We were lucky to catch up with Lizzie Kotyankar recently and have shared our conversation below.
Lizzie , appreciate you joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
Everyone loves my parents, and I cannot blame them. They made our home a place people felt comfortable and safe to be in. They got to know all of our friends and maintained contact with all of the people they felt close to over the years. My parents were young when they had kids, so they were in their prime having fun right along with us as we grew. My dad taught us flips on the trampoline and how to hop a fence to get to the neighbors yard. My mom made every one of my halloween costumes. They provided our every need. It was the eighties so we were granted with a heightened sense of freedom to roam. They both worked full time so we gained independence and confidence in our abilities to maneuver situations. There were often times during my teen years that I would get discouraged and the spent the time to listen and always allowed me to explore my interests. The encouraged and applauded uniqueness which I carried into adulthood. Their open minds, playful spirits, trust and confidence in me instilled in me the ability to always follow my own path, be a little bit of rebel, not care what others think, and just do what makes my heart sing.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
It was a long and winding road from my magickal thinking childhood to regaining that view of the world in adulthood. Being attuned in Reiki brought the magick alive. I went into the field of nursing. I have always been a person who connects people with what they need to succeed, and nursing is one role that fulfills that mission. However after having children my focus shifted to teaching, so I went back to school and got a Masters in education specifically in Montessori. I taught for 10 years until covid struck. Covid was a blessing in that, it gave me a glimpse of what it was like to have my time back and to be with my family. I was able to reconnect to my true essence which is when I found energy healing. Reiki was my first modality and since then I have added on Healing touch, Touch for Health, Craniosacral Protocol, Functional Medicine Practitioner Certificate, Sound Healing with crystal bowls and tuning forks, Spectrachrome Colour Therapy, Therapeutic Pendulum work and Geobiology ( land clearing ) as well as yoga instructor. I currently have a home studio that I conduct Chakra Balances with a therapeutic pendulum and tuning forks as well as energetic tune-ups that area a blended fusion of Healing Touch, Craniosacral and Reiki, I also infuse some of Harold McCoys Focused Mind Healing, that I learned from the Ozark Research Institute. I teach and attune Reiki Level one, two and master. I am a professional development teachers for the state of Arkansas granting teachers continuing education hours. I co-host a monthly oracle gathering at Sacred Space Studio in Rogers, Ar. and soon we will be offering a continuing education class for nurses and massage therapist that infuse energy healing into their work.
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
I have come to realize that although training is valuable, there are somethings trainings cannot teach and that comes with practice and listening to your own intuition. However, in order to listen to your own intuition, it takes practice and awareness, listening and believing. All of us how extra senses, and in order to use them we need to lean into them. I started out my reiki journey by asking to practice on all of my friends and as my confidence grew then, I traded with other healers so that we could gain insights from each other. I have always had a great imagination, but I had to undue some of my ideas of what it meant to have visions. I thought people saw movies playing behind their eyes when they shut them, and behind my eyes it was black. I was not seeing from. my eyes, I was seeing from my minds eye, where we day dream from. So after shifting definitions of what was happening I was able to confirm to myself that I was able to gain visual insights when in a meditative state. The more I practiced, the more I was able to feel the heat in my hands and understand what it meant when the heat was not there. I was also able to get over my fear that people would think I was a weirdo if I shared the visions or things I heard during sessions with clients. The more I leaned into my intuition, the more I trusted that what was happening during sessions was real, the more my clients resonated with the session they were receiving. My human ego is who needs the certificates and diplomas, but those papers mean nothing if you don’t practice with integrity and live your craft.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
When I was first starting out in the energy field I was doing a chakra balance with one of my kids and her throat chakra just would not balance I tried the chakra forks, the solfeggio forks, binaural beats… On my third pass my daughter said “ouch my ear just popped and it hurt”. That startled me, it was during the point when I had tuning forks on either side of her ears for the binaural beats. I told her I was sorry. I rechecked the chakras with the pendulum and at that point they were now all in working order including the throat chakra. I thought yes!, I succeeded in healing her. Then I was telling my mentor and she said Lizzie….. you forced her chakra to turn on, that is not for you to do. She explained that, maybe my daughter wasn’t ready to voice something and she was going to do it in her own time, but I pushed her to try and open it sooner than she was ready, hence the popping in her ear. That was a huge lesson to remind me that everyone is here on their own journey learning and living with different things and it is not my place to push them down their path or remove something that they have not asked me to remove. My daughter is fine, she did not have any lasting impact from her ear popping, for that I am grateful. I am also grateful to have had such a gentle teacher guide me towards a path of energy healing that leads with integrity and allowance of free will.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.reikiwithlizzie.com
- Instagram: reikiwithlizzie
- Facebook: reikiwithlizzie
Image Credits
Lizzie Kotyankar, Audrey Deleuil, Chanse Dubose ( and Sacred Space Studio), Jazz Spradlin, Katy Morter, Leslie Scannell, Yesenia Morales, Wenjie Zhu, Andrea Sisti, Brooke Swenson