Episode 38: From Barbie Dream Houses to House Healing: Exploring the Healing Power of Place with Psychic Deborah Keys

Welcome to the Carousel of Happiness Podcast.

On today's episode, you’ll meet Boulder-based intuitive healer and teacher, Deborah Keys. Deborah is a psychic who specializes in a modality called House Healing. You’ll learn what house healing is and how to know if your space needs a healing. Deborah also gives her professional opinion on what’s going on psychically at the carousel. Plus, next week, I'll share the outcome of a reading and healing she gave the carousel on a recent visit.

If you're interested in more information about Deborah's Psychic Horizon's colleagues, check out my conversation with Boulder-based animal communicator, JoLee Wingerson in Episode 16 and my conversation and soul retrieval with shamanic artist, Cypress Willett, in Episode 27.

If you're interested in learning more about Deborah and her work, check out her Space Healing business, Divine House Healing, or learn from Deborah in the 8-week House Healing program at Psychic Horizons.

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

Check out the carousel on the CBS national news! https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carousel-daydream-helped-marine-get-through-vietnam-war-he-then-made-that-carousel-a-reality/

If you enjoy the podcast, please consider visiting the Carousel of Happiness online (https://carouselofhappiness.org/), on social media (https://www.facebook.com/carouselofhappiness), or in real life. Or consider donating (https://carouselofhappiness.org/once-donate/) to keep the carousel and its message alive and spinning 'round and 'round.

If you have a story to share, please reach out to Allie Wagner at outreach@carouselofhappiness.org

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, you met Evergreen-based filmmaker, Shane Matthews. Shane and his co-director, Joe Ventura, made a short film about Scott in 2020 called “Carving Joy.” You heard how Shane got the idea for the project, how it was influenced by his own personal challenges, and how the film festival, Mountainfilm, inspired it all. 

On today’s episode, which is part 1 of 2, you’ll meet Boulder-based intuitive healer and teacher, Deborah Keys. Deborah is a psychic who specializes in a modality called House Healing. You’ll learn what house healing is and how to know if your space needs a healing. I reached out to Deborah specifically because I wanted her professional opinion on what’s going on energetically at the carousel. She gives me some initial thoughts over the phone and then is generous enough to come up to the carousel personally and give it its own special psychic healing and reading.

On next week’s episode, you’ll hear more about the specifics of Deborah’s reading of the carousel, I’ll walk you through how she does the work that she does, and I’ll share some incredibly interesting details of what she psychically experienced at the carousel on her visit. Plus, she’ll give you some tips on how you can take small steps toward improving the energy of your space on your own.

Let us begin with today’s story.

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As a child, Deborah Keys was less interested in her Barbies than she was in decorating their Barbie Dream House. She points this out when I ask her how long she’s been doing space healing.

Even as a young person, Deborah intuitively understood that Barbie’s space and the environment around her was as important, if not more so, than her outfits or her relationships. 

While Deborah’s interest in space healing started very young, she didn’t practice her skills professionally until being introduced to feng shui in the early 2000s. At the time, she was going through a challenging time in her life and was really drawn to the idea that uplifting and redesigning her space could help improve her health, mood, and overall well-being. It was something she really needed at the time, and it paired nicely with her innate interest in the healing power of space around us.

Feng shui, as you might already know, is the ancient Chinese art of placement. It focuses on the arrangement of one’s surroundings, through the placement of furniture or other home accents, in a way that aligns with natural energy patterns. The organization of a space, according to feng shui, has the ability to improve mood, reduce anxiety, and enhance the quality of life for those who enjoy the space. 

Deborah loved the idea that uplifting and redesigning spaces could change someone’s spirit so much that she would go on to train with feng shui master, Laurelyn Baker, and become a certified Black Sect Tibetan Buddhist Feng Shui healer in 2003.

In 2007, Deborah explored her connection to energy healing further by joining the clairvoyant program at the Psychic Horizons Center in Boulder, first as a student and then, later, becoming a teacher. If the name Psychic Horizons sounds familiar, it’s because that’s where animal communicator, JoLee Wingerson from Episode 16 teaches and where shamanic artist, Cypress Willett, from Episodes 27 and 28 studied. Check out the show notes for links to those episodes in case you missed them.

