About Guidance for Healing & Jon McIntosh
What is Guidance for Healing?
There are times when Life seeks to live through us in ways at odds with our personal wishes or plans. Disruption by disease or other health and emotional challenges, relationship struggles at home and work, accidents and crises and their accompanying pain and suffering, offer a profound opportunity to begin a journey of Self-discovery, deeper meaning and authentic healing.
Guidance for Healing work offers deep insights in order to understand and give meaning to how all life experiences serve our personal development and the unfoldment of our soul. Fundamentally a practical spiritual approach, it provides strategies and methods to initiate and sustain profound healing. Drawing upon intuitive guidance, soul as messenger of spirit, mindfulness therapy, dream work, depth psychology, working with inner and outer subconscious selves, channeled material, consciousness work, shadow work, pattern recognition, intentionality and the uniqueness of each client, guidance sessions provide the opportunity for transformational and holistic healing. I walk with you as a guide as we learn how to value and move through life challenges in ways that bring you more meaning, more fulfillment and more joy.
Who is Jon McIntosh?
-Clinical medicine experiences during college years and an innate curiosity about consciousness and mind/body medicine set the stage for a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of disease, crisis, conflict and pain.
-Study and experience with W. Brugh Joy, MD over two decades supported a personal dedication to a path of Self-Discovery facilitated by consciousness and shadow work, dream work, energy healing, heart-centered transformation and spiritual enlightenment.
-Discovery and affirmation of a giftedness for hands-on (energy) healing by shaman (Don Gabino) and of medical intuitive skills by a Master Teacher of Energy Healing (Rosalyn Bruyere) led to exploration of many non-traditional healing realms.
-Expanded repertoire of healing knowledge and capacity with Bella Karish (Fellowship of Universal Guidance), Harvey Grady (Center for Human Potential), Rosalyn Bruyere (Healing Light Center), Mietek Wirkus (Bioenergetics), Thorwald Dethlefsen (The Healing Power of Illness), Hal and Sidra Stone (Psychology of the Selves), Donna Eden (Eden Energy Medicine), Jin Shin Jyutsu, Dream work (Stephen Aiszenstat, PhD – Dreamtending/Pacifica Graduate Institute and Michael Conforti, PhD – The Assisi Institute), personal Jungian Analysis (J. Marvin Spiegelman, PhD, HeartMath, Sound Healing, Energy Psychology (Psy-K) and other organizations and teachers.
-Member of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM), Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), CG Jung Society of Colorado and the Depth Psychology Alliance.
-Special interest in shifting states of consciousness and harnessing the power of the placebo response to induct healing, creation of ritual as healing intention made manifest, body and disease symbology reflecting unconsciously held material and selfless service by living the four attributes of the Heart Center – Compassion, Innate Harmony, Healing Presence and Unconditional Love.
-Personal learning experiences as one who has delivered and received powerful woundings, betrayals, losses, collapses, trials and sufferings.
I grew up in the Chicago suburb of Glenview. Immediately after graduation from Loyola Academy and while attending Loyola University full-time I had the good fortune of being hired as a night and weekend clinical laboratory technologist at a teaching hospital. I became intimately involved with many aspects of clinical laboratory testing and correlation of results with patient clinical presentation. I was especially fascinated with hematology (study of blood and diseases of the blood) and spent thousands of hours with a microscope performing blood cell differentials and bone marrow analysis over the following four years. Since I mostly worked the night shift and weekend days, I also had the opportunity to spend time in the Emergency Room, Intensive Care and the Surgical Heart Unit. I learned how to read EKG’s, start IV’s, draw arterial and venous blood, do cutdown’s, etc.
It was around this time that I became interested in the relationship between psychological processes and the nervous and immune system – what was then called psychoneuro-immunology – which has expanded into what we now know as mind/body medicine. As my college years progressed, I wanted to learn more about self and symptoms and I began psychotherapy with one of the school psychologists.
