On Building a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World

Being a healer today often means navigating complexities and challenges. Healers of all modalities can feel sidelined, underfunded, or delegitimized within a Western capitalist framework. Naturally questions arise: from how to honor your limits within a culture that valorizes overwork and perpetuates burnout, to how to prioritize your emotional needs and spiritual goals and their place in your healing practice, and how to recognize unconscious biases and unexamined motivations unintentionally brought to a healer’s work.

Through her work, somatic psychotherapist, author, and podcaster Laura Mae Northrup demonstrates ways of staying true to one’s calling in a world built from systems designed to extract, oppress, and exploit. In her latest book, Radical Healership, she offers an authentic, spiritually grounded approach to finding your true path to working in a healing profession. She also addresses fundamental tensions that arise for practicing healers working in a late-stage capitalist culture, including how to maintain an ethical framework while also balancing financial sustenance and how to market and brand a practice authentically, without resorting to fear-based tactics.

Join licensed psychologist and CIIS faculty Elizabeth Markle for a conversation with Laura designed for healers of all modalities. Begin to learn how to build the practice you want—and thrive as the healer you were born to be.

Laura Mae Northrup, MFT is an author, educator, somatic psychotherapist, and podcaster. Her forthcoming book Radical Healership (Feb 2022) is a spiritually informed and anticapitalist guide for healing practitioners who seek to build a values-driven healing practice. She is the host and creator of the podcast Inside Eyes, an audio series about people using entheogens and psychedelics to heal from sexual trauma. Her work focuses on defining sexual violence through a spiritual and politicized lens, mentoring healing practitioners in creating a meaningful path, and supporting the spiritual integrity of our collective humanity. You can learn more about her work at her website.

Dr. Elizabeth Markle is a licensed psychologist and professor of Community Mental Health at California Institute of Integral Studies. Elizabeth is also the Founder and Executive Director of Open Source Wellness, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to transforming health care and health outcomes in partnership with communities via a "Community As Medicine" approach.  Dedicated to multi-level approaches to individual and community health and healing, Elizabeth’s research and entrepreneurship are focused on systems design to generate social support, social capital, and social sustainability in health and healthcare.

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