Interview with Vivien Schapera - Cover Story March 2026

Hello Vivien, welcome to our cover story interview! Growing up under Apartheid, you sensed very early that you would one day leave South Africa. How did that knowing shape your life?

Knowing that I would one day “have to leave” South Africa shaped my life the way pruning a Bonsai tree alters its growth habit. I don’t mean that it stunted me, I mean that it shaped me in a global way, affecting everything about me. It was not a single path of influence, because it affected the way I understood the world, what I thought and my relationship with the future. The Sharpeville Massacre was a pivotal event in South Africa, triggering a massive wave of emigration, awakening an awareness that stability was not assured. My parents’ friends decided to emigrate. I overheard their intense conversations and witnessed the packing and goodbye process. I was 5 years old when I realized that emigration was on the cards for me. One of my granddaughters is five now and it reminds me that five-year-olds are full of curiosity, drinking in the world, listening to us as we speak.

Everyday Magic tells deeply personal stories, including the loss of your brother. What was the most difficult truth to write?

Aah! This is a very, very interesting question for me to answer. The most difficult truth to write was not what happened to my brother. It was actually a wonderful thing to write about him, because in the process of that I could see the full arc of his life. I came to comprehend, in a most comforting manner, that even though he died young, at the age of 37, he lived his full life-span.

No, the difficult part was to convey the truth about my mother, tactfully, yet without betraying myself. I was young when I wrote Everyday Magic and my parents were both still alive. South Africa shaped me like a Bonsai tree and so did my mother. Nowadays narcissism is the trending personality disorder so people throw around the term “narc.” Sadly, my mother had both borderline and narcissistic disorders and this had immense impact on me. It was basically “do or die” so I became my own authority, engineering a unique path in life.

I solved the problem of reporting my childhood authentically by simply saying what happened without interpretation or comment. I decided that those who recognized the timbre of my mother’s behavior would understand that layer. I will admit that I was anxious about what my mother would say. I expressed this to a client, and she responded brilliantly: “Your mother will take the book the way she takes everything else.” Sure enough, my mother read a few pages and announced: “I’m not going to read this!” To this day I do not know whether she ever read Everyday Magic. My dad on the other hand said: “Viv, when I finished the book, I turned it over and began again at the beginning.”

You trained in psychology and the Alexander Technique before moving into energy healing. When did you realize your work was evolving into something new?

That was a fascinating progression. As I was finishing my training in the Alexander Technique – this was in London, England – I had a “healing” session with a woman named Soozi Holbeche. I didn’t know what to expect but I thought someone was going to wave their hands over me. There was crystal waving but no hand waving. At the end of the session Soozi said to me: “You have a lot of healing in your hands; you need to do something with that.” I said: “Yes, I am going to be an Alexander Teacher.”

I never expect people to know what the Alexander Technique is, so I will explain. It is a hands-on method and you guide the client through a new way of using themselves, aligning their head, neck and back, stimulating their postural mechanisms and giving them a brand-new experience of themselves. The nervous system connection through the hands is all important. “No,” Soozi said, that isn’t enough.”

Yikes! I liked that she said I have healing hands. Who wouldn’t want to hear that? But I felt confused more than anything else. Once I got going, back in Cape Town, I was very busy teaching the Alexander Technique. With so many clients I became exquisitely sensitive to the contrasts between people, and began to sense the human energy field quite clearly. One day, I had two clients who each epitomized yin and yang energy respectively. The one was a hirsute, Greek Karate champion and the other was a sylph-like professional ‘cellist. As the young woman glided from the room and the young man strode into the room, the field in the room changed so quickly that I got spun around and tumbled into the chair. That was my moment of realizing “Oh, there really is another layer. I am not making it up.”

To be clear, my skills are cumulative. I still think about Psychology through the lens of my academic training. I am a traditional Alexander Technique teacher to this day. However, I have added another layer – Energy Healing and Crystal Healing – using my own modality that I developed called Crystal Surgery. For me, this completes the trilogy of physical, mental and energetic layers that make up our human system, most often called “Body, Mind and Spirit.”

You founded FourWinds Academy before healing was widely recognized as a profession. What convinced you the world was ready?

Oh, I have to rephrase that! I was convinced that the world is not ready and FourWinds Academy was established to get the world ready. Here’s what happened: I looked at the rapidly evolving situation where medical experts are more and more specialized and less and less holistic. I compared the medical environment to how it used to be when I was a child – when the doctor would come to my home with her black bag and take care of me when I was sick. She knew me since I was a baby, she knew my family, she knew all about me because she was my doctor. This was the general practitioner’s role. Who was going to take over this role in the future? The answer was: “No one.” Who was going to know which specialist to refer me to? Who was going to fill the role of health and wellness generalist? Who was going to give me enough time?

