Energy Healing and Meditation: Learning to Listen with Melissa Seil-Butler

There was a period in Melissa Seil-Butler’s life when she knew what helped her feel grounded, and stopped doing it anyway. She had meditated for years and practiced yoga since the early 2000s. Then she started a business, became what she describes as a workaholic, and slowly put those practices aside.

Melissa was working so much that she couldn’t see what was happening in the rest of her life. Her marriage was struggling. Her health was suffering. Eventually, she developed severe vertigo and couldn’t walk for three months. That experience brought her back to meditation and opened a much bigger door.

What followed was a deeper exploration of energy healing and meditation, including Reiki, Rapid Eye Technology, hypnotherapy, and sound healing. When Melissa joined us on Wake Up, Sunshine, we wanted to understand how she got there. We also wanted to know what these practices actually look like for her. The conversation kept circling back to something simpler: getting quiet enough to notice what is happening inside us.

When the Practices That Help Us Get Lost in the Noise

Melissa’s interest in health started long before she became a healer and wellness practitioner. She was fascinated by the body and why it works the way it does. She also found herself drawn to bigger questions about why we’re here and what we may be capable of.

Yoga came into her life first, mostly as exercise. Then, around 2007 or 2008, she became deeply curious about meditation. She wanted to understand the difference between praying, pondering, and meditating. For Melissa, they started to feel like distinctly different experiences.

Meditation eventually became the place where she felt able to listen. “You pray and you pray and you pray for things, and then how do you hear?” she said. As her mind became quieter, she felt more able to hear what she describes as God or her higher self. She also noticed that she had more clarity and focus when she was meditating regularly.

Then life got very busy.

Melissa was running another business at the time, and she loved it. But work slowly took over. She stopped meditating and put many of the practices she valued on the back burner. Looking back, she realized she was too distracted by work to see how much else was unraveling.

When her health eventually forced her to stop, she returned to the things she had left behind. She started meditating again and trying to quiet the noise in her mind. From there, her experience with energy healing and meditation expanded into Reiki, Rapid Eye Technology, hypnosis, and sound work.

Melissa had already spent years working with people through nutrition. This became another layer of that work for her. She became interested in the relationship between what we experience emotionally and what we feel physically. More than anything, she wanted to understand what had helped her during a period when she had felt so unwell.

“Whatever That Was, That Was Super Real”

One thing we appreciated about Melissa’s story is that she didn’t come to energy work without questions. She describes herself as pragmatic and sometimes skeptical. She doesn’t naturally gravitate toward something simply because it sounds mystical.

Her first Reiki experience was one of those moments. Melissa and her son both received sessions, and afterward they compared what they had felt. She remembered sensations around her throat and nose and asked whether the practitioner had touched her there. Her son told her she hadn’t.

Melissa didn’t walk away feeling like she suddenly understood Reiki. She walked away curious. “Whatever that was, that was super real,” she remembered thinking. “I don’t know what this is, but I need to know more.” That curiosity eventually led her to one of her teachers, Glenda. Melissa went on to study Reiki, Rapid Eye Technology, and hypnosis. Another teacher introduced her to Tibetan singing bowls, which became a major part of the way she works today.

As Melissa explained all of this, Jenna had questions. A lot of them. What does a Reiki session actually look like? Is someone touching you? What is happening with the bowls? How does Rapid Eye Technology work?

It became less of a polished explanation of energy healing and meditation and more of what we actually wanted the conversation to be: three people sitting together and asking what all of this means.

What Energy Healing Looks Like in Melissa’s Work

Melissa describes Reiki as working with energy in and around the body. During a session, a person lies down while the practitioner may lightly touch certain areas or hover their hands above the body. Melissa said different people describe feeling those sessions differently. She tends to experience energy as heat, while her husband often experiences it as cold.

Rapid Eye Technology came into Melissa’s life through Glenda and later through formal training. Melissa described it as a practice that uses eye movement and bilateral stimulation while working with difficult emotions or experiences. Hypnosis became another part of her approach because she was interested in the subconscious patterns people carry.

Then there are the Tibetan singing bowls. Melissa’s bowls are placed on the body during some sessions, and she listens to how their sound changes. She told us that this is the part of her work she has the hardest time explaining. There are things she feels she hears or senses while working with them that she considers part of her own intuitive gift.

“I can’t really train people what I do on this end,” she said. “Something comes in that I understand with those bowls.”

