by Gussie Fauntleroy

It’s appropriate that a wooden loom, kept in storage for Naomi Lake by a friend since 1978, was returned to her last fall. Naomi set it up in her healing room and slipped back into weaving as if she’d never stopped. In a sense, she has been weaving all these years—just not with physical threads. Instead she’s been weaving together strands in the tapestry of vibrational medicine, developing ways of perceiving and aligning a person’s vital energy field in the aim of helping the patient shift into a greater ongoing expression of wholeness and health.

Naomi’s decades-long evolution as a healing facilitator has paralleled her personal spiritual path, with increasing awareness in one area allowing deeper understanding to unfold in other parts of her life. The principles at work in what she’s been doing all these years have echoes in ancient wisdom traditions from around the world. They’ve also begun to find articulation in the leading edge concepts of quantum mechanics, which describes the unlimited potentiality of an underlying fabric of consciousness—the realm in which true healing ultimately occurs.

Seeing colors
Naomi’s journey toward healing work began, it seems, when she was a baby in her crib. Among her earliest memories was seeing colors and shapes in the energy field around people, although she had no explanation at the time for what she saw. Adopted at birth, she now knows that in a primal, inarticulable way she was searching for her birth mother by looking for someone whose feeling/colors matched her own. Later, waiting after school for her parents, both physicians in a San Francisco Bay area hospital, she noticed colors in certain areas around patients. At first her parents were intrigued, but their interest soon turned to concern for Naomi’s eyes. When she was 7 they scheduled exploratory eye surgery to determine what was wrong. The frightening prospect was enough to shut down Naomi’s ability to see color/energy fields. A few years later she came across a book on chakras, the ancient knowledge of focal points for the vital energy that flows in and around the body. With this understanding she found she could turn off or on her ability to perceive and affect this subtle vibrational field.

Also as a child, Naomi learned from the family’s live-in housekeeper that the intuitive healing energy of her hands could help make a headache or other physical discomfort go away. When she left home at 16, she took with her the strong desire to learn more about healing, along with a comfortable familiarity with Western medicine and a nascent awareness of powerful alternatives to the conventional medical model. She briefly considered becoming a medical doctor, but life soon set her on another path.

Gathering the strands
Married young, Naomi lived for a few years with her husband and three sons on an old mining claim in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California. She learned about wild-crafted medicinal herbs from a Native American neighbor and used herbs and hands-on healing to treat family and friends. At 23, divorced and attending the University of California at Berkeley, she delved into the study of anthropology, focusing on healing approaches among indigenous cultures in different parts of the world.

In 1978 Naomi moved to Provincetown, MA, where she met her husband, Jimmy Roderick. Over the next 17 year she developed a busy healing practice and traveled to Mexico City, England and around the United States, teaching health care professionals—including at Harvard Medical School and for the American Holistic Nurses Association—to incorporate chakra/energy work as a therapeutic tool. Gradually she learned other, related modalities, including naturopathy, massage, polarity therapy, and shamanic journey work. In 1995 while visiting a friend in Taos, she took a side trip to Crestone. She and Jimmy decided to spend a few months here—and stayed.

The multidimensional web
Naomi’s interest in shamanism deepened and expanded in the 1990s during visits to the Amazonian jungle of Peru. There she studied with indigenous shamans whose healing and spiritual practices included use of the powerful visionary plant mixture ayahuasca. “I was ready for the next step, and it was indeed another step,” she says of the experience. “It expanded my capacity to see the vast interconnectedness we have with plants, animals, and the entire universe.” Another important step was her introduction to computer-assisted technology known as quantum biofeedback, which allows the practitioner to more specifically identify, locate and “untangle” knots or kinks in the web of energy that constitutes a person’s energy field. Other approaches, including Access Consciousness and Eric Pearl’s The Reconnection system, became tools toward the same end.

Healing and paradox
After decades of refining her understanding and skills, Naomi has become aware of a challenging paradox in her healing work. As she pinpoints specific areas where energy “untangling” needs to occur, patients can become attached to the idea of a certain named disease or a particular area of imbalance. The result can be a tightening up around the concept of an ailment, rather than an opening and expanding of awareness that balances the entire energy field. “I know we can move to the place where we can transcend the material,” Naomi says. “It’s the identification with contextual reality that holds us back.” This paradigm shift also means letting go of attachment to being fixed or healed by someone else, she notes. “The different modalities I work with can be a catalyst or a jump-start to enhance someone’s capacity to heal themselves, but it’s really the individual who moves their own energy in order for healing to occur.”

In the past few months, Naomi’s response to this challenge has been to intentionally enter and inhabit a place of not knowing. It’s been a quiet, regenerative pause to allow for the shedding of her own attachments to contextual reality—including her identity as a healer. “We get distracted by definitions of self, which are contractions that keep us from being in the field of unlimited possibilities,” she reflects. “I do feel, believe and know that we all have the capacity to live from that place.”

This article is reprinted by permission from The Crestone Eagle, all rights reserved