What’s the Difference Between a Healer and a Spiritual Life Coach?

In case we’ve never met, my name is Crystal Lynn Bell and I am a healer and a spiritual life coach.  As I begin to finish up my book and come back into spiritual life coaching, I want to address a question that has been coming up from prospective clients and students:  What is the difference between a healer and a Spiritual Life Coach?

I am writing this article for people who are looking to receive healing and/or Spiritual Life Coaching services; and for people who are interested in pursuing a career in this exciting field.  I offer services for those who are looking for personal healing and I also offer certification to folks who want to become healers and/or Spiritual Life Coaches and establish their own businesses.

In case you’ve ever wondered about the difference between a healer and a Spiritual Life Coach…

For me today, the difference between a healer and a Spiritual Life Coach is an important topic of consideration. Before I got  certified as a Spiritual Life Coach, I offered healing in the way of massage, Reiki and a Angelic Guidance Therapy.  All of those healing modalities were powerful in the short-term but they lacked a few things that I sensed even waaaaaay back then.  I really enjoyed doing my work, but I’ll tell you– every week my clients would come back with a level of passivity that was not letting them find their sense of power.

It was as if they thought that the healing was supposed to take away something.  But that’s not what healing is.  Healing is a communication between your Divine Nature and The Divine.  But what are you to do with that open portal of communication when you get home and have to deal with you unfaithful partner, your grumpy boss or the friend who has suddenly stopped returning your phone calls?

How do you apply that healing to your work, your relationships, with your children, to your body image issues, to a debilitating dis-ease?  How do you apply that healing to your grief and fear, to your past wounds, to your inner child that needs your attention?  How does that healing help you forgive those who have hurt you?  How does it help you forgive yourself?

Healing modalities are beautiful and powerful and effective for changing our energy in the short term; and they are essential to our well-being.  But we have to maintain that change, modify our behavior, develop new beliefs and confront our fears.  Spiritual Life Coaching brings all that beautiful healed energy into the practical world with application.

In my experience, the difference between a healer and Spiritual Life Coach…

What I am noticing in my practice today is that people who are coming to me for certification are NEEDING to know the difference between a healer and a Spiritual Life Coach! Because the general public doesn’t quite realize that healing opens the door, but the person themselves has keep up with that high vibe change.  Most folks can’t do that on their own.

In my opinion, the differences between a healer and Spiritual Life Coach are not super diverse, but as a practitioner it made all the difference in the world for me.  Healing modalities alone do not…

1. Teach my clients what they needed to know in order to deepen their relationship with The Divine.  They felt great for a few days and then they went back to their old routines.
2. Hold the client accountable to a course of engaging homework that required them to be actively responsible toward their healing.
3. Build-up within the client the long-term, consistent and sustainable momentum and intensity needed to affect change at all four levels of their being– intellectual, emotional, spiritual (energetic) and physical. (Think creating habits…)

For me, these three things were not really doable within the scope of a mere healing session or even in a series or package of healing sessions.  Even with a powerful massage package where the client was given a course of self-care, getting clients to follow through with that homework for months was not likely.  Without those three things, healing went in one ear and out the other within the week.

In my perspective, in order to really affect change with a person, we as healers must understand that we are merely facilitators and channels of Spirit.  The client has to do the work themselves to deepen the work and apply it to their lives.  This is where the coaching becomes essential.  I think this is the primary difference between a healer and a Spiritual Life Coach.

Step in the Spiritual Life Coach…

The Spiritual Life Coach is like a healer with permission and a duty to hold folks accountable.  Coaches work with objectives, get clients to articulate their goals and dreams and then create game plans and strategies to guide the client along the path.  Our job is to actively engage clients intellectually, emotionally, physically and at the level of energy.  And on top of it all, in my humble opinion, we have to teach our clients to do this for themselves.  I always say, “I need to coach myself out of a job.”  It means that I must get my client so self-reliant that they no longer need me to guide them.  They hear Spirit themselves, they trust their own intuition, they have all the resources they need to effectively handle challenges and obstacles that come up for them.  When they are in my care, I help with all this, but there comes a time when they must do it on their own.  I love my clients, which is why I help them be POWERFUL.

And let me make this clear:  Spiritual Life Coaches also need to be healers.  Healers work with energy.  They clear energy, they channel energy and they hold space for energetic transformation.  In other words, clients benefit from both.

