HEALING

Welcome

Hi! My name is Keaton, creator of Nature Embodied and the Nature Embodied Collective (a blossoming Exchange Network of healing practitioners). To celebrate the sprout poking through the snow that is my first reiki healing session on youtube, I wanted to share with you some meditations on healing, a grounding into my practice and my lineage and being nature embodied.

The Spiral & Healing

The symbol of healing that I’ve always connected to—and I suppose it’s more like a symbol of open-mindedness or abstract thinking, more aligned with the mystery—is the spiral. I love spirals, and I find them such a fascinating symbol to ground into when I think about what healing is.

On Being a “Healer”

I’m entering into this space as a quote-unquote healer, and I wanted to open up about what I think that means. I don’t really subscribe to—or I hope not to—over-identification or individualism as a concept, especially with how addicted we can be to it in Western modes of thinking: that I’m the healer and you’re not.

My whole service operates on the fact that I can weave a space together where you and I can both be healers. I know that if you’re coming to a session—whether virtually, asynchronously, live, or in person—we’re becoming one thing: the thing that we always are. From my point of view, I call it universal energy.

That is our identity at the core of our being. When we can meet each other behind all of these different sheaths, and recognize that we’re both that one thing—that we’re all that one thing—a lot of healing can take place.

The Container

The intention set for the container is that we both melt into that one thing. Anxieties, tension, and all the things that get held up in our insistence to maintain careful distance from ourselves and from each other can soften. Loving witnessing can happen, and that is healing.

I also understand that it can be threatening to encounter ideas about healing where I might not be acknowledging—or deeply enough understanding—your lived experience. That is a challenge, because it can sometimes close doors to connection.

Responsibility & Identity

I want to take responsibility for the role I play in the world. I am a female-presenting white person, and that can rightfully make a lot of people feel unsafe, or worry that I might say something hurtful or move with unconscious bias in harmful ways.

I want to acknowledge your experience if that resonates, and open up space to hear you—if that’s something you want to communicate with me about.

I also want to say that I, as a person with a name, life goals, bills, and all of that, try to spend my time in reflection so that genuinely loving action can come from it. Not the kind of loving that bypasses or walks away from bias, but a loving that is steady, informed, and aware.

This is something I do my very best to walk with, while also knowing that issues will arise. As much as I want to act with complete precision, it’s inevitable that I will learn through mistakes.

Roots in Yoga & Trauma-Sensitive Practice

I began this journey with yoga when I was a teenager—at sixteen—and I’m now almost twenty-five. This practice has evolved with me over time, alongside Reiki.

I want to speak specifically about these lineages—yoga and Reiki—to help ground you in my practice and what I may begin offering here.

In terms of yoga, I trained as a vinyasa instructor. Vinyasa simply means movement synchronized with breath. It’s often what people recognize as a “flow” class, and it has roots in Ashtanga yoga as well as the yoga philosophies of Patanjali.

When I completed my training at eighteen, much of the experience felt traumatizing to my body. I want to name that openly, in case it resonates with others who love a practice and come to it seeking healing and authenticity.

In those classes, my body felt scared and trapped—like my movements were not my own. This isn’t necessarily the fault of individual teachers. Ashtanga is a very specific style that emphasizes progression and form. Teachers often want to guide students toward a particular expression of a pose based on their own experiences. This can create a conforming mindset.

Teaching, Children, and Unlearning Conformity

I formally left the yoga field as a teacher in 2021. I am now a full-time early childhood educator, working with toddlers. Every day I’m blown away by the magic of humans—their resilience, creativity, emotional intelligence, and ability to move with change.

Teaching children has shown me how deeply ingrained rules and systems are passed down in our society, especially here in Canada. We carry the weight of patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalistic ideologies, and they show up early—in education, in childcare, and even in yoga spaces.

As a younger person with access to information and lived perspectives—especially from Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities, folks of diverse gender identities and sexualities, and those working at the margins—I began to see things differently. Conformity is no longer something I see as necessary or helpful, especially in teaching and healing environments.

I’m deeply grateful for my winding, spiraling relationship with yoga. It wasn’t the idealized student-to-teacher pathway. It included moments of feeling disconnected from my body, even crying in postures where I felt I had betrayed my own trust.

Teachers and thinkers like Ariel Schwartz, David Treleaven, Tara Brach, and others working with trauma-sensitive mindfulness and polyvagal theory helped me reorient toward practices rooted in nervous system awareness, consent, and authenticity.

Children remind me daily of what it means to be fully human. Their bodies and brains are still developing, but their personhood is whole. That understanding informs everything I offer.

Reiki, Distance Work, and Letting Practice Evolve

My Reiki journey has also been spiralic. I trained in Reiki at eighteen and began offering gift sessions after completing Level Two in the Usui lineage.

Over time, I felt disconnected from much of the Reiki space—particularly the heavy use of New Age language, spiritual capitalism, and pricing that felt inaccessible. While I believe in fair monetary exchange, I also felt that something essential was missing.

Stepping back from one-on-one sessions opened space for distance Reiki work, which became a rich ground for experimentation and growth. Without rigid structure or expectation, I was able to let my practice emerge from the heart rather than obligation.

That freedom allowed my philosophy to root more deeply. When structure loosened, my practice blossomed—and I could begin sharing it more honestly.

I would not be here without the generosity of practitioners who offered Reiki to me. That reciprocity is at the heart of my intention for the Nature Embodied Collective. While it may not always be visible, it is a lived experience in my life—one I share through energy work, reflections, and writing.

Nature Embodied

I want to ground into the idea of Nature Embodied for a moment. Nature, as a concept for me, is akin to what some people might call God. I think of nature as the earth and the universe.

The forces of nature can sometimes sound harsh or cold because of associations with natural disasters and similar ideas. But when I created this space and this name, I hoped for the wisdom, subtle layers, mystery, healing power, creative flow, sharp discernment, and curious movement of nature to be recognized as dwelling within us—as everything.

In a world where we often feel separated from nature, especially within Westernized, colonized, capitalistic, patriarchal, white-supremacist worldviews, there is so much grey area between feeling connected and feeling like nature is home, a guide, a constant presence.

When we work through that grey area, bring it into the body, and allow it to become embodied, that’s the closest thing we can have to a truly tethered connection. That’s what I hope to be a ground for miraculous work to happen—for mystery to keep pulling us in.

That is Nature Embodied.

The Collective

To speak to the collective side of things: that word comes up a lot for me because it helps me see myself as something plural. When I share something to a collective, it also feels like it comes from a collective.

My goal of building an exchange network with healing practitioners comes from the same heart. It’s from the collective and for the collective, with accessibility in mind. That’s why I wanted the collective to come online.