I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by VoyageBaltimore Magazine about my early years as a practitioner and my progress since then. You can  the check out the story directly at their website here, or read the transcript below. 

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Sharp.

Hi Jessica, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I always knew I wanted a career where I could help people but didn’t know where to start, so I started with what I was “bad at”. I’m squeamish about blood so that ruled out nursing and veterinary. I’m not great at making people part with their money so that ruled out non-profit and sales. I had heard about Reiki in high school but didn’t take that seriously until an incident with my infant son opened my eyes.

When my youngest was just 2 weeks old, in early 2012, I developed terrible mastitis. I was feverish, too sick to get out of bed, and my partner was trying to calm the baby down in the next room. Nothing was working, so in desperation I decided to telepathically send my son “good mom energy.” I’m sure it looked comical – me lying in bed with my face scrunched up, balled up fists, exhaling like steam was coming out of my ears. For some reason I thought I had to push the energy out really hard!

Well, the baby stopped crying almost immediately. I, of course, thought it was a fluke so I stopped pushing… and he started crying again. I sent energy again and he stopped crying again. It was the first of many, many times I would be blown away by the amazing ways humans can interact with energy, a confirmation in the unseen forces of human potential and the Universe itself. My baby and I went back and forth like this for about 5 minutes, during which I was basically torturing my child and also recognizing that this could be “my thing.”

To learn more about Reiki I went to the place that all good Xennial kids go for information, the library. I learned that training standards for Reiki practitioners in North America are all but non-existent – I mean, in some cases you can just watch a video and then download a printable “certification” – but I was determined to take the most in-depth training I could find. I felt a cracking-open in my soul, like I had found my calling, but I knew myself well enough to know that I would need consistency and practice to be good. A one-day workshop might make me feel energized in the moment, but on Monday I would go back to changing diapers and wiping noses and forget all I had learned.

It was at this point that the student was ready, so the teacher appeared – almost literally! I’d been researching Reiki apprenticeship programs but all were exorbitantly expensive and out-of-state, which as a new mom was untenable. I was at the Main Street Festival in Laurel just a few months after having my energetic experience with my baby and stopped by the booth of an acupuncturist friend. “Do you know anyone who does Reiki?” I asked. “Oh, yeah,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. “This is Greg, he’s our Reiki Master, and he’s about to start teaching a mentorship course next month.” So… the exact thing I had been seeking was now going to be affordable and just six minutes from my house? If it had been a movie this would be the scene where the single sunray shone down and a choir started singing. It was confirmation, truly.

So I signed up for the 100-hour Reiki mentorship course, which was 10 months long and covered so much more than I would have learned in a weekend. We certified in all three levels of Reiki and I graduated in May of 2013, then began co-teaching the program with Greg the following autumn. We taught together for 2 years, and I practiced out of the same acupuncture studio where we had met.

Fast forward 13 years and I’ve now taken over teaching the mentorship program completely. Greg moved to Virginia to become a psychologist, and I took over his caseload as I transitioned to full-time private practice. I’m biased, but good god I honestly think I have the best clients in the world! I am blessed to spend time serving unique and wonderful people, helping them relieve pain and lean into self-compassion.

I’ve studied in a few other modalities that I use to supplement my Reiki practice, such as trauma-informed bodywork and sound healing. The mentorship program has grown to cover trauma-informed techniques and practitioner skills, ethics, animal Reiki, hospice care, shamanic work, and specific protocols for illnesses like cancer and auto-immune disorders. Mentoring is such a delight and each cohort teaches me so much about myself as well.

I also now operate a collective healing space in Savage Mill that serves as an incubator for other new practitioners as they build their clientele, which has been such a joy. I was blessed to have a “slow and steady” start to my business and only paid a small percentage of each session’s income as rent. This meant I always turned a profit and never had to dip into personal savings to make rent. Now I’m able to pay that forward to the next generation of practitioners and I honestly couldn’t be happier – that is a real dream come true!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think anytime you are doing something that is a true soul calling there will always be a “guiding hand” that helps you through the challenges but also… oof. Anyone who has really dedicated themselves to healing work will tell you that you can only help heal your clients to the level you are willing to heal yourself.

Being a good practitioner of any kind – therapist, Reiki practitioner, coach, etc. – means looking deeply at your own, ahem, “stuff.” It’s a pull-no-punches shadow work journey you silently volunteer for when you take on this type of career. Without doing that deep self-examination not only can you not see or serve your clients in their depths, but you also inevitably end up falling into some unethical ego pitfalls of your own.

