Georgia, can you pinpoint the time when you first took an interest in alternative healing?

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been trying out all sort of ways to be happier and healthier.

I signed up for a massage course at school as an antidote to exam pressure, trained with the student Samaritan service at Oxford and took up regular yoga in my twenties. It’s been 27 years so far with the same teacher. I only know because I have a photograph of myself doing a shoulder stand, nine months pregnant with my son Freddie!

When I had four small children, I found that reflexology, kinesiology and acupuncture helped me to be kinder and more patient. Energy work was so fascinating and so powerful that it seemed a natural step to start training.

The energy healing you practise is a form of psychic healing. Is that an ability that can be taught or does it have to be ‘in you’?

I truly believe that everyone is capable of being a healer, and everyone is psychic to some extent. If you have ever comforted a small child, cheered up a friend or diffused an argument, that’s healing. If you’ve ever felt that a place or person feels “not quite right,” that’s tapping into your psychic ability.

Tuning into energy is just like cooking. Some people are natural cooks and can instinctively produce delicious feasts. But we can all make toast and cups of tea, and we can all learn more skills.

When did you realise that you could do it?

Everything moved up a notch when we moved to a haunted house. Our two year old kept complaining about a boy with a green face in his bedroom, our nanny saw an Edwardian family in the drawing room and I had to take action. Every psychic person who helped us insisted that I was exceptionally psychic too. I was dubious, but started training at the College of Psychic Studies on South Kensington and discovered they were right.

Are there some illnesses or ailments which energy healing is particularly suited to?

Practitioners have different skills. I seem to be particularly good at decluttering emotional baggage. It shows up in my clients’ energy field like dense blobs. I can’t see it, but I can feel it strongly under my hands. Like Marie Kondo, my job is to help my clients clear it out of their life. They often say that they feel lighter and happier at the end of a healing session.

How important is the patient’s attitude to the success of the treatment?

Energy healing isn’t faith healing. It can work on sceptics like my husband, whose bad back was cured in one session by a brilliant healer from Glastonbury called Tareth. In general, find someone you like and trust and who seems to make sense to you.

Do you believe in a God or can energy healing be explained in other ways?

I’m not religious, but when I see sunlight shining through green leaves, or hear birdsong, or feel a breeze on my skin, I am sure that there is some sort of divine energy. Perhaps science will be able to explain it all one day. This incredible life force that allows us to move, grow, fall in love, create, dream. When it’s all flowing round our body and energy field, we stay healthy.

Is the medical establishment more accepting about alternative healing than it used to be?

Energy medicine isn’t new. Chinese and Indian doctors have been looking at ways to keep qi or prana flowing around the body for thousands of years with techniques like acupuncture, massage, qi gong and meditation.

It is very exciting that media superstars like Dr Rangan Chatterjee and Dr Michael Moseley are drawing attention to good food, exercise, sleep, relaxation and a positive mental attitude.

Are there ‘advances’ in alternative healing and if so, what do you expect to change in your own field?

I am looking forward to a time when it’s universally known as complementary rather than alternative medicine! There is so much that we can do to take responsibility for our own health. I love the way that primary schools have started to teach mindfulness, and that yoga is so mainstream.

What is the most satisfying case you’ve worked on?

Many of my healing clients turn up feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. By clearing and protecting their energy they feel much stronger and happier. It is truly thrilling that quite a lot of them are now training to become healers themselves.

You also do ‘house-healing’. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Everyone should feel comfortable and relaxed at home. If you feel on edge, don’t sleep well, or can’t sell your house, you may need some house healing. A home however big or small, is like a box with a lid. If there is any energy in there that doesn’t suit you, it needs cleaning out. This could be emotion left behind by the previous owners, trauma in the land or a lost spirit. The last three houses I cleared sold within a week. One was snapped up within an hour!

Georgia Coleridge is the author of The Chakra Project, (Aster Books) a colourful guide to energy and chakras.

For more information on healing, see her website GeorgiaColeridgeHealing.com