My Healing Journey

I started on my journey as a healer in childhood – though I didn’t realise it at the time – I was always massaging relatives and pets as a child, and was drawn to plants.  My earliest memories are of my mother and I tending morning glories in a window box on our fire escape in New York City.  I was always happiest walking outdoors but, as fate would have it, I ended up being a banker.  I did well, but wasn’t particularly happy.

I came back to my desire to heal as the result of the terminal illness of my first husband.  I would give him reflexology treatments with lavender-scented lotion in the hospital, prompting one fellow patient to state he wished he had someone do that for him too – so I did!  I had finally found what would I at last recognise as my life’s work – healing.

After my husband’s death, I left New York and returned to Los Angeles, where we had spent the penultimate year of our marriage.  I qualified as a reflexologist and found the yearning to do healing work grow stronger.  Time passed and, following a series of incredible events set in motion by vivid dreams, I moved to London (via New York) to marry my second husband (whom I met many years before my first husband – a New Yorker’s love for efficiency on a divine scale!).  It was in London that I found the soil needed to make my healing work flourish.

After qualifying as an aromatherapist with the Tisserand Institute, I also became attuned as a Reiki master, yet I still had the nagging sense that I didn’t have all the pieces of my particular puzzle.  A chance encounter with Bach Flower Remedies (at the request of my Reiki master – she requested I take Impatiens to calm me down!) made the final piece fall into place – it sparked a fire and the certainty that this, at long last, was what I was searching for.

I then enrolled in a foundation Bach course – after learning the properties of all 38 remedies in ten days – even for me that was quick!  It wasn’t learning at all, but remembering.  I began using the Bach remedies with my clients and on myself, but found the old yearning back – why? I wondered.  That question was answered not too long afterward…

As part of my new found passion for flower essences, I made two of them while on holiday with my husband in the Gambia, West Africa – Pink Oleander and Prickly Pear. On returning to London,  I learned soon afterward that  Prickly Pear was helpful for pets who didn’t like being left alone or had been abandoned.  As it happened, I happened to have some with me to give to a colleague, when another therapist, with an old and very nervous dog, appeared.  I remembered the essence and we sprinkled some on the dog’s muzzle and paws.  He licked it off, sneezed, stopped trembling and flopped down to sleep!  It literally took seconds – and all of us who witnessed the event just shook our heads in awe. 

Now I knew why other essences didn’t call to me – I needed to create my own essences.  Holidays now meant researching, meditating and making essences – culminating in 38 essences, which I named Spirit of Makasutu, in honour of the sacred Gambian forest.  Since then, the original 25 essences created in Gambia were joined by essences made in Jamaica, Florida and the New Forest in England.

It felt right, that this tiny, gentle country, though poor in material wealth, was rich and strong in spirit. Here was healing coming from Africa instead of being in need of it.  As an African-American, I had truly come home with Spirit of Makasutu Flower Essences – in more ways than one!