Several years ago, I first discovered toe reading at a Celebrate Your Life conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.  I had flown to Arizona a day early to take an all-day workshop from James Van Praagh, a clairvoyant, spiritual medium, and New York Times bestselling author of Talking to Heaven.

While autographing my book, he told me that I should get a toe reading and that I should do it that day while the lines weren’t very long because tomorrow the lines would probably be a three hour wait!  To be honest, I silently rolled my eyes and thought, “Good lord.  Toe Reading?  What will they think of next?”  Little did I know that one little decision would affect my whole life!

I got my first toe reading and was blown away.  In 10 minutes, the Toe Reader revealed to me more about myself than my family would have been able to!  Being a natural skeptic, I thought that maybe she was just psychic, or a good guesser.  So I went to a Celebrate Your Life in Chicago and received another toe reading.  With the same result, I was beginning to think that it would be difficult to have two good guessers in a row.  Not to be deterred, since I still was not convinced, I went to yet another Celebrate Your Life conference, and this time my reader was Barney Cannon.  He was so accurate that I decided right there I had to find out more about this.  So I rearranged my conference schedule so that I could attend the short workshop from KC Miller, the author of Toe Reading: Are You Walking Your Destined Path.

Toe Reading is a unique and captivating healing art, which uses active listening, powerful, soul-searching questions, and deeply skilled insight to help people create change in their lives. It is the art of sitting before someone and witnessing their very being, their life story. Toe Reading is based on the theory that each individual records a holograph of the story of their life and stores it within the body. The position and shape of the toes contain this story, which can be read by a skilled practitioner.

Intuitive Empathic, Published Author Becomes - Traveling, Spiritual Minister and Angel Card Reader (Cherie Lee-Aka, Amy Jamison)

I am Cherie Lee, aka Amy Jamison, the published author of  Visions From Above / My Journey ~ My Destiny, a book about my near-death experience and 42 years as a visionary/intuitive guide.

If you’ve ever been to the Healing Pages Bookstore on SWIHA’s campus, you probably have noticed the huge selection of decks of cards. I had purchased an Angel Card deck by Doreen Virtue in 2014, when I met her at the Hay House Writer's Workshop in March 2014. This workshop was the foundation for me writing and self-publishing my first book in June 2014 with Balboa Press, a division of Hay House.

In October 2016, I took this same deck of cards with me to one of my holistic business development classes—the one on-campus (although the Entrepreneurial Suite is also offered online.) I remember laying them out on the table, and afterwards, my teacher encouraged me to go live on Facebook that evening and market myself by doing an Angel Card Reading with her. That was such great advice.

Lauren Doyle has been life coaching for over a year now; allow me to share her reflection, “Both my own experiences with self-work, as well as finding myself as a mentor and guide to friends and family, has led me to life coaching. I found that throughout my different careers and jobs, I was often sought out for my knowledge and advice. I finally decided that there was a gap and the need that I could fill.” When Lauren coaches her clients, she utilizes the Rewriting the Story worksheet the most. She finds that this tool allows clients to reflect and rewrite, not only past experiences, also to stop the train of automatic negative thoughts (or ANTs) that can so easily take over, freeing clients to move on and write the future they really want.

From a young age, Stephanie M. Bjarnson already admired life coaches. A counselor taught her self-hypnosis techniques, which she then used to bring herself out of a severe depression during her youth. Her hometown wasn’t the most accepting of her approach to holistic healing, as she shared with me.

Stephanie feels that this fear is due to the mainstream medical establishment that pushes pills, therapy, and rehab on to people, rather than promoting self-love, meditation, and holistic methods of healing. Stephanie sums up healing and wellness succinctly, saying, “It all starts with the self - that is where we truly evolve.”

Though the fields of life coaching and hypnosis may differ in their approach to healing, these were the two areas that Stephanie desired to learn about the most, dating back to her highly beneficial childhood experiences with them. It comes as no surprise that Stephanie eventually enrolled in the Mind-Body Wellness Practitioner ONLINE program, where she specialized in Clinical Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching.

Like so many other students that end up at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, Steven Jaggers also found his way here through a need to find a holistic solution to an afflictive situation. Although he was originally born in Orange County, California, he spent the majority of his childhood in Arizona with parents who struggled with heavy drug addiction. After graduating high school, he entered corporate America, joining a microchip company. “I knew then that I wanted to help people because for me, it was more fulfilling than just turning a profit.” Almost like a consequence, he got laid off and his mother desperately needed help, so he moved in to take care of her. She was having difficulty with prescription drug abuse, and he knew there had to be another option to help treat her: “We needed a different way to deal with her underlying illness, rather than the ‘Western medicine approach’, which is to just mask symptoms. I began to search for holistic ways to treat her and the pills’ side effects which created even more problems. I knew there had to be another path. I really felt like we had been tormented by Western medicine." However, Steven had his own difficulties when he was diagnosed with scoliosis, and at one point, his doctor told him that we was going to need spinal surgery. He felt strong resistance to this treatment, as he did not feel surgery was the best option for him. Well, he was right. Today, his spine is healthy, and with the treatment of massage and soft tissue manipulation, most of which he experienced through his program at SWIHA, he was able to get out of pain and avoid surgery.

