The Healer I Am: From the Girl Who Saw Angels to Cosmic Light Healing

I was nine years old the first time I saw an angel.

It was at a funeral. A teenage boy named Reece had died in a car accident, and the room was full of people breaking open with grief. As they stood, one after another, to say what they had loved about him, I saw him. Not his body at the front of the room. His light body, luminous and whole, moving close to each person who spoke, hovering near the ones he had loved, as if he wanted to be beside them one last time.

I did not say a word. I remember looking around and understanding, the way a child understands the shape of a room, that no one else was seeing what I saw, and that no one was going to speak of it. So I made a quiet decision. If they were not going to talk about it, neither would I. That became my rule for a long time, the way I kept myself safe with all the otherworldly things I saw, as a child, as a teenager, and long into being a grown woman. I saw, and I stayed silent.

The first people who called me a healer

For years I had no idea this was a path. I only knew it as a strange and private way of moving through the world.

Then, in college, I took a job at a natural food store called Good Earth, and I found myself working beside a few remarkable energy practitioners. They started handing me small things to try, building my confidence a little at a time. One day they looked me square in the eyes and said, “Vanessa, you are a healer. This will probably be your path.” I did not believe them. Their gifts seemed so far beyond mine. But they were the first people who ever told me this was even possible, and they began, gently, to let me trust it. One taught me to send energy through the breath, the way we do in quantum work. Another taught me the basics of Reiki, to hover my hands over the body and feel for warmth and cold, to scan slowly until a place seemed to reach up toward my palm. A little ping, I came to call it. The body’s own way of raising its hand and saying, I am right here, can you help me?

Birth taught me how I see

Later that same year I met a woman named Briana, who was training to be a midwife and became my best friend. She opened the entire world of birth to me. I took my first doula training before I had ever been pregnant, and I was pulled in instantly. I became a certified birth doula, and I trained beside her, assisting the midwife.

It was in birth that I first understood how much more than touch was moving through my hands. I would press into a laboring woman’s low back or her shoulders and feel something far larger than my own two hands at work. The threshold of birth is one of the most remarkable places a body can stand, right at the seam between worlds. And there, I began to see again. Ancestors arriving with messages for the birthing mother. Beings gathering to celebrate the crossing. Once, in a frightening birth when the baby was not doing well, I felt them come to help. Birth became the place where I slowly began to understand what I see, and how the information comes to me. (I have written about Briana, and about losing her, in Where Grief Lives in the Body.)

The years I was not allowed to expand

But I was still a practicing, active member of the LDS church, and those two worlds could not sit together. The faith I was raised in held a small and frightened view of healing. The healers I knew who were still active in the church worked in secret, afraid of being found out, afraid a woman in their ward would tell the bishop. Some of them lived as though the Salem witch trials might come for them any day, as though naming their own gift out loud could get them cast out of everything they knew. I could not grow or explore while I was inside all of that. My belief structure held me captive. The only reason I had been able to learn anything at all was that my two mentors at Good Earth trusted I would never turn them in.

Then one night in 2019, I watched a documentary about shamans, people who live with one foot in the spirit world and one foot in this one. As I listened, I began to cry. They were putting language to everything I had experienced my whole life. I had never met a single person who called themselves a shaman. I had never even known there was a word for it. And here it was, and here were my people, and for the first time I felt seen. That was the night the real deconstructing began, because I had finally found a framework wide enough to hold what I had always been.

The dream, and the man from it

What happened next I could not have made up.

The night after the documentary, I had a dream. In it I saw a man who worked with the elements of the earth, who understood both the unseen world and the seen one. The very next day, with no prompting, a friend emailed me. She was teaching a course on pottery made from the red desert soil of Boulder, Utah, and she was teaming up with a shaman trained in Peruvian shamanism. I clicked the link to see who he was.

It was the man from my dream!

I instantly cried and knew I needed to be there. I trained with him, and then with his colleagues, in the Pachacuti Mesa tradition. And about two years after I finished that training, in a vision, Cosmic Light Healing was revealed to me.

It did not arrive as something I invented. It came the way these gifts have always been passed, as a transmission, shown to me in a very specific way and given to me to carry as part of a lineage, for the healing of the physical body. What I was shown stays in the quiet of my practice, where the sacred things belong. However, that vision is where the work I now do with the body and the field truly began.

Who I am now

That is the long road of it. From a nine-year-old at a funeral who saw a dead person in their light body and said nothing, to a woman who has finally stopped staying quiet.

I am a birth doula, a shamanic practitioner, a rewilding reflexologist, an energy and Reiki worker, a quantum cosmic light healer. But underneath every one of those words, I am simply the girl who always saw, who spent most of her life keeping it safe and silent, and who is silent no longer. This is the gift I was given. And now, at last, I get to use it in service to you.

A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist. This work walks alongside healing and growth. It is not a replacement for therapy or medical care, and many of the people I sit with do both. That is a good and beautiful thing.

If any of this stirred something in you, if some part of you has always sensed more than you were allowed to say, I would be honored to meet you there. You can begin with a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes, no pressure and nothing to sell.

I stayed quiet for a very long time. You do not have to.