We recently connected with Joseph Clarke and have shared our conversation below.

Joseph, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about the best advice you’ve ever given to a client? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

My client came to me about a lack of heartfelt connection.

My client noticed a troubling pattern in her relationships. A friend would come to her to discuss something difficult. A breakup. A death, Struggling with addiction. Anytime these difficult topics came up in conversation, my client would resort to platitudes and reflexive positivity. My client would say things like, “oh, this too shall pass,” or “it will all work out in the end.” My client noticed that her friends were turned off by this. Some friends even began fazing my client out of their lives.

My client felt stuck and unsure how to proceed. She believed in the power of positive thinking. She felt like she was doin the right thing. But the feedback from her loved ones told her, time and again, that something was off, something was missing.

My client and I discussed the situation over Zoom. During the conversation, we discovered an unresolved trauma from my client’s past. My client’s parents went through a divorce when my client was in her early 20s. My client remembered that, at the time, she forced herself into a care-free attitude about the divorce. Instead of engaging her heartfelt feelings, she resorted to platitudes and breezy assurances – “it’s all ok,” “it’s perfect, actually,” “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.” My client recognized that while these positive affirmations were comforting, they also numbed her to the raw emotional feelings coursing through her body. Because she neglected those raw emotional feelings, they remained unhonored and unprocessed within her. We then made the connection to her present situation: just as she resorted to offhand assurances with herself during the difficult time of her parents’ divorce, she was resorting to offhand assurances with her friends during their difficult times. She was repeating the same coping mechanism, and experiencing the same result: distance, numbness, and lack of heartfelt engagement.

To help my client shift out of this limiting habit, we focused on reconnecting with the heart and gut. My client noticed that her responses were all from her head. She was repeating affirmations she kept stored in her head. Her conversations came from her head, rather than from her heart and her gut. To establish a richer connection with her heart and her gut, we used a breathing technique I’ve formulated called “3-brain synergy breathing.” This technique involves feeling into the gut, heart, and head during the breathing cycle, while using the visual of three candles being lit and blown out. My client and I practiced this technique together until she had it down. She noticed right away how much more balanced and connected she felt.

The practice paid off – big time! Two days after our session, my client had a heart-to-heart conversation with a dear friend who was grieving the death of her teenage son. Normally, my client would dread these sorts of conversations, as she feared she would resort to her typical mode of superficial engagement, which could turn off, or even hurt, her dear friend.

This time, though, the outcome was very different. My client practiced the 3-brain synergy breathing technique on the drive over to her friend’s place. I coached my client to simply listen to her friend while breathing and feeling her heart and gut. That’s it. Listen, breathe, feel. Feel, breathe, listen. Let your responses come naturally as they do, without forcing them. My client followed my advice. The result was incredible. My client reported back to me that this was by far the most engaging conversation she’d had with this friend. My client listened to her friend for an hour, and my client didn’t feel anxious at all during the talk. Instead, she focused on breathing, feeling, and listening. Her friend appreciated the conversation so much that she actually extended the conversation beyond the initial hour they had planned. There was even laughter and crying in the conversation!

My client was floored! This was what she had been wanting – a true heart-to-heart with her loved ones. She just didn’t know how to do it. After just one coaching session together, she had the tools and focus necessary to handle one of the most difficult conversations imaginable. She now takes that same skill into her conversations with her other friends, and she’s noticing that they’re opening themselves back up to her again. It was all so simple! And all the tools necessary were already within my client. They just needed to be recognized, activated, and cultivated. That’s what we did together during our coaching session. And from there, my client did the rest, and saw incredible results!

Joseph, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a spiritual healer who believes in the bottomless power of the heart.

When we live in loving connection with our heart, life flows, and we feel a richer sense of purpose, passion, and possibility.

When we’re out of touch with our hearts, we live from our heads and guts instead. They can only get us so far. Eventually, we start treading water, just to stay afloat. When the seas of life get rough, we begin to sink and drown beneath the crushing weights of expectations and desires.

I help clients cultivate their heart connection. That’s really all I do. As my clients master the lifelong art of connecting with the present moment through the heart, they feel better, they think more clearly, they make wiser decisions, and they enjoy life more.

I help clients cultivate their heart connection using three methods: Reiki energy healing, mindfulness coaching, and spiritual dialogue.

Reiki energy healing is a gentle technique for helping clients rest, relax, and reconnect with their heart’s inner guidance. The beautiful thing about Reiki is, there’s no effort required from the client. The client simply lies down and relaxes while I perform the treatment. My clients typically emerge from Reiki sessions feeling relaxed, centered, and empowered. In the days after their treatment, clients report back that they are sleeping better, feeling calmer, completing their tasks more easily, and feeling more in the flow of life.

Through mindfulness coaching, I help clients learn, refine, and master techniques for being more present and aware. I coach clients in meditation techniques that help them feel more centered and focused. I teach clients breathing methods that they can use to relax, recharge, and refocus. And I teach clients simple methods they can use on-the-go to be more calm and attentive. What I love about these techniques is they’re portable. Once my client has mastered them, my client has them in their pocket, and my client can deploy them anytime to regulate their energy and enhance their mindful presence.

Through spiritual dialogue, I help clients discover the hidden roots of their suffering. I listen to my clients describe their struggles. As I do, I utilize my spiritual intuition and my personal experiences to help my clients discover the patterns underlying their suffering. When my clients finally realize what’s actually been holding them back, it’s much easier for them to heal, grow, and let the past go, so they can live more fully in the present moment.

