I sometimes meet students and healers who feel uncomfortable charging for energy work. They want healing to be free and available to everyone, and don’t like how it feels to bring money into it.
I also want energy healing to be available to everyone.
But the way to make energy healing available isn’t to make it free. It’s to charge. This post explains why.
Why free sessions don’t help, and what does
Imagine Helga the healer. Helga can see eight clients a day.
If Helga charges $100 a session, she’ll see eight middle-income people. If she charges nothing, she’ll see eight low-income people.
By making her services free, Helga isn’t helping more people, just different people.
But if Helga’s friend Mary also becomes an energy healer, then they can each see eight people a day, for 16 people total.
If you want more people to get energy healing, you need more healers.
(And with 1.5 billion people worldwide living with chronic pain, we definitely need more healers.)
How to get more healers
Most people want to do good in the world.
Most people also want to pay their rent, put food on the table, and send their kids to college.
Helga loves energy healing so much that she’ll do it for free, eight hours a day, after working a regular job.
What about Mary? She’s raising two kids. She gets to work early, picks up the kids at 3pm, and her only downtime is after their bedtime. She’d like to do energy healing, but an unpaid extra job is out of the question.
But if Mary could get a job as an energy healer? If she could work with energy, support her family, and have time to take care of her kids? She’d jump at the opportunity.
Think about who you know. You might know a few Helgas. But I bet you know a lot more Marys.
For better or worse, we live in a capitalist society. And in that society, the way to get more energy healers is to make it a career, so the Marys of the world join us.
Towards a real solution
Helga creates a healing practice. She charges for her services. She hires a marketer, and has a wait list to see her.
Helga invites Mary to join her practice. Mary has kids and needs stability, and knows nothing about marketing, so she could never start her own practice. But joining Helga’s practice solves all that.
Helga and Mary teach classes, with some grads getting hired by Helga. Part of becoming certified is giving sessions by donation. Now people who can’t afford Helga and Mary’s sessions can get energy healing from their students.
By charging for her services and building a company with a career path, Helga has created a world where many more people are receiving energy healing.
Healing Lab
That’s part of the vision of Healing Lab: To be a place where healers can get a job and a paycheck, do what they’re here to do, and leave the marketing to someone else.
Beyond that: Our mission is to end chronic pain by developing a modern science of energy healing. That requires scientific research to understand how energy healing works and develop better healing techniques. It requires lobbying state governments for laws protecting energy healers, like California and New Mexico have. And it requires working with insurance companies, to get energy healing covered (just as acupuncture and chiropractics are), so it becomes affordable to just about everyone.
But you don’t have to do all that to create a world with more energy healers. Just charge for your services, teach a friend, and bring them into your practice. That’s all it takes to get this help to more people.