Healing Yourself First: Energy Work, Intuition & Healthier Relationships with Ann BruinsmaHealing Yourself First: Energy Work, Intuition & Healthier Relationships with Ann Bruinsma
Recover Your Soul: A Spiritual Path to a Happy and Healthy Life
Rev. Rachel Harrison talks with qigong energy healer Ann Brunsma about self-healing, intuition and energy work, and how these practices can shift relationships and patterns like codependency. Their conversation links spirituality, recovery and personal responsibility in a warm, practical way.
46:56•19 Oct 2026
Healing Yourself First: Energy, Intuition and Healthier Relationships
Episode Overview
- Focusing on your own healing can be one of the most supportive things you do for the people you love.
- Energy work and qigong address subtle vibrations, helping clear what "deadens" your spirit and magnify who you really are.
- Intuition doesn’t have to look dramatic; a quiet inner knowing can be just as valid as vivid visions.
- Doing deep personal work keeps a healer (or anyone in recovery) from projecting their own wounds and judgments onto others.
- As one person shifts their energy and steps out of codependent patterns, relationships around them often begin to change as well.
“"One of the most important things we can do for the people we love is to focus on our own healing."”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This conversation between Rev. Rachel Harrison and holistic qigong energy healer Ann Brunsma gently shines a light on what happens when you decide to heal yourself first and let everyone else benefit from the ripple effect. The chat is relaxed, warm and a bit "woo" in the best possible way.
Ann shares how she grew up in a very medical, science-focused family, earned degrees in maths and economics, and then slowly found her way back to her highly sensitive, intuitive side. You’ll hear how serious health challenges in her family steered her towards holistic approaches and energy work, and how qigong training gave her a structured way to work with life-force energy. A big thread running through the conversation is self-trust.
Ann openly admits that her path has been "filled with a lot of self-doubt", yet she kept showing up for intuitive classes, learning that her strength is a deep inner knowing rather than dramatic visions. There’s a lot here for anyone who’s ever felt too sensitive or doubted their own gut feelings. Rachel brings it back to recovery by linking energy work with codependency, people-pleasing and control addiction.
Instead of trying to fix partners, children or loved ones in addiction, she and Ann talk about becoming a clear energetic channel yourself—doing your own inner work so you can show up calmer, more grounded and less hooked on outcomes. The stories are down-to-earth, sometimes funny, and surprisingly practical: from remote energy sessions that shifted a son in active addiction, to a client whose own healing softened an abusive marriage without a single session for the husband.
If you’re sober, sober-curious, or simply trying to build healthier relationships, you might find yourself asking: what would change if you really did put your own healing first?
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