Dr. Hannah Arnold grew up in a very intellectual environment, surrounded by writers and journalists, as her parents were well-connected in the world of German literature. She continued in the cerebral tradition — skipping a year at school, earning a Ph.D from Oxford at 26, working in the German Parliament as a researcher and in Publishing. Then everything changed. At a Yoga Teacher Training, Hannah came across the Japanese healing modality ‘Reiki’. Her mind was blown by what she experienced during the first energy healings he received and she began to question much of what she had believed to be true about life. Today, she has been studying and teaching healing modalities such as Reiki, ThetaHealing®, and Emotion/Body/Belief Code Kinesiology for a decade. In 2020, she founded the New Earth School of Reiki, a place where high-achieving individuals can come ‘home’ to a part of themselves which they have ignored for a long time: the sentient, intuitive, heart-centred part which allows us to connect with ourselves and our environment more deeply, intimately, and authentically. Hannah wants to spread the message that feeling deeply and being intuitive are not a contradiction to having a Ferrari of a brain and being successful.
Dr. Hannah Arnold, Energy Healer
Hannah, you are 36-years-old at the point of publication. What does your life look like these days?
Sunny and busy! I live on a Finca outside Sotogrande in southern Spain with my family: my husband Christoph and two small kids, four dogs, one cat, two horses, about 30 chickens, and varying numbers of volunteers. We moved here a year ago after having spent six years in Berlin and a few years in Scotland. I work online mostly because that is just so convenient and I can reach people all over the world. Now that we are more settled, I am also offering sessions and workshops at our Finca and am beginning some exciting collaborations with local wellness centres. My husband has to go to Germany to check in with his company regularly and we enjoy a mix of farm-flavoured home life — learning about permaculture, farm to table eating, and all sorts of off-grid living questions, hosting cooking classes for children and other community events — and traveling both individually and as a family. We are getting used to everything it takes to run a little farm — all the daily micro- and macro-catastrophes — and are learning a lot. I have already gotten so much more resilient to things like leaks, and wires being eaten by rodents!
It seems like you have kept yourself busy so far…?
I have always had an enormous appetite for life. I am naturally curious, like my mum who in her sixties still travels all the time and learns new things. I admire her for wanting to experience as many of life’s facets as possible. I have that, too. In my childhood, I was a feral tomboy but grew up surrounded by very intellectual adults. I still remember sitting on the lap of the German Nobel Laureate Günter Grass and recall the smell of his pipe. I was an only child and my father was 48 when I was born. Spending much time with older cerebral German intellectual men had the effect that I felt stupid a lot all the time and, as a coping mechanism, became fairly precocious. I recently got diagnosed with ADHD so I understand now that in addition my brain is a pretty intense piece of hardware. Yes, my life has been an absolute whirlwind. The first part was about the development of my intellectual faculties: I graduated in the top 3 of my school after having skipped a year, went to St Andrews in Scotland to study Biochemistry, changed to Philosophy and English after a semester, and completed my D.Phil on the poet W.H. Auden at Oxford when I was 26. I was extremely driven and did not know any other way of existing. I spent holidays doing internships rather than decompressing. I cannot remember anyone ever encouraging me to take it slow and look after myself. Meanwhile, I felt socially awkward and deeply lonely inside. This imprint is still alive in me. I now understand that I was overwhelmed by my high sensitivity — without knowing this was something that even existed. I could always feel other people’s feelings as acutely as my own and as a result, with it happening unconsciously, I was oftentimes not able to distinguish whether something actually had to do with me or not. Confusion and overwhelm were my primary emotional states. I became the greatest people-pleaser and over-performer because I just did not understand how to navigate my emotional life in a healthy way. All along, I did have pretty good intuition and kept being driven by my urge to find a place inside myself and in the world that felt truly rightful. For instance, as a reward for completing my Ph.D I gifted myself with a trip around the world and a Yoga Teacher Training in Costa Rica. I naively thought I was about to do something for my body. Little did I know that my choice would pretty much end life as I had known it and initiate its second phase: the one where I binge-learned everything about Energy Healing and Spirituality for a decade.