As part of the clairvoyant program, Deborah was introduced to the concept of house healing in a two-hour workshop. In it, she learned that she could use the psychic healing and reading skills she was learning in the clairvoyant program and apply them not only to people and animals but also to spaces. 

She was hooked. 

Deborah began working on houses almost immediately, taking the skills she was learning in the clairvoyant program and applying them in unique and creative ways to spaces. And her clients loved her. They were experiencing massive shifts and changes as a result of her work. They slept better and felt safer; they sold houses that had been on the market for months almost immediately. It was clear the work Deborah was doing having an impact on her clients. 

Eventually, Deborah took all her accumulated strategies and ideas, and built an 8-week House Healing Program at Psychic Horizons, which she leads to this day.

What is house healing exactly? How does it work? Why would you call someone like Deborah to have her heal your space? What are the signs your space might need a healing? 

House healing is the process of psychically examining a space to identify and address any unwanted energies. Unwanted energies can include portals, vortices, beings, and yes, even ghosts. And while ghosts tend to get the most attention in the media in this realm, Deborah says they’re actually not as common as you might think. 

According to Deborah, the most common house healing issue she runs into is what’s called predecessor energy. Predecessor energy is residual negative energy that’s been left behind by the previous occupants of the space. Energy like excessive anger, mental health issues, and addiction can linger in a space long after the previous occupants move out and new ones move in.

And what happens with this predecessor energy is that the new occupants start to pick up on it and absorb it, not realizing it is not theirs, not realizing it does not belong to them. For example, let’s say a newlywed couple moves into a new house where the previous tenants had been fighting a lot. Let’s say they’d been fighting so much that they’re now getting a divorce, that’s why they were moving out. That residual argumentative energy can linger in the space and, now, “all of a sudden” the newlywed couple has absorbed it and has started arguing themselves, not really understanding why.

And this happens to us all the time whether or not we realize it. For example, you might walk into someone’s office right after they’ve had an argument and your body registers that residual tension. You can feel it. How do you know? Well, you might get a headache. Your stomach might start to feel queasy. You might want to run out of the room without consciously understanding why. That is your body responding to the energy of your surroundings in that moment.

And what Deborah does as a space healer is she goes into places where unseen energy has accumulated and she psychically tidies the space up. Her work is the spiritual equivalent of deep cleaning your house. 

So, how would you know if your home needs an energetic clearing? 

• Are there rooms or spaces in your home that feel cold or yucky or empty or sad? 
• Are there rooms in your house your kids or animal companions refuse to go into? 
• Do you leave your house and go about your day feeling generally happy, but when you get home, you start to feel sad, lethargic, or depressed? 
• Do you have constant clutter in an area of your home you cannot clear out, no matter how hard you try? 
• Are you behaving in a certain way in your space that is unusual for you? For example, are you normally a gentle person, but in your current apartment you’re fighting with your partner all of the time? 
• Are you having trouble sleeping?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might be in need of a space healing. Particularly if you’ve noticed unusual behavior in your kids or your animal friends. According to Deborah, children and animals are particularly sensitive to energy and their behavior can offer clues that there might be energetic imbalances or issues at play. If they won’t go into certain rooms or cry uncontrollably when they are in certain areas of your house, that is a pretty good sign you might want to reach out to someone like Deborah.

For example, Deborah got a call from a family whose baby would not stop crying. Anytime she was in the house the baby would wail and wail and wail. Her parents tried everything and were at their wits’ end. They called Deborah and it turns out, there was an energy vortex in their tiny townhouse. An energy vortex is sort of the energetic equivalent of a highway or major thoroughfare – think lots of on ramps and merging traffic – so to speak. Because the baby was far more sensitive to energy than her parents, she was feeling all of that chaotic energy and responding to it by crying. Deborah and her team cleared the space and now everyone in the family sleeps well at night.

