- April 24, 2024
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I’m lying face up on a white sheet, stretched out on a table trying not to fidget. The sunlight glinting through the closed blinds bathes my line of sight in a buttercup hue — the very color of my most decrepit chakra, the solar plexus, aka the complex system of nerves and ganglia in the pit of my stomach. Aka my gut.
Susan Milligan, a Lakewood Ranch reiki master and energy healer, approaches the table. “It helps to set an intention before we begin,” she says. “If you can think of one thing you’d like to work on …”
Stick-to-itiveness, I say to myself.
“I feel like the wind keeps getting sucked out of my sails,” I say out loud.
“Hmmm,” Milligan says.
“Like my inner compass is spinning.”
Another hmmm.
“I never used to feel this way. I used to be decisive and determined. Like a dog with a bone.”
Milligan seems to intuitively understand the rest, so I leave it at that and close my eyes, letting the ghost of my former tenacious self soften into the table. As I do this, my thoughts drift to my stomach, where I can feel hunger pangs and Milligan’s light, hovering touch. I fight the urge to get up and grab the packet of peanuts I stuffed in my camera bag that morning. Why didn’t I just eat breakfast before leaving?
Through slitted eyes, I can see Milligan doing some sort of finger dance over my navel, tugging and knotting invisible string, a sort of pantomime of Cat’s Cradle — air sewing if you will. I take a deep breath and surrender to the void just as my phone, set to vibrate, begins mewing in my purse. The buzz harshens my two minutes of mellow and immediately dredges up the impending stress of my afternoon: the one-hour drive back home to St. Petersburg, the fact that I’m going to be late getting my children from school and later still getting the other two children I offered to babysit. Why didn’t I just tell my friend I couldn’t watch her kids today?
I start sweating, which makes me think of air conditioning, which makes me think of ventilation, which makes me think of COVID-19. Always COVID-19. I hear the voice of my husband and the collective voice of every social media user in my Facebook feed scolding me for not wearing a mask during this appointment. My imaginary tongue-lashing goes something like this:
Why didn’t you wear a mask?
Because the practitioner said it wasn’t necessary.
How does she know?
Because she’s deeply in tune with the universe.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is deeply in tune with science, and he says we should always be masked.
But neither one of us has COVID-19.
Can you prove it?
No.
Well then shame on you, disease vector. Enjoy your energy healing!
Thanks. I’m going to bury myself in a hole when it’s over.
A sudden physical awareness cuts through my self-deprecation, a trembling below my ribs that feels like butterflies flapping or a fetus kicking. My eyes flicker open a hair, just enough to see Milligan knotting the final
loop-de-loop of invisible thread. In this moment I feel the skin on my abdomen tugging and puckering like I’m being sewn shut. The sensation is so strange that I will myself to close my eyes tighter and roll with it. That’s when I realize my eyes were never open to begin with, and for a second I feel like I’m melting. Then I remember I need to pick up my kids, and I ladle my molten aura off the table and reach for my phone to check the time.
Susan Milligan didn’t always feel so comfortable mucking around other people’s energy fields.
Growing up in New York in the 1970s, Milligan stayed squarely within the bounds of her middle-class Catholic upbringing. Her father was a New York City police officer, and her mother was a school teacher, neither of whom dabbled in esoteric wonders and “tutti-frutti” beliefs — Milligan’s words.
“I very distinctly remember looking around my Catholic elementary school and thinking, ‘Does anyone else have a problem with this?’” recalls Milligan, now 52. “The premises of these Muslim, Jewish and Christian religions always felt to me like a way to scare and control people. At the time I wasn’t sophisticated enough to rebel against it. I was indoctrinated to be obedient, but I always knew in my core it didn’t feel right.”
Milligan has always felt things in her core, and not just her things either — things radiating out of other people’s cores: pain, joy, anxiety, fear, love. It’s a mixed blessing that haunted her for two decades as a physician assistant. A graduate of Boston College and the physician assistant program at The School of Health Sciences at Touro College, she spent most of her career feeling other people’s pain.