One thing that sets me apart is that I haven’t always been spiritually minded. For much of my life, I was an atheist. I thought spirituality was just wishful thinking. All of that began to change in 2011, when I was hospitalized for leukemia. I was in law school at the time. The diagnosis hit me out of nowhere. While in the hospital receiving chemotherapy, I began to feel panicked and terrified of dying. As I lied their on my hospital bed feeling scared of death, I suddenly sensed a presence in the room with me. I sensed this presence floating right above me. Immediately, I felt calmer and steadier. Then, this presence descended into me. As it did, I suddenly felt my fear of death vanish. From deep within me, I heard my own voice say that I was okay, that no matter what happened in this room, whether I suffered, whether I died, I was completely okay. This didn’t feel like an assurance. It felt like I was remembering a deep truth about who I really was.

I went into remission and left the hospital in 2011, and proceeded to graduate from law school, pass the bar, and work as an attorney. My awakening experience led me to begin practicing mindfulness meditation. That was my focus until 2018, when my spiritual awakening entered a new phase. The way I describe it is: dams in my heart and gut broke, unleashing a torrent of energy into my body that felt like a constant avalance. I’d been shoving all my unwanted thoughts and feelings down into my heart and gut, in an effort to keep my head clear. Now, my heart and gut began to reverse the flow: all those repressed feelings and thoughts began flooding into my conscious awareness, like a gushing river that never stopped. Along with the represesed emotions and thoughts came insights and epiphanies. Some insights and epiphanies were about me and my life. Others were more general realizations about the nature of life itself.

Living in this torrent of thoughts and feelings was overwhelming! It felt like I was spiraling out of control. Fortunately, I found a spiritual teacher and guide who helped me greatly. She contextualized what I was experiencing. She taught me techniques to manage my overwhelm. Most importantly, she was a supportive, nurturing presence who listened to me and shared from her heart and her personal experience. With her help, I found my footing again, and I felt empowered. I recognize this gushing river within me as the very force of life itself! Rather than hating it, fighting it, or ignoring it, I learned to surf it, to flow with it, to notice it and let it be.

By 2021, I realized I couldn’t practice law anymore. It didn’t feel right anymore. And it wasn’t in alignment with my inner experience, which was focused on spirituality, healing, and living from the heart. I left the law in 2021, and I moved with my family from San Jose to Oceanside, which is where we’d dreamed of living. I established my spiritual guidance business, which I named “Joseph Clarke – spiritual flourishing.”

Working as a spiritual healer has been rewarding beyond description. I love helping clients overcome their struggles. I love discovering new ways to be of service. And I simply love what I do! I’m so grateful that I found this path in life. And I feel blessed to have a job that align with my talent and my passion for spiritual healing.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When my spiritual awakening intensified in 2018, it got ROUGH.

I felt sometimes like I was losing my mind. My mind would race so fast, so intensely, and so relentlessly, it was like a runaway carousel that I couldn’t get off.

I felt tremendous pain in my body, too. Stabbing pains in my gut. Sparky, shocky pains in and around my heart. It felt sometimes like my throat was stuffed with scratchy tissue. My head would ache and throb, especially around my eyes and jaw. These pains would last for days or weeks at a time.

Starting my business was hard too. I’d never been an entrepreneur before. I had no existing clients. I was starting from sratch, with no real business skills.

Through all these difficulties, I persisted.

A key was seeking help. My spiritual teachers and guides helped me to contextualize my struggles and to employ new methods for managing and resolving them. I turned to natural medicines, including psychedelics, to help me heal, awaken, and grow. I learned to be more gentle with myself, and to give myself time, space, and comfort when I was feeling runned down or burned out. I learned to be more vulnerable and open with my wife, to share my struggles with her, and to trust in her loving support.

Together, these helpers carried me through the most difficult period in my life. And as grueling as that period of tremendous suffering was, I now recognize that it was foundational to my work as a healer. I can relate to those who are suffering tremendously because I have too. And I can share with others the outlooks and methods that served me well on my healing and awakening path.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Sharing from the heart.

When my marketing isn’t working, it’s usually because I was sharing too much from the head or the gut. I was sharing my philosophy or my theories from my head. Or I was sharing my confidence and my skills from my gut. These methods aren’t all bad. Folks do connect with these messages. But they pale in comparison to messages that come from the heart.

The wild thing about sharing from the heart is – there’s no formula! To be truly from the heart, it must be authentic, spontaneous, and impassioned. When I feel stressed or short on time, I sometimes get frustrated about this. I want a simple, repeatable process I can use to grow my clientele. I have to laugh, because it’s like the universe is trying to tell me: Joe, practice what you preach! I preach heart connection to my clients. I tell them that’s what it’s all about: connecting with the present moment through the heart. When I try to market to clients using formulas or force of will, it backfires. When I slow down, connect within, and speak from that space of connection, it flows, and clients come to me. So simple! And yet, it’s the work of a lifetime.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.josephclarke-spiritualflourishing.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spiritflourish_oceanside_reiki/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SpiritFlourish/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-clarke-5180566/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpiritFlourish
• Youtube: @josephclarke-spiritualflou713
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/joseph-clarke-spiritual-flourishing-oceanside