When it first dawned on me that I was entering perimenopause, my immediate reaction was:

Repulsion.

Absolutely NOT.

My life had only just started to feel like I'd levelled up in a really radical way.

And I've always been a rebel with a fairly low tolerance for other people's definitions of me, so the idea that I had apparently arrived at the beginning of my decline didn't sit particularly well.

My body was changing.

That part was real.

But the story I'd been given about what those changes meant felt increasingly suspicious.

The first thing people usually want to know about distant energy healing for animals is:

How can you possibly work with my animal if you're not in the same room?

Fair question.

Energy healing works with the animal's energetic system rather than through physical touch, which means the work doesn't require us to be physically together.

Medical Qigong is a branch of Chinese medicine that works with Qi — the body's vital energy — to support health and wellbeing.

Most people who have heard of Qigong know it as a movement practice: slow, intentional movements combined with breath and awareness. Medical Qigong draws from the same understanding of the body's energetic system, but a practitioner works directly with a person's Qi.

When I finally discovered I had fibroids, years of strange symptoms suddenly made complete sense.

Pain. Inflammation. Exhaustion. Brain fog. The lumpy-bumpy landscape of my lower abdomen. By the time I had my first ultrasound scan I was so unwell I’d been struggling to get out of bed or do really basic daily tasks.

Eventually imaging showed a large posterior-wall fibroid and several smaller fibroids.

And I had a decision to make.

I thought becoming self-employed meant I’d become my own boss and I’d be in charge of my time, and now I would write my own timetable.

And it did… and it also turned out to be a big old identity crisis.

Obviously there were practical things to learn.

Pricing.

Marketing.

Websites.

Systems.

Strategy.

Invoices.

The mildly horrifying discovery that nobody is going to deposit a salary into your bank account simply because you have been worked very hard all month.

Interestingly, it no longer pays to spend a lot of time spinning your wheels once you become your one and only employee…

One of the first questions people ask me when they discover I work with clients online is:

But how can Medical Qigong work if we're not in the same room?

It's a good question.

We're used to thinking that if someone is going to work therapeutically with our body, they need to be physically with us. They need to touch us, manipulate something or give us something to take.

Energy medicine operates from a different premise. It's a much more subtle process.