter Monos leads the group in a gentle Yin Yoga while playing his Tibetan Singing Bowls. I always leave each session feeling both relaxed and re-energized. You can find out the class schedule at De La Sol Yoga Studios.

Sound & Spirituality

Sound can also be used to help us on our spiritual journey using the methods above or in many other ways.  In my next blog post I will share about some of my experiences with sound & spirituality from journeying to Nepal to experiencing a group event with Tom Kenyon this past October.

What types of experience with sound healing have been healing for you? I’d love to hear about what you enjoy the most.

 

 

To Meditate Or Not To Meditate: Easy Ways To Get Started Or Restarted

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I have been an on again-off again meditator for years.  I have always envied those individuals that have made meditation a regular habit in their lives.  When I met my husband, he would meditate daily for 30-minutes to an hour every morning and evening. He would invite me to join him, but at the time I thought it looked pretty boring to sit silently for that long. He too goes through periods of meditating and not meditating.

Over the years I would read about people such as Ram Dass, Yogananda, or Michael Singer who had mystical and transformative experiences meditating, and I thought, “Well of course if you’re having that type of “wow/life-changing” experience, you would continue to meditate”. Or I would think, “Of course if you’ve chosen the spiritual vocation as your life path, these transformative experiences would happen”. And then at the same time I would read about stories of people who meditated for years and never had that “wow” experience while meditating.

So, if I can’t get a Guarantee of that “Wow Factor”, Why Meditate?

So, without having the “wow” factor goal in mind, I wondered why meditation would be so highly recommended for individuals.

  1. Physical, mental, and emotional benefits

Calmness, focus, centeredness, happiness, better health, and self-love are all benefits of meditation.  It seems that as each year goes by, more and more research demonstrates the healing benefits of mindfulness[1]  or meditation for more and more things. Pain, mental illness, stress, and burnout is just a few of the things it can help with.  Just google “research meditation” or “research mindfulness” and you’ll notice a plethora of information at your fingertips.

When I taught Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to teens and adults, mindfulness was a key component to this therapy. The main benefit of mindfulness in DBT is to help a person pause and connect with their thoughts & emotions and how they are using this information to interact with the world. Many other types of psychotherapy involving mindfulness have been created too, with the most famous probably being Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) created by Jon-Kabat Zinn. In other psychotherapies, the word mindfulness is never mentioned, but it is used in practice to help a person connect to their emotions and bring awareness to thoughts.

  1. Spiritual benefits

If you’re on a spiritual path, meditation seems a key part in going deeper into one’s spiritual journey whether it be with a religion or a more general spiritual path.  Meditation allows a person to connect beyond themselves to something on a much grander scale – God, the universe, specific religious individuals such as Jesus or Buddha, and more.

Where Do I Start (or restart)?

 

Books

  1. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are, was one of the books that inspired me to start meditation. It’s an easy read with short chapters. This book is especially helpful if you’re interested in the Physical, Mental, & Emotional benefits. If you’re a person who is interested in being mindful but doesn’t want to sit quietly in meditation, this book provides many other options.  You can do anything mindfully. Really.
  2. Want a book that also captures the spiritual benefits? Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul  is succinct and you can tell from the depth and simplicity of this book that he is a seasoned meditator.

YouTube Meditations

There are a lot of guided meditations available on YouTube, it can be a matter of trying a few to find your favourites.

  1. Tara Brach is my favourite person to listen to for a guided meditation. I love her voice and her variety of meditations. You can find many selections on her website or on YouTube.

Apps

There are many apps related to mindfulness and meditation. After not meditating for many months, I tried the 14-day trial with Headspace.  This was a great way to hear if I liked the person’s voice for guided meditation and try out some of their meditations.  When flying on Air Canada earlier this year I found some of their meditations available on the online entertainment system.

After the 14-day trial I decided to buy a subscription for a year (They offer a great discount after you’ve completed the trial).  I really appreciate the options to have a 1 minute or a 30-minute meditation.  Also my screen can be dark and it can keep playing (unlike YouTube). Some days I’m happy if I meditated for 1 minute. Other days I want to meditate for a longer time.  They also have great packages for different topics such as sleep, restlessness, worry and more.

