Published 2010-10-18T20:25:00Z”/>
Stephanie Maynard
Mind, body and soul met music, massage and medicine at Cafe Culture Saturday.
The cafe hosted its third Holistic Arts Faire from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and featured a variety of vendors, live music and lectures all revolving around the holistic theme.
The event was thought up by David Winglifter, who has been attending and organizing holistic shows for 20 years and was asked to put on a similar event in Chico. Winglifter described holistic in terms of being connected.
“People tend to put things into categories and groups and separate them,” Winglifter said. “Holistic looks at everything being connected – awareness, perception, spirit, life, mind and body. Separation is an illusion.”
Holistic arts use this basic idea of interconnectivity and synergy to create healing and self-betterment programs and schools of thought that involve many areas of life, best shown in the variety of the vendors. Natural medicine, massage, card readings, crystals and energy were all present, but no two vendors went about it in the same way.
One vendor combined massaging the body with energy work to heal sore areas. Another used the idea of words as energy to heal and dowsing rods. One woman specifically targeted energy blocks that develop in the prenatal stages of life. Yet another vendor used radio transmitters and crystals in necklaces to target electric waves to provide healing and shielding.
Lectures by specific vendors were spread throughout the event every hour, with titles such as “Self Help with Homeopathy” and “Tapping the Ocean of Energy.”
The latter was given by Lawrence Kiser, a prosecution lawyer turned energy expert.
“I used to run to de-stress, and then I got injured and couldn’t run anymore,” Kiser said. “I looked for another way to de-stress and got into meditation.”
From there, Kiser encountered a style of energy healing that could heal and calm without even touching the person, he said. In his lecture, Kiser discussed ways to do this to friends and to oneself, as well as how to tap into the energy in the earth and air to both calm and energize.
Beneath the bamboo-draped ceiling of Cafe Culture’s upper room, Kiser asked for volunteers from his 12-person audience. He demonstrated how to tap into energies as well as heal energy fields of a specific person.
“Those of us that work with energy fields know that they’re invisible,” Kiser said. “We can’t see what we work with, but we can see the results.”
To show differences in energy fields, Kiser used two dowsing rods that spun around in circles when indicating a flowing, healthy energy field and turned into each other, creating a visible X when the energy field was blocked. Unblocking energy fields was as simple as having the group concentrate on a positive or negative thought and direct it at the central person.
Thoughts, like people, are made of energy and can affect each other, Kiser said.
“Everything is interconnected,” Kiser said to his audience, many of whom were fellow vendors. “I know I’m speaking to the choir here.”
Throughout the event, vendors visited with each other. A card reader got a massage, a masseuse had her energy field healed and an energy healer received a card reading.
Many of the visitors to the event knew some of the vendors. One woman greeted two women at their booths with a hug and the greeting, “Hello, beautiful minds.”
Chico resident Michael Carr attended to see some friends who had booths at the event.
“I thought it was a really neat idea,” Carr said. “I’m interested in alternative healing methods and find it interesting to see what people like.”
Carr practices mediation but does not actively practice any other form of holistic healing, he said.
“The way I see it, non-traditional healing methods take into consideration that humans are more than physical beings,” Carr said. “We have electrical currents running through our body, so acupuncture isn’t that hard of a leap to make.”
Even concepts that Carr describes as a “harder leap” to accept, such as energy fields and crystals, he can find some basis for, he said.
“I know that crystals and minerals all have different vibrations in them and I’ve been to natural mineral hot springs, so I can see how that could work,” he said.
Stephanie Maynard can be reached at
