The Real Intro

This is my place to share with all of you, who I am, how I got to this place, and general thoughts I experience while working in the healing professions. As a musician, a massage therapist and a Reiki practitioner, I often find myself asking why it is, I can't seem to get my thoughts and feelings out quickly enough. Please join me in sharing these thoughts and express your own as well.

Let me tell you a little about how I got to where I am.

I was born totally blind in 1963, the youngest child in a blended family of eight kids. My parents realized quickly that I was an avid learner of music, and I enjoyed art. My father was a teacher of ceramics at Michigan State University for over forty years. Mom began learning how to work with blind children, just so she could help me. Her career in the field of blind education is noteworthy.

In 1968, I started attending Michigan School for the blind, and I attended there full time, until the winter months of 1978, when I started going to public school part time. I did that until 1979, when my mother took me out of school and we went for seven weeks to Mexico, where I studied Spanish. I then moved with herfor the next two years to Massachusetts , and lived in the bedroom community of Newton. That in itself is a story.

In 1982, I had the distinct pleasure of graduating from the Interlochen Arts Academy, after attending there for a year. I studied piano and voice while there. I also rebeled, because as a guitar player, I found folk music to be more to my liking. I'm still that way.

I attended Michigan State from 1982-1988, obtaining a double bachelors in arts and social work. In 1990, I graduated from the Masters program in social work at Western Michigan University.

For two years, I went through a rather dark time of reflection, before I enterd the workforce as a social worker, helping pregnant women on medicaid to get the services they needed. I lost that job three years later, for various reasons.

I spent the next eight months wondering what I was going to do with my life, before finding a social work job with Jackson Community Mental Health.

When I lost that job four months later, I spent the next five years trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, while working in a variety of different volunteer positions.

I've always loved massage, and I've always known I should be doing that for a living. I finally answered to the calling I was supposed to follow, by signing up for massage school in 2001. I graduated in 2002 and have been doing massage ever since.

I've since completed all three levels of Reiki, knowing that there are those among my Christian bretheren, who would look down on me for doing so. Yet, I also knew that there were those among my friends who would love and support me through those changes.

I owe so much to my friends Katie and Wally Metts for encouraging me to finally do this, and to Tom C. for the shove I needed, just by being a part of his blog community for the last couple of months. All of you knew, I needed the shove necessary to release the creative fast pace of my thoughts in a different medium. Katie and Wally, have been encouraging me and my husband Bert in our musical endeavors, ever since they first heard us. When I started a newsletter, they kept saying to me, "You need to do that as a blog", and I kept kicking and screaming.

Joan F. Thanks for sharing your expertise on the computer to help me set this up muchquicker than I ever could. (Grin)

Mom, and the rest of you, thanks for always being there. I love you.