My Journey to Healing

Autobiography of a Healer

The Search for Spiritual Truth

Born the fourth of four children in seven years, the joke in my family has always been that I raised myself. Given a great deal of freedom in a relatively safe small-town neighborhood by three years of age, I followed the older kids around our dead-end street, over the small creek and down the sand lot a half mile to what we called Beaver Pond, and throughout the several square miles of woods that started just a few feet from my house. It was within that freedom that my independence of thought and belief was first nurtured.

I have many clear memories from before I was two years old, and I don’t remember a time when God wasn’t a part of the way I interpreted and processed my world. I was with my family at the Episcopal Church multiple times each week for various activities, and it was like a second home to me, yet my experience with God went far deeper than activities at church.

I’m told I was a child who incessantly asked questions, and that included questions of God. I remember being alone in my bedroom playing at four years old when I asked God how He was able to talk to so many people at once. Since I had conversations with God and assumed everyone else did too, I imagined God working a huge old-fashioned phone switchboard, but that still didn’t explain how He could talk to everybody at once.
I also don’t remember a time before I was able to intuitively sense the energy and emotions of the people and animals around me.

At the age of ten, I decided that there was hell because the loving God I knew, communicated with, and felt around me would never send one of His beloveds to such a place. I didn’t tell anybody about this realization because it didn’t occur to me to do so. I was so certain of it that I didn’t need validation from outside myself.
I’d had many powerful, undeniable spiritual experiences by the age of twelve, yet I didn’t have any examples of intuitive people in my life, so I had come to believe that my ability to read energy was due to my social and body language skills.

I had also become aware of a deep organic understanding that we all act from a place of feeling unconditionally loved or from one of desperately longing for that love, and that I had a somewhat puzzling natural ability to make people feel valued for exactly who they were, giving them a reflection of themselves in which to realize their own worth and potential.

It was at this point in my life that my sister, seven years older, brought the concept of Eastern religion home from college and into my awareness. These experiences during my pre-teen years opened my world and launched me onto the lifelong path of a spiritual seeker.

I needed to find my Truth, and I knew in the core of my being that God’s Truth and my Truth were one and the same. I knew I didn’t completely fit within the world around me, yet I had no idea how few had the experiences with The Divine I’d been blessed with.

I was successful at walking with one foot in the physical world and one in the spiritual, but my longing to find my Truth was stronger than any other within me.

Seeking, Studying, and Searching for More

My years at Pacific Lutheran University were spent seeking outside the Christian realm of belief while living in the middle of it and even taking required Christian Religion classes. It was unlikely, but I was hungry. I read Autobiography of a Yogi (note the similarity to the title of this piece) by Paramahansa Yogananda, The Book of Mormon, The Koran, The Bhagavad Gita, The Prophet, and I studied the Bible.

In each I found pieces of myself but didn’t find the place inhabited by my tribe where I had no doubt The Divine was ever-present. By my mid-twenties, I felt like I’d dug a thousand holes but hadn’t found water, let alone “made it to China,” so I chose to return to the familiar community of the Christian Church. I did, and it was good, yet my longing remained—I just didn’t know where else to look.

Seeking and studying intensely but not finding resonance or any place I belonged, I went in and out of the Christian community but never stayed long before I got restless and went looking for “more.”

I dabbled passionately in New Age thought and literature when my sons were young, and that seemed close to my Truth, but life was busy, there was no community, and if there was a central, cohesive theme in what I’d found, I missed it.

Being a mom had always been my dream, so it was a time of relative contentment even though intense seeking was all but put on hold.

I had success using ESP cards, read Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and other popular New Age authors of the day, experienced a couple of good psychic readings, bought a deck of Tarot cards but didn’t practice enough to get proficient with them, and used The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need by Joanna Woolfolk to create natal charts for fourteen family members as Christmas gifts.

