Canvas Rebel - Meet Jo-Anne Suriel

https://canvasrebel.com/meet-jo-anne-suriel/

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jo-Anne Suriel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jo-Anne, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I don’t think anyone comes to work in a healing vocation without taking a hefty amount of risk. Previously, I’d been working in finance for over a dozen years, had earned an Ivy league MBA, and was a business analyst at a top private equity firm in New York City. From the outside looking in, it was a highly successful, dream career. But on the inside, for most of my waking hours, I felt really uninspired and spiritually empty.

At the same time, my body began giving me signals that things were out of balance. Despite going to the gym all the time and eating a very healthy diet, I began experiencing debilitating joint pain and panic attacks. I was eventually diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and anxiety.

For some reason, I felt called to explore alternative wellness practices, so I started receiving reiki, a very gentle energy healing technique, which helped me alleviate the pain and stress so much so that I began studying reiki in order to practice it on myself. Reiki helped me to feel more centered, calm, and clear-headed.

Eventually, I knew that it was time to make a job change, so I started looking at other firms, including mission-driven non-profits and potential “bridge” jobs to transition to a field that felt more restorative and aligned with collective wellness. But deep down, I kept thinking that I needed to take a bigger risk and start something on my own.

So, then I decided to take a few months off, after leaving my finance job, to see what it would be like to start doing reiki on other people. I also started studying sound therapy, bodywork, and the akashic records, which is like the energy of your soul’s history. Five years later, I have no regrets. There have been many peaks and valleys but ultimately, through the growth of my business and generous feedback received from those I’ve been able to guide on their healing journey, every day I get confirmation that I’m on the right path.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an intuitive energy healer who takes a very integrated approach to wellness. I bring all of my knowledge and training to every healing session—in both one-on-one and group sessions—to help my clients achieve greater balance so they can thrive throughout life with ease.

My unique one-on-one offering is called Energetic Well Readings and the corresponding group session is Energetic Well Sanctuary. I believe that we all have a profound wellspring of healing energy within. But through the hardships and distractions of life, we can become disconnected from that inner well. The work that we do together helps to gently guide you back to a place of dynamic equilibrium so that you can better tap into your own innate restorative wisdom to navigate through life’s challenges and also prepare yourself to receive its many gifts.

The three core modalities that I use in my work are the akashic records, reiki, and sound therapy. The akashic records are like an energetic database of your soul’s history throughout lifetimes. By connecting to this profound resource, we can look into the reasons and root causes of any wonderings or difficult situations that may be coming up for you and receive guidance toward remedies and solutions.

Reiki is a very gentle-yet-powerful healing practice that helps to bring your mind, body, and spirit back into alignment. It can either be done hands-on in-person or be sent to you from a distance. This modality helps to balance the functioning and flow of the energy centers in your body and the energetic field surrounding you. Reiki is well-known to help with anxiety, depression, and stress and to promote pain relief and a sense of wellbeing.

Sound therapy is an ancient healing practice that uses different combinations of sound frequencies to help regulate your body’s various systems, including the nervous system, and bring you back to a state of harmony. I use different instruments, including sound bowls, drums, gongs, chimes, as well as the voice, to help you return to equilibrium. Sound therapy is also a gentle-yet-profound wellness technique that can help reduce stress, alleviate pain, and improve sleep, among many other benefits.

While I incorporate all of these beautiful modalities into my work, the essence of my practice really is to help you remember that you are nature. Nature always finds its way back to equilibrium and you, too, can always return to balance—sometimes it just takes a bit of guidance.

I’m very conscientious about not disempowering my clients, which unfortunately can sometimes happen in the healing and wellness space. I’m not here to “fix” you. You don’t need to be fixed. You may simply need some assistance to reconnect with the powerfully healing energetic well that already exists within you.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

In the healing and wellness field, it’s so important to remain curious. Curiosity is the gateway to learning and this is a very dynamic field that you could never really “finish” studying. While we are all essentially the same, we’re also very unique and different. Humanity is so rich and collectively we’re really just beginning to understand the physical body and the energetic body. In my own healing journey, when I learn about myself, it helps to inform my work with clients. When my clients and I learn from each other, it helps to spread elements of healing throughout the collective. That’s part of what makes healing work so exciting—it goes well beyond your immediate perception. The more open you are to being curious, the wider the door will open to profound levels of understanding.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

When I read the book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz, it really felt like a homecoming. The book talks about four basic foundations of wisdom from the indigenous Toltec people. These four principles (called “agreements”) are very simple yet extremely profound and they’ve helped me to have a more balanced perspective in my business as well as in my personal life.

In particular, the agreement to not take anything personally has been so important for my own emotional health. We can get so caught up in our various relationships—with family, friends, and business connections—because sometimes people operate from a place that contains unhealed wounds. When you begin to recognize that, most of the time, the way other people behave towards you is more a reflection of them rather than a reflection of you, this can really liberate you from spiraling into self-doubt. So, for example, if someone tries to insult me, when I take a closer look, it never is really about me. It’s more about the person trying to work through something that they are dealing with on another level. You see this with a lot of clarity within the akashic records, as well. There is so much freedom in not taking things personally.