S3 | E3 Dr. Devon James

I'm out in the lovely suburb of Hinsdale, Illinois, with Dr. Devon James, owner of Within Reach Healing. Laura O'Malley, my guest earlier this season, kept telling me I had to go see Devon, so I did, and I've been back half a dozen times since. Devon is trained as a chiropractor, but she concedes the chiropractors probably wouldn't let her back in the club, so I like to call her a witch. She's fine with it.

Devon has just built out a gorgeous, 2,900-square-foot space in a quiet wooded setting, a big step up from her first office of under 500 square feet. Her vision is a true one-stop shop. During COVID, her patients leaned on her for everything, and when she'd refer them to the best people she knew, they'd tell her it was too far to drive. So she brought those people next door. Her team now includes massage therapy, orthopedic and pelvic floor physical therapy, mindful facials, sound healing, yoga, life coaching, a bioscan unit, and soon nurse practitioners and a psychotherapist. When I was in Sedona in 2021, I sat in meditation thinking, "We need a Sedona in Chicago." This place is pretty close.

We dig into applied kinesiology, the muscle testing Devon learned in chiropractic school, where every muscle connects to an acupuncture meridian, lymphatic and vascular points, a nutritional need, and even an emotion. Take the psoas: it shares a meridian with the kidneys, its main nutrition is water, and the kidneys' emotion is fear. That's why Devon has zero protocols. She asks each person's body what it wants that day, then pulls from 17 or 18 techniques, including TBM, quantum neurology, and remote energy healing. She tells the story of the seminar where she saw a flash of her teacher's past life, helped heal his shoulder, and learned that most practitioners don't actually hear their patients' bodies talk to them.

Devon is open about where this all came from. Her father struggled with alcoholism until she was about ten, and she learned to sense his mood from miles away and keep the house calm. She started her own healing work at 19, went through a divorce, spent eight years in therapy for complex PTSD, and recently had her therapist tell her she was healed and didn't need her anymore. It was far less triumphant than she expected. We compare notes on growing up hypervigilant, on dissociation and falling asleep as a defense, and on how a secure, loving relationship with her partner Aiden gave her the footing to do the deep work and, after losing $40,000 on a building with toxic dry-cleaning chemicals underneath it, to build this place anyway.

We also talk about who she sees: people with chronic and autoimmune illness who've been to many doctors without answers, survivors of abuse, and especially kids, including children on the spectrum and non-verbal kids she says communicate with her telepathically. She built an indoor play cottage so kids are upset when they have to leave and parents never have to apologize. Finally, we have some fun with her idea for a "healing carnival" open house, complete with a passport to wellness, raffle tickets, and blind muscle testing.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Within Reach Healing and Devon's vision of a one-stop wellness center
• Why Devon was trained as a chiropractor but works nothing like a typical one
• Applied kinesiology, muscle testing, and how each muscle connects to meridians, nutrition, and emotions
• Why there's no protocol for low back pain, and why she asks each body what it needs
• Discovering her intuitive gifts at a TBM seminar, and the science of intuition as pattern recognition
• Remote energy healing and the bioscan unit that picked up a family argument from across the world
• Growing up with an alcoholic father, hypervigilance, and complex PTSD
• Getting "fired" by her therapist after eight years, and what healed actually feels like
• Dissociation, panic attacks, and learning to let feelings pass through
• Working with chronic illness, abuse survivors, kids on the spectrum, and non-verbal children
• Losing $40,000 on a building and building her healing center anyway
• Supplements, muscle testing yourself, and why bodies change
• The sway test, blind testing, and a healing carnival

You can find Dr. Devon James and her team at withinreachhealing.com and on Instagram.