Energy healing is a broad term used to describe practices that work with the body’s subtle energy systems to support physical, emotional, and mental well-being. Found in traditions across cultures—from Eastern practices like Reiki to more contemporary modalities—these approaches are based on the idea that when energy flows freely, the body is better able to restore balance and function optimally.
Rather than focusing only on symptoms, energy healing invites a more holistic perspective, addressing underlying imbalances and creating space for deep relaxation, clarity, and renewal. For many, it offers a gentle yet powerful way to reconnect with themselves and experience healing in a more intuitive and embodied way.
What are the Energencia Healing Bliss Booths at the KwazuluSpirit Festival? These are 13 healing booths supported by 26 qualified healers, and overseen by Master Teacher and Academy Principal Alanha Prior, which offer free 30 minute energy healing sessions all day for both festival days. Modalities include: Western and Eastern Reiki, Angelic Reiki, Crystal Healing, Reflexology, Kinesiology, Access Bars and South American Shamanic Healing.
Energencia Academy was founded in May 2007 in KwaZulu-Natal. Alanha Prior joined the academy as a student in 2010. After completing a comprehensive curriculum, including Reiki Master training, she began teaching in 2014. Over the years, she has had the privilege of developing and facilitating a variety of courses and workshops. In August 2019, she became the Principal and Owner of Energencia Academy.
With over a decade of experience as a Master Teacher, Alanha is dedicated to nurturing a supportive and inspiring learning environment for all students. Her journey with Reiki began as a personal quest for deeper meaning and understanding. A transformative experience led her to enrol in a Reiki course at Energencia. It was through Reiki that she found answers to long-held questions about herself and her place in the world. Recognising the profound impact Reiki had on her life, she felt compelled to share this gift with others.
She is deeply passionate about the work she does and considers it a privilege to work with Reiki energy and connect with so many wonderful people. Reiki has taught her a new way of thinking and being, enriching her life in ways she never imagined.
Energencia, under Alanha’s care and direction, has guided thousands towards advanced proficiency and mentored hundreds to become master practitioners and teachers in Reiki, Crystal Healing and other modalities.
About Energencia Academy – Discover the Heart of Healing in KwaZulu-Natal As a leading Academy in different forms of Reiki, Crystal Healing and life-changing energetic workshops, Energencia is dedicated to providing authentic, internationally accredited training. Energencia’s courses are meticulously designed to honour the true essence of these ancient practices, ensuring students are equipped to make a positive impact on the world and those within it.
Courses
Their courses have been expertly written by qualified educators, designed to resonate with both novices and seasoned practitioners. Their commitment to relevance and accreditation ensures every lesson empowers growth and meets the highest standards. They have also sourced, and are the local distributors of some of the best international Reiki training courses. Explore and experience this nurturing environment, where healing thrives and well-being flourishes.
How holistic intimacy & neuroscience are teaching us how to live more connected lives.
When I started writing for Odyssey Magazine in Spring 2022, the focus with the Blissexology column was intimacy coaching as part of a healthy and conscious sex life.
The focus was mainly on pleasure and bliss. That hasn’t changed, but it has certainly evolved!
I was honoured to be part of the Mind Matters Summit 2025 in Cape Town. My husband, Tim, and myself ran one of the immersion sessions with Sensorium Sensory Soundscape, at a beautiful venue called Rooftop on Bree.
This entire Mind Matters summit reinforced the worldwide movement towards the neuroscience of immersive experiences, and was a summit that moved beyond just talk, into experiencing.
The understanding and studies that are emerging about how much mental health matters in every aspect of life, are mind blowing, as well as the deep connections of practical immersive experiences to health and wellness.
But what was strongly reinforced for me was the connection and transformation within group immersions. Apparently the feedback from these experiences was that although some were nervous about these immersions, the benefits were tangible and immediate.
Some senses can only be activated in immersive experiences with the community. This sort of experience, through deep connection with your senses, is deeply intimate. Because it’s deeply and vulnerably connecting to yourself and others.
Because it’s transformative.
Because we are evolving what an intimate experience looks like, and realising it expands definition way beyond just your sex life.
There is a neuroscience around this aspect of intimacy that is only really starting to emerge into the public consciousness now. Intimacy, as a definition needs to evolve and expand. Holistic means encompassing the whole of a thing and not just a single part. Holistic Intimacy can be inclusive of all intimacy, not just the sexual part.
