Art of Healing
By Valerie Myers, Erie Times-News, Pa.
Aug. 3–CAMBRIDGE SPRINGS — For Leslie Blake, the art of healing isn’t all that different from painting.
Directing paint onto canvas or directing energy in a Reiki session, it’s all about spiritual growth and how her work makes people feel.
“I’ve always loved watching people smile as they carry a painting down the ramp to their cars. Now I watch as they smile at more,” Blake said.
Blake is offering Reiki healing sessions adjacent to her Back Home Studio on New Richmond Road and is putting on a holistic women’s health fair there on Saturday. The 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. event will include Reiki master energy demonstrations and spiritual massages; yoga, Rapid Eye Technology and reflexology demonstrations; vital sign and muscle testing; self-defense demonstrations; and discussions on herbs, organic foods and natural cosmetics.
Much of the “new age” therapy is old hat for Blake, who has studied and practiced alternative healing since her diagnosis with fibromyalgia 15 years ago.
“I’ve always been alternative. Now I’ve come out of the closet, so to speak,” Blake said. “Customers for years have been asking me to share what I’ve learned.”
Suffering from chronic pain so severe that she couldn’t bend her neck and a throat nearly swollen shut from reactions to medication, Blake, now 48, stopped listening to doctors and began reading about alternative medicine when her sister, a herbalist, gave her a book on the healing powers of herbs. Blake took herbs, grew and ate organic foods and began daily yoga, meditation and exercise programs.
“All the doctors did was hand me pills,” Blake said. “I cured myself.”
She sells her own lines of herbal teas, natural cosmetics and organic body butters alongside paintings, gemstone jewelry designed to heal, prayer beads, and woven and crocheted bags and scarves.
“People tell me that my painting has become more spiritual, and that they’re buying it for its spiritual and meditative power,” Blake said. “That describes me as well. I’ve practiced what I preach and slowed down. Now I know I can lighten up in my work and help other people.”
Blake was certified as a Reiki practitioner this summer. Reiki is an Asian method of laying on hands to boost the life energy that practitioners believe flows inside each of us. Blake offers sessions for women only seven days a week.
“Women have been left behind for centuries,” she said. “They’re still the main care-givers for children and the home and parents and do double and triple duty by working besides. It’s incredibly stressful.”
Reiki can relieve that stress and accelerate healing, client Peg Grandin said. The Centerville LPN works at a nursing home, has a family and underwent knee replacement surgery in February.
“The pain is better since I began Reiki. I was taking two Vicodin every four hours, now I’ve taken three in the last four weeks,” Grandin said. “I’ve noticed another change in me — I’m more relaxed, I’m calmer. Before I was so stressed out that if anything happened around the house, I’d snap. Now my husband tells me, ‘You just keep going back there.’” Grandin describes Reiki treatment as relaxing.
“It feels like my whole system is relaxing,” she said. “I’m lying still but it feels like my foot is actually moving.”
Blake’s daughter, clinical psychologist Ashley Howles, describes the sensation as waves of energy moving through the body. “It feels like a deep tissue massage. I can actually feel heat in the bottom of my feet,” she said.
Blake describes similar pulsing sensations as she lays hands on and over what she’s learned are body energy centers.
“I look at my hands, and they’re perfectly still,” she said. “Sometimes my hands feel so hot that I wonder if it’s uncomfortable for the client.”
Blake is adding a Reiki room to her house, and believes she was led to the decision as she was led to alternative medicine.
“We’re living in a small part of this great big, 2,700 square foot home. Now I know why; we have the room to do this,” Blake said. “Putting this house here was evidently part of our path.”
Howles has studied alternative therapy along with her mother and is helping organize Saturday’s health fair. Both women emphasize that “new age” therapies, some of them centuries old, don’t replace traditional medicine.
“What we do complements traditional medicine,” Blake said. “We need to treat body, mind, spirit and soul.”
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