Share Your Light with Dr. Chesten Cantrell

In this episode we are excited to welcome Dr. Chesten Cantrell! (Just as a head’s up, there are a few slightly colorful words in this episode!) Dr. Chesten Cantrell is a body worker, energy worker, and mind-body worker. As a body worker, she practices chiropractic, massage therapy, and craniosacral therapy. As an energy worker, she practices Reiki and 13th Octave LaHoChi. As a mind-body worker, she practices techniques described in her ebook “Revealing Your Diamond,” life coaching, and neurolinguistic programming. As a child, Chesten would randomly see and hear things that she later learned were spirits. She would know random information about people around her that couldn’t be explained. When she was eleven, she purchased her first tarot deck. She did readings for friends and peers that were accurate and she had an increase in premonitions and knowledge about those around her. Her curiosity about magic, psychics, and the paranormal increased. During a séance involving two uneducated teens, she was able to connect with her Nanny who had passed and ended up accidentally leaving an open portal to the other side in her bedroom. She had frightening experiences with some beings that had come through. It wasn’t until her late teens that someone else identified and closed the portal. But the experience left her terrified of the paranormal for years. There was a three-year time period during high school when Chesten struggled to accept her abilities. Growing up in a conservative Christian area, there were enough people around who had strong opinions about who was going to Hell. This included people who did tarot readings, saw spirits, or did anything else remotely psychic. On top of that, mental illness runs in Chesten’s family, so she became overwhelmed by the game “did that happen or am I crazy?”. The fact that her family, while accepting her gifts, had advised her as a child never to talk to anyone about this part of her didn’t help. To her, it became something to be ashamed of. So, she shut it down to the best of her abilities. While she had closed off the psychic part of herself, her empathetic side remained and developed. From her teens onward, she would have loved ones and strangers alike open up and “spill their guts out.” There was a joke among her friends that if their quiet, reserved loved one got around Chesten, they’d open up. During her college years, she was introduced to people who were open-minded about mystic things. She went to multiple lectures and events hosted by energy workers, psychics, and the like. She became a Master Reiki practitioner in Usui Shiki Ryoho in 2009. She was pursuing a degree in Biology at the time. Her logical and intuitive sides clashed. Watching “What the Bleep Do We Know” and its extended version helped begin a more amicable relationship between her skeptical side and her believer side. In 2010, she attended chiropractic school. She had to shut off her intuitive side while in school because going to a body part because it felt like that’s where she needed to go wasn’t going to help her pass her courses. From 2010-2015, tumultuous events occurred involving the death of a parent, a toxic relationship, a toxic marriage, a toxic divorce, and a failed business. Chesten moved back to her hometown in southwest Virginia feeling shattered and like she would never heal. She had lost all faith in herself. This feeling and the abusive relationship she escaped motivated her to work on herself so she would never end up in another relationship like that again. As she worked on herself, she learned how to love, trust, respect, and have compassion for herself. She wants others to realize these truths about themselves too.