The biggest event was receiving confirmation that my paternal Grandad was with me. When I asked if he was my guide, seated in the mid-morning sunshine on my bedroom floor, I was suddenly in front of myself, looking back and seeing him behind my right shoulder.

At the time, I didn’t know that’s where a paternal grandfather in spirit is often seen by mediums, the position helping to identify their relationship.

I was no longer drawn to organized religion, yet I felt the need for a loose framework to weave my beliefs into and to make sense of its purpose—and of my purpose within it. Through this long and divergent journey, however, I received the gift of deep respect for all paths leading to Divine Love.

Through the Dark Night of the Soul

My dark night of the soul began at age forty-four and lasted fifteen years, including divorcing my first husband after twenty-three years because of his non-functioning alcoholism, and a second divorce ten years later after six years of domestic violence in the form of emotional, verbal, and financial abuse.

After leaving my first marriage, I lost my home shortly before both sons left together on a bus for four years in the Marine Corps. I used my spiritual practice and my knowledge of nutrition, fitness, and homeopathy to maintain my health, but it was a struggle at some points.

By the time I left my second marriage, I was emotionally bankrupt and had developed health issues from the chronic stress, including leaky gut, a blueberry allergy, Hashimoto’s, gluten intolerance, CPTSD, and back and leg pain severe enough that I limped when I walked and could no longer work out.

I moved in with my aging parents for a year and got involved in their Episcopal Church. It was a time of healing respite during which I needed ten hours of sleep a day, and I cried more days than not—sometimes all day.

During that year, I spent one to two hours in spiritual practice first thing each morning before walking my dog in nature for another hour, and I began meditating at the suggestion of my gifted Episcopal priest.

After a few years, I started feeling strongly that my daily spiritual practice was my richest and most joyful connection to God, and that resulted in my church involvement slowly waning.

A Spiritual Reigniting

Shortly after that shift in spiritual focus, I met a friend who introduced me to Abraham-Hicks and the Law of Attraction. Our relationship lit both of our spiritual lives on fire and catapulted us forward.

We talked openly of our spiritual experiences without fear of being thought weird or crazy, took online classes from spiritualist Camp Chesterfield, and learned deeply from the work of Abraham-Hicks, Paul Selig, Eckhart Tolle, Joe Dispenza, and others. I was drinking from a fire hose and still couldn’t get enough.

Answering the Call to Heal

My interest in natural health and healing started in earnest at age eighteen and had led me to the self-study of nutrition, chiropractic, natural childbirth, and homeopathy.

At fifty-nine, I was feeling a subtle, nebulous call from God toward a melding of spiritual metaphysics and natural health in some form of energy healing, but I didn’t have any idea what that might look like.

Thankfully, I did understand that God Source knew both my soul’s longing and my incarnational purpose, and I trusted that my healership would manifest in a perfect and delightful way, far beyond what I could envision on my own.

I set the intention and surrendered it, staying curious and alert for any signs along my way, yet not thinking about it much.

Over two years later, having just finished reading The Energy Cure: Unraveling the Mystery of Hands-On Healing by William Bengston and Sylvia Fraser, I had a private session with internationally regarded psychic medium Rebecca Rosen, and one of the first things she said to me was, “They’re telling me you’re a healer and they’re excited to work with you because you’re so willing to serve. They are so excited that they are jumping up and down!”

I told her I’d been feeling called and had just finished reading a good book on energy healing, but before I could tell her the title, she asked if it was Hands of Light by Barbara Brennan.

Stepping Fully Into the Work

I ordered Hands of Light before going to bed that night, and the workshop Rebecca told me I’d be going to in two months turned out to be a Hands of Light workshop in Santa Fe.

Not only was Barbara Brennan’s work very clearly resonating with everything related to my longing to become a healer, but everything her guide, Heyoan, said was another way of saying what I knew to be true from my spiritual experiences and what the other channeled entities I’d been listening to were teaching.

Finally, after fifty years of seeking, a consistent, resonant message within a framework I was comfortable with was clearly before me.

