28. Finding Essence and Connection: Amanda Riley's Path as a Compassionate Healer

Bao: 00:00

Today, I'm receiving Amanda Riley. She and I met through this beautiful online community of women entrepreneurs called Affinity Women's Networking and she was probably the third or fourth person I got to know. This community is so amazing. It feels like the self sustained village of strong, wise, and witchy women I have always dreamed of having.

Bao: 00:21

I joined back in March of this year, and so just a few months ago, and I have already developed a strong bond with some of them and Amanda is one of them. Amanda is a compassionate healer, she uses complementary therapies to help people to come back to their true essence. She grew up in a great loving family, a privilege that she's enormously grateful for and she has always had a gift to help others and does from a full cup. When her father died in her thirties, she started her journey of grief, learning who she really was and how to be in. a different space and how to heal herself. Since then, she has learned so many modalities. She's a Reiki master, massage therapist, and reflexologist.

01:07

She's trained in the Bowen technique, M Technique, Pranic Healing, Angelic Reiki, Myofascial Release, Indian Head Massage and Pregnancy Massage and more. She studied on cavities, worked on patients in St. George Hospital, receiving dialysis, worked on cancer patient in three hospitals for eight years. She has been to Bosnia to help victim of the war, went to Malawi to support patient dying of HSV and cancer. Those many years of self development helped her to find herself to be the person she always was, sensitive, emotional, empathetic, and yet able to look after herself and her needs. Listen to our heart to heart conversation around her story and experience as a sensitive soul

Bao: 02:16

Amanda Hello, and thank you for being here with us.

Amanda: 02:18

Hello. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Bao: 02:21

I'm quite excited about this conversation that we're going to have together because it's one of those that I didn't plan anything. I don't have an outline, so let's go where it brings us.

Amanda: 02:31

Which I find perfectly the best way.

Bao: 02:33

I have to say, I have the confidence to do that with you because. You just have these like beautiful aura, you just touching soul. I just felt that I just had the confidence to go through this with you.

Amanda: 02:46

Thank you and same to you. I feel exactly the same in your company, a wonderful calmness. Looking forward to our conversation today.

Bao: 02:55

So this podcast is about ambitious empath and HSP and just to start off, I'd love to know if you yourself identify as an empath or an HSP.

Amanda: 03:07

Certainly an empath. I wouldn't necessarily say HSP because I think I've grown in my sensitivity. I think I've not understood the sensitivity before, I think I've had always an innate understanding of healing, and have done it in an unconscious way, perhaps, is how I like to perceive it, and even as a child, helping out others was sort of the standard way of being, but it was only when I was told by others that I'd helped them out that I'd realized that I'd helped them out. I hadn't identified that that had been something different or unique or special in any way.

Bao: 03:53

And so do you want to tell us about the work that you do today?

Amanda: 03:57

Absolutely. I am. a healer. It's taken me quite a long time to be able to use that word, but I started with massage therapy and doing reflexology and I'm a Reiki master, but I also now teach meditation online and do a daily online meditation practice, which is about helping people to manifest their goals, ambitions, dreams, which I feel is incredibly important to have a sense of controlling how your direction of your life is, because I know from my own experience that hasn't been the case at times and hasn't felt the case at times I work from that level of supporting people with their emotions through hands on therapies and listening and communicating and also using something called the emotion code to release trapped emotions. But also just sort of feeling into the energetics of the situation, being intuitive in the moment and using some of my psychic powers that I'm ever developing over the years.

Bao: 05:13

I have so many questions around that, but let's start first with the beginning. So how did you come to that, to be a healer?

Amanda: 05:22

Because I was In a very different career, I was working in insurance and my father used to work in insurance and I went traveling after leaving the job, came back from a year away to discover that my father had lung cancer. Well, my head was in a spin. I didn't really know what to do. I hadn't really made a plan for what my reentry back into the real world was going to be like.

