The idea of going for a scan can create anxiety. Whether for the purposes of routine screening or to double-check a medical suspicion, scans also tend to be rooted in the physical body. So the idea of a metaphysical or holistic scan – to look for energetic blockages – caught my interest.

It’s Kimberley Jones, a Torquay born and bred Art Historian turned healer and artist, who offers this insightful and unusual service under the banner of Quantum Coaching and Healing, and for anyone remotely interested in the connection between the emotions, the mind and health – she’s a must-see.

Sure I was intrigued to learn that Kimberley “reads” bodily energy with her hands and can feel colours - red, blue and green - which reveal different types of energetic information all over the body. But I was relieved to be greeted by a very normal looking and sounding person when I went for my initial consultation.

“I have sensed ‘energy’ since I was a child - although I wouldn’t have called it that,” Kim told me when I quizzed her about her background. “I just knew what people were thinking and feeling.”

“Growing up I found my sensitivity made it hard to be in the world so I started numbing myself with alcohol and cigarettes at a very young age. I convinced myself I could get a respectable job and perhaps be a ‘businesswoman’, whatever that meant,” Kim revealed.

“Nothing satisfied me and I moved jobs regularly. I buried my abilities deeper and deeper until I forgot about them. I got more and more stressed,” added Kim whose mother it turns out was also highly psychic.

Following her mother’s death in 1997, Kim started experiencing violent psychic events and her abilities were blasted wide open again, far stronger than before.

“I went into a ’spiritual emergency’, a crisis that often leads to a breakdown of some kind,” Kim told me. “I also became physically unwell. Diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in 2000, I became unable to function in any normal way and had to stop work.”

“The one thing that had a strong effect on me during these years was healing. Whether spiritual healing or Reiki, each session led to a huge improvement in my condition and my reawakened extra-sensory abilities.”

“Eventually I was strong enough to start my own research and training, using myself as my own guinea pig,” she explained. “I began by studying Reiki and am now a Reiki Master.”

Soon after Kim trained in “energy mastery” and the “energetics and spirituality of business”, followed by a voluntary apprenticeship to a leading European re-birthing therapist, which enabled her to learn more about how pain, both emotional and physical, is just energy held in the body’s energetic fields.

“This is when I started to see and sense how energy behaves in and around the body according to what we are thinking. It was a huge breakthrough for me,” she said.

Kim has now developed all of her learning into a system called Quantum Coaching and Healing where she uses her abilities as an “energy intuitive” to scan people’s energy fields and offer guidance and healing according to what she finds.

“I have found this cuts through to a truth that is validated by my clients time and again,” she told me. “People are regularly referred to me by their psychotherapist or body work therapist. Your energy fields never lie. They always speak the truth about the deep issues underlying anything you want help with.”

Kim reckons our masks, inherited beliefs and attitudes are like our ‘words’, and she calls the real us revealed by our energy, our ‘music’, claiming that if our words and music don’t go together we get imbalance and eventually dis-ease of some kind.

“I see my job as something resembling a choir master, bringing your words and music together so you can sing your own unique song in the world with health, confidence and joy,” says Kim who also offers support to those highly sensitive to the energy of others at work or at home.

Her Quantum Coaching and Healing sessions involve clients lying down fully clothed and relaxing on a treatment bed. Kim then passes her hands over and around your body sensing energy fields as though she has “eyes in her hands”.

Kimberley’s approach – after an initial and thorough pre-treatment discussion - is a really interesting blend of off-the-beaten-track energy work and hi-tech methodology. Lying on her treatment table, I was at first aware of her ’scanning’, but soon drifted off into a much-needed snooze, comfortable in the safety of her already-healing space.

Before I fell into too much of a slumber however, I saw how Kimberley transcribed the sensations felt and ’seen’ through her hands into coloured shading on an outline of a human body – representing me and my energy on this particular day - on her laptop screen, for later interpretation.

It must have been around 30-40 minutes, when I felt Kimberley’s healing touch on my arm inviting me to rejoin the conscious world. A little fuzzy still, I returned to the consulting area to be greeted by a pretty map of my metaphysical energy and to hear Kimberley’s insights, findings and ideas about what it all meant.

Depending on what is needed, Kim uses healing, visualisations, breathing, relaxation techniques and energy meditations, drawing on her toolkit of training and experience combined with intuitive and psychic sensing.

She’s good and she’s accurate. Coming from a very loving and supportive place – and not in any way ungrounded or annoyingly new age – Kim really gave me something to think about and a number of useful tips to help me through what she saw as my energetic blocks. I’ve always thought the body never lies, and Kim’s energetic extension of this theory takes things a convincing step further.

Kimberley Jones’ Quantum Coaching & Healing is available in Totnes and Netwon Abbot. Call 01803 868282 for more information or a consultation. Or visit: www.quantum-coaching.co.uk

OK, it’s not an obviously health-related question, but if you bear with me, I’m sure you’ll end up agreeing that television does have a deep impact on our wellbeing.

It’s come up as an issue because I have just discovered that the average American home has more TVs than people. One of my great heroes of health, Dr Joseph Mercola reported on his website this week that “taking into account the epidemic of obesity along with the frightening exercise debt that’s harming America’s health, it’s no surprise to me, based on data reported by Nielsen Media Research, the typical home has 2.55 people and 2.73 TV sets.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I like watching TV, even though I don’t have one at the moment. (I’m like the telly-less kid who becomes an anti-social moron when at a friend’s house – instantly attracted to the hypnotic, moving pictures in the corner of the room). But this interesting statistic inspired me to take a deeper look.

In my research, I spoke to an American acquaintance, Kathy Westphal who created www.trashyourtv.com - a website that urges you to “Trash your TV for a happier, healthier life!” She told me that the average American watches over four and a half hours of TV a day. Now as Brits, we’re sure to be catching up and I sincerely hope we never reach the complementary statistic she shared that Yanks spend only 38 minutes in “meaningful conversation with children”.

It really looks like the ‘one-eyed childminder’ could do with some careful scrutiny. The aforementioned Nielsen Media Research report tells us that the 4 hours and 35 minutes per day, up three minutes from last year, add up to 31½ hours every week - almost a second job for most people.

That works out at 5½ days per month, more than two whole months every year and by age 70 we’ll have spent over 13 years watching television!
“Aren’t there more important things you would rather be doing with this time?” asks Kathy, who holds a view supported by the TV-Turnoff Network who back an international annual TV-Turnoff Week. They claim: “television cuts into family time, harms our children’s ability to read and succeed in school, and contributes to unhealthy lifestyles and obesity.”
“On average, children in the US will spend more time in front of the television (1,023 hours) than in school this year (900 hours),” they report, adding that “Forty percent of Americans frequently or always watch television during dinner.”
US Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher said at the Kick Off of TV-Turnoff Week 2001, “We are raising the most overweight generation of youngsters in American history…This week is about saving lives.”
Of course it’s your choice. But where America leads, we tend to follow. It’s undoubtedly a health issue – if not physical, then mental – subjected, as you are to tens of thousands of adverts a year, let alone mind-numbing actual programming. I say no one can face that lot uninfluenced.
If you want to take action try Kathy’s “TV Free System” – TV rehab if you like. More at: https://paydotcom.com/r/6301/carlmunson/371966/
To join the debate about TV try: http://holisticlocal.co.uk/forums/topics/view/313