Amber grew up in a Mormon home in Portland, Oregon, never really buying into it, and that inner conflict showed up as depression, brain fog, and chronic pain, compounded by scoliosis. Instead of college and journalism, she wound up in cosmetology school, where it quickly became clear people were coming to her for her touch. Massage school cracked her world open: the links between emotion, trauma, and pain, and her first introduction to Reiki. That path eventually led to energy work, shamanic tools, and guided inner journeying.

We talk about why so many of her clients arrive burned out after exhausting Western medicine, and why she sees depression, anxiety, and body pain as inseparable. Amber explains Reiki as universal life force energy, with the practitioner acting like jumper cables or a clear channel, and describes the more intuitive layer she brings: tuning into the conversation between the body and that energy. As someone who's aphantasic, I loved her reminder that intuitive information doesn't have to arrive as pictures. It can be a knowing, a phrase, a feeling. And it doesn't have to make sense right now.

From there we go into the guided inner journey work she learned in her two-year mentorship with Renee: a light, hypnotic, drug-free process where the client journeys through their own imagination, starting in nature, meeting guides and allies, and using the body as a portal. Amber describes energy extraction, where we personify something like depression or anxiety and ask what it really needs (usually love), and how this echoes Tsultrim Allione's Feeding Your Demons practice. The demon isn't slain. It's nourished, and it becomes an ally.

We also cover:

• Tarot as a way to reflect your own story back to you, not predict the future, and my take on it as training wheels for synchronicity
• Why AI can feel divinatory but comes with confirmation bias built in
• A client whose year and a half of weekly Reiki transformed her life, and the mystery of sleep paralysis and shadow people
• Validation through direct experience, from a room filling with white light at a Paul Selig event to beings moving through my body on retreat
• Spiritual bypassing, including my own, and seeing the collective shadow for what it is
• Why there's no end point to healing, and Starhawk's idea of the spiral dance

If you're in Chicago, I highly recommend having the Amber experience in person. If you're not, her guided journeys and Reiki work beautifully remotely.

Connect with Amber: prismatichealing.com

Special Guest: Amber Renee Schwartz.

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