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" I&amp;#039;m lying on a table in a small white room above the Hudson River, in a sleek modern high-rise where you&amp;#039;d expect wealthy European bankers to maintain pieds-\u00E0-terre. The room is filled with healing crystals of every hue: An enormous black tourmaline glitters in one corner, and on the floor beneath the table, smoky quartz, aquamarine, and other rare specimens rest on tiny silk pillows. My eyes are closed. I smell a variety of essential oils\u2014ylang-ylang, lavender, rose\u2014being applied to the soles of my feet, the back of my neck. Dozens of delicate acupuncture needles are inserted along my meridians, which, according to traditional Chinese medicine, are the paths through which the life energy known as chi flows. Knees, ankles, shins, hands, wrists: the body as a subway map of stops and signals through which the energy either can pass or will be blocked. My eyes flutter open. Forgive the stereotype, but when I think of a healer, I imagine a rather large, older woman in a caftan, perhaps, her hair wild and frizzy, amulets and charms heavy around her neck. In a darkened studio redolent of burned sage. Tamar Davir, the dazzling, sprightly creature moving around the table and inserting the needles is instead young, radiant, and wearing Jimmy Choo stilettos. She has dancing blue eyes the color of the Caribbean at dawn, and her tawny skin is glowing. This is a healer? What am I doing? You have to go see Tamar, a friend had been telling me for years. Tamar was a drumbeat, a name whispered in certain circles\u2014from the hills of Malibu to the corner offices of midtown Manhattan\u2014passed along reverentially, like the best dermatologist or yoga teacher or nutritionist. You have to go see Tamar. When my voice would become reedy with tension. When I burst into tears of frustration. When I was stuck, stuck, stuck. Tamar. My eyes drift closed. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s something pulling you on your left side,&amp;quot; Tamar says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very heavy and dark. Can you feel it?&amp;quot; I nod. With the needles opening my meridians, the inhalation of essential oils, the powerful energy of the crystals, it does indeed seem that I have a heavy darkness weighing down my left side. How is it that I&amp;#039;ve never been aware of this before? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re going to clear that,&amp;quot; she goes on. Her voice is mellifluous, but bands of steel run through it. She falls silent. My mind races. Heavy darkness? Left side? Am I losing it? But then I begin to feel something happening. At first the area is tingly, as if my arm and shoulder had fallen asleep, and then chills begin to move up and down the left side of my body. I&amp;#039;m floating. From a distance, I&amp;#039;m vaguely aware that she is asking me questions and that I&amp;#039;m answering them. But my mind is no longer chattering away like a mad monkey. I go somewhere I&amp;#039;ve never been before, and when I come back, our hour is over. It should be said that I am a neurotic Jewish writer. I&amp;#039;ve spent a lot of years talking. I&amp;#039;ve talked in comfortable offices equipped with white-noise machines and decorated with hardy leafy plants so glossy they didn&amp;#039;t look real. I&amp;#039;ve talked on the Upper West Side, on the Upper East Side, and in downtown Manhattan. I&amp;#039;ve talked in an office by a waterfall in Connecticut, where a smelly old Lab snoozed by my feet. I&amp;#039;ve talked and talked to a Woody Allen\u2013worthy cast of shrinks. The one whose eyebrows wriggled at everything I said. The one who actually was Mia Farrow&amp;#039;s therapist. The one who was so ancient I was afraid he&amp;#039;d die on me. The one who was so distractingly well dressed that I found myself considering where she bought her clothes and whether she had a personal shopper. (Nice stockings, I wonder if they&amp;#039;re Wolford not being a productive therapeutic vein to mine.) And then there was the one who saw beneath my well-established veneer and practiced stories and, in the most mild-mannered but direct way, called me out on my shit and saved my life. Dissecting and understanding my history was, for decades, as natural to me as breathing. It has been necessary. Invaluable. Until it stopped working. If I were to pinpoint the moment I felt talked out, it was during a drive home from the shrink who had the smelly old Lab. She was wonderful (the shrink, not the dog): smart, thoughtful, kind, engaged. I originally had gone to see her because my mother was dying, and my father was long dead, and my baby had been very sick, and I was very sad. But what was there to say? I felt as if I couldn&amp;#039;t punch my way out of the same old paper bag of my story one more time. My mother had been difficult. My grief was complicated. I missed my father. I&amp;#039;d been traumatized by my baby&amp;#039;s illness. Yada yada. As I drove down the winding country roads of my neighborhood, past horses grazing in fields and cows silhouetted against a steel-gray dusk, it felt clear that talking\u2014at least in this way\u2014was no longer useful to me. I hadn&amp;#039;t been looking for a healer. My tribe believes in Freud and Western medicine (practicing it, if not marrying it), and the benefits of chicken soup in a pinch. My tolerance for anything otherworldly is pretty low. And I was okay, wasn&amp;#039;t I? I was happily married, reasonably successful. But I was hungry for something I couldn&amp;#039;t name. Something mysterious that I hadn&amp;#039;t managed to touch during all those years of therapy, but that I could feel was there. Intangible, it was the shift I felt in the rare times I managed to meditate long enough, or when listening to a powerful piece of music. I had come to think of these as moments of grace, a feeling of being part of a greater whole. Virginia Woolf called this the pattern behind the cotton wool of daily existence. In a handful of instances, I&amp;#039;d been suffused with a peaceful and unmistakable sense of connectedness\u2014but to what? Woolf, my literary goddess, wrote that &amp;quot;the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven, certainly and emphatically there is no God. We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.