Today, Mystic Mag‘s Marko Velimirovic had the opportunity to interview JoAnne Dodgson, Energy Healer who kindly agreed to share some information about her career, healing sessions, and what is her favorite part of her job.
When did you first know that being a healer was your calling and how did it come about?
My callings as a healer are filled with passions for personal and collective transformation and change. These passions have guided me along the paths of my inner healing and becoming a healing arts practitioner.
After college, I was a teacher with adolescents in public schools and residential treatment centers. It was so evident the teenagers were facing significant challenges in school, at home, and in their communities. I came to see, in my youthful exuberance to change the world, that the most beneficial thing I shared was genuinely caring for the students, being attentive to their well-being beyond academics, and believing in them as capable and deserving-of-love human beings.
I soon made a shift to pursue my doctorate in Counseling Psychology, following my desires to be more directly engaged with people and their healing process. When entering graduate school, I was hired as the director of a women’s shelter program. As I listened to women’s stories, I became witness to the effects of trauma in their lives, in their relationships, in their bodies, minds, spirits, and hearts.
I felt compelled to learn more about how to tend to the wounding and facilitate healing. I felt called to be involved in ending the violence and harm in our world. Providing therapeutic services for personal healing, and developing community response networks and social change programs, became the great passions in my professional life.
About twenty-five years ago, following my spiritual searching and a deep longing for something I didn’t really have words for, I began my deep dive into a ceremonial lineage. Ka Ta See is a traditional way of life brought to this country by elders from the Eastern Andes Mountains. After a lifetime of exploring various spiritual traditions and practices, I knew I’d finally come home.
My healing arts practice is centered in these ancient ceremonial healing ways. I’ve come to understand healing as a remembering of who we really are, of our purposes, passions and potentials, of our capacities to relate with equity and balance, and to live centered in our hearts.
As we reweave our inner worlds, reclaim our wholeness, and embody our genuine humanness, we naturally contribute to collective change, to the weaving of a thriving and diverse web of life, to creating a loving, peaceful, harmonious world.
What services do you offer?
- Throwing of the Bones Ceremony
- Energy Healing and Balancing
- Spiritual Counsel
- Apprenticeships
- Online classes
- Medicine stories in articles and books
What exactly is Ceremonial Healing?
My life and work are centered in a ceremonial lineage. My offerings involve the sharing of ancient ceremonial processes rooted in the understanding that healing takes place holistically, on many levels.
Ceremony is sacred space filled with unconditional love, acceptance, respect, and attentiveness to the physical and spirit realms. Ceremony holds spaciousness for boundless potentials, welcoming the mystery and magic.
Ceremonies can be woven into daily life so people are empowered in their healing. Ceremony offers ways for people to cultivate well-being, to feel their connectedness and belonging, to let go of addictive and disempowering patterns, and receive vast, enriching sources of guidance and support.
What can a person expect from your healing sessions?
I meet people where they are in their life paths and transitions. I want to learn more about what each person is seeking. Together, step by step, we will find and create the pathways for healing that are beneficial, restorative, and empowering.
In the heart of it all is guiding people to the remembering of their Song, their unique and genuine self, and to claiming their birthright to be who they really are.
There is spaciousness for grieving losses and for letting go of what is ready to be released.
I offer processes for healing trauma, for weaving wholeness and belonging, and awakening freedom, joy, love, and balance in relationships in everyday life.
What is the most important detail in maintaining a relationship of mutual trust with clients?
Trust is cultivated through experiences that take place over time. Many of us are carrying the effects of wounding that have occurred within our relationships. Opening to the possibility of trusting someone, exploring what trust even feels like, learning how trust may be experienced and expressed – this is a co-creation, unique in each relationship, a profound and sacred unfolding.
I’m deeply honored when someone entrusts me with their stories, when I’m welcomed into someone’s life as a companion and guide in their healing.
What do you love most about your profession?
I love being with people as they remember who they are, as they let go of what no longer needs to be carried, and begin to live more lovingly, creatively, passionately, peacefully and empowered.
I love being with people as they awaken and deepen their relationships with our earth, with spirit realms, with ancestors and ancestral knowledge, with the natural rhythms and cycles of life.