What shifted for you once you opened up to the world of Healing and Spirituality?
In a way, everything changed. I have become a mediator between two seemingly separate realms by helping smart and logically-minded humans with a healthy dose of scepticism to embrace something as ethereal as energy work. I used to be the biggest sceptic myself and know what it feels like to not believe in any of it. I grew up without religion and in my school yearbook they called me ‘Atheist of the Year’. After all, I identified as a Scientist back then, with majors in Biology and Chemistry, and religion seemed to be a contradiction to this. But being a ‘good empiricist’, I always found people who had faith absolutely fascinating, like some exotic species: precisely because I could not relate to their experience at all. Receiving Reiki for the first time had such a profound impact on me because something beyond my understanding — completely outside of my concept of reality — became real and tangible for me, a lived experience. In one simple yet profound moment, countless beliefs I previously held were shredded to bits. You kind of have to feel this happening in your own body to truly understand what I mean. What happens in the realm of healing and spirituality is difficult to convey through the medium of language if someone has not experienced it. And if someone has experienced it, you don’t need words to explain it. This is partly what creates the gulf between those who are ‘in’ healing land and those who are ‘out’, as it sometimes seems.
Can you share some specific experiences so the readers can relate?
When I first received Reiki, the woman giving me a taster session slowly moved her hand downward in front of my body, not touching me at all. Once she moved towards the belly area, where I had felt constant pain since my father had passed away when I was 23, my breathing stopped and I suddenly started ‘grief crying’. My jaw quivered because I was crying so intensely — yet I did not feel sad. For the first time, I had a personal experience of psychosomatics: how old unprocessed emotions can be stuck in the body causing havoc until we find a way of releasing them. A bit later, two healing sessions with a healer in Germany cleared my intolerances to milk and gluten that I had had for three years. I walked in not being able to drink milk and walked out having no reaction to it whatsoever. We just cleared a few beliefs about my mother: ‘mummy issues’ often have to do with intolerance to milk. I had another experience when I was doing a practice session for my Level 2 Reiki training on a uni friend, who happens to have a Ph.D in theoretical physics. I was holding my hands next to her head. Suddenly, we heard a loud click-popping sound. She opened her eyes in surprise and asked: ‘Did you hear that?’ I nodded. ‘That came out of my head, right?’ I nodded again. We stared at each other slightly terrified. My teacher later explained to me that likely my friend’s spine had released in a big way. I did not even touch her physically and yet the energy flowing through my hands into her system was strong enough to liberate a stuck vertebra. This was about a month after I first tried hands-on-healing. I would never have believed this to be possible. Another particularly memorable healing was when I used the BodyCode applied kinesiology system to release a few stuck emotions from a friend who experienced severe period pain every month. This took me about five minutes — as a distance healing without her even being on the phone. Of course, I had her permission and shared the results when I was done. The next bleed she experienced was painless. A decade of similar experiences richer, I am not the same person as before.
So you saw symptoms and mental states changing in a way you thought impossible before? What did seeing this happen and facilitating it change in you?