We didn’t try to turn that into a neat explanation. Melissa was describing her own understanding of the work and what she has experienced over many years. Some of it was familiar to us, and some of it wasn’t.

That became part of what made this conversation about energy healing and meditation interesting. There was room to be curious without pretending we all experience these things in exactly the same way.

Paige Has Experienced This Work From the Other Side

For Paige, the conversation was personal. She has worked with Melissa herself, and so has her husband, Alex.

Alex was also very much a skeptic. Paige laughed while remembering how he used to refer to oils, energy work, and similar practices as her “voodoo shit.” Then he went through a period when he was struggling physically after being sick. Paige eventually convinced him to see Melissa after other things he had tried hadn’t helped in the way he hoped.

Melissa remembers sensing what she interpreted as grief, sadness, and feeling dishonored while working with him. Those emotions also made sense within what Alex had recently experienced in his military career. Melissa worked with him using her bowls and the practices she uses with clients.

Paige remembers Alex trying to run the next morning and feeling dramatically different. For the two of them, it was an experience they couldn’t easily explain. Alex’s response afterward was essentially: Okay, I’m a believer.

It was one of several moments in this conversation where we found ourselves laughing about how strange something can sound until it becomes part of your own experience.

Becoming More Aware of What Paige Could Feel

Paige later went through Reiki training with Melissa and became Reiki attuned. Alex did too. A few days afterward, they traveled to Las Vegas, where Alex had lived while they were dating. Before that trip, Paige had always thought Vegas was fun. She never wanted to raise a family there, but she enjoyed visiting. This time, she experienced the city completely differently.

She remembers looking around and feeling sad. To her, people seemed disconnected, almost like they were going through the motions. Alex noticed a similar feeling. “I was very aware at that time,” Paige said.

Paige doesn’t formally practice everything she learned in Reiki training every time she feels someone’s energy now. What stayed with her was the awareness. Sometimes she notices that another person’s presence feels aggressive to her. In those moments, she has found herself instinctively putting up a hand or creating an internal boundary.

For Paige, learning about energy healing and meditation changed how she thought about those moments. She became more aware of what she experienced as her own energy and what seemed to belong to someone else.

Jenna connected that idea to something most of us have probably experienced in some form. Sometimes you walk into a room and something simply feels off. Sometimes you meet someone and immediately feel yourself pull away. Whether we call that energy, intuition, instinct, or awareness, the feeling itself can be hard to miss.

Caring About Someone Without Carrying Everything

That brought us into one of the parts of the conversation that felt especially relatable. Melissa talked about what it has been like to care deeply about people while learning not to absorb everything they are going through. One of her teachers has a phrase for it: “Don’t be a garbage collector.”

Melissa knows she has a tendency to care big. She wants to help. She wants people to be okay. Over time, she has had to become more aware of when someone else’s problem starts to feel like her problem too. Her reminder to herself is simple: That’s their life. This is my life.

Jenna recognized what Melissa was describing as boundaries. It’s knowing where another person ends and you begin. For Melissa, that distinction has become an important part of how she thinks about protecting her own energy. It doesn’t mean she cares less. In her experience, it means she can care about someone without making their healing her responsibility. That has been something she has had to practice repeatedly, especially because nurturing other people comes so naturally to her.

The conversation moved beyond energy healing and meditation here. We started talking about relationships, family, friendships, and all the ways we can become wrapped up in another person’s life. Sometimes it happens so gradually that we don’t realize we’ve stopped including ourselves in the equation.

Melissa Learned the Importance of Her Morning Twic

Melissa has a morning practice now that she considers an important part of her life. The funny thing is, she learned just how important it was by walking away from it. Twice.

After the first period when she stopped meditating and taking care of herself, she promised herself she wouldn’t do that again. Then she did. When she felt her life beginning to unravel a second time, the pattern was hard for her to ignore. “I was actually really glad that I had these interrupted times,” she told us. There was something clarifying about seeing the same thing happen again.

Now, Melissa starts her mornings with some form of movement. It might be a walk or a bike ride. Then she meditates, usually somewhere between 15 and 40 minutes. She also spends time reading spiritual or philosophical texts that help her feel oriented. The exact routine isn’t what mattered most in her story. What mattered was realizing how different she felt when she consistently made space for those things.

As Melissa talked about her morning, Jenna was nodding along. Her own mornings have changed dramatically in the last few months.