When Milligan joined the house staff working nights at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center on Long Island 27 years ago, she didn’t think she’d last a month.
“You’re working with patients already admitted and patients in emergency and patients ready to leave,” she says. “You’re putting in tubes and starting IVs and basically hurting people all the time. Two weeks into the job, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’”
She hated it at first but stuck it out anyway, partly for the paycheck, partly out of service and partly to prove to herself that she was on the right path. Plus, she was good at it, thanks to her no-nonsense, Type-A demeanor and intuitive bedside manner. “You might toughen up on the outside, but you still feel turmoil on the inside,” she says.
Milligan never considered how the bad juju was impacting her health until she was married and unable to get pregnant.
Desperate, the then 20-something made an appointment for an energy healing at the suggestion of a friend whose aunt practiced reiki, a Japanese light-touch technique based on the idea that all living things have a life force energy that can be tapped, channeled and unclogged.
“I told her I’d do it if it didn’t cost more than a pair of shoes at Nordstrom,” Milligan quips. “I went into the session rolling my eyes because of course I didn’t believe in that stuff.”
The spiritual tuneup had a profound and lasting effect, resulting in a positive pregnancy test one month later. “Something shifted in me after that,” she says. “My whole world opened up.”
She started studying reiki and other related modalities shortly thereafter and in 2004 enrolled in the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, a mecca for light workers, spiritual gurus and champions of Eastern medicine. (The school was founded on Long Island in 1982 by former NASA astrophysicist and human energy field pioneer Barbara Brennan.)
Guided by a reiki mastership and four years of comprehensive Brennan training, Milligan began doing healings on the side for a small cadre of hospital colleagues and friends. The sessions made her feel less at odds with Western medicine and better equipped to lead those most hurting through the darkness.
In 2015, she relocated to Lakewood Ranch with her husband, a computer engineer, and two teenage daughters. After a brief stint working as a physician assistant at Ideal Image, she opened Inquire Within Goddess Shoppe, a metaphysical boutique on Lake Osprey Drive selling all the requisite new age accoutrements: crystals, stones, sage, candles, oils and a diverse collection of handmade jewelry. The shop, which Milligan relocated in January to a quiet cottage in Gillespie Park, functions as a sort of gateway to her more powerful proclivities: “goddess” healings and energy medicine.
When the pandemic hit in March, she had no idea the space would feel like such a refuge from the madness.
“The system is fracturing,” Milligan says. “Things are breaking down. There’s a lot of chaos and a window of opportunity. Now is the time to grab back our power.”
There was a time not long ago when I ran only on instincts. So acute were these hunches that I dubbed them my Spidey senses and acted on them as if I were in a latex suit, slinging and swinging from one webbed roofline to the next. Without them, I would have never taken the life-affirming risks I’ve taken as a journalist, wife and mother.
I was originally given this assignment back in March, but I postponed it for COVID-19 reasons. At the time, I had no idea how disorientated I’d feel by October or how big the blockage would get in my gut after carrying around the weight of so many second guesses. I might not have gone out looking to grab back my power, but my soul did without asking permission.
When I walked into Milligan’s shop with its enchanted crystals, mesmerizing baubles and sunshine-imbued buttercup milieu, the only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t know anything for sure, except that I was steeped in the wake of a spreading virus and its subsequent mire of economic and interpersonal quagmires.
COVID-19 cut me off from friends, family, neighbors and vital professional relationships, including my parents, whom I haven’t seen in person since January. It cost my husband his job and our health insurance and sent our kids into a kind of hibernation marked by long bouts of screen time, screaming and scant socialization.
No wonder I felt inert. The universe fired a poison dart at my ever-swinging body and flatlined my Spidey senses. But like all things with strings attached, my pummeled receptors dramatically perked up when I threw them this one gift: faith. In the weeks following my session with Milligan, I made a promise to no longer tether my instincts to the things you cannot see. It might seem counterintuitive, but I don’t think so. I’m finding it easier to get around now. I feel freer now without my web.