Summary

If you notice in your life that it feels busy, even a few minutes of meditation a day can provide benefits of restoration and calm.  Often between sessions with clients a take a few minutes to connect to myself and shift my energy from the past client to the next one.

I don’t use the word mindfulness in most of my sessions, but often I’m helping clients to connect with themselves in a deeper way to find the solutions that they seek. Many of us like to spend time in our minds, and while we would benefit from connecting with our bodies or our emotions, we are often not practiced at doing so. We are often on the move.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something to inspire you to start or restart your journey with meditation!

 

[1] Meditation is a form of mindfulness. There are many ways to be mindful without meditating, but meditation is a popular method of mindfulness.

3 Books To Explore Real Magic

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A few years ago one of my sons awoke after having a nightmare that I was drowning.  I comforted him that I was indeed okay.  His shouts had awoken me from my own dream where a giant wave had covered me and I was floating underwater.  You can imagine my surprise that my son was having the same dream as I was, but a different experience of the dream – almost like he was on the shore watching. I did not experience my dream of being underwater as fearful because I knew I wasn’t drowning in my dream.

So is that experience coincidence? Or how is it possible that we could have the same dream at the same time?

I think everyone has a story about something that has happened to them that is unexplainable by the boundaries of science.  It’s not to say that science couldn’t explain these things in the future, but currently there are many limitations in what can be measured and validated.

3 great books that explore mystical or magical experiences more in depth are Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, Real Magic by Dean Radfield, and The Power of Eight by Lynne McTaggart.

Men Who Stare at Goats

This book is written by a journalist who meets some interesting characters who have worked for the U.S. government to study if “magical” methods can be used in the armed forces.  There is a movie loosely based on the book with George Clooney & Ewan McGregor.  Individuals were taught the skill of remote viewing in which they go into a meditative state to gather sensitive information from other countries or armies. Both the book and the movie do a good job of letting the reader/viewer decide what they want to interpret as truth or fiction.

Real Magic

Dean Radin recently outed himself as scientist who studies magic.  In actuality he has studied magic for decades, but used to call it the studying of psi or parapsychological phenomenon. In reality, magic could be anything that happens in our world that cannot be explained by science.  He gives many illustrations of documented experiences, his own experience with intention & synchronicity, and of course science to explain some of this phenomena.

If you’re more of a science-minded person, this a great book because he explores the stigma of studying paranormal phenonmena in the realm of science.  He explores scientists firmly-rooted fears and experiences of losing credibility when they share scientific research that states the opposite of what they’ve been taught as true.  Science can become dogmatic, and Dean shares his own experience of being in the situation where scientists reject facts because it doesn’t fit with their personal beliefs.

Dean’s list of evidence-based articles

The Power of Eight

Lynne McTaggart is a journalist who is an expert on the research of the “science of spirituality”.  She is best known for her book The Field.  Her newest book, The Power of Eight, chronicles the science of what happens when a group of people focus their intention on healing a person.  She is hard-wired for scientific explanations, yet finds herself experiencing miracles in her workshops when small groups of 8 focus their intention on healing a person.  She documents her journey and her more empirical work starting out with plants and then working more broadly.  If you belong to a prayer group, this all may come as no surprise to you, and for the non-spiritual person this will give some credibility to this practice.

What kind of experiences have you had that you’ve brushed off as coincidence or maybe have had others brush off as nonsense?  Once you open the door to exploring these elements of life, it’s likely that your lens of the world will start to shift dramatically.

Want some free online resources about the science of energy healing?  Check out my other blog post, Must-read sites about the science of energy healing (that are free too).

Introducing Energy Healing At Home

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After a few months of simmering with this idea, I finally got creative and made a few videos for those interested in learning a few methods of energy healing to do at home.

If your energy field is healthy and strong, this positively impacts your physical, emotional, & spiritual well-being too.

In each video I explain the benefits of each exercise and give you a video demonstration of how to do them.  They are easy exercises to add to the start of your day or at a moment when you need to connect with yourself and centre.

Go to www.JuanitaLepage.com and sign-up to learn more.