Big Shoes, Big Impact

When I was a kid, at least one adult a day would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Some kids have a list of things they want to be. They’ll say a professional sports player or an astronaut.

Not me.

I wanted to be a clown.

I was sure of it too. I had it all figured out. I wanted to travel around with the circus, wear green pants with purple polka dots, and have shoes bigger than my body.

Most adults were surprised by this. Many of them would tell me that being a clown wasn’t a real career and some of them even laughed at my response. Nothing they said could change my mind.

I was going to be a clown.

At 8 years old, I couldn’t be convinced that becoming a clown wouldn’t fulfill all my dreams. I was dead set on that idea until the preacher came by and changed everything.

Once a year he stopped by our house to give us gifts for the holidays. I always got the same gift from him, a box of soft peppermint sticks and a silver dollar. Every year, he asked me the question that kids get most often.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked, as he shifted in the chair.

“A clown,” I replied, shoving a peppermint stick in my mouth.

He chuckled and leaned over the arm of the chair, “You’ve told me that every year for four years, seems like you’re sure about it.”

I stared him in the eye, “I am going to be a clown.”

He sat back in the chair with a smirk on his face. “Ok then, why do you want to be a clown?”

My brain broke. No one had ever asked me why I wanted to be a clown. I had never thought about the reason but I also immediately knew why.

“I can help people because laughter is the best medicine.”

“So you just want to help people? You could be a nurse instead.”

I didn't want to be a nurse right after that, but something about what he said stuck with me.

He hadn’t convinced me that being a clown wasn’t the right choice but he wouldn’t be the only person who would tell me I should be something more practical. Throughout my life, everyone preached the importance of a college degree. It was supposed to afford you a well-paying job, with good benefits.

They all told me I could be anything I wanted to be but I quickly learned that was only true if what I wanted to be fit into the mold of what they thought was worthwhile.

By the time I was sitting in the library of my high school tasked by the guidance counselor to choose my career path, I wasn’t even thinking about being a clown. I was only thinking about doing something that could help people, be respected, and make a lot of money.

I thought choosing healthcare checked all of my boxes. I was certain that it would be the best career to help me make the impact I wanted to make. At the time, I had no idea how wrong I was.

After passing my exams, I immediately got a job doing patient care. When the 2008 crisis hit and all my peers were looking for jobs, I was pleased I had decided to work in healthcare. I was being recruited by companies from other states while my friends were scraping by and unable to find work.

I was filled with gratitude for the abundance of opportunities, but I couldn’t help but also feel a bit down. I had worked my way up the ladder and with that came insight.

Helping people was rarely the focus.

I mean sure, it was on the mission statements, but it didn’t seem like it was true. It seemed there was always some red tape or some policy that prevented us from caring for the patient in the way that suited them best.

Patients were forced to go without care because of insurance. Hospital staff stereotyped patients and as a result, patient care suffered. Nurses were underpaid and overworked. Doctors were taught to listen to a book and not their patients. Staff (and physician) education came from marketing reps for drug companies. Appointments were booked so close together that patients felt rushed out and didn’t have time to get their questions answered.

The focus was always the dollar, the bottom line, the profit margins.

I began to seek out other ways to work in healthcare without subjecting myself to the restrictions that I found so damaging. This led me to become a behind-the-scenes worker. I investigated and audited. I fixed systems and policies in companies across the USA.

I’ve worked at high-level positions in home health care, assisted living, long-term care, short-term rehabilitation, hospitals, blood banking, and pharmacy.

Each of the places I worked at hired me to find the problems and implement the solutions. I uncovered a plethora of problems that stretched across the whole of healthcare but none was more shocking than the realization that made me leave the industry for good.

The healthcare industry isn’t about helping people.

It’s a money-making machine that churns out medications and advice that’s been written (and lobbied for) by companies that stand to make money off of those same medications and advice. Take the advice doctors give about food consumption, for example, in America, those guidelines are lobbied for by companies who sell the foods.

It’s not the fault of the doctors or the healthcare workers. I truly believe that they all chose that field for the same reason I did, to help people. Most of them still believe they are.

I know that I would have gone on thinking that too had it not been for climbing the ranks and seeing what goes on by the scenes.

Of course, the impact of healthcare isn’t all bad.

People who wouldn’t be alive today are still breathing because of life-saving technological advancements in the healthcare industry. However, the kind of treatment you receive and the likelihood your life will be saved changes based on what you look like, what insurance you have, and what economic class you are deemed to be in by the staff.

I’d like to say that didn’t happen and that everyone who needed it received care, but it’s just simply not true. Women’s health complaints have long been written off or downplayed. Women who aren’t white often don’t even get their complaints heard. Indigenous and black women still die during childbirth at extremely high rates because some of the original (and still taught) medical texts suggest they feel pain differently than white people.