Practically speaking, energy can impact the sale of your home. If you have had your house on the market for a while and it’s not selling, an energy healing can help. Deborah has worked with many owners and real estate agents to transform the energy of a property to the point that it sells soon after.

I reached out to Deborah specifically because I was curious what she’d have to say about the psychic thumbprint of the Carousel of Happiness. I wanted to know, from her perspective, what is going on here on an energetic level here and how might our bodies be registering this energetic experience?

She was generous enough to not only share her professional opinion of what might be going on here, but also surprised me by offering to come up to Nederland and give the carousel its very own healing and reading. I’ll share more about the details of the reading in next week’s episode, but I want to share something I learned in our first conversation.

As we are talking, I explain to Deborah two phenomena we see pretty regularly at the Carousel of Happiness and I ask her thoughts about them. As we’ve discussed on the podcast, people frequently enter the carousel house and get emotional without consciously understanding why. They might tear up, they might catch their breath. This happens, as well as a tendency for visitors to feel compelled to share their life story with us while hanging out in the gift shop.

If you remember from one of our first episodes, I asked Dr. Philip Tedeschi from the Denver University School of Social Work what he thought about this behavior being a regular occurrence at the carousel. What he said was that when visitors enter the carousel, their bodies recognize the space as safe and immediately shed excess accumulated energy they’ve been holding on to. And their bodies do this just a hair before their minds can catch up and tell them not to. That’s why folks cry unexpectedly, it’s because their bodies are releasing stored energy that up until this point didn’t feel safe for them to release.

The same thing is happening with visitors who feel compelled to share their personal stories with us. Pat can attest to this. 100%. People feel compelled to share profound truths about themselves when they are here because their bodies register the carousel as a safe place to do that. They are essentially releasing pent up energy in the form of stories about themselves.

And Deborah agrees with these ideas, but she takes it a step further. She maintains that Scott’s pure intention to create a healing space and the way he imbued healing energy in almost every step of the process makes going into the carousel house an actual healing itself.

What does that mean? What that means is that, the extent to which you are open to the carousel and its ability to share its healing energy with you is the extent to which you actually receive healing from the carousel. 

That’s right, the carousel can heal you energetically.

You don’t need to ride it. You don’t need to do anything. Simply being in the space and allowing your energy to be attuned to it is all you need to do. Whatever energy is not yours, whatever energy does not belong to you, whatever energy is not in line with your highest and best must dissolve away. Negative energy cannot co-exist with the healing energy of the carousel.

Deborah believes that the goal of every human being is to connect with divinity in some way. It doesn’t matter your faith tradition, it doesn’t matter how you do it. What matters is that you individually find a connection with something larger than yourself.

In places of healing, like churches, synagogues, and yes, even carousels, it is easier for human beings to find this divine connection. Put more bluntly, in places of healing it is easier to hear god.

However that looks and feels to you.

We are getting into our slower season at the carousel. And you know how much I personally love a more mellow carousel experience. If you’re in the area and want to consciously experience the healing energy of the carousel, I invite you to come on in. Try a different way of experiencing the space. Maybe take a spot on one of the benches and close your eyes. Maybe start to notice how your body feels. Maybe take a couple of deep breaths. Maybe become present with your current experience and invite the healing energy of the carousel into your body, into your heart, into your soul, into your mind.

Then watch, pay attention, be curious. Take notes, if you want to. But know that this healing energy is 100% free. It is a gift of healing that, yes, originates from Scott Harrison but has accumulated momentum and strength and power from every single human being who has walked through our doors over the course of the last 15 years. Every single employee and volunteer, every wide-eyed visitor, every laughing child, every veteran on Memorial Day. All of those layers of healing have built up and accumulated over time to the point where anyone who walks through the door now, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, can access this healing energy.

You can think of it like predecessor energy with a positive spin. 

Next week, I’ll walk you through Deborah’s visit to the carousel. You’ll learn how she does the work she does and what she discovered when she psychically examined the Carousel of Happiness. Plus, she’ll give you some small steps you can take to improve the energy in your space.

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.