Passing on kindness and compassion

I grew up on the Southside of Chicago, the daughter of two paediatricians who were active in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 70s. They gave unconditionally to others and that instinct towards care and compassion was instilled in me to carry it into everything I do today.

My route to becoming an Integrative Holistic Practioner was very much not via an express train. Moving to London to study and graduate in the early 1980s I worked as a Management Accountant and began to experience the sheer pressure most people tolerate living with to varying degrees of success.

I was introduced to meditation and healing through friends and recognised immediately that I had been moving towards this all along. While navigating raising young children and the demands of being in business I eventually qualified as a certified British School of Meditation and Mindfulness teacher with the certain knowledge that these practices can be genuinely life changing with the right help and guidance.

That journey of learning and discovery is a continuing process for me and my clients, too.

A position of care and kindness is where my work begins and every session is created individually for each  client. I draw on a range of practices and tools to meet each person where they are on their own journey. My business and HR background gives genuine insight into the stress many people carry and I want everyone that I work with to feel grounded and supported from the moment we begin.

I work holistically, drawing on science and research alongside traditional healing practices. At the heart of everything is a deep respect for each person’s own capacity to heal. My role is to offer tools, giving space and perspective to enable clients to feel sufficiently supported to cut their own path.

A three point approach

Three areas sit at the centre of my practice and the first is bringing a sense of calm and balance. Having experienced how the pressures from work and our personal lives has a direct effect on our physical and emotional wellbeing, I enable their own healing and offer them accessible ways to restore equilibrium.

The second is Reiki and energy healing. I initially encountered Reiki in the early 2000s and during a workshop at the end of the first practice session I had given the woman I was working with sat up from the couch with tears on her face and said, “I’ve never felt so loved in my life.” That moment changed everything. I realised immediately that Reiki is a means of transmitting something words cannot always reach and for me it means unconditional love and the possibility of enabling inner peace. I have been a Reiki Master and Teacher since 2008 and that sense of wonder has not left me since.

Finally there is Environmental Energy Alignment. I help clients harmonise the flow of energy in their homes and workplaces, drawing on traditional Feng Shui and energy clearing by bridging their surroundings and connecting them to their spaces. Bringing them the knowledge to create their own calm that can increase a positive atmosphere, helping support clarity, sleep and a sense of possibility far more than most people realise. I regard this as the nurture and healing of our inner and outer environment. When our living spaces thrive and prosper, so do we.

Insights from practice

After more than two decades, what strikes me most is how universal the underlying need for holistic integrative practice is. Clients arrive with very different circumstances; illness, burnout, in grief, or experiencing a life that has lost its sense of flow. But beneath all of it is the same quiet wish; to feel more like themselves again and to remember that ease is possible.

Healing is rarely dramatic. It is quiet and cumulative; the breath that slows, the room that finally feels peaceful, the client who says, almost in surprise, that they slept through the night. What I help bring is not mere training but the lived experience of the pressures of early parenthood, business-building and personal health challenges. I’m so glad to have the opportunity to be a part of the Nutritious Minds Clinic, to help enable our clients to experience, calm, balance and healing.

With warmth and gratitude,

Heidi Lerner Rearden