For me, this meant many, many tearful conversations with my mentors, my journal, and my Higher Power. It meant, for example, having to reckon with lack mentality and money trauma – but not before I put myself through the wringer about my worth. It meant having to learn how caregiver burnout showed up in my body and spirit, which wasn’t always apparent because my symptoms were emotional, like anxiety, self-sabotage, and crippling self-doubt rather than physical fatigue. It also meant having to look at the struggles I had setting boundaries with clients, especially male clients who became infatuated, and my reasons for those struggles. It meant getting sober – not a requirement for being a healer per se, but something that turned out to be necessary for me. I had to look at the ways my own selfishness and self-loathing showed up to rock the boat of my sessions and my personal life. It was ugly, painstaking work that happened in tandem with the work I was doing in the business and customer service sense.

The unique thing about this type of challenge is that if you’re doing it right, it doesn’t go away. It just changes and deepens. I said it *was* ugly, painstaking work – well, it remains so. For me, intentional self-reckoning is the measure of a healer’s integrity. A good practitioner knows a healthy relationship with oneself is a lifelong practice, not a class to pass and then never think of again. So the shadow work and self-examination are things I’m always doing alongside my entrepreneurship, unpacking new horrors and joys all the time.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a trauma-informed Reiki practitioner, sound healer, Tarot reader, and oracle deck creator.

My specialties are emotional and spiritual healing, and helping clients restore a sense of self-compassion. We do this by learning about the energy itself, how to set energetic boundaries, how to feel energy moving in their bodies, and much more. Every session is unique and the ways each client’s energy body “speaks” is always a joy to interpret.

It’s important to me that a client not only feel better physically and mentally when leaving a session, but that they leave with more understanding about their energy body and some tools in their toolbox for self-regulation. I’m not a practitioner that’s going to wave my hands over someone silently, take their payment and wish them well. My sessions are rich and educational, and I do my best to make each person feel seen in their wholeness.

One of my proudest achievements, as well as some of the most fun I have at work, is teaching my 100-hour Comprehensive Reiki Mentorship Program. It’s the same class I took, and I’ve reverse-engineered it to include the information I learned as well as all the things I wish I’d learned – addressing the blind spots I had when actually entering private practice. We cover marketing, ethics, choosing a practice space, prenatal and post-partum care, how to treat children, energetic and emotional anatomy – I could go on and on. I teach all of the things I get really excited about when it comes to this work, and it’s just a bucket of fun.

The mentorship program is my flagship offering – it’s live-taught and hybrid, meaning we meet weekly for live lessons and students can join either in-person or on Zoom. This opens up enrollment to students out of state so they are still able to learn from me. It’s also one of the only Reiki training programs in the US to include clinical practice, meaning students practice on volunteers in mock session settings rather than just practicing on each other. This gets them comfortable with meeting strangers, talking to them about energy, and touching them – something they will do often once they start marketing and seeing clients.

I think another thing that sets me apart is that I treat and teach children and families. I have a toybox in my office and I love to offer family sessions, where parents can come get some treatment while the littles play (this relieves the need to find and pay for a sitter!) and the kiddos get to try Reiki as well. It’s a beautiful bonding experience as well, because usually the children are excited to treat alongside me and learn how to “take care of mommy.”

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
When it comes to business, I’m in the middle of the road. I’ll take a risk on “saying the weird thing” to a client or trying a new technique with them, but financially I’m more conservative.

What I find even more interesting is that as my confidence as an entrepreneur has grown, my physical risk taking – meaning, doing dumb, dangerous stuff and thinking, “Eh, I’ll be fine, who cares?” – has actually become more conservative! This is because I’ve studied nervous systems and trauma responses, especially the ways we override our body’s natural security system. We override these systems for myriad ways – to impress people, to give in to outside pressure, because we feel we can’t say no, etc. etc.

As with lots of healing work, your first client is yourself so I’ve learned how to detect subtle cues from my brain and body that might have otherwise been ignored. I remember a time when I was hiking with a colleague. She had a lot of experience with trauma-informed nervous system work and at the time I did not. I invited her to jump over a deep ravine to a narrow ledge to get to another area of the woods and she balked. I did it without thinking much of it. However, a year or so later, after training in bodywork for PTSD and trauma I did the same hike and found that my nervous system was screaming at me not to do that dangerous jump. I’m much more in tune with my body now, and that has diminished my physical risk-taking, but allowed me to have so much more trust in my business decisions.

Pricing:

• Intake Reiki Session – $180
• Reiki & Sound Healing – $180
• Couples Sound Bath – $222
• Soul Retrieval Ceremony – $250

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gentlehandsreiki.com
• Instagram: @gentlehandsreiki
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GentleHandsReiki/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@gentlehandsreiki3313