The man studied me, the fan stirring the heavy summer heat as we crammed into his Beijing flat, and said, “you will be called…

明月 · Ming Yue

— Bright Moon —

given name, China, 1998

A Life Lived
Facing Towards the Unknown

Most people who come to energy healing find it when they are looking for something. I found it while looking for everything else.

After studying Applied Linguistics, International Relations with a focus on Security Studies, I spent more than two decades living and working across the world — Russia, Ukraine, China (mainland, Hong Kong & Macau), Mexico, Bulgaria, Thailand, Moldova, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — it all reads like a spy novel rather than an educator. My initial purpose was to experience the world and grow in ways that direct confrontation with yourself accelerate.

I was not looking for a spiritual path. I was living one — before I had the language for it.

The places I lived were not calm. Some were undergoing revolution. Some were marked by acts of war, political upheaval, and social rupture. I moved through all of it — curious, committed, and paying close attention to how human beings navigate the unseen forces shaping their lives.

That attention is what eventually led me to the work I now offer others.

Learning to Stop

For years, I chased the rush of last-minute deadlines. My own adrenaline became fuel. I used stress the way some people use caffeine — to power through, to produce, to keep moving. The extreme rush of energy was my nervous system and brain maintaining a high I mistook for drive.

Over time, that habit drained my health and my joy. I just didn't know it yet.

Everything began to shift when I found myself in Asia. There, I encountered different ways of existing in a body — ways that did not ask the body to override itself in service of output.

In China, midday rest was customary — a stark contrast to my ingrained "push through" mentality. At first I resisted. There was always more to experience, more to do. But when everything, including many restaurants, closed for the midday break, there was nothing that could be done. Even the uncle and auntie — terms of respect — who religiously guarded the entrance to my university housing were nowhere to be found.

It took a good six months of watching people strolling outside during the afternoon break before I began to wonder: what was it that kept me so tied to the idea of getting things done?

I lay down to rest. And all the things I wasn't doing played like a film in my mind. I got up, wrote them all down, and tried again. More arose. Every time I attempted stillness, this struggle appeared — and I saw clearly that my body and mind had been trained to run without stopping.

That was the beginning of a different kind of study — not of languages or international systems, but of my own nervous system. The unlearning that became the foundation of everything I now teach.

The Chinese approach to the body emphasized lifelong care — a concept that was foreign to me. Daily exercises were broadcast over school speakers at six in the morning. My university students moved through them as one. The same movements I watched young people practice I saw repeated by elders in parks across the city — a thread of care stitched through an entire lifetime. They understood something I was just beginning to grasp: that what you do in your twenties is an investment in how you inhabit your eighties.

I was in my twenties and healthy. Thinking of myself at eighty felt abstract. But surrounded by that wisdom, something in me began to shift. I began a journey of unlearning nonstop work and learning, slowly, what balance actually felt like. The ego in me would like to say that I still practice this learning. But the truth is that I slipped back into my old ways once I left China for Mexico and Russia. Picking up speed along with my career.

The First Time Sound
SHook Me to my core

Before the magic of Xiahe, we start on my journey to Mount Emei in Sichuan. It is draped in mist, its temples half-hidden. I came upon a nun reading a book, a pail at her feet. I didn't know what it was that she had that created a glow about her. But I recognized it. Permission to read a book and rest in the middle of the day — extraordinary. And it was more than stopping. Her way of being spoke to me. How do I reach that?

"Searching for this elusive sacred stillness created the story of my life — until I activated it through Reiki and sound."

That question led me to Xiahe — a culturally Tibetan town in the mountains of northwest China. I resisted my impulse to travel from this area into Tibet for my Mandarin was small and the countryside at that time was full of so-called bandits. Instead, I stayed in Xiahe and woke in the mornings to wander down to the temple area. There, I rested against a temple wall, and Tibetan throat singing and the resonance of ceremonial instruments moved through the space, through the stone, through me. My body began to release its grip on the constant drive for productivity. I was drawn, almost involuntarily, into a place of stillness I didn't know was inside of me—my inner sanctum.

I should say it transformed me completely. It didn't. Within a month, familiar patterns of productivity returned. But something had shifted underneath. That peaceful, grounding effect — the mountain air, the sound, the stillness — stayed with me as a reference point. Something I could touch again through meditation. In those mornings, even a moment or two of true rest had been enough to show me that this place of sanctuary existed inside me.

I continued learning from monk talks in Chiang Mai, Tibetan yoga in Elista, yoga teacher training in Hong Kong. I carried books back from each place to my library in the States and read them before I shipped out again overseas. Gradually I found familiar threads woven through the teachings of every tradition — common fables, shared wisdom, truths. It was how each teacher personalized their story, how they drew from their own life, that stayed with me. To honor that tradition, I try to do the same.

When the Body
Finally Said No

China showed me a different way. But understanding something and actually living it differently are not the same thing — and I would spend the next decade proving that to myself. Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, Hong Kong: each new posting, each new chapter, each new career step carried the same old pattern underneath. The adrenaline, the push, the sense that stopping meant falling behind.

Living through decades of international instability takes a toll that accumulates quietly. Acts of war, revolution, environmental disruption, the constant upheaval of uprooting and replanting in new cultures — I moved through all of it, and I believed I was managing.

The reckoning came as anxiety, panic, and burnout. Not all at once. Slowly, dripping into being like a leaky faucet. It is impossible not to hear the drip. I knew something was wrong. And then, the faucet exploded and I was inundated with everything all at once.

What brought me back to balance (healed me) was not one thing. It was the willingness to let many traditions support what no single approach could do alone — Reiki, sound, allopathic care, shamanic practice, and the slow practice of listening to my body instead of overriding it.