Healthcare workers discriminate against families with state-funded health insurance. Doctors also spend less time with those patients because they don’t get paid as much as they do when they bill other types of insurance. Even worse is the hundreds of thousands of cases where providers complete unnecessary treatments that pay well so they can make it worth their time.

These kinds of practices were commonplace in all of the companies I worked for. It was talked about openly at every board meeting table I sat at. Profit was the goal. As long as the bottom line kept increasing, it didn’t matter if patient care suffered.

After several years, it became abundantly clear that the healthcare industry was just another system that worked to uphold supremacy and classism. I hated it but it seemed like a necessary evil for a long time.

Eventually, I quit my last healthcare job and started a business doing something completely different. I was doing what I loved so I thought that would be the end of it, but I still had the drive to help people. I tried to see my new career through a different lens. I twisted the reality of it to try to make it fit, but it wasn’t helping people in the way I knew I needed to.

I wanted to make a big impact, to help people feel and be better.

Time passed and I started to feel more down. I didn’t know what to do. I had a successful business that wasn’t making me happy. I knew I needed to help people but I thought working in healthcare was the only way.

It wasn’t until I got extremely sick and the healthcare system failed me miserably that I found an alternative.

As I dug deep into the causes of the symptoms that suddenly plagued me, I came across Ayurveda. I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I read everything I could get my hands on about it and the one thing that it kept coming back to was energy.

According to the teachings of Ayurveda, energy was everything. Energy imbalances were responsible for all symptoms, both mental and physical. Balancing the energy was the solution to healing the ailments.

At first, I was dubious. I had spent years learning the ins and outs of the human body and couldn’t fathom that it could be that simple. I also knew enough about quantum physics to know that it was probably true. I decided I would find out.

When I study something, I really study it. I get into the weeds and immerse myself in it. I try it out myself, I evaluate it, I try it out a different way. I really give it a chance.

I did that with energy work.

What I found was miraculous. Healing was easier and it progressed at a steady pace. I didn’t have to force it or try to make it happen. Moving energy facilitated the healing process.

One day, during meditation, something happened.

Sitting on the grass, tears fell down my face. I hadn’t been able to know myself in this way before. It was intimate. It felt both comforting and frightening. I felt in touch with the Universe in a way I had never felt before.

My hands were tingling and hot. I pressed them against the ground to cool. Feeling the energy exchange between myself and the Earth felt like a big hug. I knew that everyone needed to feel this love.

The leaves fell and the snow came while I mastered the basics of energy work.

I noticed significant changes in my health and overall well-being. My anxiety was nearly gone and what was there I found easy to manage. The symptoms from my complex PTSD were subsiding. I felt like I knew who I was for the first time in my life.

That led med to also knowing how I was meant to make my impact in this world. I'll never forget the moment that knowing came.

Sitting in front of a space heater to keep warm, I took deep breaths to begin my practice. It was before dawn, my favorite time to channel energy. Dead of winter, the temperatures were hovering just above zero, and I was shivering.

I felt heat wash over me. It was like I was sitting in hot sand on the hottest day of the year. My shivering stopped and I felt a balance fill my aura. I had grown accustomed to this calm and balanced state. I had learned how to bring myself back to it in just a few minutes. Sitting with the awareness that I was in control of my experience, something in the back of my mind told me my path.

Experiencing the healing and seeing that I could do it to myself made me feel empowered. I wanted to share that with others. I wanted to help them learn they could help themselves heal.

That day, while everything around me remained frozen, the heat of the fire inside me spoke. It told me to become a Reiki Master.

It took some time, but I found a mentor I resonated with and began my studies. I learned to access energy, move energy, channel energy, and most importantly, how to help other people heal themselves. I spent months practicing my skills and during those months, who I truly am emerged.

I found myself hidden under all of that stuck energy I moved out and I couldn’t wait to teach other people to do it too.

In the wee hours of the morning, while the next winter's snow fell outside, my mentor began my attunement. Afterwards, she told me that she kept getting this one-word message. She said it wasn’t clear at first but the longer we were connected, the more clearly she could hear the word, “purpose.”

I believe it’s true.

Energy healing allows me to truly fulfill my purpose of helping people. It enables me to give them the gifts that the healthcare industry wouldn’t. I can give them a solution that they are in control of. I can help them find the healer inside themselves.

When I left healthcare, I had no idea that I would return to helping people heal but I’ve never been so grateful that’s how it turned out. Healing is really about coming home to who we are at our core and now I can teach people how to do that without the system that often harms or traumatizes them.

Nothing makes me happier than being able to make an impact in someone’s life and in turn this world. That’s the true impact I wanted to make all along. I wanted to help change the world - and I am. We all are.

As each of us does the work to heal ourselves, we heal humanity as a whole.

My role in that is to help people learn to transmute and balance energy. I inspire them to do that by teaching them that play and laughter are the best medicines.

Maybe there’s still a clown in there after all.

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