Then I looked at the role that I seemed to be filling as a practitioner. To my clients – it was me. I was the person giving individuals enough time and attention to identify the layers and ascertain which kind of specialist they needed. Even more specifically, I could assess whether the key dynamic was physical, mental or energetic. I realized that properly trained “Healers” would be needed in the future. I looked at my colleagues who were working successfully as Energy Healers and they all had strong academic backgrounds followed by additional committed studies to multiple alternative modalities. The information was staring me in the face: You cannot learn how to be “a Healer” in a weekend or three. If we want Energy Healing to be a profession, it requires a standard professional training. I called a meeting in Cincinnati to propose the concept, and so many people turned up, my big instructional studio, designed for group classes, overflowed.

That’s how FourWinds Academy was born and I am very pleased to say that many others, including academic institutions and integrative health centers, have been inspired by FourWinds Academy and the concept it represents. That was exactly the point.

Community is central to your work. Why is healing so much stronger when it’s shared?

This is a very, very good question that literally gets to the heart of the matter. Let’s examine how “healing” happens. The human organism is a self-healing system. That is our design, and it is a wondrous design. But as with every system, stress can cause it to get blocked, frozen or off balance. When that happens, focused external input is what will help. This “focused external input” can be in the form of reducing interference (the Alexander Technique, for example); unfreezing the mechanisms (psychotherapy for example); inputting a remedy to boost the system (Homeopathy for example) or directly manipulating the issue (antibiotics or surgery for example). But “healing” happens in a landscape, not a vacuum. Like growing a plant, health requires satisfactory conditions and the more optimal, the better the growth and healing. There is one key phenomenon that profoundly alters the trajectory of self-healing: a mother’s love. Fortunately, this does not have to be biological, others can fill the role, conveying human to human care. In medicine it is called “bedside manner.” There is nothing more uplifting to us humans than the embrace of community love.

The Complete Guide to Crystal Surgery represents 25 years of research. What makes Crystal Surgery unique in the healing world?

Firstly, I want to say thank you for this chance to lay out the answer to this question. I can say with a very happy smile that I am extraordinarily proud of what I have achieved. Over 25 years, I used,developed, tested and wrote up more than 100 procedures plus a methodology, forming a brand-new body of knowledge entitled Crystal Surgery. To do this, I empirically developed the protocols, then checked that anyone using the same tools and skill sets could repeat the outcomes. Only if everyone who tested the procedures could produce the same benefits was the procedure included in the book. In fact, it was because people were reporting their exciting results on a daily basis that I began to take Crystal Surgery seriously as a discipline in its own right. Before that, I was not sure whether the benefits were a product of my extensive background and experience. Over the years, I accumulated more than 80 graduates who assisted in this Crystal Surgery research.

I think that what makes Crystal Surgery different is this testing by a larger group of people. The existence of a textbook, the length and content of the training, and a stated syllabus that includes both theoretical and practical exams – all in alignment with the vision of FourWinds Academy – are the distinguishing factors of Crystal Surgery.

You’ve written about entrepreneurship, embodiment, healing, and spirituality. What thread connects all your books?

Empowerment. My books are all “how to” books, even when they don’t have “how to” in the title. For example, Everyday Magic is a case study in how to understand your life so you feel empowered.

We can’t rewrite our lives but we most certainly can re-understand our lives, especially from an adult perspective. After all, why be stuck with three-year old thinking when we are no longer three?

I believe that human potential is the number one resource of our planet – even more poignant now that AI has come on the scene. My personal mission is to help people develop their potential and that is the theme of all my books, including the fiction that I now plan to write.

The pandemic forced you to shift to remote healing. What unexpected doors did that open?

The pandemic absolutely did open unexpected doors in multiple ways. I had to shift to remote healing and that was a complicated dynamic for me. I won’t lie – it was kind of shocking to close my doors and stare at my empty studio. I was accustomed to doing some remote sessions but not on any scale. To be frank, I was not sure how I wanted to proceed. The whole point in the Alexander Technique is that the teacher can put her hands on you. However, I didn’t have time to mull. Within 24 hours my phone was ringing off the hook with people asking whether I would please work with them remotely. The net result was that my calendar filled up very quickly with some of my local clients, and a slew of national and international clients. It turned out that once people couldn’t go to a local practitioner because of lockdown, they decided “Well, then I may as well call Vivien.”

