Canvas Rebel - Daily Inspiration: Meet Jo-Anne Suriel
https://canvasrebel.com/daily-inspiration-meet-jo-anne-suriel/
Today we’d like to introduce you to Jo-Anne Suriel
Hi Jo-Anne, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been obsessed with wellness and spirituality since I was a teen—I started practicing yoga in high school and was eating organic way before it was “normal.” I also danced and played sports so I was a pretty healthy kid. But then, in adulthood, I experienced unexplained miscarriages, joint pain, and also very intense anxiety. This led me to start exploring emotional and spiritual wellness and the impact of energy and the unseen.
At the same time, I was in a career that looked very impressive on paper—I’d earned an Ivy-league MBA and was working at a very successful private equity fund. But, even though I had a job that many people found desirable, for the majority of my conscious time—the work demanded a lot of time, beyond a typical 9-to-5—I felt spiritually and emotionally empty and unfulfilled. At the height of my professional “success,” I developed debilitating autoimmune symptoms and was finally diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.
This diagnosis led me to journey deeper into a spiritual path—my intuition kept telling me that this disease wasn’t just a physical happenstance—and I began training in reiki so that I could do it on myself to heal. A few years later, I eventually made the decision to leave my finance career to practice reiki full time and also began my studies in the akashic records and sound therapy.
This path has become a profound journey of healing myself and also helping others to heal. As one of my spiritual teachers says, there is no difference between healing others and being healed yourself.
Nevertheless, being an energy healer is not for the faint of heart. I’ve worked through so much emotional baggage—childhood trauma, low self-worth, intergenerational wounding, and more. But I’ve come to see that every challenge is ultimately a gift that I can in turn use to help others on their own healing path.
I now offer a healing practice that combines all of my experience and training into one integrated session—Energetic Well Readings. This can be done one-on-one and also in group sessions, virtually or in-person. I essentially read your unique energy, explore the meaning behind any life challenges or patterns, and then create space for healing and alignment to occur.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’m not sure if anyone comes to a healing path easily—or willingly! There have been many struggles along the way on many levels. When I was first faced with my autoimmune diagnosis, I was in so much physical pain that it was difficult to walk. When my kid was a newborn, there were times when I wasn’t able to hold her because of the intense pain and inflammation. I was even prescribed a walker and the most aggressive medications—the same ones used in chemotherapy.
But I’ve come to see that there is always a gift hidden within these moments that feel so desperately defeating. Working through an autoimmune condition and mental health struggles has deepened my well of compassion for the suffering of others in so many ways. This journey has also been a profound lesson in patience and informed perseverance—persisting in a way that is clear-eyed and aligned versus “powering through” with a sledgehammer approach just because you think it’s the thing you’re supposed to be doing.
Even in my healing business, I have to be conscious about tuning into my intuition when making any decision—am I doing x, y, or x from a place of authenticity, or am I doing it because it’s what some expert told me I should do? There’s really a constant practice of awareness that I need to employ in order to stay true to myself and continually return to balance.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I created a healing practice that is unique to me but, at the same time, uses modalities that are universally accessible to pretty much everyone. My Energetic Well Readings utilize the akashic records, which are like energetic codes from your soul’s journey throughout lifetimes, as well as reiki, a very gentle-yet-powerful energy healing practice, and sound therapy, which uses both audible and inaudible frequencies to guide your body back into alignment. I also bring my intuitive gifts and over two decades of study on various wellness and spiritual practices.
But ultimately, over the years, I’ve gained a profound ability to tune into the most healing of all vibrations, which is love. This is the most powerful frequency medicine that I’ve experienced and witnessed and it’s truly an honor to share it in my 1-on-1 Energetic Well Readings and my group healing experience, Energetic Well Sanctuary. In Energetic Well Sanctuary, rather than doing an akashic records reading for an individual, I read the energy of the group. There is always some common thread the helps everyone to leave the session more aligned and in tune with their own energy.
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I’m obsessed with languages. I’m pretty fluent in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, which was my college major, and right now I have over a 700-day learning streak on Duolingo (mostly in Italian). I always try to learn some of the language of any place that I travel to—for practical reasons but also as a way of honoring the land and its inhabitants.
I’m sure part of this linguistic interest is about healing cultural grief and wounding from my own childhood, from being monolingual in English and not learning my parents’ heritage languages (Spanish and Tagalog) as a young kid. But I also just love the beauty and elegance of language—including English—and get a real kick out of the nuance of translation. I guess that’s part of what I do professionally in many ways—I’m basically translating energy.
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