Story and Photos by Grace Pernecky

Barb Scholz is a leading energy medicine practitioner in this region, highly respected by other energy medicine practitioners, and deeply valued by her clients. Born in Lansing, she moved to Ann Arbor when she was 14 years old and has stayed here ever since. She refers to herself as a Modality Museum, and rightly so. Over the course of her life, she has practiced and become immersed in yoga, aromatherapy, essential oils, homeopathy, craniosacral therapy, massage therapy, acupuncture, energy medicine using Donna Eden’s method, and more.

For over 20 years, she’s been an Energy Medicine practitioner. She studied with Donna Eden herself back in the late 90s and early 2000s, before a certification program existed. (Energy Medicine is a modality of healing developed by Donna Eden that incorporates techniques from yoga, acupuncture, kinesiology, qi gong, and those developed by Donna herself.)

Scholz says, “It’s kind of like acupuncture, but you use your hands instead of needles to work with the energy.”

As one of the first teachers of the Eden Energy Method (EEM) program, Scholz has acted as student, teacher, and practitioner. Since the initiation of the EEM program, she has been involved in its evolution into a rigorous and instructive four-year course in which students learn fundamental skills about working with energy and can eventually become certified, skilled practitioners themselves.

Scholz has served as a guide to help others heal, and her practice is full and thriving. She serves as a practitioner at her cozy home near Argo Canoe Livery and the Huron River. She spends much of her free time tending to her biodynamic garden which she has cultivated for over 45 years.

Grace Pernecky: Let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and raised? What sorts of occupations did your parents have? Where do you live now?

Barb Scholz: I was born in Lansing, Michigan. I lived there for the first 14 years of my life, and at age 14, we moved to Ann Arbor. It's been my home ever since. I went to Slauson, Pioneer, and then to the University of Michigan.

My dad is a mechanical engineer and self-taught electrical engineer. He still plays with his computers at age 99! When I was growing up my mom didn’t work, but she did bookkeeping before she had kids. Then, she did the bookkeeping for my dad’s business when my siblings and I had grown up.

I’ve lived in this house for 46 years. I love this place. My sister owned it before I did and sold it to me when she went away to college.

Grace Pernecky: What is your earliest memory of having thoughts of pursuing a career in healing?

Barb Scholz: It was kind of an odd journey. I was really interested in going into science and math. So, I got my degree in mathematics from U of M. But in high school, I began reading about alternative healing. In my early 20s, I started taking every workshop I could on various forms of bodywork. During my 20s and 30s, I was always studying something or taking workshops: yoga, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, ayurvedic medicine, craniosacral therapy, massage therapy, polarity therapy, aromatherapy and more.

When I was 47, in 1997, I was diagnosed with optic neuritis, which involved inexplicably losing sight in both of my eyes for six weeks. The doctors told me within two years, 50% of people with this condition get MS, which shocked the heck out of me. That started me on a journey of searching far and wide for alternative health treatments because I already knew what standard medical care was going to advise.

Through a series of serendipitous events, and after months of searching for alternative treatments, I found out about Donna Eden and Energy Medicine and immediately felt drawn to it.

GP: Why did you feel drawn to this particular modality? And how did you go from student to practitioner?

BS: Donna’s story is that she had MS and cured herself. When I learned this, I knew that she would be my teacher. I signed up for every workshop she taught.

Her methodology and her techniques are so focused on self-care, which was very different from the model I’d been working within where people would work on me, and I would have to wait till the next session. During that wait period, I would start to fall apart. To have someone teach me things that I could do for myself was a game changer.

I became a very devoted practitioner of self-care, and I started to improve. It was this slow rebuilding of my immune system’s response by way of correcting imbalances in my energy field that brought me back to wellness. It was transformational.

Over the course of a few years, entirely by word-of-mouth, I started teaching and then working on people myself. I loved to teach and share, but I was not really going to “work” on people. I was quite resistant to the idea of becoming a practitioner and having a business. I already had a full-time job as a medical software developer and project manager. Starting a practice of seeing people did not seem realistic.

I was practicing meditation daily at that point. I kept getting messages that I was to start an energy medicine practice. I would argue with this guidance. Then, during one meditation, I saw an image of a donkey stubbornly sitting down, resisting the pull of a rope by one of my guides. I was like, “okay, I get it, I get it!” Before I knew it, I had quit my job in the software engineering world and had started my own practice. At that point, there was no Eden Energy Medicine certification program, so I was learning from the book, from the workshops, and from experience. And people were coming for sessions.

GP: What are some examples of conditions/ailments you’ve worked with as an energy medicine practitioner? What have you learned about energy through them? What becomes possible when you work with energy that’s different from other modalities?

BS: Even towards the beginning, my clients started having these healings that were absolutely amazing. For example, one of my clients had an autoimmune illness. Her liver numbers were in trouble, and she was told to come off her medication. She was told that the next thing to try was chemotherapy—she didn’t want to do that. She contacted me. I did not claim that I could correct her liver numbers, but we agreed to try the experiment to see if working with her energies might help. So, we just started using energy testing and doing the techniques that were indicated to rebalance her energies.