Amanda: 05:46

So I was left a bit frazzled and uncertain, unsure, no firm ground to stand on and actually, my sister bought me a weekend workshop in massage and I just went to that weekend and discovered the passion there. I'd always enjoyed massaging my father's shoulders throughout my life. So I decided to take up massage and I discovered during massage, actually all the things that I'd already known and didn't know that I knew. So being able to be connected to a human being in a way that wasn't necessarily through touch or through communication verbally, but through feelings and through being able to sit in that energetic field and I would have visions and things like that.

Amanda: 06:45

I remember I worked on one man once and I had a vision of a wall with red painting written over it, the words stop and after it, and I thought that's just a bit of a funny vision. But when the treatment finished, he said to me, was there anything that you saw? And I was the first person that somebody had asked me that question, as I said. Well, I did see this funny thing with a wall and this, but I don't know what it means. It's probably nothing and I was trying to sort of shut it down and write it off, but he went in to tell me about the trauma and the things that he had experienced made so much sense for him. It was understanding that he had to stop for him. He had to change his patterns of behavior. So it was quite an eye opener to me about. Listening to all of the images, to the pictures and the words that come up and just being curious.

Bao: 07:42

I love what you just said right now. I just had goosebumps around listening. I think that we don't listen enough in this world.

Amanda: 07:51

No.

Bao: 07:51

Our culture, our society. So I love that. I just have a few questions. So this workshop that your sister offered you, it was around messages, right? Yes. But it was you learning it.

Amanda: 08:05

Absolutely me learning. So just a beginner's weekend that you would learn to do. For someone for your friend or something like that.

Bao: 08:13

It's crazy that she had such an intuition into this might be something for Amanda.

Amanda: 08:19

Absolutely.

Bao: 08:20

Because you mentioned that the things can be expressed, not necessarily through touch or words, but through feeling and vision. But in that context, you were actually touching people, right?

Amanda: 08:31

I was, yes, absolutely. And I found it easier to connect in with the person through the touch. It sort of gave me the permission. To enable to pick up these things, whereas I needed permission, I felt like I couldn't do it without the touch. I've subsequently now learned I don't need the touch and I can go in and do it on Zoom or in person or across the world, over the phone, whatever. But at the beginning, I definitely needed that, that permission through the touch.

Bao: 08:55

So I found super surprising from that man that he asked you that question. Have you seen anything? Like, do you think that he also got the vision?

Amanda: 09:14

He didn't have the same vision that I had, but he was also a massage therapist and so he was further along the line of me and more open and more intuitive and more understanding of everything. So he had explained that also he'd had a lot of treatments in the past where other therapists had told him about what they'd had as visions coming through. So that's why it was almost his expectation that another therapist would be able to read into that energy and see it, which I think a lot can almost all probably.

Bao: 09:52

Do those vision happen every time.

Amanda: 09:54

If I let it, if I go in, I'm never overcrowded with anything. It's always very gentle and, um, it is always on a permission basis as well, that the other person is in asking for that. So, more often than not, often there are times when I feel like the person may not need that for them in that moment that actually they need to just shut off. It's all intuitive and maybe sometimes it's intuitively wrong or right, but I kind of believe in things always being right. I think trusting in that, that even the worst things that happen to us in life give us the greatest lessons. As long as you're being ethical and conscious and aware and listening to people and trying to do your best, then I think everything is in the right time in the right place.

Bao: 10:55

I'm a little bit curious about Reiki, because I heard that many times, actually, my mother in law, she practiced Reiki. I think there are different levels. She just got the level one, but that's enough for what she wants to do. Like, how would you define that? Because she explained that to me of course. It's still so abstract.

Amanda: 11:14

It is. Yeah. It's very hard to understand. If I look at myself even 15 years ago, I was probably the biggest denier of it all and thinking it was all nonsense. So I'm still quite grounded in all of it because it's a learned experience. It's a learning. I think Reiki is also a general term that people apply because they can get a certificate for all sorts of healing that they naturally have. So one Reiki person that you go to will be very, very different to another Reiki person because we're all working from our own energy. We're all working in that way.

