Emily Ball
Licensed Massage Therapist, Certified Life Coach, Certified Reiki Master Teacher, General Mystic: History & Education

The Business of Who I Am

I am a Licensed and insured Massage Therapist in New York State, a Certified Life Coach, and a Certified Reiki Master Practitioner & Teacher. After completing a 1,000 hour certification program from the Finger Lakes School of Massage in Ithaca, NY, I received my license to practice in 2009. I was certified in Reiki levels I & II with Carolyn Musial, and certified in Master Practitioner Teacher & in Advanced Reiki Techniques with Melanie Rimkus. I received my Life Coaching certification in 2021 through The Academy of Modern Applied Psychology. I also participated in a two year Medicine Wheel Workshop, along with other mystery courses, with Donata Ahern. Other educational pursuits are listed at the bottom of this page.

After working in Massage Therapy for over a decade, my bodywork practice has evolved to encompass the mind-body or somatic connection. Everyone has a story about their body and this narrative dictates how their healing journey will evolve. In my Massage and Bodywork Coaching sessions I work to illuminate aspects of my clients story so they can make adjustments to lifestyle and habits to live in their body with greater ease.

My Massage Therapy & Bodywork experience includes working with patients in pre-natal, birth and post-natal, forms of bursitis, sciatica, rotator cuff trauma, carpal tunnel, thoracic outlet syndromes, whiplash, post-surgery (including top-surgery), conditions of cancer and remission, diverticulitis, Rheumatoid, and other forms of arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Parkinsons, Alzheimer’s, Dementia, HIV, AIDS and COPD. I have also participated with clients in massage and/or reiki as a part of their end of life transition.

My Energy Medicine Healings offer my personal style of energy healing cultivated over decades of study in myriad mysteries; from tarot cards to quantum physics.
My main goal is to quiet the chaos that seems to stick to us as we move through our days, to remove energetic blocks that no longer serve my client, enhance energy to depleted areas, establish a connection to and maintain healthy energetic boundaries, and assess other energetic goings on that arise during a session.
I invite my client’s spiritual guides and resolved ancestors to assist in the healing treatment. If called to do so, gemstones of specific frequencies are utilized. I work with pendulum dowsing to help ensure that my ego isn’t leading the session. This spiritual work often results in some claircognizance, a psychic message picked up through the work. While these messages, images, or suggestions come from Source, they don’t always arrive at their targeted destination; as it can be difficult to isolate messages in a busy world. If something resonates with my client, that is great. If something doesn’t then I ask them to first check in with themselves to see if they may be paradoxically avoiding the message. Sometimes there is no message and sometimes none of the messages resonate. Every day is different.

I feel that insight is something most of us would normally be able to tap into on our own in a more calm, stable and instinct-supportive culture & society. Things being what they are, not everyone is called to dedicate time to work with their insight. Even if/or when they are, there are many societal obstacles that can present themselves. By working with resolved ancestors and divination tools, my Intuitive Readings can help unveil potential future paths, offer guided answers or more appropriate questions for new perspectives, propose a direction for your focus and suggest ways to bring you into balance.

Ceremonies are celebratory acknowledgements, many of which I feel are missing in mainstream western culture. I find that formally acknowledging our changes, losses, progress and new ways of being can serve to bring us into unity and wholeness with ourselves. I love personal and group ceremonies, it feels like creating an act with intention; a time to recognize or remember that we are living life on purpose. Rituals are normally performed as petitions or requests and can be as detailed as wanted or warranted. Rituals seem to have a more serious or cautious tone - in them we are asking to receive something and in that there is a sort of bargain mentality. These spiritual events are customized to the individual occasions and people involved. For more on these, click HERE

After working with people on some fairly deep levels in massage therapy and energy healing, ceremonies and rituals; and self-studying interpersonal relationships, internal journeys, and reading so many books on a variety of psychological takes, I decided to study life coaching. I do not enjoy the term life coaching or the stigma attached to it; which isn’t without merit, anyone can legally call themselves a life coach. It was 2021, my lumbar spine was decidedly on strike and threatening my job as a massage therapist. I turned my focus to energy healings and had a great time with lovely people who genuinely appreciated the work. Energy healing wasn’t paying my bills and I’d always been curious about coaching. All of my service jobs have involved levels of confidentiality, as well as dear souls pouring their hearts out with the pains of life. That’s all fine and good however, those dialogues weren’t the focus of those jobs. Since the pandemic this type of situation became more regular with my massage & energy healing clients. So, I completed a life coaching certification class and then developed Coherence Coaching (only to find it patented by an entire unrelated Coherence system of healing). This is another place where my client’s stories about themselves and life in general determine the direction of the sessions. In this work, my job is to help guide my clients to understand what motivates their behaviors and habits so they can create decisions and actions based on the deeper values and beliefs unveiled in our sessions. I work to inspire insight into what drives our choices and what motivates us to make change and reach for our potential.