Every now and then I’d email Donna and say, “Donna, what do I do?” We didn’t have an energy medicine program at that point, and I was just working from her book. She sent me a little protocol, which is now called Advanced Substance Testing, to find out which of my client’s medications was throwing her off balance, and we’d rebalance her so that her medications could work for her, and not bother her liver.

My client had been given six weeks to try and make a difference before they put her on chemotherapy. Within those six weeks, her liver numbers had stabilized, and her doctor just said, “Keep on doing whatever you’re doing.” About three weeks later, her doctor canceled the order for chemotherapy because her liver numbers were improving.

This work isn’t a panacea. It isn’t always a miracle. But it has brought this client a baseline of health, wellbeing, and longevity that is beyond what she thought possible. Yes, she still has ups and downs, there’s no question about that, but her continued work with energy medicine has given her a different baseline of health. That made it clear to me that this work is kind of a huge deal. Beyond stress relief and general wellbeing, it allows something in you to find a balance around which healing emerges. We still have the genetics we have; we still have the biochemistry we have. We still have to look at our food. We still have to look at our sleep—you know, the basic lifestyle issues. But we often forget that our energy field is one of these issues—something that needs daily grooming, a part of our daily hygiene.

GP: How does the model of working with energies differ from other modalities of healing?

BS: Everybody is incredibly unique, and yet, we’re all made of the same energies. Those energies are undulating and dancing in ways that are unique to us and responsive to our lived life. A lot of times, when I’m teaching practitioners how to work on people, they think of the energies in terms of cause and effect and static.

We have to get out of that mode—it serves us well in physics, chemistry, and a lot of other science training that we might have had, but for energy work, we must move into a model that is highly responsive and adaptive. This means that you can interact with an energy on one person and get a totally different response than the last person you worked on. You have to really feel your way through not only what you are doing, but how the person is responding and follow those responses.

GP: There’s this tendency within our society to think that Eastern medicine and Western medicine don’t go together. But very early on, you seemed to have this understanding/intuition that these things can be very valuable, depending on context. How did you come to understand this?

BS: Going back to my childhood, I was always a sensitive kid. I felt and sensed things that were not what other people were sensing and feeling… vibrations, tingling, etc. We all have a perceptual system, and we think that we are alike—we are so not alike!

Early in my twenties, I started doing yoga, and I had more sensations that I didn’t understand. So, I started reading more literature on yoga, and then went to a yoga class. I began to understand what was happening to me was just a natural expansion of my perceptions. That set me off in the direction of working with stuff I was perceiving.

These things aren’t explained in the scientific model. But if you’re a good empirical scientist, you don’t throw away data. You go, “Even though I can’t explain it that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Even though I don’t understand it, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring, to see if I can begin to understand it differently.”

A really open, curious mind is the foundation for science, for working with subtle energies, and for a fulfilling life. It is the bridge that joins western and non-western medicine, in my humble opinion.

GP: We talked a lot about energy medicine as being this foundational thing for you that has solved a lot of problems and has provided a lot of insights, but I’m wondering about some of the other modalities that you practice. Do you feel, as a whole, there’s one modality you tend to use more than others, or do you tend to see them as tools in the toolbox?

BS: I have several other modalities that we haven’t discussed. I tend to be a bit of a Modality Museum. But I think the one that is absolutely significant is lifestyle. Basic lifestyle choices is where traditional Chinese medicine focuses first, and I think that’s wise. I find that the energy medicine world of Donna Eden is a great tool here, because there are so many self-care techniques in it. Most of these techniques take between 30 seconds and a minute. And while seemingly simple, they are surprisingly beneficial.

For me, energy medicine is foundational for self-care. Most people think that they have to wait to get back to balance. Some people think, “I can hardly wait to go home and have a drink.” Or, “I can hardly wait to go to bed tonight.” All these things can certainly shift the balance. But it’s so much easier and quicker to do 15 seconds of energy work and have the balance come in at that moment. The gift of Donna Eden’s energy medicine is that you don’t have to wait for a practitioner: you don’t have to wait for sleep. you don’t have to wait for a hot bath at night. You don’t have to wait till you get out of a situation,.You can be in a situation and start finding a better balance by doing some simple energy exercises, which most often go unnoticed by others.

When you are not feeling well, when you are going through an illness especially one that doesn’t have a solution yet, anything you can do that makes you feel better is a point of empowerment because an illness makes us feel very disempowered. We do not know what’s going on with us. We feel like we need someone to help us, and we need someone to fix it. And these are very disempowered places to have to stay for any length of time. These feelings and thoughts may have some truth in them, but as much empowerment as you can give to someone, especially when they aren’t feeling well, makes them internally more resilient. Surprisingly simple corrections, done daily, make a big difference over time.

That whole view of our health being just our physical body is an incomplete model. Our health is also our sense of who we are in the world, and that includes, do we have agency?; Do we have the ability to change our life? And the answer isn’t “no” all the time. The answer isn’t “yes” all the time. But the more we can add self-care, self-improvement, and self-guidance, the more health we can bring to that moment.