Amanda: 11:54

Reiki is all powerful healing, curative. thing. It gives what is needed at that moment, which more often than not is just a sense of peace and calm. I try to allow for Reiki to just be a very gentle experience for people in my treatments. I know of other Reiki therapists where they have lots of wailing and crying and screaming and all sorts of things happen, but that's their experience of Reiki. So it's wildly different for each. Yeah. As I say, each person comes at Reiki with a different sense of it, but certainly when you first train in Reiki, you certainly start to feel it. You feel the energy in your hands. As I'm talking now about Reiki, I can feel that Reiki healing. It's literally tingling on my hands and I wouldn't have believed somebody before if they'd said that to me until I felt it. And sometimes we have to be that sort of doubting Thomas in order to, to work and I am very much that one. I have to feel it to believe it. This is evidence here to me that this something here. Now how powerful that is depends on every person that you meet is different and we all come at it from different ways. So yeah.

Bao: 13:19

One question I have. Listening to you and remembering what my mother in law told me about Reiki. So what she told me about that is that she can feel when somebody has pain and where they have it and even if the other person never mentioned that, she's going to ask about that and then people will say, Oh, actually, yeah, actually I do. I do have pain there. And now you're talking about all this. I'm just wondering, like, Is there different types of energy? Like, what do you feel the energy of? Is it the energy of your bones, your muscle, your members, or is it on a soul level? What is it?

Amanda: 13:58

As I said before, it's very different for each person. So I used to do a lot more feeling into that body, but actually it wasn't good for my physical health to be feeling into other people's energy in that way. I have kind of stepped back a little bit on that, and my focus also is less on the physical side now and more on the emotional side, because from my experience, the emotional side has a great impact on the physical side, and once you clear the emotional side, you can potentially clear the physical side.

Amanda: 14:34

For your mother in law, her feeling into that. Is the her way of working and if she feels comfortable and if it's not affecting her, then that's a great way of using the healing and to be able to identify where there are areas more often than not people can sense the energy when they put their hands slightly above the body and feel into the different areas, but there are lots of different ways that people work in different ways with it. For me, I'm much more about working with the emotions and so I said, so if someone's feeling. Like they're about to cry, I might get a blocked throat chakra until they start that crying and then it opens up a lot, or I might get a feeling of heat or heaviness in the head, or there'll be areas that come up that I can identify with, but they don't necessarily mean to be physical. They can just be energetic and it's quite hard to understand what does this energy word mean? What is it about from the way I work is if I feel into it, if we both feel into it together and really embrace it and sit with it. It just allows for it to release as we like to do in most people's lives is to avoid the feeling if it's a discomfort, we want to step away from it and move away because it's not really sitting well with us and I don't feel comfortable. So I'm just gonna find a way to distract or do something different to not feel into it. But within my work, I try and get people to really come to embrace it.

Amanda: 16:24

Imagine this feeling here is a small child that you're bringing all your love and attention to, and you're physically carrying this in your arms and bringing it closer and you imagine if you're someone who's suffered from years of depression, you don't want to go close to this depression. You know, how dark and deep it can get, but actually by coming in closer, you can help to release it. It can feel incredibly hard and yet, when you really, really deeply feel into it, you can change your state within minutes but those minutes can feel like days, weeks, months, hours, whatever it is that is for you. So my form of Reiki is now very different to how it was when I started. Is that Reiki? Probably not so there's a lot of things that can be kind of fit into the field of energy healing as well.

Amanda: 17:24

It's a difficult term to know when you go and book an appointment with someone. How is their Reiki going to be working for them? Are they going to be the ones that are going to visually see with their eyes? They could see energy, you know, or sense. In a way that they can sense the energy rather than some people can clearly see colors, they can clearly see the chakra system and some people can hear, they can hear noises, sound, whatever it is. So we all work in very different ways and it's just a wonderful world that we live in that we have so many unique styles and ways of working.

Bao: 17:59

Thank you for this explanation. I think it really helped me to grasp a little bit more what Reiki is. What I'm wondering, because you also mentioned depression, I believe that the people you work with, some of them may have like extreme conditions or life is not easy for them, I guess and so how do you balance that? Like helping with them, being in contact with them? It is something that I have to work on because I know that as an empath, I need to have a sense of boundaries and be able to set healthy boundaries with people. I know that also, usually because of the way that I am, I usually attract those people who wants to share their baggage with me and so I'm still in the process of learning how to find a balance in that .

