About

Peacock & Paisley provides holistic healing services, ranging from energy healing like Shamballa Reiki to coaching to shamanic healing.

This blog provides insights, information, news and views on metaphysical and holistic health topics including alternative medicine and spirituality and energy healing and energy psychology. We welcome and encourage your comments! Or email us through our Contact Page.  Call us at 603-617-4963.  Tell us about yourself and what drew you here down in the comments section below.

Where did your company name, Peacock & Paisley, come from?

It literally popped into my head one day as I was brainstorming a company that would encompass what I feel is important in life and would provide me a way to share with the world, to improve it, and to help people while enjoying what I do. Art, Body & Soul were the three main topics, and Peacock & Paisley just popped in. It felt like that summed up in a swirl what it is about. I’ve always loved both, from early childhood. My grandparents’ friends had peacocks and I loved them and was thrilled with them from the moment I saw and heard them. Peacocks are really an experience. My grandfather had worked in Turkey for a short time and had brought back a piece of paisley cloth which my grandmother artfully draped over a bureau full of toys out on their sun porch. I would stare at it, mesmerized and absorbing it, meditating without the slightest idea what that was. I was quite the bohemian hippie chicklet! Wasn’t it funny, then, when I discovered as an adult the symbolism and significance of peacock and paisley…..

The Story Behind Peacocks

Peacocks are magnificent. They’re gorgeous, intense, colorful, soulful, passionate, have immense presence, and have been symbols of the Divine for eons. Early Christians are said to have considered them symbols of a certain type immortality, since it was reputed that peacock flesh did not decay after death. Muslims are said to have considered them an embodiment of the sun and the moon. Peacocks are said to be sacred to Kuan Yin, the Japanese and Chinese goddess of mercy and compassion. They symbolize kindness, compassion, empathy and love. The Hindu Goddess Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge and Wisdom, is said to ride a peacock. Buddhists use peacock feathers in purification ceremonies; the feathers symbolize purity. Some people say that peacocks die of grief after the death of their mates, which speaks of their loyalty and fidelity.

Peacocks also symbolize the birth of new life, the soul, expression of one’s own beauty inside and out, prosperity, royalty, dignity, and peace.

The Story Behind Paisley

Paisley is an art form representing the totality of life within a drop. Fertility, creation, all of what is necessary to bring something into being. It started as botanical drawings which encompassed an entire plant from seed to root to blossom.

Who Are You and Why Are You Doing This?

Heather Cate, Spiritual Coach for the Creative Soul

Good question!

I’ve been metaphysically inclined since early childhood;

I just didn’t know it back then, and was actively discouraged after the age of 6 from “using my powers.”  Funny thing is, though, my favorite tv shows were Bewitched, The Nanny and The Professor, I Dream of Jeannie, and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

I went through a number of physical illnesses starting in early childhood, and was treated extensively with your usual American medical treatments, including heavy-duty drugs for allergies.  These caused bad side-effects and didn’t do much to help.

Having grown up in a very dysfunctional family, I sustained some “war wounds” which traditional therapies didn’t help.  So, in my twenties, I started looking for some alternatives.

I found that my body, mind, and spirit were inextricably intertwined, and that medical tests were frequently unreliable.  That doctors had personal biases and fears which impacted the choices they made about caring for me; they chose to take care of themselves rather than push past what they feared in order to give me the help I was paying them for.

Through blessed synchronicity (I lived and worked in Croatia during their war, and food was scarce, especially dairy items, and I stopped taking my allergy medications because I was having unacceptable side-effects), I discovered that I, the daughter of a dairy family that competed with Hood for many years, and the granddaughter of people who lived next door to a different dairy, member of a family who drank milk with every meal including pizza, I was allergic to dairy products!!  That’s what caused me to need mood-altering, hallucinogenic, speed/uppers allergy medicines for 20 years!  If I had only listened to Rosemary Bertelsen, my childhood best friend’s mother, all those years ago when she suggested I might have a food allergy.  My family and I had nowhere in our lexicon to put her ideas, so we thought they were kooky and unfounded.  The fact that she had figured out how to save her own son from some very severe allergies…. well, we couldn’t put it all together.  Largely because we didn’t want to.  But how much simpler it is!!!

From that, and several metaphysical experiences that I couldn’t write off, I started to open my mind to new ideas, new approaches.

While I was looking for a way to soothe my heart, mind, soul and body during a time of intense flashbacks and PTSD, I found Reiki.  It worked!  Talk therapy had helped in the past with things I was aware of, but not with the things I couldn’t yet face. But Reiki soothed and restored me, brought better balance to my energy and relationships.  I cried through many sessions, tears just pouring down my face.  Thank you, Linda, for your gentle supportive understanding and your remarkable healing.  With Reiki, you don’t have to know what’s going on, you can just sink into a cocoon of healing energy.  You can go off into another zone.  You may or may not feel the healing energy, see colors, feel warm healing hands even where there isn’t another physical body actually touching you.  You feel safe.  Which is part of what I really really needed.  And I decided that I wanted to be able to do this.

I healed my grandparents’ dog after she’d had a spinal embolism which left her lower half paralyzed.

I massaged her, and felt amazing heat coalesce in sort of a ball through the area I was massaging.  The veterinarian had said that we’d know in a month if she’d ever recover.  In the meantime, I had to press on her bladder to help her go to the bathroom, carry her outside while she was pooping, wash her in the sink, dry her.  My grandparents couldn’t do that work, and were going to put her down.  She was so loving and clearly wanted to live that I couldn’t do anything but do all that and keep her alive.  She was a good-sized Cocker Spaniel, though, so it wasn’t too easy.  I really wanted her to recover as quickly and fully as possible.  Good thing for both of us, the massaging worked, and in a week, she was up and walking normally!  I had done energy healing on her without knowing it.  People had always said I had healing hands.

My family always thought I should be a surgeon, but cutting up baby pigs during my college Bio 101 class gave me horrific nightmares, and I just couldn’t do it.  I didn’t know what the deal was or what direction I would go in besides the one I’d worked toward my whole life at that point, but regular Western medicine certainly wasn’t it.

When I was in my late 20s, I had a strange, crystal-clear experience of knowing that someone very important

to me was dead.

I wasn’t sure if he was dead right then, or if it was a matter of time.  I freaked out.  I knew it was important not to influence anyone directly involved by talking about it with them, although I did call their house, and got only their answering machine.  Their son later told me that he could hear something in my voice and knew I was worried, but didn’t know what it was about.  His dad died 10 months later, almost to the day.  The knowing but not knowing got me exploring, talking with my minister who was very helpful.  She recommended Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s books about dying and grief.  I dug deeper into spirituality and what it means to be a finite human having an unlimited spiritual experience.

Then, a few years after that, my deceased great-uncles appeared to me in a not-entirely-dream dream

just before 9-11.  And then I was shot in the back in a dream which lifted me almost 2 feet in the air off the bed in real life.  That’s when I got serious and ended up getting training in shamanism.  I also have mentors and teachers and healers.

Heather and the Lilies

We all need healers every now and then, some of us more than others.

Because no matter how evolved we are, how much work we’ve done on ourselves, we usually have blind

spots where we really need some help.

So how can I help you?

Shaman, Shamballa Reiki Master-Healer-Teacher, Spiritual Coach, Business Coach …. it’s hard to find one single title that fits it all.  I like Lightworker.  And Metaphysician.

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Disclaimer: The information within this site is presented for information only. This site is not intending to diagnose, prescribe, or treat any condition or illness. Consult your medical care provider if you have questions or concerns about health conditions.

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