Welcome Home: Where My Journey Into Healing Began

There are moments in our lives that divide everything into a before and an after.

For me, that moment came in November 2022.

I was going through something so deeply emotional and heartbreaking that, at times, it genuinely felt as though I was dying inside.

I knew I needed something, but I didn't want to speak to a counsellor. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with counselling. It simply didn't feel like what I needed.

For some reason, I wanted to have Reiki.

I knew what Reiki was, vaguely, although I had never experienced a Reiki session before. I hardly knew what chakras were. I certainly wasn't walking into that room expecting some enormous spiritual awakening.

I was hurting.

And I wanted to feel better.

I had absolutely no idea that I was about to change the direction of my life.

"Welcome home, Lizelle."

I lay down on the Reiki practitioner's bed and the session began.

And then I saw something.

Three faces appeared to me in the sky.

They clapped their hands and said:

"Welcome home, Lizelle. For the first time, you are at the right place at the right time."

Strangely, I didn't think it was particularly strange.

That probably sounds ridiculous when I write it now. ��

But I only understood why much later.

I had always seen things.

I had always felt things.

Images, feelings, knowing things that I couldn't necessarily explain.

I just thought I had an incredibly wild imagination.

I didn't yet understand these experiences through a spiritual lens. I certainly didn't think of myself as intuitive or believe I had some sort of "gift".

It was simply something my mind did.

Or so I thought.

Then I got off the bed

The experience during the Reiki session was extraordinary, but what affected me most was actually how I felt afterwards.

Something had changed.

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Two days later, I was still completely blown away by the experience.

And I had one overwhelming thought:

What did she just do to me?

I needed to understand it.

Not because I wanted to recreate that experience for myself, but because almost immediately, another feeling came with it:

I want to learn how to do this for other people.

I wanted to help people feel what I had felt.

Looking back now, I think that was the moment the healer in me woke up.

Or perhaps she didn't wake up at all.

Perhaps she remembered.

I didn't waste much time

Once I knew, I knew.

Within that same week, I enrolled to study energy healing.

In February 2023, just a few months after that first Reiki session, I began a two-year journey at an energy healing school.

At the same time, I found a Reiki Master and began studying Reiki with her, a journey that would continue for the next three years.

What had started with me simply trying to survive one of the most painful periods of my life had somehow opened an entirely different door.

And the deeper I went, the more things began to make sense.

Especially the things I had spent most of my life dismissing as my "crazy imagination".

Learning to trust what I had always felt

As I learnt to work with energy and began doing healing sessions for other people, those experiences became stronger.

I would see things during sessions.

Sometimes an image.

Sometimes a person.

Sometimes I would feel something very clearly or simply know something without understanding how I knew it.

And sometimes words or messages would come.

The difference was that now they weren't about me.

They were connected to the person lying in front of me.

I began sharing what I received, and time after time, something that made absolutely no sense to me would mean something to them.

That changed everything.

Slowly, I began to understand that perhaps this wasn't simply my imagination after all.

And even more slowly, I learnt to trust it.

Today, that intuitive connection has become an important part of the way I work.

During a healing session, I may see, feel or receive something that I believe your higher self wants to bring to your awareness at that particular moment in your life.

I don't force it.

I don't go looking for it.

And I don't claim to have all the answers.

I simply allow whatever comes through to come through, and if something does, I share it with you.

What it means is yours to discover.

From one Reiki bed to Hocoka

Sometimes I think back to that woman who walked into her first Reiki session in November 2022.

She was heartbroken.

She hardly knew what a chakra was.

She wasn't looking for a calling.

She wasn't trying to become a healer.

She just knew that something inside her was hurting and that, for whatever reason, Reiki felt like where she needed to go.

And then she lay down on a bed and heard:

"Welcome home, Lizelle."

I understand those words very differently today.

Because that session didn't only help me through something painful.

It led me back to a part of myself I hadn't known was there.

It led me to years of studying, learning, questioning, experiencing and healing.

It led me to the work that makes me feel more connected, present and purposeful than anything else I do.

And eventually, it led me here.

To Hocoka.

The name Hocoka comes from the Lakota concept of the sacred centre, the space within the circle.

Perhaps that's why its meaning touched me so deeply when I found it.

My own journey into healing began with being welcomed home.

And now I have created a space where I hope others can experience their own version of coming home.

Not to me.

Not to Reiki.

Not to a belief system.

Back to themselves.

I couldn't have known it as I walked into that room in November 2022, but something was beginning.

The healer in me was waking up.

Remembering.

And more than three years later, I finally understand those words.

I was exactly where I needed to be.

Welcome to Hocoka.

Come back to you.