Stephen Hubbell says he was drawn to Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (SWIHA) due to his curiosity in exploring the healing arts, and he was on a spiritual adventure! He elaborated by saying, “My adventure’s purpose was to find a way to bring my spiritual relationship more fluently into the physical world in an applicable way to help and heal people, as well as myself. I was most interested in the Polarity Therapy program at SWIHA when I first found out what Polarity Therapy was.” He went on to graduate from the 750-hour Massage Therapy program, in which he was certified in Massage Therapy, as well as in Polarity Therapy. “SWIHA has been a huge part of my transformation.”

As far as massage goes, Stephen continues to stay focused on studying and applying for his massage license in the state of California. He plans on combining massage, polarity, and astrology together to form the perfect business trine. In the meantime, he really enjoys giving his friends short massage sessions to help them feel better. He is currently doing astrology readings for both individual and couples sessions.  “I enjoy working with clients on a longer term basis. For example, it’s awesome to work with someone for three months at a time so that I can really help people free up their minds and their lives for more enjoyment, love, pleasure, etc.”  To supplement his energy work, he is currently working at Camp Cedar Glen, which has awesome programs like archery and rock climbing, and there he helps maintain the grounds and campsites and enjoys being immersed in nature!

Bradley Goss first enrolled at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, in the Associates degree program for Western Herbalism and Holistic Nutrition. He was already a Physical Trainer at a gym and a Detoxification Specialist, but he knew he wanted to continue his education. Before finding SWIHA, he was taking classes at Phoenix College where, to his dismay, he found he did not resonate with what the nutritionist teachers were teaching. “They would tell us that having a couple of cokes a day isn’t bad; there is no good fat; white bread is the same as whole wheat bread; and eating sugar won't make you fat. I didn’t want to be at a school, filling my brain full of things that I knew weren’t correct, just to have to relearn them later.”  So Bradley started looking for another school. New York Integrative and SWIHA were his top two. He wanted a campus school with online options, but he really liked that one of his favorite teachers/authors, Dee McCaffrey (The Science of Skinny) worked here. Since he was already in AZ and NY would require a move, he chose to stay local, as he connected with our mission and philosophy. He reflected on his first few months at SWIHA: “I arrived, ‘not SWIHA material’. I believed in the goodness of foods, but not like I do now. I’d hear teachers say, ‘Be aware’ and ‘this food helps with consciousness’.  I was like, ‘What am I missing? I’m not drunk, what is she talking about??’ I wasn’t aware, even though I thought I was.”  The nutrition and herbalism fit together perfectly, as he still believes that diet and herbs is the curative solution to all dis-ease, however, the education took a lot effort. His feedback to new students or those in the herbalism program was, “Stick with it and don’t get discouraged, especially with the herbal medicine. The payoff is so worth it!”

Can you imagine, one day looking back on your life of over seventy-five years, and realizing you have walked a parallel path with extensive history? It is so important for every human being to realize that with life comes the constant ebb and flow of change, and if you are the type to resist it….maybe find a Life Coach and do some work around your resistance, if you’d like to experience more ease! Said in jest, but this week’s graduate has a compelling story of change, dreams, and blessings that created a lifetime of memories and experiences. This is the epitome of “living life”.

Llewellyn D. Howell grew up on a farm in western New York where hard work was the only mode of life he and his family knew. His father always worked a minimum of two jobs, which required him to work days and nights, so sometimes he wouldn’t even see his father. Although Llew developed many life skills as a farm boy, by the time he was seventeen, he was ready to move to something else.

His first dream was fulfilled when he earned two college scholarships, including one from Bakery Confectionery Workers Union of America, one of the few union scholarships given in the country at that time. This allowed him to escape to the University of Michigan! While he was there, he realized his next two goals. One was to teach abroad and the other was to find the small town of Bavaria. He shared a memory of keeping a photograph in the back of a boring German book, and he would often come to that page and hold the photo and think, “Someday, I’m going to go there.” At the beginning of his junior year, he transferred to the State University of New York at Brockport. He developed another dream: “I wanted to be a teacher. I loved being in the classroom, being with children all day, helping to shape their lives. I finally developed some steam in my academic work.”

Georgia Nelson spent over thirty years in the medical industry and remembers, as a little girl, that she wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. While in this field, she noticed she always got pulled back in to dermatology. When her sister was seventeen years old, she was in a horrible head-on collision that split her face open, leaving her face severely scarred. Georgia shared how this trauma affected both of them. “When you’re a teenager, damaging your face can seem like the end of the world.” Though her sister continued to have surgeries and as a team of doctors worked to diminish the scarring, Georgia noticed a transformation in her sibling that inspired her to help others with their skin problems. She has wondered if this was one of the reasons she found herself working in the dermatology departments throughout her career. Georgia became intimate with her own physical struggles, as she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and then later, basil cell carcinoma. This struggle also made her passion for oncology and hematology grow, as she came out a cancer-survivor!

At the age of 50, the pull toward dermatology and skin took over. Georgia decided to take a leap of faith and follow her dream into aesthetics. Her journey began with searching for a beauty school in Arizona. She had four schools lined up to tour, and Southwest Institute of Natural Aesthetics (SWINA) was the first one on her list. Commuting forty-five minutes from Cave Creek, she showed up at SWINA and remembers this, “I walked into the school and immediately knew my search was over. The staff offered me a facial and that experience was the solidifying factor that showed me I was where I belonged. That was September, and by December, I was enrolled, going to classes, and graduated in June 2016 with a Natural Aesthetics Practitioner diploma!”