Healer Q&A: Navigating trust and high profile clients with Jodi Carey
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
In this thought-provoking episode of Heallist, host Yuli sits down with the renowned multi-modality healer, Jodi Carey, to delve into the art of working with high-profile clients, drawing from Jodi's expertise to uncover valuable perspectives on trust-building, energy work, personal growth, and scaling a successful healing practice. Jodi is a spiritual guide, movement artist, and a renowned teacher in the field of yoga and healing arts. Her integrative approach blends ancient wisdom with modern knowledge. Through intuitive counseling, somatic movement, and restorative yoga practices, she has helped hundreds of clients including some of the biggest names in Hollywood move more gracefully through the rocky, pivotal moments of life.
Being a multi-modality healer
Yuli Ziv: Let's talk about being a multi-modality healer. I know for sure that as someone who incorporates so many techniques and teachings into your work, you probably spend a lot of time in your brain, trying to communicate that in the world and shaping it into some sort of bio description or a method. How do you present yourself to clients? How do you describe to people what you do?
Jodi Carey: That's exactly the challenge I face. It's so natural to me that it flows out of my body and my voice so easily when I meet someone, that I forget that it's not always translated to the public in an easy way. I always come back to language; I always come back to how can I be more accessible to different kinds of societies, to different walks of life, to every different personality, age, and religion? That is my intention—to really serve all.
I feel like the advantage for me is that I am multicultural. My bloodline is so diverse that I also have access to information just through my bloodline. That's something that I continue to explore as far as ancestral work and ancestral healing. As I dive into that for myself, I get to really relate to people on a whole other level.
Customizing the sessions for clients
Jodi Carey: Most of my clients come through word of mouth. Prior clients share their experiences, and curiosity leads new clients to me, which is amazing because there isn't a lot of, "Well, read my bio. This is what I do." It's more about their experience, the feeling, and the sensation they get. People come to me from a very kinesthetic description. When I describe it, I say, "I work with the present moment and the vibration of the person, aligning them with their highest vibration." I do postural analysis and work with posture structure, especially with people who have injuries. This allows me to experience the other layers of their consciousness. Sometimes, it connects us to possible other lives. If the receiver speaks more of their language to their physical bodies, that’s the information that comes through. If someone is really into Kundalini and subtle body, we delve into that language.
People come to me with an intention, and I would say 95% of the time, that intention changes. For me, that's the entry point. If someone feels safe to approach me from a physical place, it's about something in the emotional body, it always comes back to repressed trauma. I'm not going to sit here and talk to you about your trauma. What I'm going to do is I'm going to stretch you a little bit, we're going to stretch together, we're going to breathe, and then all of a sudden, as the emotional body feels safe and open and palpable, then we get to talk about something.
Yuli Ziv: This is really incredible. To me, it's a very cutting-edge approach, even though it's ancient and probably 1000 years old. As we discover it and go through this evolution of the human species, we are suddenly discovering all of this connection between injuries, traumas, and past lives. It all feels like a new field, at least to me, and to a lot of people in this society, it's a revelation of all this interconnectedness between different practices.
Working with the field of energy
Jodi Carey: What allows students and clients to open up to me in a way that they may not do with their psychiatrists or therapists is that I'm not talking to them about their trauma. My goal is to completely listen to the story through the body. I'm reading the body physically and also sensing things unseen, like the field of energy around them. Through study and research, honing in on working with the energy field has come naturally to me.
Sometimes my hands will start to move with clients, and it may look like I'm moving energy with my hands or doing Reiki, even though I'm not trained in Reiki. Sometimes I use different mudras that come through my body spontaneously just to work with people's energy fields. What I'm doing is feeling the dense parts of someone's energy field, whether it's on the right, left, up, down, or all around. Others are the opposite, and we have to do a bit more physical work for them to open up their etheric body so that we can dive into that fluid space.
How to build trust with clients
Yuli Ziv: You've had the pleasure of working with so many amazing big names. Just looking at your website and some of the testimonials from Will Smith and Ariel Kibler, I imagine with some of those high-profile clients, it's an even more intricate process to get to that level. Are there any key differences or rules of engagement that you, as a healer, have based on that specific type of client?
Jodi Carey: My wisdom, confidence, and polished technical practice have come from many years of direct experience with my own personal life's traumas and integrating them into my body through spiritual work. I've had more trauma and then done more spiritual work to the point where if I meet someone like Will Smith or the President of the United States, it doesn't matter who you are; I'm still going to share what's my truth. It's a personal thing and also comes from my experience relating to many different kinds of people my whole life.
When I meet a high-profile client, I have so much energetic and emotional experience that has been validated already in me. There's no hierarchy or ego-driven sense of "you're better than me." At this point, it's just, "I'm myself. This is my life." I've released so much of that pressure to please a client or to prove that what I do works. I've offered that part of my ego to the divine.
We established trust in the first 10 minutes because I showed up as myself and used my grounding techniques. I also take a lot of care in setting boundaries when I meet someone, including high-profile clients. Having boundaries comes with a certain level of drama, so I consciously work with them. If I'm working with a client who may be very good-looking or attractive, I'm super androgynous. I know how to turn that part of me off completely.