Experience after experience showed me that things I did not believe to be possible were actually very possible indeed. Seeing people move a ‘psychic pinwheel’ — little bits of metal on a pole — with only their thoughts during a ThetaHealing® class in London… Working with psychic healers who knew nothing about me or my life and could tune into my energy and reflect with absolute precision what was going on in my life… What else is possible if this is possible? What are we made of? Honestly, what is this life thing actually? My curiosity got redirected from areas which the mainstream considers to be ‘real’ to whatever I could access myself through my own experience, even if it seemed impossible to society at large and impossible to my well-trained brain. A month after having my first ‘waking up’ moment in Costa Rica, I was lying on my kitchen floor in Berlin receiving a long-distance Reiki session from my Oxford-based teacher. At the time, I still considered this to be completely absurd but I had a cold and nothing to lose. Once again, my mind was blown as I felt my teacher’s energy interact with my body just as strongly as if she stood right next to me. If anything, the intensity of the long-distance healing was higher than previous in-person sessions. And yes, at this point I did have a bit of an existential crisis. And I also did still go to medical school for a semester half a year later because I was so academic that I felt I could not ‘just’ be a woo-woo healer. Healing, this magical, often painful process of discovering deeper layers of ‘truth’ about life, about what is actually possible, really is all about discovering the truth about ourselves and what is possible in our individual life, our little big spark of a human existence that is so fleeting and yet so infinitely precious: think about it. Nothing ever was in existence that is exactly like each of us! Nor will there ever be exactly such a thing again. And this is pretty spectacular when you think about it. But much of what we believe about ourselves and life is actually pretty incorrect and detrimental to our system.
Do you lead your life differently now?
Healing is a continuous process of working through one’s masks and bringing visibility and liberation to those parts of us that feel traumatised, hurt, and misunderstood. Who feel like it is impossible to achieve something or that its dreams are not important. These are the parts that struggle to relate without falling into old patterns and perpetuating pain. Healing has everything to do with identity. With shedding layers of untruth which we made up about ourselves or accepted from others. It is all about being daring, about daring to be different: not just in comparison to ‘others’ but in comparison to who we were up to this point. The more my own acceptance of myself grows, the more radically I stop doing things that are based on fear, guilt, shame, people-pleasing, or involve making myself small in order to avoid friction. First allowing everything to be as it is makes me kinder and helps me slow down. I stop pretending I am a victim and remember on deeper and deeper levels that I am a powerful creator and 100% responsible for my life: for my actions, my words, my feelings, and my thoughts. This is not easy. It also means that on some level I created all the stuff I complain about in the first place and that, really, I need to stop moaning and instead re-create my life from a more aligned, truthful, and conscious place. We learn to trust this process by repeatedly going through it and experiencing the reward of becoming a more abundant, radiant, and wholesome self in various areas of our life and psyche. This can feel absolutely terrifying because the birth of any new identity necessitates the death of an old one. It all boils down to developing a deep trust in life and, in the end, ourselves. The trust that there is an essence beyond our limited human understanding which has our back. Going through these intense processes of purification over and over again, I developed a deep gnosis that there is no separation between the physical and the energetic. Between soul, mind, and body. Think about it. At this point in time, an entire century has passed since Einstein proved that time and space are much weirder than we thought and still mostly think. Quantum Science actually explains many of the ‘crazy’ (however in fact entirely possible) phenomena we are used to as healers, psychics, and mediums. Yet the collective idea of how existence just HAS to be and MUST be working is still very much anchored in rationality and linearity. My work for the past decade can be described as a constant, intense process of unconditioning myself and my clients from some of these presuppositions and untruths. My friends and family know that I leave no stone unturned, following this path of rediscovery with absolute dedication, stubborn persistence, and, at this point, deep faith. Faith is something I did not have growing up, and having it now — trusting that everything in my life happens FOR me not TO me and that there is guidance from some higher dimensional plane which I can trust even if my brain thinks a situation is absolutely unnecessary — makes it possible to walk my walk in the way I do. And while I still have a lifetime of growth ahead of me, I am extremely proud of the extent to which I already manage to live from a place of authenticity and love — even if it still often feels scary and hard because of the human messiness involved.
Can you summarise what healing is?
