We were lucky to catch up with Mary Callozzo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Mary thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you get your first job in the field that you practice in today?

I have many childhood memories of expressing my intuition and trying to do the things that I am now certified too. There was an entire weekend my cousin and I sat in the treehouse attempting to hypnotize each other for hours at a time. As a teenager, I remember pulling a deck of cards out for solitaire, and instead used them to do a reading for my brother on his love life. Because of my gift of sight, I always considered myself a ghost hunter of sorts, although they never seemed to appear exactly when I wanted them to.

Over the course of life, I went through nursing school, working in the medical field, moving away from that completely to get a different perspective, and then coming into Reiki and shamanic training. The first Reiki treatment I ever gave was to my teacher. I was concentrating very hard and doing my best to be intentional and perform the movements the way I was shown. I was focusing on my internal channel, just allowing love and healing to flow through my entire body, when she made the comment, “oh, Mary, I can feel the heat!“ Experiencing her reaction and seeing a physical result from my own thoughts and love, confirmed within my subconscious the gifts that I carry, that we all carry, that I knew I was now responsible for sharing with others.

I remember having a gut feeling to put my services online, create a Facebook page and a website, and make sure that people knew how to find me. I remember people telling me that people around here do not want Reiki, or understand what it is. I sometimes felt that people thought my services were more of a hobby and many did not take it seriously. My only option was to push forward in life and keep growing my knowledge base. By the time I was established as a Reiki Master, Shamanic practitioner, and I began teaching the medicine wheel, my friends and family were surprised that there was so much interest in spirituality and energy work in our area. It was as if establishing a safe space for people to heal within gave others permission to do it also. And our area now has many shamanic practitioners, Reiki practitioners, and emotional evolution is flourishing. In order for things to be different we have to think differently. We have to be different and be willing to step outside of the norm.

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.

The Rustic Raven was established around a single thought, “a safe space.“ People cannot heal unless they have a safe space to heal within. A place where they are accepted, encouraged to feel their emotions and understand what in their life is not working anymore. Awareness of where our fears and insecurities lay enable us to heal the core places that caused those fears so that we can grow into the most powerful version of ourselves. This began with Reiki and Shamanic services, as well as selling intentional items such as crystals, incense, and energetic cleansing agents. Over time this has expanded into holding space for yoga teachers, psychics and readers, hypnotherapy, massage therapy, chiropractic, and the shop has grown to include herbs, tinctures, books, Delta products, locally made crystal jewelry, and much more.

My personal services have evolved from Reiki and Shamanic teaching into advanced shamanic teaching, Hypnotherapy, and quantum healing. Quantum healing is a bit of a passion for me, as it allows me to completely use my intuition to heal without staying within substandard of other modalities. The theory of quantum mechanics teaches us about shifts in vibrational behavior according to observation and thoughts, therefore we should have the ability to command our minds of what it is, and the body begins to evolve to match that. I change the mind, and the world becomes a completely different place.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

In order to hold the space that I hold in the community as a healer, I had to first learn how to heal myself. This required unlearning everything I thought I knew about everything! I had to re-look at every scenario in my life, process it from a different perspective, and decide which parts of those stories and beliefs made me a more loving person and which parts made me a more fearful person. It takes a long time, many many many cycles, and I will hopefully continue the process for the rest of my life. And the more I am able to unlearn, the more I am able release the things that make me a fearful person (i.e. all of the things that I was taught and that I learned, but that I am not) the more room I have inside of myself for love, beauty, bliss, and wisdom. As people we go through these cycles throughout eternity, always coming to deeper understandings and different perspectives, until we realize the oneness of things, and how everything is just a different expression of one thing.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

This question has many different answers that all lead back to the same road. There are many days that I absolutely would love to be under the umbrella of someone else, to have a job that makes a standard paycheck and a boss who rides me to make sure my work gets done because I slack off and have too much fun. The position that I hold within the community is a lot of responsibility. I have to keep growing, expanding, integrating wisdom, and there are a lot of eyes looking at me for safety, love, and answers. Sometimes I look back and think I never made the choice to be a healer, it was never really a choice. There was no conscious thought in my mind that this was what I wanted to do, It just seemed to happen. From a higher perspective, I know that I chose this before I was born, that every experience I’ve had in my entire life was molding me into a person capable of holding this much responsibility lovingly. At the end of the day, the answer to this question would be no, I do not wish I chose differently. As I mentioned earlier, thought controls everything, and regret has a way of projecting sabotage into the things that we are trying to build. And I have much more to build!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.therusticraven.net
• Instagram: instagram.com/rusticravenhealing/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ravenhealing?mibextid=LQQJ4d
• Other: Please double check these links behind me! I am doing this while out of town on a mobile device

Image Credits
The main image was a selfie, the other two were taken by Jared Miles