Episode 27: Helping Spirits, Ritual, and "Nurse Energy:" A Conversation with Cypress Willett

Welcome to the Carousel of Happiness Podcast.

On today’s episode, we meet Seer, Healer, and Artist, Cypress Willett. You might remember I met Cypress on my visit to the Warrior Storyfield in Longmont. And, if you’ve been to the carousel recently, you’ve seen Cypress’s work. High above the carousel, surrounding the ceiling, you’ll find  a series of brightly colored stained glass windows made just for us by her. 

On the first part of this two-part episode, I sit down with Cypress to talk about her journey from ER nurse to full-time healer and artist. She explains how important ritual can be to connecting us to our helping spirits and guides, she tells me about a pop quiz she gave Archangel Michael, and she surprised me with a very special gift.

Want to learn more about Cypress? 

• Check out her website – https://singingcypress.com/

The Carousel of Happiness is a nonprofit arts & culture organization dedicated to inspiring happiness, well-being, and service to others through stories and experiences.

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Special thanks to songwriter, performer, and friend of the carousel, Darryl Purpose (https://darrylpurpose.com/), for sharing his song, "Next Time Around," as ou...

Transcript

Welcome to the Carousel of Happiness Podcast. I’m your host, Allie Wagner. 

On last week’s episode, I shared the results of a recent scientific study on depression. According to this study, researchers found that experiencing 90 seconds of awe a day reduced symptoms of depression by 17%, decreased stress by 12%, and improved overall mental well-being by 16%.   

Last week, we also met Carousel of Happiness Board President, Charles Wood. We learned what it was like growing up in Houston in the 50s and 60s, how meditation brought him back onto his path in his early 20s, and how he loves watching adults, specifically Grandpas, light up when they experience the carousel for the first time.

On today’s episode, we meet Seer, Healer, and Artist, Cypress Willett. If that name sounds familiar, you might remember I met Cypress on my visit to the Warrior Storyfield in Longmont. She helped me weld my little metal dragonfly from Episode 13, remember? And, if you’ve been to the carousel recently, you’ve seen Cypress’s work. High above the carousel, surrounding the ceiling, you’ll find  a series of brightly colored stained glass windows made just for us by her. 

On the first part of this two-part episode, I sit down with Cypress to talk about her journey from ER nurse to full-time healer and artist. She explains how important ritual can be to connecting us to our helping spirits and guides, she tells me about a pop quiz she gave Archangel Michael, and she surprised me with a very special gift.

Let us begin with today’s story.

GONG

Cypress Willett always knew she was a healer. As a young girl growing up along the bayous of Southern Louisiana, she regularly made potions and cast spells to heal her stuffed animals. If you asked her at the time, she probably would have told you she wanted to be an artist when she grew up too. 

But times were different then. “Artists don’t make any money,” her Catholic family told her. And, as far as that “healing” or energetic stuff goes, that’s just voodoo, they’d say.

So, Cypress decided to take her desire to heal others and channel it into being an ER nurse. That was a model her family could understand. It was a model she could understand. And, for 16 years it was a model that worked. 

Sort of.

Cypress admits to me she cried both before and after each and every single nursing shift the entirety of her career. And I’m shocked. Not just because that’s a lot of crying, but because she really doesn’t strike me as someone who would do anything she didn’t want to do. 

Cypress has what I would describe as “nurse energy.” “Nurse energy,” to me, is that highly functional, dynamic, and all-knowing energy. Think about the best nurses you’ve seen on TV. They snake from room to room, taking in all of the new information, analyzing it, and spitting out solutions in real time. Nurses know your BP, they know your dose, they know you’re terrified of commitment and they know that your stepmom is totally cheating on your dad. Nurses know.

But “nurse energy” can hold all of this information somehow. It can hold all of this humanity. It can hold all of the human-ness. “Nurse energy,” to me, isn’t fazed by anything. “Nurse energy” juggles the multiple layers of the human experience seemingly with ease. And sometimes it dresses in colorful scrubs.

And Cypress has “nurse energy.”

