The Birth of an Internet Healing Community

In 1995 I was hiding out in a snowbound cabin in northern Saskatchewan – my ninth move to escape a violent relationship that was destroying my life.

It was a cold winter that year, the thermometer dipped below -30 for weeks on end.

I was horrendously sick – physically, emotionally and spiritually.

I hated myself, I hated my life and I hated the choices I had made which had led me to this bleak place in my life. I wavered between wanting to die and struggling to find the help that I needed to survive.

But I'm getting ahead of myself in the telling of my story. And so I ask for your patience as I backtrack. My grandmother was always fond of saying, "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade." It's an old cliche, I know, but one I've learned to live by. When I was 33 years old, my third young adult mystery novel was being published, and to those around me, it appeared that I had the world by the tail. I was being invited to speak in schools across Canada and I was constantly jetting off to one locale or another – from Labrador to Vancouver and more than 300 points in between. I was the mother of two beautiful daughters. I had a lovely home and a supportive husband. On the surface, I'm sure, it looked good. My friends and family constantly praised me for my accomplishments, and I got fan mail from kids all over Canada. But my life was a mess. I suffered from low self-esteem and my marriage was crumbling. In 1993 my marriage ended in divorce and within months I got involved with a violent alcoholic. If there is such a thing as a "living hell" I lived there for at least three years. I was beaten more times than I care to remember. I tried to escape the situation on numerous occasions, but he always found me and the violence began again. By the time I ended up in the cabin in the Great White North, I was a basket case. That's when I began looking for help to heal.

Unfortunately, I soon discovered that the modern medical profession, though they could offer a solution to my depression, had little in the way of help for my wounded spirit. It is at this time that I began to look for an alternative means to heal – a journey that ultimately led to my current employment as the owner and operator of the Canadian Holistic Health World Web Site and managing editor of Body Mind Spirit Magazine. In looking for alternative help in Saskatchewan, I quickly discovered that you can't just pick up the phone book and look under the yellow pages for a shaman. Nor, I discovered, could you find alternative health practitioners easily on the Internet. That's when I got the notion to rectify this problem by creating a holistic health web site on the Internet. It took me three years of spiritual recovery before I ever acted on this notion, I was busy trying to survive my crisis, but the web site eventually came to pass.

Today I'm free of the abusive relationship, I have worked through my issues, my abuser has served his jail sentence and is now on probation in the community. A restraining order prevents him from contacting me or any of my family members for the next three years. And last, but not least, I am the proud organizer of the Canadian Holistic Health World Web Site and Body Mind Spirit Magazine.

I'll never forget the day I started contacting holistic health practitioners and asking them if they would be interested in becoming members of an online healing community. The first person I spoke to thought this was a great idea and quickly joined up. Within weeks, over a hundred practitioners had joined my online community. I quickly hired a web designer and the web site began to grow. We still maintain a community of over 100 healers, though the web site itself is ever-changing. Healers join, others leave, but all and all the community continues to thrive. We now have approximately 30,000 hits per month and that number continues to grow.

One night I asked my spirit guides how I could make the holistic health site I had created more useful – more helpful to those who sought the kind of help which I had needed so many years before. The answer was clear and concise. "Create a magazine called Body Mind Spirit. Fill it full of wisdom and clarity and fill it with love." I rarely defy the suggestions of my spirit guides and I listened that night with open ears. The very next day I started to look for writers to fill the pages of Body Mind Spirit with their thoughts on everything from body and mind wellness to spiritual wisdom and mastery. The first issue came out in April of 2001 and the magazine is still growing and evolving. We now have our own production editor, Aleesha Stephenson, and our copy editor is Maggie Frost. Our writers, at one time only from Saskatchewan, now come to us from across Canada, Africa, the United States, Australia and England.

The Canadian Holistic Health site and Body Mind Spirit Magazine, which both began as projects of love, are like a child that I nurture each and every day. They are the things that get me up in the morning. They are the things that help me to put my past behind me and to strive for something new and exciting every day.

If someone had told me ten years ago that I would one day be involved in participating in the growth of a vibrant community of holistic healers and an online healing magazine, I'm certain I would have laughed out loud. Ten years ago, I didn't know what the word "holistic" meant. Today my life is immersed in the field. I have met so many wonderful people whose lives are devoted to caring for the sick, healing the wounded, and leading all of us to a brighter, more enlightened world.

When I look back on those terrible years of abuse, I feel a great deal of gratitude. It was not an easy road to travel, but it was a journey which led me further along my path of spiritual growth. I have complete faith that I am now where I am supposed to be in my life. Perhaps I've taken some wrong roads in the past, or perhaps these are the roads that I had to take to get where I am today. I don't know the answer to that question, and perhaps I never will. For today, at least, I feel grateful to have ended up where I am. I will forever be grateful to all of those in the holistic health field who have joined our growing online community – those who have embraced me as one of their own and helped me each and every day to live a wiser, stronger and more fulfilled life.

In closing, I'm happy to report that I recently completed my fourth young adult mystery novel and that I am hard at work on a book about life after death. I'm also in a healthy, loving relationship. Perhaps dreams do come true!

By Jeni Mayer