A Long & Winding Road to Becoming a Therapeutic Touch Practitioner & Teacher Part 2..

For the first instalment check the July 2026 TTAA Newsletter.

When Judith became pregnant, her mother strongly encouraged her to learn Therapeutic Touch, due to the remote location and time it took for medical assistance to reach the lighthouse.

She went down to California to learn Therapeutic Touch by doing her mother’s Therapeutic Touch programme, which was mainly for dental assistants.  This program had 25 students and 5 teachers. Each of the teachers taught a certain part of the curriculum.  Judith later taught the meditation segment.

Eventually, after training in Therapeutic Touch, Judith’s mother said, “You know Judith, maybe you could give me a Therapeutic Touch session and I'll see how you're doing.” So she did. After the Therapeutic Touch assessment, Judith said, “Mom, I’ve got a problem.”

She replied, “What's that?” Her response was, “There's absolutely not a single part of you that is out of balance.”  Judith’s mother’s reply was, “Now you're ready to go to Indralaya in July.” Judith’s mother went every single year and now Judith encourages her students to go to Indralaya as they get the opportunity.

While at Indralaya, each year Judith found a mentor and she would work with them for the next year.  Participants are not assigned a mentor but Judith recognized that living in a remote location required more effort than others in the program. Over the years, after approaching Therapeutic Touch practitioners to be her mentor, Judith has got a lot of yeses.

She says she worked all her mentors really hard and learnt a tremendous amount from every one of them. Initially, even though Judith was at a remote location at a lighthouse, she and her mentors would correspond by mail. That shows true dedication and commitment.  

Eventually times changed and they were able to send emails.  The mentor sent emails to her mother, then her mother read them out to Judith on the phone. Judith would respond to the email and her mother would send it on to her mentor. It was a pretty crazy system but it worked and they got the communication they needed.

All the time Judith was on the lighthouses, she only did distance work. Very rarely the odd helicopter pilot would come in with a headache or one of the lighthouse keepers would get sick or injured.

Judith believes that learning distance or remote Therapeutic Touch first, gives participants a better grasp of how energy fields work and how they expand and move.  With face to face Therapeutic Touch, facial expressions can be distracting and it can be difficult to maintain focus on the field itself. 

When she was at Langara Lighthouse (she was there for 13 years), her mother and her mother’s friend, Lynn Woods, came to visit.  Lynn is a professor of nursing, focusing on geriatric nursing who has published many research papers on Therapeutic Touch, dementia and Alzheimer's disease especially in nursing homes.  Judith remembers a lot of conversations about these research papers when they visited.  Judith, her mother and Lynn, provided three Therapeutic Touch courses on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago south of Langara (previously called Queen Charlotte Islands).

The people in this area were really hungry for Therapeutic Touch, as there is very little medical support there due to the extreme remoteness.  There were three villages that they visited and taught Therapeutic Touch.  Great interest in Therapeutic Touch practitioners to the general population was achieved.

In time, Judith decided there was a little bit too much moss between her toes and there was more to life than lighthouses. She moved to Boundary Bay, which is a really picturesque place by the ocean, south of Vancouver, British Columbia.

At Boundary Bay she became the house mother for 12 young men who were at flight school. One of those men was her son.  A good number of the men were from India since it was an international flight school. After training these men fly international jets.

Judith then joined a healing and wellness centre in, Tsawwassen.  She started providing Therapeutic Touch for people in this area.  After about two years, she moved across to Vancouver Island, where she also started providing Therapeutic Touch.

Shortly after arriving on the island her partner died suddenly.  While grieving, she asked her partner’s physician what she needed to do to get used to his death and to help her grieve well.  The physician told her to go to the hospice.  The hospice is a place that provides complimentary services for the grieving and the dying.  Judith noticed that there was no Therapeutic Touch offered at Hospice Office.

For the next instalment of Judith’s story read the September 2026 TTAA Newsletter.