All this is based on my personal conviction, sense, and belief. One way I like to put it: healing is the embodiment of higher and higher frequencies of love. Practically, this can mean many different things. For one person it might involve setting harder boundaries and using their ‘no’ more while another person might need to do the opposite. We are radiant beings of light, in human three-dimensional shapes governed by the laws of the universe. Human beings stubbornly hold on to the illusion of division and pain in impressively creative, torturous, and complex forms of expression. All paths of self-development, spirituality, and healing really are crutches to make us move beyond this state to a state and feeling of wholeness. Based on this, ‘healing’ could be summarised as the process towards a direct experience and embodiment of what could be called ‘the divine’. Which is the same thing as saying: towards the experience and embodiment of one’s true nature. Which is the same thing as the purest of loves. Divinity is not something external to us. It is not something we need a church or, indeed, a healer for, guiding us towards a distant, mysterious, yet unreachable entity. While all of this is the ideal meaning of the concept, the signifiers ‘healing’ and ‘healer’ are confusing and in-concise, triggering distorted and outdated images stored within the collective consciousness: lonely weirdos living in their hut at the edge of the village with chicken claws hanging off the roof. The vast trauma imprint of the witch burnings. And behind and within all of this lingers the true reason for the discomfort triggered: that any proper healer embodies the quest into those spaces beyond the illusion of separation, beyond what is commonly known and agreed upon in society. The healer is needed and feared at the same time, both when it comes to practical life, wounds and trauma, and to the energetics of societal development. The healer is such a polarising and somewhat uncomfortable figure because others can sense his or her search for or access to something more profound. This, in the end, is what we all seek deep down, whether we are aware of it or not. And anyone who gets a glimpse of what this connection translates to in our human body — the feelings of deep ecstasy and bliss caused by the God-hormone DMT, which is naturally released by the pineal gland during healing sessions and during other moments of deep connection with ourselves — will find that it is literally addictive and thus, one could say, has the purpose of helping us continue on the often difficult path of ‘liberation’, as Buddhists would call it. Spirituality is just a summary of all the practices that seek exactly that deep understanding of wholeness, of feeling divine now without fixing or judging. Of seeing everything that is happening as being interconnected, worthy, and divine. And necessary.
How does this ‘path of liberation’ look like in practical, real-life terms and why should anyone bother?
What I have been exploring and experiencing on deeper and deeper levels, personally and in my work with clients, is that when we make the effort of charting our inner territories honestly and knowing ourselves more and more intimately — our mechanisms, strengths, difficulties, needs, passions, wounds, desires, and our energetic patterns — we are rewarded with so much clarity, strength, and fulfilment in the end. Connecting with and accepting all of our parts, however much we wish they weren’t part of our identity, is the prerequisite for standing up for ourselves, communicating authentically and clearly, and being able to walk gracefully through both the peak and valley experiences of life. What this means in detail is up to us, but the opposite would be: living a life bent around the wishes and definitions of others without being conscious and accepting of it. Just take the concept of ‘success’! As I said in the beginning, I used to be what one could consider ‘successful’ but I felt so lost and disconnected. And this is true for many of my clients, too. Once we allow ourself to look at who we are in truth and what actually lights us up, we can make choices that create a reality in which we are truly and authentically successful. And usually our deepest truest fulfilment has an element of service to the world, too. So, everyone wins. One deep truth is this: everything in existence first wants to be seen and acknowledged for what it IS before it can change. In other words: you cannot change what you do not own first. You might want to call this radical honesty with oneself, or a dedication to truth that is greater than the fear of those unknown, uncharted territories on the other side of our attachments and beliefs. And I, for one, cannot do this by myself. I have a well-trained, stubborn tank of a brain that feels like it knows exactly how things should go. Having developed an acute awareness for my own bullshit at this stage, I have a hand-full of trusted healer colleagues who regularly receive my desperate requests for a session. Their intuitive abilities help me see beyond my limited perspective and help me shift all the stuck energies that are at the root of the issue. These blocks can come from my own life and mind, from parallel lives one’s soul embodies (commonly called ‘past lives’ but since time does not really exist and healing happens in multidimensionality all our soul’s lives really are parallel and interconnected), from ancestors, from the collective… We are not what we suppose ourselves to be, not only. There are so many parts involved having a say in the making of our identity. Think of the fact that our body includes four times more bacteria than our own cells. Humanity is currently having a revelation about the impact of the microbiome on our mood and our productivity. And zooming out: beyond being a shared space for all sorts of consciousnesses which, on some level, we have invited to co-create our lived experience, beyond this strange human experience, there is nothing but pure love. Because all the supposed imperfections and problems are our teachers and absolutely meant to be there. Not for ever, but for the purpose of some major learning and integration. Becoming aware of this and embodying this truth in our life and our actions is what ‘healing’ signifies to me. Now you know why I struggle to say what ‘I do’ in one sentence. My husband jokes that my ‘elevator pitch’ is as long as a huge skyscraper with a broken lift.
