March 2004 | Living Healthy: Practitioner Profile
The Healing Mind
by Elisa Williams
A car accident brought Mair MacKinnon to her career as a natural health practitioner. She was a lab technician at a Kaiser Permanente lab in Emeryville when the crash occurred in 1985, and injuries made it painful for her to stand on her feet with her body bent over, as she needed to do on the job. A chiropractor friend suggested she attend massage school, and the combination of reciprocal treatments and training she received healed her body as well as her soul. For seven years she did massage for a chiropractor, and now she has a busy private practice in Alameda, working an estimated 4050 hours a week.
Her training didn’t stop with massage. Her clients, many of whom have been coming to her for 18 years, are given advice on natural health and treated with methods learned through her eclectic studies, including acupressure and hypnotherapy. She has been trained in CranioSacral, Lymph Drainage, and Zero Balancing at the Upledger Institute. She has a Master’s Degree in Holistic Nutrition from Clayton College of Natural Health and is now in a Naturopathic Doctor program there. She has also studied Holistic Iridology at the International Institute of Iridology and Aromatherapy in France with Dr. Daniel Penoel. MacKinnon thinks highly of the Emotional Freedom Techniques developed by Gary Craig for some emotional problems. “It’s just amazing for grief issues, when people have emotional stuff that they can’t let go of,” MacKinnon says.
But today her favorite clients won’t fit on her massage table. Two years ago she began studying equine Cranial Sacral Therapy with Ramona Sierra, a Native American healer from Utah, who comes to Eagle Nest Ranch in Castro Valley to lead classes. MacKinnon says it is amazing to see how well the horses respond to the healing sessions, particularly light and color sessions. “They respond in such a pure way. They line up, like in an old-fashioned doctors office, and then present themselves to me,” MacKinnon says. “We laugh about it. It’s very weird.” She uses green lights to reduce their inflammation, red to increase their circulation, and blue to help with their sinus problems. “They get sinus headaches and blocked ears,” MacKinnon says. “They respond like you cannot believe.”
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