Practice healings during the workshop felt like getting on a bike after many years—only I’d never been on that bike before, at least not in this lifetime.

With my friend’s encouragement, support, and complete belief in my healing ability, I began offering healing sessions almost immediately after we returned to Colorado from Santa Fe, and enrolled at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing’s four year program, starting six months after the workshop.

I was constantly delighted by the positive results achieved through me as a conduit for The Divine’s unconditional Love.

Targeted Healings and ThetaHealing

Almost a year later, a gifted self-taught healer whom I’d learned about from Rebecca Rosen called me out of the blue asking if she could interview me for a book she was writing.

Even though the last time I’d requested a healing from her was when I was first feeling a call, long before my healership path had manifested, she had added my name to a list of what she called “healer types.”

During that Zoom interview, she wondered out loud if she could teach me the method she’d developed with her angels over a twenty-year period, which was different from what I’d been doing, though it was based on the same principles and beliefs.

She gave me a brief description of her process, and I tried it the next morning after meditating. It worked on my first try, and when I shared my experience with her, she exclaimed, “You’re absolutely doing it!” Behold, Targeted Healings were created, named that because they focus on healing one specific need.

During my final year at Brennan, I came across ThetaHealing while doing research for a paper in which I was attempting to figure out what it was that I had done throughout my life to create a space for others in which they felt safe enough to trust me with their vulnerabilities and take risks to learn and heal.

Just as I had no doubt when I read Hands of Light, I knew that ThetaHealing was the perfect addition I’d been longing for to efficiently guide clients to the discovery and removal of their bottom beliefs without re-traumatization.

After earning practitioner certification from Barbara Brennan School of Healing, I continued on to earn certification from Theta’s rigorous medical intuition course, Intuitive Anatomy.

Creating Release & Restore^™

By the time I graduated from Brennan and Theta and learned Targeted Healing,  I had received another call from The Divine, this time to create an accessible way for people to release the stress and trauma I saw so many carrying within them.

I knew that each of the three areas of our triune brain stores stress and trauma in a unique way when there’s too much to process in the moment, and that  three different modalities are needed to release it because as we have evolved, we’ve lost our instinctive spontaneous release response.

I wondered why three modalities hadn’t been combined into one offering for comprehensive healing release, and then I realized the connection to my calling.

I had watched my sons cope with Complex PTSD after fighting in Iraq, I had experienced CPTSD related to both my sons’ military service and domestic violence in my second marriage, multiple high-achieving young women in my professional life were suffering from debilitating anxiety, and when my older son became a firefighter, I became aware of the profound need for trauma release among first responders.

This culminated in my becoming a certified crystal bowl sound bath healer to round out my skills, and my proprietary system, Release & Restore™, was created and launched.

Integrative Medicine Health Coaching

I know I’ll never completely stop training, but I will be done with major programs after my certification as an Integrative Medicine Health Coach.

I have had numerous clients who need medical data on their hormones, gut microbiome, and food inflammatory markers, but they have hesitated to complete medical tests with other providers yet are willing to work with me as their coach.

I went through the program myself as a client and completed certification through the Academy for Integrative Medicine in July of 2026.

The Purpose Behind the Healing

This work is the manifestation of my greatest imaginings, perfected far beyond my own ability by The Creator of All That Is, and yet I can look back and see that I came to this life to share these gifts as the culmination of my life purpose.

My ministry has always been to bring Divine Light into the physical realm, allowing others to recognize their own Divinity through it. I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing.

No matter what modality I am manifesting it through, my purpose is to reflect the Divine Light emanating from you so that  you can see yourself as the Divine Love you are and embrace the Truth that you are an extension of The Divine and cannot be separated from it. Ever.

That understanding is the first step on the path to at-one-ment with our Creator, and I am honored to be a part of your healing journey along that path.

Abundant blessings,
Janet Bedingfield