What key advice do you have for people who are excited to step into this new world?
Here are a few key things. If you choose guidance — a person or program — make sure you are very aware of marketing techniques that try to catch you by triggering your pain points. These usually make you feel like the only place where your problem will be solved is ‘this’ place. A good healer/coach/guide will make sure you have a chance to check out their way of working and their energy. They will never pressure you into buying but make sure that you both ‘click’ so that nobody wastes their time and resources. The process of healing is incredibly intimate, necessarily so, and alchemic. It relies heavily on the connection between those involved. This is why no healer can or should ever promise results. There is no guarantee for these — which means when you train to be a healer the very first thing you need to learn is to release the connection between our personal effort and the quality of the result, which is so deeply engrained in most of us. Of course, as healers we have a massive responsibility to cultivate the mastery of our art and, most importantly, embody what we stand for in our personal life and interactions, but we cannot control the outcome of the healing session. The healer holds space for magic by bringing the deepest possible faith to the healing, knowing as a fact that miracles and change are possible and, indeed, already in the making. The healer should be able to hold during the session the vision of who his client is beyond the petty human limitations, wounds, and stressors while also very much being in humble acceptance of the client’s human reality. Healing sessions and energy work need to change something. So — please make sure you trust your gut-feeling when picking someone rather than letting them convince you with their rhetoric and fancy vocab. Even if you know nothing about healing, you will be able to pick up of someone has integrity if you drop into your body. Like everywhere else in life, the truly skilled person oozes with humility and clarity and does not need to convince you.
If you could change one thing about the healing industry, what would it be and why?
What frustrates me is that many healers do not make an effort to truthfully represent what healing is really about. The whole ‘love and light’ language is really not truthful. Some people present healing as if it were a ‘push the button and you are healed’ easy fix kind of thing, which it is not — even if instant healings do happen. True healing is a deep, sometimes painful process of living authentically on a daily basis instead of ‘getting it right’. Finding balance requires being out of balance here and there, in order to know where the middle ground is. This is impossible if we are in perfectionist, anxious calcification with respect to any area of our life, including spirituality. Suppleness can be achieved a lot more easily when we work through blocks in the energetic form first. If we learn our lesson that way, we don’t have to manifest any dis-ease or roadblock on the physical plane in order to learn and grow. But this is not as easy to sell as ‘here is your quick fix — pay now!’. We have to go to the scary places — in order to realise that shame, guilt, and so many of the psychological mechanisms we allow to define our choices, are just social constructs we can decide to drop. With the right person by your side, you can be guided to those hidden energetic pockets that cause havoc in that corner deep inside of us to which we have banned them. You don’t have to live with trauma and repressed emotions or tackle facing them by yourself. And what I can share after a decade of unearthing hidden ‘stuff’ and working with clients on issues, sometimes deeply traumatic, they were never before able to share: once you meet yourself ‘down there’ in the fertile darkness of your subconscious, witnessed lovingly with your deep feelings and repressed energies, I promise you will fall in love with yourself all over again. I see it happen every day. A client wrote to me today after our first session: ‘I simple don’t have the physical symptoms anymore. And I was able to act differently!’ Shifting stuck energies in a session can give you a whole new life. But it requires a lot of ownership of one’s life and true responsibility.
