Maggie Kelly is a meditation teacher, life coach, and energy healer dedicated to helping others navigate their personal transformation. As the founder of Satsang House Meditation and Spiritual Center, she integrates wisdom from spiritual mentors like Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and Dr. Joe Dispenza with her training in contemplative psychotherapy and shamanic energy healing.
In this interview for Mystic Mag, Maggie shares her journey—from discovering meditation as a way to cope with her child’s illness to studying with Incan Shamans in the Andes—and offers insights on balancing the mind, body, and spirit for true healing.
What inspired you to establish Satsang House, and how does it reflect your personal healing journey?
I opened Satsang House in 2016 as a direct manifestation and representation of my cumulative transformational experiences up to that point.
My youngest was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a chronic, progressive, life-shortening and incurable disease. The news was certainly not something any parent expects. I felt like I had been hit over the head by one of Grandma’s iron skillets. During her first three years of life with the hospitalizations, tube feedings, daily lung treatments, clinic visits and countless hours over the phone dealing with insurance companies and pharmacies, I saw my life spiral completely out of control. I knew I had to do something very different to regain some semblance of stability and be able to better cope with what was to come.
I remembered having read the book The Seven Laws of Success written by Deepak Chopra while I had been in college and as luck would have it, I still had a copy of it on the bookshelf. As I read it, I looked at the back jacket of the book where it talked about Deepak and his Center for Wellbeing, then located about 20 minutes north of the family home. I decided to enroll myself into one of Deepak’s retreats. These were the days when Deepak wasn’t yet a household name and the retreats were intimate and small. Deepak himself came in to the room to teach us how to meditate among other things. It was here that I became literally hooked on meditation as a resource to settle my nervous system and quiet my mind.
How have teachings from mentors like Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and Dr. Joe Dispenza influence your approach to meditation and energy healing?
Oh my gosh, in more ways than I can possibly share here. My journey through personal development and transformation began over three decades ago when I was 30 years old and I’ve been sort of listening to my intuition and allowing myself to be guided to the next thing along the path.
I believe we are all students of life FOR life. In Buddhism, if we just focus for a minute on the Four Noble Truths, the first says that life involves suffering. It’s not the suffering of pain for illness that I’m referring to here but rather the suffering that comes from the events and circumstances in our lives and how we choose to interpret those events. It’s in our interpretation where the suffering arises. The Second Noble Truth asks us to inquire into the causes of our suffering. Buddha taught that most of our suffering arises from our cravings. Many of us believe that happiness somehow resides outside of ourselves and if we could only do more, be more or have more, we’d be “happy.” But this is where we cause our own suffering.
Transformation, self-realization, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it is a product of our choice to either uncover our own suffering and look into it in the form of an inquiry as to its causes. It is only from there that we can have any hope of altering our automatic patterns of behavior, our limiting beliefs and consequently, our future.
As we grow and change and life presents us with all of its challenges, we can choose the short-term discomfort that comes with trying to establish new beliefs and behaviors, or the long-term discomfort that comes with playing out and reinforcing the same script, the same vicious cycle that we’ve been running for as long as we can remember. For me, at some point in my 30’s, the pain of those repeated behaviors had become great enough to motivate me to finally change.
This is when I found Deepak Chopra and my journey began through meditation.
Meditation changed every single thing about my life. I was able to finally settle my crazy brain down that had been operating on autopilot for most of my life long enough to actually have the inquiry with myself and settle into the stillness to actually hear the answer.
After eleven years studying under Deepak and attending dozens of his retreats, I felt called to move along. That’s when I started practicing the work of Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Mooji, Thich Nhat Hahn, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other world-renowned spiritual leaders.
I became a meditation teacher in 2016 and that’s when I opened Satsang House Meditation and Spiritual Center in San Diego. I wanted to give away what I have learned so far and create a community of like-minded people to share this beautiful space with me.
It was a few years down the road when I noticed that meditation was driving up all sorts of unhealed parts of myself and I felt lost as to how to navigate them. That’s when I went back to study contemplative psychotherapy at the Nalanda Institute and became a spiritual and life coach. I ended up marrying meditation with coaching to help my clients navigate this piece as well.
In 2024, I felt called literally out of the blue to follow the shamanic path to become an energy healer. I spent a month working with the Four Winds Society and some shamans from South America to learn the ancient shamanic energy healing practices of the Andes. Shortly after returning from Chile, I added shamanic energy healing to my practice.
In the shamanic world, we work directly with the quantum energy field helping our clients transcend the 3D world of space and time and engage in the unknown in the uncertainty and void of the 5 D world.
A natural complement to the shanamic practices is the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza. And, accessing the quantum, or the void, is done through the practice of meditation. While I’ve only been a student of Dr. Joe’s since August of 2024, my dedication and practice to his work has completely transformed both the way I meditate on a daily basis but how I teach meditation as well.
Can you share a transformative experience from your time studying with the Incan Shamans of the Andes?
Every single aspect of studying with the Incan Shamans of the Q’ero tradition of Macchu Picchu was transformative. We spent 30 days together working the Medicine Wheel which is one of the most beautifully transformative experiences I’ve ever had in my life.