If you’re curious about what training I have, scroll on down to the Relevant Education section.

These days, when I’m not working directly with my clients, I am writing. I have several articles published to my Substack page mexploring what it means to be human and where our edges are; physically, emotionally, and more. I’m working on several books that range from urban fantasy to narrative fiction to non fiction.

In all of my practices I am devoted to bringing you to your natural evolutionary progression from wherever you are on your path. I am dedicated to providing a space of trust and safety that is fertile for individual and group development.

Some History of Who I Am

I've been blessed to have bodywork, energetic healing, and a focus on life transitions as an instinctual part of my life since childhood and a part of my bloodline for generations.
While concentrating in Theater at Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts, I took classes outside the school system in modern dance, Afro-Cuban percussion, Herbalism with local Buffalonian and at-one-time-herbalist Rita Ippolito ; and self-studied the effects of essential oils and healing crystals.
I am grateful for many of my teachers and mentors of this time. Most notably, Russel Link for his mind-expanding guided meditations, his dedication to diversity, his infectious sense of humor. Also Kalissa Mcgoldrick for perceiving my percussion abilities before I did and inviting me to explore them further in a safe environment.
It was also around this time that my spiritual practice began to formalize. While I had always been drawn to nature & the elements, and was introduced to meditation at an early age, it was a solitary experience. In my mid-teens I began attending pagan wiccan focused moon ceremonies and seasonal rituals at a local Unitarian Universalist church. I also developed self-initiated dream work and experimented with alternate states of consciousness.
I knew before graduating high school that I wanted to live a life steeped in the mystical healing arts.

Prior to gaining my massage therapy license, I studied Sculptural Art and Anthropology at Buffalo State College and the University of New Orleans. In these collegiate spaces I developing an aesthetic interest in the human form through drawing & sculpture, and focused my scientific interest through biology & evolution studies. During college and afterward, I worked at health food stores which allowed me to further explore the relationship between the human body and plants, mineral supplements, and essential oil aromas.

At the Finger Lakes School of Massage in 2009 I worked alongside another student studying Theresa Wilke's Energy Palpation Workshops, where we learned to facilitate energetic evolution based on the chakra system. Theresa was the school's director at the time.

In the HEAT Center’s Niagara St. location I was very fortunate to welcome Donata Ahern in facilitating some of her repertoire of mytsic/ mystery classes. Among the classes she offered, I participated in her 2 year Mayan Medicine Wheel Series, Dowsing with the Pendulum, and her Workshops for the Sensitive & Empathetic. I am forever grateful to Donata for the spiritual focus and skills she shared with us at the HEAT Center - hail and aho, ancestor!

I’m always learning, studying deeper into things and opening new doors. All of these things accumulate and, hopefully, distill into a unity through which I can offer the work.

To maintain the registration of their license in NY State, Massage Therapists are required to participate in continuing education units (CEU’s) with certifications.
At the bottom of this page I have listed studies relevant to massage therapy since graduating from the Finger Lakes School of Massage in 2009. Also listed are reiki certification classes, coursework related to divine connection/ shamanism/ spirtual quests, and all other education I’ve pursued during my career.

The HEAT Center Journey

In 2015 I gathered some like-minded practitioners together and through our efforts we opened a Holistic Healing & Education Center, the HEAT Center, which was then located at 1300 Niagara St. in Buffalo, NY. In this location we were fortunate to have many treatment rooms. With some practitioners sharing these spaces we were able to provide many healing & divination modalities. We also had a large classroom in which many facilitators and teachers offered ongoing classes. My part in the HEAT Center was Founder and Director and in this capacity I negotiated our annual lease on the space, managed our shared office, reception area, and classroom; maintained the cleaning of HEAT’s portion of the building, and handled interpersonal conflicts and unity among the sole proprietor practitioners of the HEAT Center. This was a lot of work and a great learning experience.