What makes you unique in the world of healing and spirituality?
What makes me special in the world of Reiki, intuitive healing, and energy work is that I unite in myself quite a few different realities: the academic, the abundant, the down-to-earth practical, and the spiritual. I see it as a gift for my work that healing and spirituality were not always part of my life and that I remember so well what it feels like to live without having this perspective. I have a very analytical mind and love being clear and succinct. As a former translator, I have learned to work sensitively and consciously with language and therefore I am always trying to make things as clear and simple as I possibly can. Since I am here to help those who are still new to energy healing, it is really important to me that my clients do not feel like I am talking over their head using spiritual mumbo-jumbo. This makes me think of my second Reiki teacher who would chat at me for hours about ‘light language’ she had channeled without noticing this did not impact me in any way because it was beyond what I could relate to — by far. I switched off. Healing, in my view, needs to have tangible effects and improve our life, otherwise it is theory. And there is enough empty chat in the world already. We all need to reduce consumption and increase conscious creation. Working with me, you will always be challenged to make practical changes in your thinking and in your life. I also always always bring humour and lightness into my work. And what I hear a lot from clients is that people just feel instantly safe with me. I often experience total strangers sharing much more with me in conversations outside of a work container than they would normally do with a stranger, too. I would say this is because they can feel instinctively that I am absolutely trustworthy and non-judgemental. As the poet John Donne put it, we are each a whole world in ourselves. And I am infinitely curious about each of the worlds I have the honour to be-hold, and I take my role of witnessing someone towards a more glorious, expansive, and fulfilled version of themselves very seriously. It never becomes ‘normal’ to dive into deeper and deeper strata of another human being for me. It’s awe-inspiring and makes me burst with gratitude and love every time.
What recommendation do you have for someone who is intrigued by what you share here and is keen to get going?
It would make me so happy if I found the right words to stir up your curiosity. I encourage you so much to make time for the YOU that has waited patiently to move beyond the stress, the boredom, the frustration with life and yourself, the stories, the fatigue, and the resistance. Your dreams and desires matter greatly and are desperately needed out in the open. Gift yourself a space with the right conditions for you to become an even more free, happy, and truly abundant version of yourself. Which kind of space might be best for you specifically? Only you can know and feel the rightness of this choice.
If you are interested to engage more deeply with my work, you have the following options. For more content, you can search for my articles here on Brainz Magazine, browse my Instagrams (@hannah.arnold_reiki and @new_earth_school_of_reiki), or check out my homepage. You can also listen to my Podcast HowDoYouHeal? in all the conspicuous places.
In 2020, I founded the New Earth School of Reiki where I teach a practical, modernised, to-the-point adaptation of the Japanese healing system. Reiki is, in my view, the best gateway into the world of energy healing if you have not had much contact with spirituality and healing. It is very easily learned by everyone willing to try it out, yet it is highly effective and most people feel like ‘coming home’ when first engaging with it. If you want to give it a go, I teach all four levels of Reiki in the traditional Usui lineage with a focus on it being and suitable for our modern reality. I encourage you to download my free Introductory Guide to the Reiki System (with a guided meditation). To sign up for any level course or for more information, email me at healing@hannaharnold.co — I love answering any questions you might have.
With my 1:1 clients I work in containers that I tailor to their individual needs and wishes. You have the option of scheduling a clarity call with me using the same email address. While my private clients book me for any health, business, and mindset related issues, I especially enjoy working with family businesses, fertility problems, and anything to do with high-sensitivity and overwhelm. I am here for you if you long to create lasting high-speed transformation in any area of your life. Just take away this: the worlds of feeling/intuition/heart and logic are not separate. You can be intellectual and spiritual at the same time. I look forward to walking by your side and help you integrate the two if you wish. So much love!
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