Jenna Used to Start Her Day With Her Phone and Strong Coffee

For years, Jenna didn’t have a regular meditation practice. She practiced yoga for more than a decade, but sitting down to meditate never really stuck. Her mornings tended to begin fast. She would wake up and immediately check her phone. As an attorney, there was always something waiting for her. Then came two cups of very strong coffee and with that caffeine rush, the feeling that the day was already ahead of her.

That started to change after Jenna completed yoga teacher training. A trip to India pushed the shift further. While there, she heard a teacher talk about the importance of a regular meditation practice for someone teaching yoga. Jenna had always said that she “meditated” while walking or running. This time, she felt inspired to try something different. She began sitting every morning. Three months later, she could feel a change.

“I can tell that my nervous system is at a much more calm baseline even in the midst of stressful situations,” Jenna said. “I can just tell that I’m more regulated.”

Her mornings now have a completely different rhythm. She brushes her teeth, lights a candle, sits down, uses mala beads and a mantra, and meditates. Then she reads from a meditation book. Some mornings are longer than others, but she has kept coming back to it.

For Jenna, this has become her own experience with energy healing and meditation. It isn’t the same as Melissa’s practice or Paige’s experience with Reiki. It is simply something she has noticed changing the way she moves through her days.

Meditation Finally Made More Sense When It Had Something to Hold Onto

One reason meditation hadn’t stuck for Jenna before was that “focus on your breath” wasn’t always enough. Her mind wandered. Guided meditation apps hadn’t become lasting habits either. Mala beads changed something because they gave her a physical point of focus. She had a mantra to repeat and beads to move through her fingers. There was something tactile to come back to when her thoughts wandered.

Paige immediately understood that. Sitting still has not always been the easiest form of meditation for her either. Moving practices tend to work better with the way her brain moves.

Melissa described a walking meditation where the attention stays on each part of the foot touching the ground: heel, pad, toe. Paige remembered another practice Melissa had shared with her. On a walk, Paige could choose one thing in front of her, like a bush, and focus only on that. When her mind wandered, she returned to the bush.

Then Melissa gave us perhaps the least glamorous meditation practice imaginable: doing the dishes. She jokingly calls it “dish-pasana.” The idea is to wash each dish while paying attention only to what is in your hands. Fork, fork, fork. Spoon, spoon, spoon. The ordinary task becomes a place to practice bringing your attention back.

“The goal is not no thinking,” Melissa explained. “We’re trying to have focused thinking.”

That distinction mattered. For all three of us, meditation had sometimes carried this idea that a “good” meditator should somehow make her brain go blank. Melissa’s experience was different. Her practice was about noticing distraction and returning.

That made energy healing and meditation feel less like something that had to happen in a perfectly quiet room. For Melissa, Jenna, and Paige, it has taken different forms at different times. Sometimes it looks like sitting with mala beads. Other times it’s walking. And sometimes, apparently, it’s a sink full of forks.

[If you are interested in hearing more about our current spiritual practices, you can access Episode 3, Growing Up in the Church of Christ: What We Don’t Believe Anymore here: —–.]

What If Peace Feels Less Exciting at First?

Toward the end of the conversation, Melissa described a change in herself that we hadn’t expected to talk about. She used to be the person bouncing off the walls. She loved the feeling of being high-energy and giving that energy to everyone around her. It was fun. It also left her exhausted afterward.

As she became more consistent with her practices, she noticed those extremes beginning to settle. At first, she wasn’t sure she liked it. She missed the big, explosive high. Then she realized she might have to learn a different way of being happy. For Melissa, that became part of the difference between happiness and joy. She sees happiness as more dependent on what is happening around her. Joy feels quieter to her. It feels steadier and more connected to peace.

That thought brought the conversation back to where we started.

Melissa’s relationship with energy healing and meditation hasn’t been a straight line. She has found practices that helped her, abandoned them, returned to them, and then done some of that all over again. Even as a practitioner, she still sees her own teachers and relies on people she trusts for support.

Jenna is only a few months into a daily meditation practice and is still noticing what it changes. Paige has explored Reiki and energy work while finding her own way of relating to what she learned. None of them described arriving at some final, perfectly healed version of themselves.

What they did describe was becoming more aware. More aware of when life gets too loud, what they carry for other people, and of what happens when they make room to listen.

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Other References/Links:

• The Upanishads
• Spinoza