Amanda: 18:52

I think Reiki would be really good for you in that regard in terms of just doing the Reiki one, because it gives you the opportunity to sort of put yourself in a bubble and to allow yourself to be protected interference into your energetic field and that's something that takes a while to learn, but as you open up to Reiki. It is an opening. It's a journey, and it's experiential for yourself. First, it gives you the option to be protected or to learn about that protection, because often I think we forget. To look after ourselves in that process.

Bao: 19:31

I think it answered my question. So you mean that you actually learn about that?

Amanda: 19:35

And it's very simple. There is no grand thing, but you can visualize on a daily basis that you're in a protective pink ball of light and allow yourself. So I used to work in a cancer center and within an NHS hospital, my NHS badge used to fool around my solar plexus. Which is often the area that we sort of can give from, and our energy can be sort of taken from, and I would visualize that that badge was sort of protecting my solar plexus, and when I would put it on was, I needed something physical to do, because my visual brain doesn't work as quickly or as well as some people. So, I put it over my neck and that would be my prompt of. I am coming into this area, which is quite a dense energy area, working with cancer patients all the time. I'm being protected, but it took me many years to grow in, to learn how to do that. Just to think that I needed it.

Bao: 20:39

I see that. I'm reading now the things that you've wrote me when we discussed about doing an episode together of the Ambitious Empath Show I know that you learned many things among them Bowen technique, having M technique, pranic healing, Angelica Reiki, myofascial release, Indian head massage and I was just wondering, it seems like you love learning. It seems like you love expanding yourself and you want to tell me a little bit more about that, about you and about this aspect of you.

Amanda: 21:11

It's funny because I laugh when you say I love learning because as growing up, I was always the naughty one at school and never really did very well. But I've always been curious and I've been curious about people and I found this passion and when I find something that I'm really enjoy and I'm passionate about, I'm driven to learn more. So I went through probably a good decade of literally consuming as much as I could in terms of learning and growing and all of those courses were kind of relatively simple in comparison to the personal development work that I did over that time as well. That's where my real growth came from, my real healing came from. Doing family constellation work, et cetera. Breath work, all of that profoundly helped me. I've been passionate about learning also because I have been very unwell and my illness came from this ease, which was when my father died of cancer. I thought I was doing okay. I was okay. I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm helping everybody else. That's my role, to support and help and I didn't really look to myself and what my emotions were doing too much, and I buried them and I suppressed them and so I had to do a lot of work in order to unpick all of that to allow out any of the, it was a lot of anger, rage coming out from all sorts of things over the years. Some very trivial stuff, but just. Things that I just had suppressed over the years, time and time and time again and my learning has been not only both in things that I can give to others, but also in the self development as well.

Bao: 23:09

Thank you for sharing that. I feel that A lot of people on their path of self discovery and self actualization, a lot of it is motivated by healing your own ones and by healing your ones, you actually also learn and vice versa. You learn to heal others and to help others, depending on human design type or your birth chart or anything, I feel that sometimes just the fact that you're owning your story for some people might always deep help others to own theirs and so I can really see how learning about all that has helped you and I'm just wondering about this was surely the main motivation for it, but I'm wondering if you have this intellectual drive to understand everything and to explain everything or do you feel that is it more like coming home to yourself? Like, how does it feel to learn all that?

Amanda: 24:10

It's both, absolutely both. I'm a Gemini, so I have both sides of my brain are working, firing off all the time and we're the twin element of the zodiac. I've grown up very much in that sort of logical world, thinking I was quite, maths was my best subject at school but I've also grown up with my mother as a nurse. With the emotional aspects as well, being a strong understanding how to support people, but also I guess I've had to learn the feeling into people more because my brain was naturally more logical. I've done both learnings because I was drawn to the logical, but then I also. When I started to experience and feel into things doing psychodynamic work, etc, a psychosynthesis as well, blew my mind that my mind wasn't needed. And when my mind wasn't needed, my heart opened up and as I say that, it makes me beautifully, wonderfully emotional and I feel lovely release in that because when we work from the heart. We're working from the safest, kindest, warmest place possible. So, my learning has had to sort of come from both emerge and meld, but then to understand that my brain's really not needed in most of this. It often gets in the way and it doesn't make clever decisions. So I'm going to work from the heart.

