Hi Friends,

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here on the blog. In that time, a great deal has shifted—in the world, in my work, and in how I understand the nature of healing, business, and relationship.

I’ve spent many months sitting with these changes, following threads of curiosity, and listening for what wants to emerge. I think I’m finally beginning to find language for some of it.

In these Stories from the Field, I’ll be sharing moments, encounters, dreams, and conversations that have shaped this unfolding understanding. Not conclusions so much as observations from the edge of a changing landscape.

I’d love to hear what you’re noticing as well.

Tuesday Afternoon

It is a Tuesday afternoon in a university hallway, and Boniface is explaining something to me that I will spend the next twenty years trying to understand.

He has come to Canada from Nigeria, and he has noticed something about himself that most people never get language for. When people move between cultures, he says, three paths tend to open up in front of them. Some hold tight to home and refuse the new place entirely. Some let go of home and try to disappear into the new place completely. But a few — and he is one of them — do something harder than either. They learn both worlds well enough to live fully inside each one.

“I am a hundred and fifty percent person,” he tells me, and he is smiling when he says it, but there is something underneath the smile too.

—Not because I am better than anyone, he says. Because I am carrying more. Two ways of seeing the world, at the same time, all the time.

I don’t fully understand what he means yet. I will not understand it for years — not until I am sitting across from a client whose mind wants proof and whose body is telling her something her mind refuses to hear, and I realize I am standing exactly where Boniface stood. Translating. Holding two worlds at once. Being the place where they meet.

If you run an energy healing or intuitive practice, you already know this person from the inside, even if nobody ever gave you Boniface’s words for it.

You move daily between a client’s analytical world — the one that wants outcomes, timelines, proof — and the subtle world you actually work in, the one that moves on its own schedule and answers to no one. You hold both. You translate between them so often you stop noticing you’re doing it.

That is a remarkable capacity. It is also, Boniface would tell you, a heavy one to carry.

The Healer Who Got Walked On

Years later, I am still turning his words over, because there is a second part to what he told me that day, and it is the part that took longest to land.

“When two groups cannot understand each other,” he says, “they call the bridge person. And bridges get walked on. From both sides.”

I think of him saying this for a long time before I understand it in my own work. A client cannot reconcile what her mind wants with what her body knows, and so I am the one called in: Explain why this is happening. Make it make sense. Translate what my body is telling me into something I can act on. Fix it, and fix it on a schedule that fits my life.

I carry the weight her own resistance isn’t ready to carry yet — translating the untranslatable, absorbing her doubt before it becomes a reason to walk away, making a session land that, by any honest measure, shouldn’t be expected to land without far more groundwork on her side.

When it works, no one marvels at what it took to make it happen. The shift landed. The pattern broke. She moved forward. Of course it did.

But when it doesn’t — when the gap between her conscious mind and her own knowing is too wide, or the timing isn’t right, or she simply wasn’t ready to meet what surfaced — I am, more often than not, the one who gets the blame. Not the years of conditioning that built the gap in the first place. Not the culture that taught her healing should arrive on a guaranteed schedule, like a delivery. Not her own unreadiness, which no practitioner, however skilled, can heal around.

The bridge gets blamed for not holding.

The Cost That Doesn’t Show Up on the Invoice

Boniface was not the only 150% person I would come to know. Over the years I have sat with practitioners doing the same work he described that day in the hallway — people holding space for clients moving between certainty and not-knowing, between the body’s wisdom and the mind’s demand for proof, between what a session reveals and what a client can actually carry home to an ordinary Tuesday.

Most of them became translators long before they had language for it — learning early that part of the job was making clients comfortable with uncertainty, smoothing it, explaining it, making it bearable enough to stay in the room. Many carried that role for years before anyone, including themselves, named what it was costing.

The cost rarely shows up where you’d expect to find it. It shows up in the exhaustion of holding space for everyone while having nowhere of your own to be held. In the loneliness of sensing what’s true for every client in the room while almost no one reflects back what’s true for you. In the slow erosion of your own boundaries, after years of attuning so closely to what others need that you lose the thread of what you need.

This Isn’t an Argument Against Doing the Work

I don’t think Boniface ever regretted being a bridge. The world genuinely needs people who can hold both worlds — the seen and the unseen, the measurable and the felt. This isn’t an argument against that work, or against being the practitioner your clients lean on.

It’s an argument for asking who is bearing the cost of it — including, sometimes, asking that question of yourself.

A bridge needs maintenance, and not only from the people crossing it. If you are the only one tending the structure, if no one is checking in to ask whether you have what you need to keep doing this, the bridge wears down. Not all at once. A little at a time, session by session, until you notice you are running on fumes and cannot remember when that started.

So the question isn’t only: can I hold this for my client?

It’s also:

• Am I maintaining the bridge, or just standing on it until it gives way?
• What does it cost me to hold two worlds at once, every session, every day?
• Am I receiving as much support as I give?

Boniface stood in that hallway twenty years ago and told me something he had clearly already lived for a long time. He was a 150% person, someone who understood more than one world well enough to move between them. So are you, if you’ve built a practice around holding what others cannot yet hold for themselves.

You are doing necessary work.

You deserve more than to be walked on.

Where in your practice are you the one holding the bridge — and who’s tending it with you?

For the bridge-builders and bridge-tenders,

Jan Anderson
Your Healing Business
Jan@YourHealingBusiness.com

PS: One final question: Who tends the bridges in your own life?