Shamans believe that there is no such thing as disease. They believe there are just sick people. And they believe we are sick in the form of holding on to stories, people and traumas which carry the energy of the experiences of those traumas from our own lives or from the lives of our ancestors.
Every one of us has a Luminous Energy Field which resides about 6-10 inches off of our physical body. When each experience leaves an energetic imprint on our energetic body, it leaves an imprint sort of like a mud clod being thrown up against that window. If we do not heal that wound (i.e. wash that window), this residue will slowly manifest as disease or ailment in our physical body.
This is where energy healing comes in.
I work in the 5th dimension, the quantum energy field. I love to say that I’m so lucky that I get to dance in the quantum field every day! It is here where our energetic bodies house these traumas and dramas. These events end up attaching themselves to one of our energy centers. Each energy center has its own color, its own element in nature, its own “demon” and also manages one of the organs of our body. If we could actually see our energy centers, they’d look like little tornados spinning. Each energy center also houses the trauma or event from a particular age at which we were when the trauma occurred. For instance, the first energy center at the base of our spine is red, it’s responsible for keeping us grounded and stable. It’s also responsible for the elimination of waste and houses our primal instincts of fear, feeding, fighting, and fornicating. The legs and feet as well as our reproductive system and our rectum are are also associated with this particular energy center. Any experience that we had between the ages of 0-7 years of age are recorded into this energy center.
When this chakra is out of balance, the negative expressions of this are: hoarding, predatory behavior, mindless violence, chronic fatigue, abandonment issues, birth trauma, feeling motherless or orphaned. Because of these experiences, we end up building walls of protection around us.
But once this chakra is balanced and operating optimally, and that’s where I come in, we have a renewed feeling of safety and a sense of stability.
Each chakra or energy center is associated with a particular part of our physical body, ie. the first chakra is associated with the base of our spine, our legs, hips, knees. Known as the root chakra, it represents our sense of safety and security. It governs the energy pertaining to our survival and instincts. It is associated with how safe, secure and grounded we feel, both within ourselves and within the world around us.
So if a client comes to me complaining of knee trouble or says they feel like they are “off-center” or experiencing anxiety, I would first look to the first chakra as a place to put my attention on healing that client.
Each chakra is also associated with a particular gland in our body. So let’s take the second chakra. The second chakra is located in the genital area, womb, abdomen. So it would make sense that the glands it is associated with are the ovaries and testes and associated parts of the body are the kidneys, bladder and circulatory system.
Each chakra is also associated with its own demon. Let’s look at the fourth energy center, the heart center. The “demon” associated with the fourth chakra is grief; representing the negative energy of pain, heartbreak, and emotional blockage that can prevent one from fully opening their heart to love and compassion.
So if a client comes to me after having experienced a heartbreak or breakup, it’s highly likely that the heart chakra would be blocked and in need for me to help hold the space for them to free it from that grief and in turn, free the client from their suffering.
The work of the shaman is truly fascinating and beyond rewarding for me.
One aspect of the work I do is to keep all of your energy centers spinning in a clockwise or balanced direction. I do this using the techniques and ancient practices of the shamans of the Andes that date back to around 1420.
This process, called an Illumination, is only one of the many healing processes that I was taught how to perform by the Q’ero shamans while studying shamanism.
How do you integrate meditation, energy healing, and life coaching to help clients navigate life’s challenges and create meaningful change?
That’s a loaded question! I think I’ve answered the piece about how I integrated life coaching with meditation in a previous question above. Adding energy healing offers a completely different approach to healing on a more fundamental energetic level as opposed to simply from a psychological and/or spiritual level.
With energy healing, I am able to literally assess the areas of the clients’ energetic body that are blocked and holding repressed and unhealed trauma. From there I assist the client to tap into those energetic blockages and clear them from their own energetic field. This process is incredibly powerful and extremely healing leaving a client freed from decades old trauma and core wounding from their past. The three modalities are a perfect compliment to one another in this way.
What advice would you give to someone who feels ready for transformation but is unsure where to begin their journey?
First of all, most believe that happiness is somewhere “out there” to be sought after and achieved and if they only get that something they think is missing, they’ll be “happy.” But happiness doesn’t reside outside. True happiness resides within. If we fallen prey to the idea that more, different or better is the way out of our discomfort or unhappiness, we will only stay caught on the hamster wheel of life chasing the things we think are missing.
When we do this, we are operating from a place of lack. Something is missing. What if instead, we operated from a place of abundance? From a place of gratitude for the things we want while envisioning we already HAVE those things? It is only then that we are operating from a place of abundance.
I would start by advising them to spend time in deep reflection and get very clear about what it is about the way they are currently living their life that is standing in the way of living a life of meaning and purpose. Can they identify repeated patterns of behavior, automatic knee-jerk responses to certain situations or people or frustrations about some aspect of their lives that they are no longer comfortable with and are ready to change?
We can’t change what we don’t acknowledge. Bringing awareness to what’s not working is the first step on the path to awakening. So is spending time in reflection journaling about what they envision their life to be like if they had everything they wanted and needed.