&amp;quot; We are the thing itself. I could draw lines and arrows, parallels, diagramming the various ways I had been formed by my history. I had such a handle on it, thanks to a lot of good therapy, that I could have written a memoir. (Wait\u2014I&amp;#039;d written two!) But still, that hunger walked alongside me. Something-more-something-more-something-more. It wasn&amp;#039;t that I wanted to be happier, per se. I couldn&amp;#039;t write this off as classic midlife malaise. I was after something bigger, harder to define; Carl Jung called it the night sea journey &amp;quot;to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness.&amp;quot; These ghosts derive from the notion that there is a mystical chorus of past, present, and future that always surrounds us; that matter and energy may change forms but cannot be destroyed. But I needed a guide for this journey. I found myself drawn back to Tamar&amp;#039;s healing room because of the way an hour with her made me feel. My feet, grounded. My mind, ironed smooth. My self, if I may tweak an Emily Dickinson poem, behind myself, revealed. At the end of a session, I&amp;#039;d move through my days, at least for a while, with a powerful sense\u2014it felt ancient and unshakable\u2014of being part of a vast tapestry. Fear, anxiety, guilt, pettiness, and that endless, endless mental chatter\u2014gone. I felt like one of those three-dimensional anatomical models being filled in, rendered solid and whole by the most ethereal of practices. &amp;quot;Hello!&amp;quot; Those dancing eyes, those glorious shoes. I&amp;#039;ve come to see Tamar for the fifth, sixth, seventh time. There has been talk of energy fields. Of fairies. Of spirit animals. Of past lives. Words and phrases that I have learned not to overanalyze, because I crave what&amp;#039;s happening here. I am awash with something that feels like knowledge\u2014not the kind that rests on a flimsy parabola of thoughts and suppositions, but rather, a deeper knowing. Yes, as Tamar moves crystals in the air above me; as I feel\u2014actually feel\u2014the energy moving into dark, deadened places. Yes, as she suggests an image, a visualization to help me when I speak in front of large crowds. Yes, to the Chinese herbs that will strengthen my spleen. Yes, yes, to a wise old owl. In yoga philosophy, there is a Sanskrit word, samskara, which loosely translates as &amp;quot;scar tissue.&amp;quot; They are stubborn, the stories we carry in our bodies. One by one, I felt these stories becoming lighter. Letting go. &amp;quot;You have spiky energy,&amp;quot; Tamar says, very focused. &amp;quot;Do you sense that you&amp;#039;re running a prickly vibration?&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m puzzled. I don&amp;#039;t think of myself as spiky or prickly. &amp;quot;The energy can come across to others as being\u2026hmm\u2026bitchy, I would say. It&amp;#039;s the energy field surrounding you\u2014it looks like lots of little thorns. It&amp;#039;s ready to go.&amp;quot; An hour later, I&amp;#039;m walking down Broadway and perfect strangers are smiling at me. I am thornless. That evening, I go to a party where my natural shyness, my tendency to compare and find myself wanting, might be read as spiky, but instead there is a fluidity\u2014an ease and openness that feels like such a relief it makes me want to cry. &amp;quot;Yourself behind yourself/ would startle most.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s hard to make sense of this healing business. In fact, sense doesn&amp;#039;t really enter into it. I have, in the past couple of years, found other guides into the world beyond consciousness. Because once you&amp;#039;ve had this kind of experience, you can&amp;#039;t help but want more. You hear about a great psychic, a talented astrologer, a tarot-card reader who is uncannily accurate, and your ears perk up. At Kripalu, a yoga and meditation retreat in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts, I have absorbed the benefits of Reiki, an energy-healing method made up of two Japanese words: rei, which means &amp;quot;God&amp;#039;s wisdom&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;higher power,&amp;quot; and ki, life-force energy. This technique is not learned, but rather, passed down from Reiki master to student in a chain of &amp;quot;attunement&amp;quot;\u2014a perfect word, it seems to me, to describe this other dimension, which requires first a suspension of disbelief and then a tuning in. It is oddly similar to the creative impulse\u2014in writing fiction, I have experienced again and again an unfamiliar word, a phrase materializing, seemingly out of thin air. Or the way, in \u2028forming one precarious sentence after the next, it is possible to create a coherent world where none before existed. How does the process work? If we pick it apart, we risk losing its power. The same friend who sent me to Tamar urged me to call Colette Baron-Reid, an intuitive counselor (and best-selling author of three self-help books, including The Map: Finding the Magic and Meaning in the Story of Your Life) who counts psychology professors and therapists among her thousands of clients. I was in a period of extreme uncertainty\u2014the kind that might, years earlier, have catapulted me back to therapy, where I would have talked myself blue in the face during the 50-minute &amp;quot;hour.