How Jodi’s upbringing shaped her practice
Yuli Ziv: You mentioned your family and your upbringing, and I find it just so fascinating, the mix of traditions and cultures that you have within your family DNA. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it shaped your practice?
Jodi Carey: When I talk about it, I feel a sense of pride, almost like gratitude, as I acknowledge my lineage. My mother was Chinese, Irish, and partly German, while my father's side is Puerto Rican Spanish. My grandmother, who was Irish and from Jersey City, mostly raised me and my sisters when we were little because my mom was a young mom.
We had an old-school, cynical, and disciplinary white woman who had her own books of trauma. My grandmother was literally a character out of a book, and I still want to write a book about her one day. Her strong disciplinary ways really helped give us street smarts and a strong backbone growing up in the ghetto of New York City.
She took me to my first dance class in a place with all the drug users, in the middle of the AIDS pandemic, in a project building. I became a part of that dance company for the next few years. My grandmother saw this as her second chance to live with purpose, raising us as her legacy.
I had a very strong relationship with my grandmother, which I feel was its own spiritual teaching. We were soulmates in a way; the power of that relationship is still being revealed to me. My grandmother wanted to give us something to do, to keep us off the streets.
On my father's side, the Puerto Rican side, they were very religious. That was the church experience for us. My Puerto Rican blood gives me a certain feeling when I speak about it. Because my dad was an artist, a singer, a drummer, I feel like a lot of my artistic talents come from hi.
Many of my instincts about life come from Puerto Rico, which is a big mix of African American, Cuban, and more. I really feel like I can relate to these multi-ethnic lineages just through my Puerto Rican blood. I love dancing salsa. I feel the rhythm inside my body.
Balancing the present moment with future vision
Yuli Ziv: I'm curious about how you see yourself embodied and fulfilling the service that you're meant to do. Do you see a future evolution of yourself? Is there even a need for that? Is it just one of those fleeting thoughts?
Jodi Carey: I'm so present-moment oriented. It's even hard for me to literally plan or have an event tonight. Usually, any coach, teacher, or presenter will have an agenda or plan. I never plan. I have an intention. I don't know what I'm going to do until I meet the group. I'm sure that's terrifying for most people. My collaborator, because I'm co-hosting with her, is like, "What do I do? What did I sign up for?" I'm letting her take a little bit more of the agenda-based lead. I'm going to organically facilitate.
In that sense, when I look into the future and the evolution of what I do, I can only base it off of what I'm presently experiencing. I still get very nourished by the work that I do. However, I would like for it to unfold a little more easily as far as clientele and growth. I've never had to market myself before. Now we're in this deep, technological, crazy stage of life. I freak out with that stuff because I feel the push to have to market myself outside of my discipline.
I get really weird about the future, so when you ask me that question, I go into that a little space of fear and worry. I'm thinking about having all of these videos on my website, and all of this information for people to access. I've been thinking about having a monthly membership so that people have access to all the tools that I share in my one-on-one work. But that's not how I work.
There are foundational maps that I can offer, but there are thousands of those at this point in the industry. I battle with myself: "Do I really want to spend my energy on that, when what I do is this?" How much do I want to adapt to the ways of where the wellness industry is evolving? Why do I want to adapt? You know, so I'm really introspective, and you know, in that place, especially right now, I'm super, like contemplating where the next move is. I'm working with my clients for this week, so I'm not a multitasker brain. When I'm with you, I'm with you.
Scaling the practice
Yuli Ziv: The more I talk to healers, the more common thread I hear is that scaling what they do is one of the hardest things. Because deep down, we all want to help more people, we want to touch more people in different ways. But at the end of the day, like you said, this gift that you have is seeing a person for who they are and customizing and using your incredible toolbox of all the ancient traditions that you've learned in this life and many other lives, so how do you scale that.
Jodi Carey: I get to cultivate a space for people who've never even heard about this stuff. I used to work with Goldman Sachs. These are people who are sitting at their desks all day. I remember one day I came into Goldman Sachs and everyone was sitting at their conference table. I brought my crystal ball and other incredible tools. They were usually sitting there with their pen and paper ready to jot down information, but I literally said, "Everyone, close your books and close your eyes."
How can I open people up to something bigger? It's a game for me to create an experience for people to feel their body in a different way, to hear their breath, and to be able to slow their heart rate down. Maybe to give them the chance to have an intuitive knowing about something.
I've worked with clients who, seven years later, send me an email saying, "Now I'm psychic. I can read people's minds." I'm like, "Amazing!" For me, it's like dropping a little pebble, planting a seed, and leaving the rest to God.
Yuli Ziv: It's not just about scaling your healing business. It's about how we can take this concept and really make it more acceptable and accessible. Those case studies are right—they're not scientific, and they're often private. How do we bring them to the wider conversation? I'm sure every healer asks themselves the same question. It's beyond scaling. It's about bringing this idea into the mainstream.
Jodi Carey: Yes, these conversations help because there's no pressure or dogma. I'm not here trying to sell what I do. It's just sharing information that's usually inaccessible to most people.