That experience — of being undone, and then finding the way back — is what I bring to every session. I know what it means to be the person laying on the table praying for something to shift. I have needed help I didn't know how to ask for. I have had to learn, again and again, that the body's signal is not weakness. It is information.

When I eventually returned to the United States and established Sanctum with Eve in Decatur, Georgia, it was not as someone who had arrived. It was as someone who had traveled far enough to know that balance is not a destination. It is a practice. A returning. A quiet daily choice.

To all the experiences and teachers along the way — I extend my eternal gratitude. They offered me their shoulders to stand on when I was unable to make my own way. I now offer my shoulders to others.

Wherever You Go,
There You Are

Abroad, I wanted to learn about the world. And I did. What I did not always do — what I was very good at avoiding — was learning about the parts of myself that needed loving kindness and integration.

The truth is that constant movement is also a kind of hiding. The next great trip, the next country, the next project — they can become ways of not having to sit with yourself. When you are always arriving somewhere new, there is always a reason why you feel unsettled. There is always something external to point to. The deeper work of honest self-examination is easy to defer when the horizon keeps moving.

Wherever you go, there you are. The work found me as I was looking for everything else.

It was after a dark night of the soul, and the breakthrough that came on the other side of it, that the deeper work continued. Not the study of energy systems or healing modalities — I had been doing that for years. But the work of acceptance. Of seeing all the parts of myself without the buffer of the next adventure. Of learning to enjoy each moment exactly as it is, rather than as a stepping stone to the next one.

That shift is now at the heart of everything I offer. Because I have seen, in myself and in the people who come to see me, how much of our restlessness is really a refusal to be fully present to who and where we are right now.

"To shine so brightly that others feel joy in my presence."

That is my life purpose. It was prompted by the extraordinary teacher Chitra Sukhu during her Yoga Nidra | Awak{end} Sleep™ training — one of the most profound experiences of deep relaxation and self-inquiry I have encountered. When we were asked to write our life’s intention, I read those words, and I recognized them. This is the state of being that I am working towards. It is who I want to be in the world.

Shining brightly is not about performance. It is not about being impressive or relentlessly positive. It is about becoming so genuinely at ease in yourself — so rooted in your own inner sanctum like the nun on mount Emei — that the people around you feel something ease in them too. It is the natural effect of someone who has stopped fighting themselves.

That is what I am practicing. A life-long commitment. That is also what I hope to reflect back to the people I encounter.

I Felt The power of reiki.
And I Still Didn't Believe.

I want to be honest with you about something. I did not come to this work as a true believer. I came to it as a skeptic who could feel something happening and couldn't explain it away.

When I first encountered Reiki, I felt it. The warmth, the shift in the room, the way a body responds when something releases. And people began telling me I was powerful — that sessions with me had made a real difference. My friend Julie told me I had given her a hip surgery. Five years later, she still has no problem with that hip.

I believed her. And I didn't believe me. That gap — between what I could feel in the room and what I could allow myself to claim — was one of the more honest struggles of my life.

You know that Marianne Williamson passage that’s in every self-help book and movie? The one that says our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate — it is that we are powerful beyond measure. That it is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.

I lived for several decades inside that fear. The struggle to have faith in myself was, underneath everything, a struggle to allow myself to take up space. To live vibrantly. To accept that I had a real capacity for something that mattered, and that it was not arrogant to say so.

I am still learning what that feels like. I am still learning what it means. And that is exactly as it should be because I am with you on this journey.

We grow, move, and change together — in community, being seen, witnessed, and heard. That is what I offer you. And, as it turns out, a pretty powerful capacity for healing.

Just in case you missed it, here’s the quote:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."

— Marianne Williamson

Ming Yue —
Bright Moon

In 1998, a friend's father in China gave me a Chinese name: 明月 — Ming Yue. Bright Moon.

I have thought about that name many times over the years. A name given by someone who had just met me, offered simply and without much explanation. I accepted it gratefully and carried it with me across the next two decades of travel.

More than twenty years later, in 2021, I began offering sound meditations on the full and new moon. Sometimes I wonder if he had an eye on the future. Maybe he knew that I would grow into this name.

The next day I went with his daughter and got a chop. In Chinese culture, a chop is the seal used to sign artwork, paperwork, and documents. An emblem of identity, pressed in red ink. Mine carries the characters for bright moon.

The red mark on the cover of my I Ching books is a recreation of that original chop. It is one of the things I carry from that first chapter of my life in China — a small, tangible connection between the person I was becoming in 1998 and the work I am doing now.

There is something fitting about it. The moon does not generate its own light. It reflects. It cycles. It pulls at the tides and marks the passage of time. It is present even when it is not visible.

That feels right for who I am in this work.

Tl:DR

I spent twenty years living across a dozen countries, chasing experience and picking up speed. China showed me stillness. I left and forgot. A Tibetan temple wall in Xiahe showed me again. I left and forgot. Eventually my body stopped asking nicely.

The burnout, the anxiety, the dark night — that was the real education. What healed me became what I now offer others: Reiki, sound, energy work, and the slow practice of actually being present to your own life.

I was a skeptic. I could feel Reiki and sound working and still struggled to claim it. I am still learning what it means to take up space, to show my power, to release my control and perfectionism. I am still on this journey — which is exactly why I can sit with you on yours.

My life purpose, inspired by my teacher Chitra Sukhu, is to shine so brightly that others feel joy in my presence. I am practicing that every day.

I do not see myself as someone who fixes others. I see myself as someone who sits with you while you remember how to return to yourself. The work is sometimes lonely and you do not have to be alone doing it.

That is what I offer you. And, as it turns out, a pretty powerful capacity for healing as well.

— Eve Smyth · Sanctum with Eve · Decatur, Georgia