How to Build a Successful Energy Healing Practice

Q1: You’ve been an energy healer and practitioner for many years, way before it was “mainstream.” How do you differentiate yourself and your practice from the “airy fairy woo woo type practitioners”?

Well, that’s a fabulous question! Made me smile hugely! I’ve never spent an ‘airy fairy woo woo’ day in my life. I’m very grounded, and the work that I do is grounded, too. The energy healing that I teach and practice is steeped in a thorough understanding of the energy bodies and how they interact and integrate with one another.

The work is systems-based, in other words, I didn’t grab an idea here and a technique there and smush them all together to create a smorgasbord of healing approaches. Everything integrates and works together. At Energy Healing Institute, the philosophy of healing includes the awareness that healing happens when an individual is aligned and coherent with their intention, attention and the actions that they take.

The client is the healer, the practitioner facilitates a process where the client can heal him or herself.

I’ve been practicing and teaching full time since 2002. Prior to launching EHI, I was in the corporate world, holding a variety of different roles in entrepreneurial businesses, including my own consulting firm. I was concurrently studying energy healing and cultivating conscious awareness as part of my overall well-being since 1991. When I made the choice to migrate from corporate roles to launching the Energy Healing Institute, my business experience came right along with me, and has served me and the practitioners who learn to launch a practice from me, very well.

Q2: Monetizing the intangible, something most of my clients need to do, and yet not as easy as monetizing a tangible product.  Any wisdom you can share around how to share your gifts and  take care of yourself financially?

I’ve done a lot of work to understand the demographics of the practitioners who study at EHI and the consciously curious learners and clients who take my online courses and work one-on-one with me. I’ve learned to be careful about naming my courses and programs so that they convey the level of expertise and content that I’m sharing. For example, I never use the word, workshop. That word often means a day-long or weekend long experience that you might attend with a friend. You’d learn something, certainly. And you’d have an experience of whatever is being shared. But it’s less intensive and serious than the word training.

The word training is also one of the ways I differentiate from the ‘airy fairy woo woo’ that you asked about in your first question. Workshops can often carry a woo woo theme and approach. That’s not my style at all.

I have also been in practice since 1992. There’s a level of experience, expertise and knowledge that I carry that has enormous value to those who choose to study and work with me. I do charge for that. I’ve spent a lot of money learning my trade, I added it up one time and realized that I had spent more than $100,000 learning and studying energy, consciousness, and evolution. A lot of that money was spent in one-on-one sessions with teachers for mentoring and supervision, refining and honing my abilities. I worked nearly weekly with one of my teachers for 11 years. That’s more than 500 hours of supervision and mentoring, and a little more than half of the $100,000 that I invested in my knowledge base and mastery.

My advice would be: There aren’t any shortcuts to mastery beyond, practice, practice and more practice. If you think mastery of a healing form can be awarded after a weekend workshop or two, you’ll be woefully prepared for launching a thriving practice.

Q3: I believe all real energy healers have an inborn gift that they have cultivated and refined over the years. What would you say to someone who has this inborn gift but have yet to cultivate it?  How do they refine and form those gifts into a service others need?

I believe strongly that gifts are really latent talents. When Serena Williams was handed her first tennis racket, she likely demonstrated a gift and flair for tennis. She would never have risen to the incredible heights that she has as a tennis champion without days, weeks, months and years of training, practice, coaching along with winning and losing lots of matches.

Whatever the gifts are that you carry, hone them, refine them, ground them into a systems-based approach to healing. Stay away from teachers who can teach what they do, but can’t offer the mechanics of how they do it. Look for teachers who have successful practices, have their feet on the ground, have high expectations of their students, and a well organized program with clear deliverables and outcomes. Be sure that supervision is part of the program, as you work on practice clients, you need to be able to come back to the learning environment and discuss cases, treatment strategies and approaches.

And if you’re not sure about the business aspects of running a successful practice, find a program that offers the tools to launch a practice, or budget for a business coach to guide you through the tasks required to get up and running. It’s hard to go it alone without the expertise to thrive. Get the help you need so your investment in learning is backed with practical advice and know-how.