But it didn’t feel like that to her at the time. Every morning before work and after every shift, Cypress felt the magnitude of the responsibility of her job. She felt the constant, intense pressure not to make a mistake.

And, in some ways, this pressure was what she loved about the job. It was what kept her coming back for more. The pressure forced her to focus. It forced her to pay attention. It forced her to find and maintain a flow state. There was no other option. If she did not, people would die.

Plus the job allowed her to “dissociate through doing,” as she likes to call it. There was always something to do as an ER nurse. There was always someone who needed something. There was always an activity to engage in that would keep her safely away from her feelings. There was always a way to escape.

According to Cypress, while necessary, the Western medical system is lacking. Virtually no one engages in any kind of prevention, and the system is entirely focused on putting bandaids, temporary fixes, on things. Western medicine believes diseases are “random” and there is no acknowledgement of the underlying energetic causes of physical symptoms. 

And Cypress saw, firsthand, how this played out in her patients’ bodies. Day in and day out. Bandaid after bandaid.

About 15 years ago, Cypress decided she was ready to learn more about energy healing. And started by learning the Japanese system of Reiki. 

And while she was open to the idea of energy healing, she wasn’t so sure at first. In fact, she didn’t really “feel anything” when she got her first Reiki attunement. “Was this even going to work?” she wondered. Was all this “energy stuff” made up?

It was the next day, after her Reiki attunement, when she was reading a book about Reiki in the breakroom at the hospital that Cypress started to feel something in her hands. 

They were warm for “no reason.”

This made her curious, but she was still hesitant. As a nurse in the ER, Cypress saw a lot of patients who claimed to see spirits and ghosts. Sure, some of them were on drugs, but others weren’t. And she knew what happened to those folks. She knew the protocols. She didn’t want anyone thinking she was “crazy.” She didn’t want anyone to lock her up.

Cypress tells me this story of being on the cusp of something new, but not fully knowing what it all means. I can relate. And chances are, you can too. In fact, Joseph Campbell called this place the mythical threshold. The point of no return. The point where the adventure begins. The point when life becomes different.

And Cypress did something in this threshold moment that I absolutely love. She decided she was going to test the Universe. If this energy stuff was real, she should be able to get some proof.

She had recently read in one of her books that Archangel Michael was the “Mr. Fix It,” so to speak, of angels. He was known as someone you could count on to fix something if it were broken.

So, Cypress decided to make a personal request to Archangel Michael to fix her fancy, expensive blender. That’s right. She had one of those expensive blenders and it was broken. She wanted to use it to help her eat better, but she didn’t have the $600 to buy a new one. So, she thought, if Archangel Michael was, indeed, “Mr. Fix It” he’d be able to fix her blender, right?

So, she said a prayer. Asked for the blender to be fixed and explained what she planned to do with it, if it were fixed. Then she thanked him.

A couple of days went by. Cypress couldn’t bring herself to check the blender. She wanted it so badly to be true, she wanted so badly to believe, and she wasn’t sure what she’d do if it didn’t work. She’d be so disappointed.

But eventually her curiosity won and she checked on the blender. As she turned it on, she heard the familiar high pitched whine, the awful noise it had been making, and she started to get disappointed, and then, all of sudden, the noise changed. 

Her blender worked.

Cypress was hooked. She started to study different forms of energy healing from different teachers. In addition to being a Reiki Master and Teacher, she’s studied yoga, and attended a 2-year clairvoyance training program at Psychic Horizons in Boulder. Remember JoLee Wingerson, the animal communicator I talked to in Episode 16, she was one of Cypress’s teachers. 

After studying other modalities like Healing Touch and Primus Healing, Cypress shifted her focus to shamanic healing. She has completed three years of training thus far, and recently began a two-year program with the world-renowned teacher, Sandra Ingerman.

During most of this time, this training, Cypress is still working at hospitals in Boulder and Longmont. Eventually, she’s able to convince one of the hospitals to allow her to practice Reiki while on shift. She was regularly called to bedsides where patients were experiencing seemingly inexplicable problems with pain or blood pressure. 