When I was 22 years old, I married and moved to southern California. I continued university studies in biochemistry at California State University in Fullerton and psychobiology at the University of California at Irvine and worked in a private clinical lab for about 3 years. I had a strangely diverse interest to become both a MD hematologist and a psychiatrist – a “hemopsychiatrist” (which sounds better than a “psycho-hematologist”) – again curious about the relationship between mind and body, psychology and blood disorders. Yet within a couple of years and with my first child on the way, my responsibility genes tried to kick in. I started full-time at an arrhythmia detection services company where I spent thousands of hours analyzing 24-hour recordings of patients’ heart rhythms. Back in those days, the recordings were played back at 60 times normal speed. If you blinked, you actually missed a minute’s worth of heartbeat waveforms!
Before my 30th birthday I was asked to join a managed care organization as director of provider relations. I seemed to have a certain rapport with physicians, drawing from both my scientific education and clinical experience, yet it wasn’t long before one of the physician providers made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Since our fourth child was now with us and my sense of responsibility was growing I joined a multi-location occupational healthcare medical group as the Administrator, reporting directly to the physician-owner. I also managed the marketing team and gained valuable experience in medical practice development. We started the state’s first occupational healthcare exclusive provider organization and that exposure led to helping another physician-owner operate and develop one of the first urgent care centers in southern California.
My work and my behaviors were taking a toll on my marriage. I continued my long-term psychotherapy and learned first hand about countertransference though I had no clue at the time what was happening. Yet the psychotherapist gave me a great gift along with that pain. She took me to a weekend conference offered by W. Brugh Joy, MD a teacher of heart-centered transformation and spiritual enlightenment with whom I began the next incarnation of my sacred journey of Self-discovery.
With no shortage of work opportunities I went on to run another multi-location primary care/occupational healthcare practice along with its associated orthopedic surgery practice. Yet as with each of the previous employers and though I was primarily acting in a business capacity, I remained curious about the relationship between mind and body. Because of my work with Dr. Brugh Joy I found myself being sought as a life counselor by some of the physicians who were facing various forms of personal and professional crises. The physicians would not reach out to psychiatrists or psychologists in the community because they felt they had their image to maintain. I came to recognize that I was perceived to be safe and trustworthy with the deepest of their secrets – having a capacity and willingness to walk with them through their most difficult challenges and sufferings and to offer a deeper understanding and meaning to their life.
In early January of 1990, I attended a 12-day residential Foundational Conference conducted by Dr. Brugh Joy. This is a conference in which Brugh formally initiates participants into the Heart Center and its wondrous resources for deep and authentic healing of body and soul. Participants travel from all over the globe to attend. There were experiential explorations of healing energetics, body-energy fields, dreams, shadow work, meditation, the I-Ching, the Tarot, individual and collective rituals, inner and outer teachers, and the realization of the profound gift of Life. This began a journey with Brugh that continued until his death in December 2009. I was honored to assist him in 2008 at one of his last Foundational Conferences.
By 1991 I had started my own company focusing on medical practice management and development. Yet within a few years I was bored with the practice management work though the company continued to operate. I became part of an internet start-up in the Silicon Valley when a couple close friends ask me to join them. We raised millions in venture capital and rode the good ride until 2000 when everything collapsed. I learned first hand about greed, ego and power – and vulnerability. Throughout the 90’s and into the next decade, I continued to work with a range of healers and teachers. I learned about the Voice Dialogue Method and the Psychology of Selves, Sum Faht meditation and the energy healing art of Jin Shin Jyutsu with master teacher Philomena Dooley.
I continued servicing a few medical practice clients though the work had lost its calling for me and I was experiencing a deep and durational depression. I just wasn’t getting the message that my previous life was dying a slow but sure death and something else wanted to manifest. Listening to my intuition I spent a weekend with Brugh at his summer home that year. One of my dreams spoke very specifically about visiting a woman in Glendale California. I didn’t know who the woman was but Brugh knew right away – “go see Bella Karish, but go soon, she is in her 90’s.”
A few weeks later, I had a 3-hour session with Bella, a trance channeler/medium and spiritualist. I learned about my past lives, master teachers and the basis for the healing capacity that was a part of my soul’s patterning. Bella told me that I (my soul) was “dual on a single stem” meaning that my soul carried both developed masculine and feminine aspects which helped explain my natural resonance with both men and women.