GP: What do your sessions look like? What can people expect?

BS: My practice is currently full. I don’t want to stimulate a lot of desire without giving people pathways to experience Eden Energy Medicine. There are several practitioners in the Ann Arbor area, but regionally, there are even more I have trained, mentored, and supported.

Check out Donna Eden’s website—you can find contact certified practitioners there (practitioner.edenmethod.com). Some of the people listed there, whom I have taught, mentored, and worked with directly are Payge Hodapp, Amy Wellein, Denise Wanty, Caryn Shapiro, Gretchen Van Loozen, Betsy Lehman, Chris Modrack, Cathleen Guldan, and Mary Ann Wilkens. I can highly recommend these practitioners and many more. There are several excellent practitioners in the Lansing area, but I have not gotten their permission to list their names in this interview.

Every session has a shape. You learn to follow the shape of a session. This allows the person to gradually open up, make a transformation, and then be able to integrate and ground that transformation.

It can be hard to describe energy medicine because it’s not like a lot of things people have experienced. My quick thumbnail sketch of it is that “it’s a little bit like acupuncture, but I don’t use needles, I use my hands to move the energy.” It works with the body’s energy field, but you can feel the physical effects of that change, that shift. There is a really tight connection to how our body feels as a physical experience and the state of our energies.

A client has pain, discomfort, a sensation that is entirely physical, and I work on an energy that is related to it. When the energies go to balance, the pain or discomfort often goes away. You have to shift from thinking, “How do I make this symptom go away?” to “What energy pathways are involved here and how might they be influencing this person’s physical, mental, and emotional condition?”

GP: Could you talk about some of the challenges you’ve experienced as a practitioner?

BS: One of the great things about this work is that you really can’t plan what to do. You have to be responsive to what’s going on for your client. You start by energy testing and seeing what’s out of balance—you can look on Donna Eden’s website or go to YouTube to see what this looks like—and that process starts to form a picture for you.

The other thing that helps is the words a client uses to describe their symptoms. I like to have people actually tell me their history and what’s going on so that I can hear the words they choose, the tone of their voice, the emphasis they make—how they describe it has energy signatures on it. How we talk is a manifestation of our energies. If I were to shout at you, or be very quiet, you would have a different sense of where my energy is at. And if I were to start to cry when I described something versus giggling or laughing, you would have a different sense of the energies involved in that issue. I like to get that descriptive part, that energy picture part, and start to put together what feels like the doorway to the session, and then start to move through it.

GP: Miracles: have there been any?

BS: I once had a client who had adopted kids, given up all the baby equipment, was in her 40s, and came in because she was having allergies and stomach troubles. I was following the energies and making corrections accordingly.

After several sessions, she called me and told me she was pregnant. She hadn’t been doing anything new except for the energy medicine. They ended up with this lovely baby. And I had the privilege of doing energy work on the mom while she was delivering. It was incredible.

Energy work is powerful stuff. Yet it is gentle. Is there a guarantee that it’s going to help with fertility? The answer is no. But does it set up the possibility that something could happen? The answer is definitely yes. We all have lots and lots of potential. Sometimes, what blocks us from reaching that potential is that there are imbalances in our system. They can be mental, emotional, physical, and energetic. But if you fix the energy piece and allow for more flow and balance, you never know what becomes possible.

When people come in and tell me, “Doctors have told me that this is impossible,” all I can say is, “We’ll see.”

From their understanding, that’s accurate. But from my understanding and experience, I don’t believe in “never” and “always” and limitations that are so absolute. As long as you’ve got all your parts, we can do energy work and see how we respond. The wisdom of your system will take that imbalance and do what’s right for you.

GP: Thank you so much for chatting with me, Barb, what an amazing conversation. Any final thoughts or wisdoms?

BS: I want to say something about the word “healer” to me. I am a practitioner, not a healer. There is something wrong with the idea of “being a healer” to me. As I’ve practiced and worked on people, I’ve had this profound realization that I am not the healer. It is them that is doing the healing. I’m the one who’s assisting balances--sort of like a midwife. I am not the baby, and I am not the mother. A midwife just supports their process. I am assisting my client’s process. I am a practitioner, and I have experience: I can assist. But the actual healing process is always inside that person. I love energy testing because it lets me have a “conversation” with that inner process.

I have such profound awe and respect for the healer that lives in every single one of us. And that’s who I am interacting with through my hands, but I am not the healer. I am the healer of my own body, I am the healer of my own kingdom, as they say in Chinese medicine. You also have a kingdom that you’re the healer of. Every person has to ignite the truth that they are a healer. That’s why I love self-care techniques because they start to train and empower and encourage the awareness that you are your own healer.

The whole question of, “Why do we show up on the planet?” which is a huge topic, is to get to know this self. And if we’re always looking to the outside, we’re staying in this mode that says, “I don’t know myself.” I really believe that energy work starts to ignite the fire and the understanding that “there’s something within me that knows so much more than what I’m aware of—maybe I’d better listen to it.”