Bao: 25:51

Thank you for sharing this with us. It was so beautiful to watch. So obviously our listeners, they don't have access to the video and just watching you telling this, it felt that this moment when you talked about working from the heart and you became very emotional, it just felt like you were blooming and afterwards you were just this peaceful and shiny energy. It was so beautiful to watch.

Bao: 26:16

I also know that you shared with me that you have worked with so many different type of people. I read that you worked with patients in St. George Hospital receiving dialysis with cancer patients in three hospitals for eight years. You have been to Bosnia to help victims of wars and Malawi to support patients dying with HIV and cancer. It is super impressive to see that and to read that it feels like you have so much to give and it's beautiful to talk with you too, because I feel like, you know how people are scared sometimes. And I'm one of them that if you give too much, you also spread yourself. Not that I have the impression that I don't have enough for myself anymore, but it does feel like I'm really spreading thin if I give a little bit too much and just reading that it's also inspiring that it might also not be the case.

Amanda: 27:15

Well, I'll tell you the reality of that story is that most of those experiences were done when I was really unwell and at my sickest. I'm really suffering with ulcerative colitis and in a way, some of that journey for me was a pushing energy. It was, uh, I am going to get through and I'm going to push myself into as many. extreme learnings as I can, because I want to cure myself of this disease. I haven't cured myself of this disease. I'm sorry to say I wish I had, but I'm on the journey of learning how to manage it. How to make it easier. I have done a lot in that journey and I think a lot of those experiences were a really, I was being driven by my own internal need to find this golden chalice that would cure all and how do we solve all the world problems and now I've become a little bit more grounded in understanding that not everything is, it doesn't resolve in the way that you imagine it would do.

Amanda: 28:30

So, sometimes, as harsh as it may sound that death is a solution for some people, and that is their way, that is their path, as much as I have willed it not to be for so many people, we have to accept that that's our journeys are somehow destined to be in a certain way. And as healers, I think that's really important to know that I think to be thirsty for the fix is good, but I can't fix anybody and I repeat that to myself on a regular basis because if I try, I deplete my own energy because it's not my job to fix another human being. It's entirely theirs to work out for themselves what their path is and how to do that for themselves but I can be a conduit to healing, offering peace and along the way.

Bao: 29:28

I love that. It shows a lot of big maturity to be able to accept that. Is there something else you want to say to our listeners?

Amanda: 29:37

Yeah, I think for me in my healing, it has been a very, very, very long journey and I am still healing. I'm still learning. I'm still growing and there are moments where life doesn't go the way that I expect it to do, or that I suddenly become unwell and I feel like I hit myself over the head time and time again, because I should know better. I should do better. I just want to offer some compassion, self compassion, but also compassion to others that actually it's a journey. It's always going to be a journey and nobody is perfect. So if anybody is suffering at this moment in time, know that we all go through it. We all do and try not to imagine that there's a destination. It's a journey, which doesn't mean to say you can't get better and you can't feel happier. It does absolutely but there may be times where you're not going to feel that and that's okay.

Bao: 30:46

Thank you so much for your wisdom, Amanda. It was such a pleasure to have you with us.

Amanda: 30:51

Thank you for having me today.

Bao: 30:53

So if people want to reach out to you and maybe are interested in working with you, where can they go?

Amanda: 30:59

The easiest place is my website, so it's the artofhealing.me.uk.

Bao: 31:06

Awesome I'll make sure to share this in the show notes. Thank you, Amanda.

Amanda: 31:11

Thank you very much. You have such a wonderful as I have said to you before, a wonderful energy that it makes it very easy for us to communicate with you and to feel heard and to express ourselves. So keep doing the work because it's brilliant.