SWIHA Blog

Since she was a teenager and even after becoming a stay at home mom, friends would seek out Lori Beard for assistance. “I enjoyed sharing my guidance due to my life’s experiences and interest in human behavior and the roots of those behaviors,” she tells us.

As the mother of eight children, Lori was ready to go back to school when her youngest child went into kindergarten. She received her Life Coaching and Clinical Hypnotherapist certifications from Southwest Institute of Healing Arts out of her desire to guide, transform and impact lives.

When asked about their favorite instructors at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, many students exclaim “Linda Bennett!” without hesitation. She’s a prolific Hypnotherapist and, what many don’t realize, a Life Coach as well.

“I had my first experience with Life Coaching back in the early nineties,” says Linda, “The process really helped me when I was developing my own business. I found that my coach asked great questions that I hadn’t thought of. It made a big difference in my business.”

Kelly St. Claire was enjoying her life as a mother of two with a successful career as a hairstylist when she suddenly felt as though something was missing from her life.

“I love beauty. However, my passion also lay in holistic and energetic healing,” Kelly explains, “I didn’t know the term ‘multi-passionate’ at the time. I just thought I was flighty and that in order to get into my holistic health work I’d have to leave my beauty work. I struggled with it for a long time.”

The urge to expand in to healing eventually led Kelly to take many holistic workshops in order to stretch her knowledge base and get inspired. That’s how she found Southwest Institute of Healing Arts!

“I fall more in love with the work every day,” proclaims Linda Bennett, Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and the Program Director for SWIHA’s Hypnotherapy programs, “I have been involved in this field for 25 years and I’ve seen incredible transformation occur through the use of this modality.”

“For me,” she explains, “it’s all about connecting the head and the heart. When the two are disconnected from each other, imbalances take place and there is illness of some sort.”

“If you see me walking around,” says Michael Anthony Suszczynski, a graduate of SWIHA’s Mind-Body Wellness program, “I can gladly give you ten miraculous stories.” The key word in that invitation is walking, because a debilitating back injury twenty years ago left Michael unable to do anything except crawl.

In an attempt to repair the damage to his back, Michael underwent a surgery followed by six months of intensive physical therapy – three hours a day, three days a week. Despite the attempts of the doctors, physical therapists and Michael’s own dedication to his health, his body was not responding in the way that they’d anticipated. He had no strength in his left leg and began to lose hope that he’d ever walk normally again. 

In 2008, Natalie McGovern met a woman who, in retrospect, seems to have been an angel…

“I was working at a psychiatric hospital, and I was in my 90-day grace period when the hospital decided whether or not I was a good fit,” she shares. “I was on psychiatric medications myself, so I knew what it felt like when interactions with the drugs were going wrong. In a couple of the small groups, patients were complaining about side effects. I told them to talk to their doctor and that they had a right to NOT take the medications that weren’t working for them. My employer didn’t like that, and I was very quickly let go…”

Karen Baker is no stranger to the ins and outs of holistic wellness. Before enrolling in the Associate Degree in Holistic Healthcare at SWIHA, Karen had managed to complete several continuing education classes, a certification in Complex Decongestive Physiotherapy and Lymphatic Drainage Therapy, and a 1000-hour massage therapy degree. Yet, with all this experience and academic prowess under her belt, was she done learning? No way!

Many people discover the healing arts after being sparked by something deeply personal; Valeria Neiman, a graduate of SWIHA’s Integrative Healing Arts Practitioner program, is a shining example of igniting this passion and turning it into her profession.

Seeking Answers

Sixteen years ago, Valeria found herself in the role of caretaker for her then-partner. He suffered from several different ailments and traditional medicine wasn’t producing many answers. After watching him undergo countless failed treatments, Valeria realized there was something vital that Western Medicine had been ignoring: the mind-body-spirit connection. This revelation motivated her to investigate alternative healing methods.

Everyone remembers their first love. For Audrey Washington, that love was massage therapy.

In 2007, with eleven years of massage and entrepreneurial experience under her belt, Audrey moved to Phoenix, Arizona, from Detroit, Michigan, to start her own massage business, ALW Massage Therapy. Once in Phoenix, she found that she preferred to hire graduates of SWIHA’s Massage Program to work as Licensed Massage Therapists on her staff. Although she was not yet formally acquainted with the school, she could tell that the curriculum taught there was strong. “They had more knowledge of anatomy, as well as the ability to do energy work and follow their intuition when working with clients,” she says. “I trusted the school and how they trained their LMTs.”

You know the drill. It’s 8:00 AM and already 96°F, the sun is beating down mercilessly through your window, and you can’t remember a time before you woke up feeling like a pajama-clad puddle of perspiration…

Ah, yes, summer is here! And with it comes the best of times—dreamy sunsets, the smell of fresh-cut lawns, road trips to memorable locales—and the worst of times—like heat waves so abysmal they can make even the most enthusiastic Coppertone babies flee from the sight of the sun.

If you’re facing oppressive heat this summer, you may be tempted to lock yourself inside, crank the ceiling fan, and post up on your sofa with Netflix as your sole companion. Not so fast…  While summer IS the ultimate time for relaxation, try not to forget that a world exists outside your living room— a world just as scorched, sweltering, and sticky as you!