Q4: Marketing skills, not something innate in most energy healers, and yet you engage in some creative and quite effective marketing tactics. Would you mind sharing a few of your most effective marketing strategies?

Energy Healing Institute attracts practitioners and the consciously curious from all over the world. A lot of the content available at EHI is offered online, in either self-paced or live trainings. Thus, I do a lot of marketing through social media. I don’t pepper all of the social media outlets, I’ve honed in on the two or three that drive the most activity for me, and that showcase my work effectively.

I’ve adopted a ‘slow and steady wins the race’ approach to marketing. List development takes time, and offering plenty of content that is free or low-cost gives me exposure to lots of different people who might want to take advantage of the courses and information that I offer.

I do not try and market to everyone. I stick to my demographics, so I’m consistently reaching out to the people who are likely to benefit from my work. I don’t do a lot of discounts on my courses. I work on strategies that increase the value of the course itself, so that it becomes an important next step in learner’s journeys.

And I’m wildly consistent. I publish articles on a regular basis. I promote them consistently. I am generous about responding to inquiries and questions so that I demonstrate that I’m tuned in and listening to what people want to know to learn, grow and evolve.

Most importantly, I work with a team of brilliant people who support my business. My website is constantly evolving. We launched our current site in 2017, and it’s not the site today that it was when we launched. We have major initiatives underway to upgrade our web presence and bring me closer to people who are interested in learning more. I am very clear about doing what I know how to do and getting help with the things I don’t know how to do. For example, I do not work on my website, try to manage my SEO, or even write my site copy. There are experts who can do those tasks far more effectively than I, and I trust them to support my business. It’s made an enormous difference in my outreach and my overall success to have a team of experts who work with me to meet my business objectives.

Q5: If there was one piece of advice you could share with someone just beginning their energy healing journey and practice, what would it be?

Take the time and save your money to attend an extensive training program rather than lots of small workshops. A general approach to energy work doesn’t make sense because the body and its energy fields are systems. They are not isolated things that will respond coherently to approaches that are not well organized as a system.

Stay away from programs that are ubiquitous, like Reiki. That’s a beautiful modality if you want to learn it for yourself and to get an idea of what energy healing is all about. But Reiki is now commoditized. There’s a Reiki master on every street in the country, and many of them give the work away for free since it’s more of a hobby than a career.

Dig in, study deeply, invest in supervision/coaching and a business mentor so that you can make the most of the money you’ve spent on learning the modality to thrive as a practitioner.

Thank you, Jill

I knew Jill would go deep with these questions and offer solid, time-tested, guidance to those wanting to build an energy healing practice, and she definitely delivered.

And did you notice the recurring theme?

Refining your gift requires a tremendous amount of work. You were born with a gift that you now must hone, refine, and ground into a systems-based approach to healing.

Where are you in your journey?

Jill has comprehensive training for those just starting out and for the advanced practitioner wanting to integrate energy healer into their current healing modalities.

Path of an Energy Healer – a comprehensive, year-long program that anchors new, inexperienced practitioners in self-care, energy hygiene, and facilitating energy healing in a client practice. The program includes online and classroom-based training courses that include the chakra-based modality, case intake and treatment strategy, case supervision and the business elements of practice. The program can be a standalone experience or serve as a stepping stone to EHI’s more advanced courses and programs.

Advanced Energy Healing Protocols – a 100+ hour program for experienced practitioners who are ready to integrate energy healing into the modalities they offer in their successful client practices. The course work is demanding, fast-paced, and includes moving beyond felt-sense or clairsentient awareness into the more nuanced and hygienic world of seeing energy and information clairvoyantly. The program includes self-paced and live, online courses to learn the Astral and Etheric chakra system, the Clairvoyance system, in preparation for 7 days of classroom training to learn and practice energy healing protocols for client practice. The classroom training culminates with a clinic where volunteer clients receive treatment, simulating the practice environment they’ll be returning to post-training. Case supervision and certification are optional components of the Advanced Energy Healing Protocols practitioner program.

Whatever the gifts are that you carry, hone them, refine them, ground them into a systems-based approach to healing.