Within two months of moving to Colorado in early 2004, I found myself in the Yucatan Peninsula with a Mayan shaman and psychic. During a psychic surgery session in which I thought I was simply an observer my hands were most unexpectedly drawn to his back – he was having some back pain which he hadn’t mentioned to the group. He turned to our teacher and said in Spanish, “This man has the hands of a healer…a bonesetter.” The facilitator translated that for me, yet I just didn’t know what to make of it, even though I had been given a similar message a few years earlier by Bella Karish.
I returned to the United States seeking the most gifted healer I could find to check out what the shaman had said to me. Since Brugh had moved more into consciousness work than hands-on healing, he referred me to Rosalyn Bruyere in California and I began attending her quarterly residential healing intensives. Rosalyn (with Brugh and Carolyn Conger) were subjects of Dr. Valerie Hunt’s research at UCLA in the 70’s in which auras were recorded and correlated with the body energy visualization capacities of the subjects. All three of them see energy. This was quite fascinating research and most valuable to the development of energy healing modalities like Healing Touch.
Prior to my second intensive with Rosalyn, I had developed a painful urologic condition. I asked Rosalyn if she would help me since the urologist said that there was no more he could do. She brought me up in front of a class of mostly physicians and nurses and proceeded to work on me for about 15 minutes after which time all of my pain was gone. She then announced to the class, “it is important that I heal this for Jon so that he can do his work as a medical intuitive and healer.” I was shocked and a bit embarrassed.
Around this time I also started Jungian Analysis with J. Marvin Spiegelman PhD that focused mostly on dreamwork. Dr. Spiegelman trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland and I felt honored that he took me on as a client. My weekly sessions were packed with deep insights into my own shadow material – something so essential to consciously encounter, embrace and integrate on the path to wholeness. I will forever be most grateful for my time with Dr. Spiegelman.
I continued with Rosalyn but felt compelled to check out what she said with other sources. With the broad range of my undergraduate work in the sciences I was a confirmed skeptic. I traveled to Hawaii and spent time with Kathleen Loughery a gifted trance channel and psychic. She told me that my knowing of information was because I direct-channeled a physician who guided me with medical information and healing energy. She explained that in many cases, it was a matter of the frequencies coming through me that initiated healing in others – I didn’t necessarily need to touch them. It is a process known as induction. We performed exercises to deepen my connection to the source of healing energy that flowed through me and Kathleen informed me that it was somewhat similar to that of Dr. Eric Pearl, the founder of The Reconnection Work, though different in both frequency and origin. It was not technique based and did not require education or competence. It was about Presence and opening to healing capacity.
This seemed pretty amazing to me yet my limited level of consciousness wasn’t ready to fully embrace what I was being told. To nudge me along I received another message just a few months later. I was attending a subtle energy medicine conference when an attendee I had never met passed me a two-page handwritten letter that spoke directly and specifically about my healing capacity. I tried to follow-up with her but she was purposefully elusive intending that I focus on the content of the letter and not on the phenomenology of how it came to be.
Wanting to further expand my exposure to other acclaimed healers/teachers, I studied BioEnergetics with Mietek Werkus and Energy Medicine with Donna Eden. I remain intrigued by, and appreciative of, the common essence in the healing attributes of gifted healers. Authentic healing is rarely about technique.
Beginning in 1998 I was called to explore deeper levels of consciousness and spirituality with the gifted trance channelers Bella Karish of the Fellowship of Universal Guidance and Harvey Grady of the Center for Human Potential. My work with the Law of Karma, the Law of Grace, the Basic Selves and the High Self is an essential offering in helping clients understand and redeem all of life’s experiences.
From 2004-2009 I participated in a 4-year residential Mystery School training program led by W. Brugh Joy, MD. Our small group which included physicians and other healers met every 3 months to deepen our consciousness, shadow and healing work. Since that time I continue to deepen my own individual work with teachers in both Jungian analysis and consciousness and healing.
I have not included the many trials, losses and sufferings along my journey as I hold these as sacred experiences to be shared in time with those of you who would benefit. If you feel called, walk with me as we learn to dive into the depth of your Soul.