“She called being in nature ‘good medicine,’” my boyfriend says to me, after a conversation with Lisa Levine. It’s a phrase that sticks with me. A few weeks later, I speak to Lisa on a morning of torrential downpour. It’s the sort of rain that seems more appropriate to a thunderstorm in the tropics than a Brooklyn spring, nature announcing her presence with every crack of lightning. So I ask her about what she said. “There are scientific studies about what happens when we’re around trees and the soft lines of the earth versus the hard, concrete, man-made lines of the city. Without so many people in such a small space, your energetic body has more room to stretch out – visually and energetically. In the city we shrink our auras and our energetic bodies down so that we can all live together. And when we go into nature, we can expand into the atmosphere and into the surroundings more,” she says. And I agree, partly because I also experience this as true – surely I am not alone in feeling like I can take a deeper, bigger breath in nature – but also because, as a licensed acupuncturist, Reiki Master, and cofounder of Greenpoint healing collective Maha Rose, Lisa Levine would know something about good medicine. She practices classical Chinese medicine and within minutes has introduced me to moxa (an herb made from mugwort), explained that qi is the energy flow that exists within all living beings, and that there are two main causes of dis-ease: stagnation or deficiency of said qi. When I ask how she determines whether it’s stagnation or deficiency, she explains that it’s primarily through the client’s pulse, though also by actively looking at a person and doing a diagnostic intake (a.k.a. asking questions), all of which sounds exhilaratingly holistic. I ask whether she considers her work a calling, and then, somewhat bashfully, what being called feels like. “Mine was literally waking up in the morning and just receiving really clear messages of ‘Do healing work. Do healing work,’” she says. “But it doesn’t have to be that specific and blatent from the universe. It can be a little bit subtler. What you feel drawn to in a strong way is a calling. It’s doing the things that come from your heart center, rather than doing the things your parents told you to do because they might make sense for other reasons. ‘I’m doing this for these reasons’ is an intellectual, heady thing versus doing something that your heart feels really drawn to.” “Often when we have an intention for something, the universe asks us to step up our game.” In addition to Reiki and acupuncture, Lisa’s heart is drawn to: taking on private clients and running Maha Rose, practicing yoga, making jewelry, mothering a 1.5 year old boy, operating Maha Rose North (her new retreat center in the Catskills), and leading a summer-long course of her own design called “The Art of Running a Spiritual Business.” I find it an impressive balance of the head and the heart, so I appreciate it when she says she allowed her healing work to be part-time at first, so that “there wasn’t an incredible amount of pressure to grow really quickly.” It’s exactly this sort of simple practicality that I come to quickly admire about Lisa. Her spirituality is fortified in, rather than hindered by, logic. In an interview with Well+Good, she said that “intense times call for serious magic,” a delicious bit of truth we end up discussing with wit rather than cheek. “Yes, I do think my career is about serious magic and giving other people tools to get in touch with their magic, whether it’s the same tools – teaching them Reiki or laughter yoga – or just teaching other people to tap in and get in touch with their tools, which is what this Art of Running a Spiritual Business class is about. Because we all do have different gifts, and so it’s about accessing those gifts and giving them time and attention and growing them,” she says. It’s the rich honesty in her voice that allows me to understand something critical about the idea of “serious magic,” that I couldn’t at first. My initial impression was that “serious” modified “magic” – that magic itself was being quantified in terms large and small, or perhaps that the magic was of a stronger, more potent variety than other magic in existence. I’ve since realized that “serious” is really the attitude of its practitioner, an idea that is perhaps best illuminated by the education or skill or experience of the magician. We agree that it’s no coincidence that healing practices such as Reiki and astrology – ancient arts that once existed only on the fringes of Western society – have made such extraordinary headway into American popular culture, particularly in the last five years. But frankly, it should come as no surprise that yoga et al. is proliferating at a time of extraordinary divide. Should readers like a reminder, “yoga” comes from the Sanskrit “to yoke.” What we are doing is practicing oneness with ourselves, so that we may achieve it with other sentient beings. Though lately I notice when writers begin an article on a healer – especially one intended for online publishing to the public at large – it starts from a place of so-called “healthy skepticism.” The author follows a well-tred arc from doubt to interest, interest to receptivity, and receptivity to tentative acceptance. That sliver of affirmation inevitably opens the author to a state of higher being, where they admit to feeling less stressed, calmer, more present. Admit is the key word, as it often seems the writer has experienced their own healing with a winking ambivalence: one foot stuck in the mud of distrust and insecurity and the other timidly stepping forward into a present of self-possessed tranquility. As Lisa says, “often when we have an intention for something, the universe asks us to step up our game.” So let’s call this a new starting line of faith in healing modalities of all kinds, and a respect for the teachers who study and practice them. Consider Lisa Levine.
