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Community Highlights: Meet Vivien Schapera – VoyageDenver
Today we’d like to introduce you to Vivien Schapera.
Hi Vivien, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Vivien is a teacher, healer, and author who is also a radio show host with HealthyLife.net. Trained in clinical psychology, the Alexander Technique, and healing, her specialty is understanding the complex interaction of Body, Mind, and Spirit. In 1999, Vivien founded FourWinds Academy for the Healing Arts & Sciences, a school for training healers, and in 2021 Vivien, and her husband Neil, launched an online training program at CrystalHealingTechniques.com
Our Story
We were born in Denver! We’re not from Denver, we’re actually from Cape Town, South Africa but everything to do with our crystal career stems from Denver. Why? Because Denver holds an annual Gem & Mineral Show that is a Mecca for crystal buyers.
Our crystal business has two arms: The first is supplying courses in crystal healing and the second, is supplying crystal healing tools. The courses are available online, on our website CrystalHealingTechniques.com and the crystal tools are available from our crystal business, Personal Touch Stones. In the early days, I chose to do all my buying at the Denver show, rather than the Tucson show. Any trade fair is overwhelming, but the Tucson show is in a category of “overwhelm” all of its own, whereas the Denver show is much, much more “user-friendly.”
The Denver Gem Show is not the only reason I have traveled to Denver on a regular basis to drink from the source.
My teacher, Melody, a doyenne of crystal healing, lived in Denver and held her training workshops there. Melody is the author of the Love in the Earth series of crystal encyclopedias.
Back in the 1990s, I asked Melody what it’s called when you hold a crystal in your hand and work on the energy field of the client, and she said: “I don’t know, Vivien, I think you’ve got something new there,” and so it was. It became my destiny to download a new modality of crystal healing.
After 25 years of research, and 7 years of documentation, we fulfilled the mission in 2022: A groundbreaking textbook, a 400-page plus website, and over a dozen online training courses complete with hundreds of video demos.
Both the textbook and the blogs won awards immediately upon publication. But it isn’t the awards that are the most significant to us, it is the establishment of an international community of practitioners with three (3) situated in the Denver area. It feels so good to give back!
Internet: Professional Training/School: https://CrystalHealingTechniques.com
We have 3 representatives that are physically located in the Denver area:
Ro Patterson, Practitioner
Avelo Creations
Denver
www.AveloCreations.com
Kathryn Winick, Practitioner
Inner Light Crystal Healing
Colorado Springs/Manitou Springs
https://innerlightcrystalhealing.com/
Deborah Felton, Practitioner
Center for Crystal Attunement and Healing Arts
Colorado Springs
sacredself-llc.com
Plus:
Karen Kuk-Nagle – Crystal Healing colleague and crystal vendor
Hands of Spirit
Boulder
https://www.handsofspirit.com
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There is no smooth road and there is no passive income. To reach this point, we have worked through numerous weekends and “vacations.” Our video camera and computers are extremely well-traveled! As every business owner knows, there is no income from a start-up. Instead, the business is a very hungry baby, going through a long, demanding latent period before there are any results.
Our work is unique and original – we are pioneers, forging a path into the unknown. The challenges we had to meet were so daunting that every person who, lured by the vision, asked to be included in the project ended up running away, including the person who proposed building this website in the first place!
You may well ask why – and there is an explanation: Heaven forbid we should be doing something other people have actually heard of, something with popular appeal! Oh no, we didn’t even find an existing (though small) niche, we went and created a whole new thing that no one had ever heard of. Working with the unknown is not a comfortable dynamic. There are numerous skills to learn and solutions to generate, and success is definitely not guaranteed.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Here is a video of the Denver Gem Show 2022: Denver Gem Show Video https://youtu.be/3Pi76HOQUxw
For 40 years we have had a private practice working as Alexander Teachers as well as offering healing sessions using Crystal Healing and Shamanism. In addition to working with individuals, we teach classes and courses in 4 subjects: Energy Healing, Crystal Healing, Shamanism, and Intuition. The pandemic pushed us into offering online courses so we expanded our website CrystalHealingTechniques.com in 2021, to provide full professional training in our new modality, Crystal Surgery.
We now have students from the US, Canada, UK, South Africa, Italy, New Zealand, and Australia engaged in our structured, certification courses, and we have people from many different countries enjoying the blogs, videos, and free courses. For our students, we also have a business, Personal Touch Stones, that supplies the necessary crystal healing tools required to do Crystal Surgery.
CrystalHealingTechniques.com is more like a Crystal Healing University with a range of courses from beginner to very advanced – advanced beyond anything anyone in the field has ever seen, with unique and original content. Our textbook, our courses, and our presentation are a source of great pride, but most importantly – we are building an international community of highly qualified practitioners, who are, in turn, serving their communities.
There isn’t a week that goes by, that we don’t get heartwarming reports of their wonderful results.
We take care in offering a lot of outstanding free information via our free courses and blogs, as well as our informative YouTube channel. We know that only a very small percentage of people want to dedicate years of study to the subject.
We also know that a lot of people are attracted to crystal healing, with numbers growing rapidly, and we want to offer quality content to all levels of interest.
Our topic is undoubtedly considered “woo-woo,” but we ourselves are traditionally qualified, professional people who have used our innate talents, educational opportunities, and life experience to bring something new and important to the world. We feel very blessed to be empowered, and we feel humbled by the opportunity to empower others.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out.
Ideas are two a-penny. Visions are pie-in-the-sky abstractions. When building a business, we discipline ourselves to keep our feet on the ground. The best way for us to keep our feet on the ground is to be 100% business-like about every aspect, and most especially about money.
To succeed in the long term, we follow sound business conventions and follow strong financial management principles. Otherwise, we may get a brief, powerful result – the proverbial “flash in the pan” – but it will burn out quickly without a strong scaffolding to support it. We always remember: debt is what kills a business. We’ve learned that visionaries who need help with numbers must get the help before commencing and running up a horrible debt.
What does “being business-like” mean in concrete terms? It means being very realistic about costs, potential income, and the expense of time. When creating a new business, we stick to the budget and run the numbers to check that expenses incurred and potential income are very realistically balanced.
Most importantly, we attentively balance listening to others with following our own hearts, minds, and intuition. As we orchestrated the coming together of all these dynamics, we saw our dream come true!
Pricing:
- Free Courses
- Free Blogs and Videos
- Crystal Surgery 1, 2 & 3: $200 each, lifetime access
- Study Group, Bachelors/semester: $500
- Study Group, Masters/semester: $500
Contact Info:
