Today we’d like to introduce you to Lucas Bane and David Devora.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We both had entertainment careers, David in finance and Lucas in production, and we needed to find ways to stay spiritually grounded so the industry wouldn’t destroy us. We became junkies for knowledge and wisdom that would make the world stop spinning so quickly and allow us to more fully enjoy the ever decreasing amount of time we had together. We did all the workshops, we read all the books, we volunteered for Marianne Williamson, and eventually a client of David’s invited us to take her course at The Lionheart Institute.
It was a turning point in our lives. It helped us make more space to actually feel the goodness all around us. For many people, the problem isn’t that their life isn’t rich with goodness, it’s that for one reason or another they are unable to feel the goodness, so much so that they become blind to it. Our healing journeys really woke us up to the miraculous world that surrounds us and caused us to immerse ourselves in healing work, both for ourselves and others. That is how Embrace was born.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It didn’t take long for us to realize that we’re good at what we do. That might not be the most humble answer, but our clients have been raving since the very beginning. What’s been more of a struggle is demystifying what we do. People just accept that acupuncture works and they don’t need to read a book explaining how it works before they give it a shot. They just accept because it’s in our culture, that someone is going to stick needles in you and it’s going to make you feel better.
We can’t just say, “we’re going to sit down and talk and then I’ll put my hands on you and it’s going to change your life!” People need more, and that can be a major obstacle when you rely heavily on word of mouth. People have wonderful results but it can be tricky for them to articulate to their friends how we helped them and why they need us. Another obstacle has been really driving home how different we are. We don’t do Reiki and you’re not going to come in and just lie on the table.
Our work is about half hands-on energy work and half Transpersonal Spiritual Counseling. Whatever is getting you down that brought you in, we’re gonna talk about it, it might lead us to something else entirely that you maybe didn’t want to talk about, you’re probably going to cry, hopefully laugh too, and leave feeling more free. More you. Besides that, the biggest obstacle has just been spreading the word so that people who need us can find us!
Embrace – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We specialize in Transpersonal Spiritual Counseling, a body-centered approach to improving mental well-being. Much of our emotional distress is tied to a physiological response to certain memories and experiences. PTSD being the best example. Sufferers of PTSD know cognitively that their threat is gone, but the body will remain on high-alert, fearful, and searching for the threat. FMRI scans have shown us that this is mostly due to reduced hippocampal volume and release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. With proper inward focus, however, a client can feel these sensations as trapped energy. It need not always make sense.
A client may be remembering a traumatic breakup and feel the sensation of an arrow stuck within their thigh. When the client is able to consciously process the trauma while feeling the sensations that go along with it, both the mind and the body can finally receive the message that the threat is gone and it’s safe to relax. This can cause both profound healing and profound insight. This can be a really wonderful tool for healing developmental trauma. Clients may track the energy in their bodies and realize they’ve been holding on to a childhood belief that they’ll be shamed or punished for feeling a particular emotion. Once they release that belief and allow themselves a more authentic expression of their feelings, profound changes can happen.
We’re most proud of helping our clients know themselves better and find strength and compassion for their weaknesses. It can sound trite to want someone who’s suffering to see how their experience has helped them, but it’s not new age BS to understand when you have a weakness or a wound, you have to learn how to adapt, sometimes for your literal survival. Usually, the skills we are best at developed because of how we adapted to a painful circumstance.
The self-sabotaging things we do that we hate, we do them because at one time we loved ourselves enough to protect ourselves in a way that is no longer helpful to us. We were hurt so badly as children, for example, that we put up a wall to keep out people who might again hurt us. As adults, we hate the wall because of all the intimacy and connection it has stolen from us. When we go back and become fully conscious of the way we built that wall as an act of love for our own protection, we feel safe to bring the wall down brick by brick. When we see clients feeling more safe to let love in and safe to give love freely, nothing in the world feels better.
What sets us apart from others? Results. We consistently hear that our work is more helpful than whatever else our clients have been trying.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
It’s not huge or profound. It’s the text messages. The Facebook comments. When clients say things like “You’ll never understand how much this is helping.” There’s nothing better.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.embraceheals.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @embraceheals
- Facebook: facebook.com/embraceheals
- Twitter: @embraceheals
Image Credit:
Lorenzo Hodges
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