Below, I have outlined 14 main differences between healers and Spiritual Life Coaches, but please understand that if you want to be of greatest service to people, you need to do both.  Coaching without the healing component is like pasta without the sauce.  Something’s missing!  So please read on and see if this information is helpful for you.

OH!  And be sure to check out my Ultimate Shadow Work and Healing Package which offers a rigorous course of Shadow Work, Healing and Light Work.  And if you’re interested in becoming certified as a Spiritual Life Coach, then please check out my Spiritual Life Coach Certification program… and you can bet there’s an awesome modality on healing included in that certification– OF COURSE!

So what’s the difference between a healer and a Spiritual Life Coach anyway?

1. The dictionary definition of healing is something like— to make sound or healthy, to restore to purity, or to overcome an undesirable condition.

2. In my opinion, a Healer is someone who changes the vibration of something which allows healing to take place. I do not believe that people heal, but rather that healing is something we do for ourselves. For example, a Reiki Master will introduce Ki (Life Force Energy or Unconditional Love) and healing will happen. A Shaman will rearrange the consciousness structures, open portals and healing will happen.

3. Although doctors and scientists do not call themselves healers, they certainly have developed some true cures that heal, improving the quality of our lives.

4. And of course, high vibrational foods can heal the physical body.

5. Soothing words and acts of kindness can heal the spirit.

6. As a spiritual profession, a healer can offer many different modalities— Massage, Shiatsu, Theta Healing, EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques®is one of the easily learned, meridian-based types of energy healing. It combines needle-free acupuncture— ie, Tapping, with mind-body medicine,) Cranial Sacral Therapy, Quantum Entrainment, and of course, Shamanic Healing and Reiki.

7. Healing sessions often leave a person relaxed and peaceful. We rarely complete a healing session leaving a person raw, unless it serves a higher purpose. In coaching, I don’t try to soothe the client because they are in the program to work through what they are experiencing. Soothing it away is like sweeping it under the rug when we are working together.

8. In healing, the client can be mostly passive, allowing the energy to work through them. In Spiritual Life Coaching, the client is actively engaged throughout all sessions (except when we are doing a healing.)

9. A healing service can be a one-off where you receive what you need for the moment and you can either go back or not. Spiritual Life Coaching has a mission with objectives and goals and so it usually comes in packages so that you can work to complete something.

10. A life coach is someone who works to help you achieve your goals in your personal life or career, for example. A Spiritual Life Coach does this, but from my perspective they coach from a spiritual philosophy— using energy and spirituality as the basis for the coaching.

11. Self-employment: Both Spiritual Life Coaches and healers can work in their own home or office, make their own hours, and even travel around the world offering their services.
* Both healing and SLC can be done remotely. My personal experience is that I prefer to do my healing work in person and my SLC online. After healing, I would want people to rest and linger. Healing can happen on a lunch break but the person may not feel great to go back to work right after. After coaching, we’re all pumped up and ready to rock and roll. When we do healing during coaching, then the client can be quite worn out.

12. Licensing and certification: Both healing and coaching are virtually unregulated, except for touch therapy based on anatomy like massage. Technically, anyone can set up shop and call themselves either one without any training or papers behind them. How you set up your business, though, is determined by your local government. The rules can vary hugely! For example, in Beverly Hills (a few years ago) you didn’t need ANY kind of certification to practice massage in client’s home, but you had to pay a $2000 business license fee. In neighboring Santa Monica, you needed 750 hours minimum and certification from an accredited school and the license was something like $250. Currently, there is national licensing in the US and also state licensing. In California, they have introduced a statewide requirements to which all smaller district adhere. Reiki has a an association that you can join. And life coaches have professional associations that hold you to high standards, however, Spiritual Life Coaching is super-nichey and there is no one regulating us although there are people who will certify you.

13. Promoting the healing and Spiritual Life Coaching businesses can be quiet different because coaching is more about the coach and what they offer as opposed to the healer who might come secondary to the healing modality. This is not entirely true, however, it is kind of true in today’s market. Our world is more personality based so you will probably hear about a person’s personality before you know exactly what they offer. You will perhaps also know more about the RESULTS a coach gets as opposed to that of the healer simply because coaching tends to be results-oriented and aiming you toward a certain goal. Whereas healing is more about allowing healing to come through without emphasis on the predefined desire and outcome.

Okay, friend.  I hope this was helpful.  Be sure to subscribe to get more of my perspective on healing, coaching and all things esoteric.  Thanks a bunch!