From 2015 through the end of 2018, or until the Niagara St.building which housed the HEAT Center was “suddenly sold”, I was lucky enough to have a classroom space to offer a weekly Simple Stretches hour, run a few sessions of my Mastering Energy Workshops and offer monthly New Moon Ceremonies.
While we all remain on great terms with each other, the pracitioners of the HEAT Center disbanded in late 2018. as we all needed to find homes for our practices and the market was not favorable for renting larger spaces to include us all.
Amanda Rayburg and I kept in touch and in search for a space to continue working together. Through her networking skills she found us a space with a family-owned, West Buffalo based real estate company and in January of 2020 we signed a lease and moved into our beautiful Grant St. location.

Of course, we all know what happened next. On March 15, 2020 I was on my daily call into the department of health to ask if I should keep my office open. The operator told me that while legally the DOH couldn’t ask me to close, she highly recommended that I do so. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was rampant in Western NY.
We all have moments in our life when we have to weigh the potential consequences of an action, or inaction. I have no dependents, other than cats and plants. My rent at the time was very inexpensive (and worth every penny, big eyeroll). I have a partner (who is also in the service industry) ,family in town and the rest of my support network is strong as well. I am used to living well below the poverty line, and have a knack for creative solutions. I also offer remote services in energy healing & reiki. I could afford to close, so I did. I have all sympathy for personal service folk in a different position than mine, I have no idea what I would have done!
On August first 2020 Amanda and I reopened our offices in the HEAT Center with intensified protocols and some restrictions.

We have all lived through some fairly wild times, cheers to our collective resilience!

In General

Beyond being a licensed professional I’m a leader, a facilitator, a guide, a soul-usher, a spirit fosterer, a dream walker, an unseen realm traveller, a creative, a teacher, a student; and in all things I am imperfect.
In my life I appreciate the extraordinary magnificence of nature; from the sea worms living in gaseous vents on the ocean floor to the galaxies we continue to learn of, and everything in between.
I enjoy hiking, knitting, painting, writing, travel, dancing, walking, cooking, sculpting, rhythms and sound, swimming, martial arts, gardening, creating in general, sharing wisdom, travel, magic, and celebrating the inter-connectedness of all things (did I mention travel?).
I live with my husband, our two cats and a zillion plants in deep West Buffalo, NY in a house we’ve been renovating for about a decade.
All of my experiences, academic and self-guided studies influence my every day experience, the body and spirit work I offer, and support the foundation of my Mastering Energy workshops.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have found a grounding platform to work with people in healing and sharing some of what I've learned on my journey thus far!

Relevant Education:

Massage Therapy & Hydrotherapy Certification & Licensure, FLSM, NY Board of Regents. 2009
Energy Palpation Series, with Theresa Wilkes. 2009
Reiki I & II Certification, with Carolyn Musial. 2014
Viruses and the Immune System, an essential oil focus with Andrea Butje. CEU. 2015
Anxiety and Massage, self study. CEU. 2015
Advanced Prenatal Massage Certification, self study. CEU. 2015
Mayan Medicine Wheel, with Donata Ahern. 2016
Dowsing with the Pendulum, with Donata Ahern. 2016
Active Isolated Stretching Certification, a 3 day intensive workshop at FLSM with James Graffenberg. CEU. 2017
Advanced Physiology of the Skin, webinar with Tammi Sweet*. 2017
Inflammation, Actually, webinar with Tammi Sweet*. 2017
Reiki III, Masters Class, with Melanie Rimkus. 2017
Advanced Reiki Techniques, with Malanie Rimkus. 2018
Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, self study. CEU. 2018
Love Your Liver, webinar with Tammi Sweet*. 2018
Physiology with the Heart, webinar with Tammi Sweet*. 2019
Heart Coherence, webinar with Tammi Sweet*. 2019
The Endocannabinoid System, webinar with Tammi Sweet*. 2019
Psychology of the Body, self study, CEU. 2020
Anatomy & Physiology, a 12 week study with an herbal focus, with Tammi Sweet*. CEU. 2020
Life Coaching Certificate Course, self study course certified through The Academy of Modern Applied Psychology, with Kain Ramsay. 2021

*Tammi Sweet MS, LMT, is one of my all-time favorite educators, both in-person and online. She offers classes & webinars through Heartstone Online, a whole-hearted physiology education platform. If you want to know more about the human body, it’s functions & reactions, I highly recommend any of her classes!

Emily Ball Licensed Massage Therapist, Certified Life Coach, Certified Reiki Master Teacher, General Mystic: History & Education