by Gussie Fauntleroy
It’s
appropriate that a wooden loom, kept in storage for Naomi
Lake by a friend since 1978, was returned to her last fall.
Naomi set it up in her healing room and slipped back into
weaving as if she’d never stopped. In a sense, she has
been weaving all these years—just not with physical
threads. Instead she’s been weaving together strands
in the tapestry of vibrational medicine, developing ways of
perceiving and aligning a person’s vital energy field
in the aim of helping the patient shift into a greater ongoing
expression of wholeness and health.
Naomi’s decades-long evolution as a healing facilitator
has paralleled her personal spiritual path, with increasing
awareness in one area allowing deeper understanding to unfold
in other parts of her life. The principles at work in what
she’s been doing all these years have echoes in ancient
wisdom traditions from around the world. They’ve also
begun to find articulation in the leading edge concepts of
quantum mechanics, which describes the unlimited potentiality
of an underlying fabric of consciousness—the realm in
which true healing ultimately occurs.
Seeing colors
Naomi’s journey toward healing work began, it seems,
when she was a baby in her crib. Among her earliest memories
was seeing colors and shapes in the energy field around people,
although she had no explanation at the time for what she saw.
Adopted at birth, she now knows that in a primal, inarticulable
way she was searching for her birth mother by looking for
someone whose feeling/colors matched her own. Later, waiting
after school for her parents, both physicians in a San Francisco
Bay area hospital, she noticed colors in certain areas around
patients. At first her parents were intrigued, but their interest
soon turned to concern for Naomi’s eyes. When she was
7 they scheduled exploratory eye surgery to determine what
was wrong. The frightening prospect was enough to shut down
Naomi’s ability to see color/energy fields. A few years
later she came across a book on chakras, the ancient knowledge
of focal points for the vital energy that flows in and around
the body. With this understanding she found she could turn
off or on her ability to perceive and affect this subtle vibrational
field.
Also as a child, Naomi learned from the family’s live-in
housekeeper that the intuitive healing energy of her hands
could help make a headache or other physical discomfort go
away. When she left home at 16, she took with her the strong
desire to learn more about healing, along with a comfortable
familiarity with Western medicine and a nascent awareness
of powerful alternatives to the conventional medical model.
She briefly considered becoming a medical doctor, but life
soon set her on another path.
Gathering the strands
Married young, Naomi lived for a few years with her husband
and three sons on an old mining claim in the Sierra Nevada
foothills of northern California. She learned about wild-crafted
medicinal herbs from a Native American neighbor and used herbs
and hands-on healing to treat family and friends. At 23, divorced
and attending the University of California at Berkeley, she
delved into the study of anthropology, focusing on healing
approaches among indigenous cultures in different parts of
the world.
In 1978 Naomi moved to Provincetown, MA, where she met her
husband, Jimmy Roderick. Over the next 17 year she developed
a busy healing practice and traveled to Mexico City, England
and around the United States, teaching health care professionals—including
at Harvard Medical School and for the American Holistic Nurses
Association—to incorporate chakra/energy work as a therapeutic
tool. Gradually she learned other, related modalities, including
naturopathy, massage, polarity therapy, and shamanic journey
work. In 1995 while visiting a friend in Taos, she took a
side trip to Crestone. She and Jimmy decided to spend a few
months here—and stayed.
The multidimensional web
Naomi’s interest in shamanism deepened and expanded
in the 1990s during visits to the Amazonian jungle of Peru.
There she studied with indigenous shamans whose healing and
spiritual practices included use of the powerful visionary
plant mixture ayahuasca. “I was ready for the next step,
and it was indeed another step,” she says of the experience.
“It expanded my capacity to see the vast interconnectedness
we have with plants, animals, and the entire universe.”
Another important step was her introduction to computer-assisted
technology known as quantum biofeedback, which allows the
practitioner to more specifically identify, locate and “untangle”
knots or kinks in the web of energy that constitutes a person’s
energy field. Other approaches, including Access Consciousness
and Eric Pearl’s The Reconnection system, became tools
toward the same end.
Healing and paradox
After decades of refining her understanding and skills, Naomi
has become aware of a challenging paradox in her healing work.
As she pinpoints specific areas where energy “untangling”
needs to occur, patients can become attached to the idea of
a certain named disease or a particular area of imbalance.
The result can be a tightening up around the concept of an
ailment, rather than an opening and expanding of awareness
that balances the entire energy field. “I know we can
move to the place where we can transcend the material,”
Naomi says. “It’s the identification with contextual
reality that holds us back.” This paradigm shift also
means letting go of attachment to being fixed or healed by
someone else, she notes. “The different modalities I
work with can be a catalyst or a jump-start to enhance someone’s
capacity to heal themselves, but it’s really the individual
who moves their own energy in order for healing to occur.”
In the past few months, Naomi’s response to this challenge
has been to intentionally enter and inhabit a place of not
knowing. It’s been a quiet, regenerative pause to allow
for the shedding of her own attachments to contextual reality—including
her identity as a healer. “We get distracted by definitions
of self, which are contractions that keep us from being in
the field of unlimited possibilities,” she reflects.
“I do feel, believe and know that we all have the capacity
to live from that place.”
This article is reprinted by permission from The
Crestone Eagle, all rights reserved
|