&amp;quot; My husband\u2014a beleaguered Hollywood screenwriter\u2014was unhappy with the direction his career was taking. We were experiencing some unexpected financial turbulence. My son was entering the throes of adolescence. Everything was more up in the air than I knew how to handle. I longed for a version of a crystal ball. And so I poured myself a cup of coffee and settled into my office at home in Connecticut, then dialed the number of a woman I&amp;#039;ve never met who lives in New Hampshire. &amp;quot;I see a divorce on paper,&amp;quot; Colette told me, after a few minutes of polite intuitive-and-client chitchat. &amp;quot;Something in your husband&amp;#039;s career. Are there people who\u2026somehow represent him in the world?&amp;quot; How did she know that he was unhappy with his agent? She didn&amp;#039;t even know he was a writer. Of course, she could have googled me before our appointment\u2014at first, my cynical side wouldn&amp;#039;t shut up\u2014but as she kept talking, I realized that it wasn&amp;#039;t merely the idea but rather the language itself that was so apt. &amp;quot;Divorce on paper.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Changing of the guard.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;New paradigm.&amp;quot; The specificity of what Colette shared during that first (yes, there have been more since) phone call stunned me. Within six months of the call\u2014which I hadn&amp;#039;t mentioned\u2014my husband had left his longtime agent. Colette saw that he had been trapped in a destructive spiral and that he needed to let go of his old ideas and start fresh. Within a year, he had written a low-budget indie film to direct himself. She saw that I was hitting a financial bottom\u2014that I needed to start asking for honoraria for my speaking engagements rather than traveling and speaking for free. (&amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a law of giving and receiving,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;You have to receive in order to give.&amp;quot; Also: &amp;quot;Money is a form of energy.&amp;quot;) Shortly after that phone call, my lecture agent called with an invitation to speak to a group on the West Coast for a dramatically larger sum than I had ever been offered. Who can resist the lure of trying to peek into the future? It&amp;#039;s enormously seductive, this sense that past, present, and future are all unspooling at once; that time, rather than being a continuum, is a vast field, the pattern behind the cotton wool, accessible only if one is exquisitely tuned in. When my husband&amp;#039;s fledging film faltered because a key investor pulled out, I called Colette. &amp;quot;Your man&amp;#039;s going to make his movie,&amp;quot; she said. (As I write this, I&amp;#039;m happy to say, her prediction for my &amp;quot;man&amp;quot; has come true.) I asked her if she gives people only the good news. &amp;quot;God, no,&amp;quot; she replied. &amp;quot;Sometimes I have to tell people to give up on their dreams, that it&amp;#039;s just never going to happen.&amp;quot; Gifted intuitives seem to share the quality of being sensible and, oddly, grounded. (&amp;quot;A reader has to have her shit together,&amp;quot; Colette has told me. &amp;quot;Otherwise you&amp;#039;re getting your information through a dirty filter.&amp;quot;) They&amp;#039;re looking to marshal the forces they can to help their clients make good life decisions. Quite a few of them have Ivy League degrees, went to business school, or even studied quantum physics. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have any woo-woo clients,&amp;quot; Colette tells me. &amp;quot;I began as a skeptic myself. But we live our lives in the realm of the invisible. A good intuitive knows how to navigate the invisible.&amp;quot; Of course, we can&amp;#039;t live every moment of our lives in this realm. Whenever I scrape together the money to see Tamar (an appointment with her costs $320) or have the occasional phone session with Colette (she charges $250 for a 15-minute reading; remember, money is energy), I am peeking into the hidden world that I now believe to be there, always thrumming. I can&amp;#039;t touch it or photograph it or even think about it. I can&amp;#039;t prove it. It will crumble beneath the weight of analysis. But it feels truer to me now than the talking, the endless talking, the stories that have gone dead on me, the ones I could recite in my sleep. It tells me: There is magic in the world. There is beauty and symmetry and a mystery so profound that it cannot be understood or reasoned with\u2014only experienced. And so I unclench the fists that grasp only at that which can be proven empirically. I fill my lungs with the deep breaths Tamar has counseled. I take the Chinese tea pills to strengthen my spleen. I sleep with crystals next to my bed. I summon my spirit guides, and I call upon my visualizations. I heed Colette&amp;#039;s counsel, and she has not steered me wrong, not once, not even a little bit. I&amp;#039;m not sure what Dr. Freud would say. Probably something involving the word fantasy. But do you know what? \u2028It&amp;#039;s working. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a13946/personal-essay-on-hiring-an-intuition-healer/>