The holistic aspects of healthy intimacy can include:
The intimacy of friendship
The intimacy of grief
The intimacy of shared struggle
The intimacy of vulnerability
The intimacy of conscious touch
The intimacy of a group immersive experience
Solo intimacy, beyond hackneyed ideas of this only being a sexual experience, into real nervous system and emotional regulation, real self-care.
The neuroscience of intimacy, how our brains interpret these aspects of intimacy, shows us more and more that these vulnerable and culturally intimate experiences are giving us wellness gifts. The activation of mirror neurons in any form of intimacy including another human.
The collective effervescence effect observed through neuroscience when these aspects of intimacy are explored, and the release of oxytocin in both shared intimate experiences and with conscious touch or bodywork.
The neuroscience of intimacy is also starting to make connections to improved sleep, hormonal balance and anxiety relief through this umbrella of evolved intimacy we have both alone and in groups. As with all intimacy though, there are some challenges we have to face to connect this way.
We have to challenge our willingness to be vulnerable. Our willingness to move past feeling silly, or ridiculous. Our resistance to change patterns and outdated beliefs about what is possible.
We need to find the willingness to invite a sense of curiosity, to unlearn and relearn our lived experiences, our very definition of intimacy.
Challenging yourself to evolve and grow within your sexual intimate life can actually help you find more connection and consciousness with people that are not present in that aspect of your life!
How?
Because the neuroscience of intimacy is beginning to show us how having a blissful experience with your intimate romantic partner can release the brain activity and chemicals that can translate as an ability to be more present for your coworkers, your friends and family.
The oxytocin, the serotonin, the vasopressin, and yes the dopamine that can be present during our sexual intimacy can translate into the rest of our lives too!
It’s time we stopped relegating our sexual intimate lives into the taboo.
Restricting them to the performative, addictive, shameful and extreme.
It’s time we realised that holistic intimacy is a life skill, helping us to be authentic and to grow and expand our connection to other people.
It’s time we realised that intimacy skills increase our ability to live fuller, more connected lives in all aspects, not just sexual.
To be seen, understood and heard.
That is intimacy.
To grow and connect this to your personal aspects of intimacy means evolving way past your sexual intimacy alone.
This holds the potential for you to have real connections with real people, whether personal or work related.
This is a skill that is going to become more and more valuable with the advent of AI, and other often overwhelming technological advances
The possibilities of intimacy coaching are expanding.
Are you ready for growth?
Originally published for Odyssey Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2026.
Meet the Odyssey Magazine editor, Christa Gumede Buthelezi, and the team at KwazuuSpirit Festival.
Meet Tai Chi Master, Sifu Leo Low Ming at the KwazuluSpirit Festival.
Leo Low Ming is a dedicated, professional martial artist. He has trained with the world’s top masters and practised his art for over 48 years. Leo teaches the young and the not so young. This is learning through doing. How to experience and evolve through the martial ways unfurls. Join Leo Low Ming for a unique experience. Step by step, let the master lead you… Simple taiji and qi gong movements and meditation techniques open up an energetic connection with the physical world. The western way thinks vigorous exercise that strengthens the muscles and heart brings good health. But the eastern way is different. Gentle, slow, repetitive movements release tension in the soft tissues and nerves, stimulate the organs, circulate the blood and quietly relax you. Here there is no separation of mind, body and emotions. Unsurprisingly, scientific evidence suggests that taiji can prevent illness and prolong life. Slowly, very slowly, you can feel, release, open and heal all that is bound and restricted within you.
“When the Tao is present in the universe, the birds sing.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: Verse 9.
If there is harmony and balance in nature, your true nature unfolds. There is no such thing as early or late. Too much or too little. Too fast or too slow. Taiji is an art of inner peace. An inner peace arising from yin and yang, the two equal and opposite forces within us and the entire universe. Our life energy, or chi, arises through the interplay of yin and yang. Wellbeing depends on a harmony or balance between these two. Africa: The birthplace of humanity, where ancient ways can help us to see how we are part of the world, impacted by it and affecting it. Also as the most dominant species, we see how we burden the planet through our disharmony. As the Tao Te Ching says: “Empty and be filled. Bend and be straight. Yield and overcome.” Through mind, body awareness and the breath, it is time to recalibrate, recharge and reconnect with yourself and the natural world.
“…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” – Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.
The world has a ready answer: gracefully. Quietly. With good skincare and a positive attitude and a willingness to accept, with dignity, the slow dimming of the light.
I want to offer a different answer entirely.
At 67, I am not dimming. I am not declining. I am not managing the distance between who I was and who I am becoming with anything resembling resignation. I am, if anything, more alive, more present, more at peace with myself and with life than at any previous chapter of my journey. Not because I have escaped the realities of ageing – but because I have stopped fighting them, and in that surrender, discovered something extraordinary waiting on the other side.
