Blog 5: After my heart attack in December I decided to add physical therapy to my healing path. I was busy nearly every morning with workout in the gym at the hospital and the first healer, who came to our house after December 24th was Ivy.
Ivy is a beautiful lady, who does Ayurvedic healing massage with essential oils. Although she was fully scheduled, she came over through the snow to our house for one hour and gave my body a soft massage treatment with oils and vedic chanting. Truly a treat. She did not even charge me for that session, it was a gift from her heart and I was very touched. I highly recommend her treatments.
On recommendation from a friend (thanks Carol) I also got treated by one of Santa Fe’s senior healers Donald VanHouten. He used Feldenkrais and Osteopath techniques to help my bruised ribs (from the defibrillator) and helped me immensely. A great healer, a honorable person and I also recommend him highly. He has been treating me up to now.
Santa Fe is a healing place of sorts and there is no shortage of practitioners. I continued healing sessions with Acupuncture with Martha Iwaski and Nicole Wheeler, who also added Lymph drainage to her acupuncture treatments. Both very good in their own ways. Another practitioner I recommend in Santa Fe is Jayne Dearth, who does visceral manipulations. She is amazing in putting all the organs in their right place, very professional and very dedicated.
I also recommend Bob Schrei as a body worker in town.
Doing all these sessions plus the weekly massages by Anami, with her knowledge of the sacred touch, my healing went well and I had great sessions with one exception, which gave me a lot of headaches and extra ordinary costs.
This is Kevin Kopriva, who works in Santa Fe and visits Boulder and charges $ 300.00 per hour for Chiropractic work, also for home visits and he also charges that rate for packing and driving. So be aware! In our case that added up to $ 3,100.00 for two visits of a total of 8 hours of treatments. His rate to ‘friends’ is $ 210.00 per hour. In our case he did not gave us this information beforehand. In Santa Fe I recommend Seth Friedman for chiropractic work, very reliable and good service.
Kevin Kopriva’s particular modus of operation is well known in Santa Fe, but since he was ‘recommended’ by a friend, we trusted this recommendation and that created a lot of frictions and another dark spot for that profession.
Sometimes practitioners are hurt by the bad economy or other personal circumstances (like bankruptcy or sickness) and do not provide information of their rates and conditions in writing before treatment, so keep your ears and eyes open and double check on their reputation and track record online. But otherwise I can only talk the best about the people, practitioners and nurses I have met after my heart attack.
It has been nearly 4 months now and my energy levels are up, I feel fit and I am ready to travel and go on with my life. The heart attack turned my life around and put everything in a new focus and a new vision starts to emerge.
It came to my attention that the altitude of Santa Fe 7,300 ft (about 2,200 meters) provides a good dry and sunny climate, but is not really recommended for heart problems, since the heart has to work harder here.
So after mentally scouting the whole of the USA we will visit Florida next month and will check out especially Sarasota and Bonita Springs, as possible new future residence.
I know, I know…lots of problems… snakes, alligators, bugs, heat, humidity and hurricanes plus a so-called non-progressive population. I can’t wait to check out the Sunshine State also called ‘God’s Waiting room’.
So my next blog will be from the South West Gulf Coast of Florida.
Lots of love.
Bhikkhu
