Healing is an ongoing process for us all, and is as successful as our degree of agency in it. My grandfather Charles Mraz was a famous apitherapist and beekeeper, and founded the family business Champlain Valley Apiaries in 1931. He received the Dr. Bodog Beck award posthumously for his advancement of bee venom therapy as a treatment for various autoimmune disorders, primarily arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Before I could read, I was studying charts on acupuncture and helping him manage bees to administer stings to patients.
Healing and Body Work
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3rd generation apitherapist
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Practiced energy work, acupressure, and massage since childhood
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Level 1 reiki practitioner
October 4th, 2018 I started a new age of life, set off by a serious table saw injury which affected all five fingers on my left hand. While in mid air, time stretching as blood spiralled around me, I feared that I had permanently lost my ability to play music - for the sake of my father's client's summer camp addition. By the time I reached the ground however, I knew I would recover by whatever miracle necessary.
A nine hour surgery at Mass General Hospital, followed by daily hours of meditation and energy work assisted by my mother (who was, fortunately, oddly, on the west coast at the time) for the ensuing weeks, along with twice daily dedicated physical therapy got me most of the way there. A second surgery to replace scar tissue with skin grafts enabled me to wear gloves again. If I hadn't been working for my father at the time, none of the initial professional interventions would have been financially possible. Paying into worker's compensation for thirty years covered the quarter million dollar cost of the entire process.
I changed many things about my life. As I continued recovery with the aid of a skilled acupuncturist and healer, Christina Ducharme (blueheronacupuncturevt.com), I took a friend's advice and began my studies in Architectural Engineering at Vermont Tech (now part of Vermont State College). Call it a classist mentality, but I had never considered that I might be able to learn the skills and earn the accreditation to allow me to design the kinds of buildings I had been dreaming of working on my entire life. Suddenly my burdensome imagination became empowering, as innate curiosity yielded an academic passion my parents had only dreamt of. Everything I was learning landed in the context of thirty years of construction experience and a lifetime of fascination with the built environment. Getting an education in building science healed a rift in my psyche that legitimized a multigenerational obligation to fulfill clients needs and found me amongst the "learned professions," with a code of ethics that allowed me to staunchly embrace my own professional ethic which had been compromised so often in the name of savings.