That discovery is what I call Radiant Living.
Radiant Living is not a wellness trend. It is not anti-ageing in disguise. It is a way of moving through the world – particularly through the profound season of midlife and beyond – that is rooted in three simple but transformative pillars: a Calm Mind, a Strong Body, and Natural Radiance.
A calm mind is not the absence of thought or challenge. It is the understanding – neurological and spiritual at once – that we are not our thinking. That beneath the noise of worry, expectation and self-judgment lives an innate wellbeing that no birthday, no diagnosis and no life circumstance can touch.
A strong body is not about performance or perfection. It is about movement we can love, nourishment that genuinely serves us, and an honest, compassionate relationship with the body we are living in right now – not the one we had at thirty, and not the one we imagine we should have.
And Natural Radiance – perhaps the most quietly revolutionary of the three – is what emerges when a woman stops abandoning herself. When she reclaims her joy, her boundaries, her pleasure, her presence. When she stops performing wellness for the world and starts actually inhabiting her own life.
I have spent over forty years in the personal development field and twenty-four years as a life and wellness coach. I have coached thousands of individuals through their most significant moments of change. And I can say, with the particular authority that only lived experience provides, that the women I meet who are thriving in their fifties, sixties and beyond are not thriving because life got easier. They are thriving because they found their way back to themselves.
That is the conversation I want to bring to the KwaZulu Spirit Festival. Not a lecture – a lived experience. A tap on the shoulder, an invitation to remember what has always been true:
You were not made to simply age. You were made to radiate.
Meet Sharon at KwazuluSpirit Festival with her masterclass, Radiant Living, on Sunday 31 May, 14:00.
ABOUT SHARON:
Sharon Castle is the founder of Mindfit Coaching Academy, a pioneering South African training and development organisation dedicated to developing conscious, emotionally intelligent leaders, coaches, and entrepreneurs. With over 40 years of experience in the personal development field and more than two decades of professional coaching practice from her studio on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Sharon has designed transformational programmes such as The Awakening, The Coaches Calling, Business Builder, Mindfit for Teens, Your Inner GPS – and most recently, Radiant Living, her global membership programme for women over 40 who are ready to stop accepting decline and start living with genuine vitality, clarity and joy.
As a respected life coach, mentor, and teacher of transformation, Sharon integrates timeless spiritual wisdom with practical coaching principles rooted in the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. Her down-to-earth and insightful approach helps leaders, teams and individuals bridge generational gaps, build resilience, and create cultures of collaboration, purpose and wellbeing.
At 67, Sharon is living proof of her own philosophy – that ageing is not a diminishing, but a deepening. Through Radiant Living and its three pillars of a Calm Mind, a Strong Body and Natural Radiance, she invites women across the world to reclaim their vitality, their presence and their full aliveness at every stage of life.
Known for her warmth, authenticity and grounded wisdom, Sharon inspires others to redefine what is possible – to live and lead with clarity, compassion and confidence by reconnecting to their innate potential and choosing, at any age, to radiate.
Your Magic Toolkit is a silly name for something really important. All of us, no matter how experienced you are or what titles you hold, forget the very simplest practices which make this being human a radical adventure in showing up as ourselves and enjoying the moments that only this life brings.
A reminder for some and a guaranteed series of “lightbulb moments” for others, Christa brings levity and straightforward, concise instruction in creating a life which is grounded, expansive and light-oriented even in the rougher seas of life. This toolkit holds all the little tools Christa wishes fervently we taught our children in Grade R, for the care and keeping of you. The presentation will provide an overview of various ways you can tap into support beyond the offerings our societal norms hold, combined with embodied practices that the audience will try out on the spot! Come prepared to sit, stand, and play with new and old favourites.
If you’d like to delve further into any or all of this, you can find Christa at www.christagumedebuthelezi.com.
About Christa: Christa Gumede Buthelezi is an ordinary human with an extraordinary ability to communicate across different aspects of consciousness. As a medium and a diviner, she creates a bridge between being human, all that has been and all that will be. In plain English, you might call her a coach, a mentor or even a Sangoma. In any case, she brings light to the world in any way possible. Born in the US, she is South African by choice and spends her days with her family in KwaZulu-Natal. She is the editor and curator for ODYSSEY, the conscious living magazine based in South Africa. With an amazing team of creators and collaborators, Odyssey invites curiosity, connection and compassion for being human in today’s world.