Cypress would sit down, call on her guides for support, put her hands on the patient and watch their symptoms mitigate or disappear all together. Her colleagues were surprised. She was not.

Cypress’s wish for everyone is that you’re sovereign. You’re free. To make your own choices. To follow your own guidance. She strongly believes that each and every one of us can heal ourselves. And we access that capacity of healing by listening to our intuition. By listening to the guidance of our helping spirits. 

Cypress calls upon ritual to connect her to her helping spirits. When I ask her what she means by ritual, she explains that ritual allows us to directly connect with our helping spirits and guides by asking for something – beit guidance, support or even a functional blender – and then waiting for a response.

She’s quick to point out that ritual is unique to each individual and it works whether or not you believe in it. You can write a question down on a piece of paper and put it on an altar. You can speak a prayer right before bed. You can close your eyes, explain why you want the blender. Wait a couple of days and turn it on.   

Our helping spirits are always talking to us. But sometimes they speak in riddles. Sometimes they speak in a language you, and you alone, speak. The way my guides speak to me is different from how your guides might communicate with you. You might hear a still, quiet voice in meditation. You might see repeating numbers. You might feel a pit in your stomach walking down a dark alley. 

You might have a powerful dream. You might hear a snippet of conversation with perfect timing. You might find yourself saying to another the exact same thing you needed to hear right now.

Those, plus so many more, are ways your unique guides specifically communicate with you.

How do your guides talk to you? How do you know?

As we’re talking about signs and guides, Cypress and I talk about intuition. That inner knowing. That internal compass. Cypress believes we all have it, or at least have access to it. 

I admit to her that my intuition and I haven’t always been on great terms with one another. Somehow the wires got crossed and I couldn’t trust her. I didn’t trust her. So she stopped telling me things, or at least that’s what I thought.

I explain to Cypress that for the last decade or so, I’ve been on my own path. Not the path of my parents or my culture, but my path. And I’ve found along the way that I kept getting close to things that I know mattered to me and then finding myself stuck. Like comically stuck. Like “cartoon in quicksand” stuck. No matter what I did, or how hard I tried, there was no way to muscle through what I was trying to do. Whether it be starting a business or writing a book. Things I knew I wanted to do, things I knew mattered to me. Things I had been dreaming about since I was a little girl and every time I got close to them I thunked myself on an invisible barrier of some kind. 

And the barrier felt like constant, low-grade nervous system activation. I felt it in my body through an elevated pulse and tension in my chest. I’d feel it in my digestion and while I slept. The closer I got to who I thought I was becoming, the further away my body wanted to go. I didn’t even know how to make sense of the messages anymore, nothing seemed to make sense. 

“Soul retrieval,” she said. “It sounds like you need a soul retrieval.” 

“What is that?” I ask her.

Cypress explained that soul loss is a common occurrence in human society and it can go unrecognized for years, if not lifetimes, because we don’t really talk about it in Western culture. 

There are many causes of soul loss, to include trauma, illness, and situations of high stress. During these moments a small portion of your soul’s energy can fracture and leave. It does this in order to avoid trauma and preserve itself. Protect itself.

The process of soul retrieval is a shamanic practice that brings that pure, un-traumatized essence back into your body so that you can be more fully yourself. Cypress thought the process could help me.

And she offered to guide me through one next week.

In that moment, my entire body felt tingly and light and excited and…there was no doubt in my mind what my helping spirits wanted me to do this. 

They wanted me to go to Longmont and have Cypress retrieve my soul.

So, that’s what I did.

On next week’s episode, you’ll hear the second half of my conversation with Cypress. We talk about art as medicine, the power of rainbows, and her process for creating the stained glass for the carousel. Plus, I share what it was like to be one of Cypress’s clients and experience a soul retrieval with her in her beautiful healing space in Longmont.

In the meantime, take care. Be well. And, as we like to say at the Carousel of Happiness, “don’t delay joy.” And we’ll see you next time around.