I was forced to do an overhaul of how I worked. There were two amazing developments: 1. I crafted a systematic way of doing Crystal Surgery remotely that included a new version called micro-Crystal Surgery. 2. I taught classes on zoom and got my #1 wish – to train Crystal Surgery practitioners all across the world.

You’re writing The Life-Changing Power of Yes. Why is “yes” such a radical choice right now?

A few years ago, “yes” was my focus. I realized how very, very important the word “yes” is to our nervous systems and that we should use the word much more proactively than we do. I did some research and saw that other authors had already made this contribution so I moved on writing-wise, but not before incorporating my understanding of “yes” into both my personal and professional life.

The word “yes” is loaded with meaning and impact. It is important not to reinforce anything that is off track or unwanted so one cannot be indiscriminate. Other than that, it is a kindness to use the word “yes” generously when appropriate. “Yes” is oil on a squeaky hinge. “Yes” is a reassuring hand on the shoulder. “Yes” is profoundly calming to the nervous system. “Yes” is indeed a radical choice because “no” stops us, whereas “yes” opens doors.

Hosting The Schapera Show put you in the interviewer’s chair. What has that taught you about listening?

My first big life lesson in listening came at the age of 18, when I was studying Psychology. In class we read a book called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. That book has been like a bible to me so I cannot say that being in the interviewer’s chair taught me about listening to an individual person. It did something equally profound, teaching me my second big lesson in listening. I learned that there is a whole layer of voices that I wasn’t even hearing.

Becoming an interviewer revealed to me that there is a community of authors, creators, and life adventurers stretching across the world who are sharing their knowledge, generating waves of wisdom. I feel so grateful to have connected with this community, and especially to be part of The Relatable Voice which provides a forum where we can hear each other.

For skeptics curious about energy healing, what’s the first thing you invite them to experience?

This question makes me smile because if someone has come to me, their skepticism is not acting as a barrier. The skepticism is a filter. I offer all my clients the opportunity to enjoy a new experience of themselves. Then, by quieting the cacophony of life, I invite the spine to align and the nervous system to reorganize. In truth, I love the filter of skepticism because it makes the reward of seeing my clients’ faces light up as their bodies relax, all the sweeter.

When readers look back years from now, what do you hope they remember most about your work?

You know this is a really hard question for me to answer because I have never thought about a reader remembering something about my work. My writing is designed for the reader to remember themselves.

After some reflection I can articulate what I am hoping will happen. I hope that my writing transforms people, positively shaping their entire lives. I am not trying to communicate thoughts and ideas. I am trying to show people a road. Even more specifically, how to discover their own road. I want to help people to develop their potential via my writing in the same way as my sessions do. Above all, what I want for my clients is that they become happier. This is the way I gauge whether my work is effective – if my clients are becoming happier by self-actualizing. That is what I want for my readers too – that they become happier in their lives, and in themselves.

I also hope that my readers will use what they learned from me to help others. I write so that my reader can understand herself better. I write to illuminate the path ahead. I write so that my reader’s inner light will shine brighter in the world. When I think about what I want to generate with my writing, an image comes into my mind. It is an image of many shining lights moving harmoniously, onward and upward, dancing on the highway of Life.

Vivien Schapera is an author, teacher and Energy Healing practitioner living in Cincinnati, OH. In addition to studying Psychology, and the Alexander Technique, Vivien earned a 4th Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo. In the course of working with people, she developed a new modality of Energy Healing which she named “Crystal Surgery” because of the way that crystals are used as precision tools.

Over the course of her career, Vivien has written five books, established three professional training programs and worked in private practice for over 40 years. In addition, Vivien writes a monthly column for The Relatable Voice and hosts The Schapera Show on HealthyLife.net.

For Vivien, the most significant aspect of all her accomplishments is how she has managed to integrate her personal and professional developments, applying her knowledge to her own life. Vivien has been married to her husband, Neil, for 45 years and together they navigated the loss of their first-born child, Aidan, who died suddenly of ventricular fibrillation at the age of 26.

Fortunately, their lives continued to be blessed when their younger son, Jason, married and brought three beautiful grandchildren into the world. Besides spending time with their grandchildren, Vivien and Neil enjoy gardening, photography and travel.

Find out more at https://crystalhealingtechniques.com, https://schapera.com,

www.4windsacademy.org, YouTube, The Relatable Voice Magazine Column.

Cover story published in The Relatable Voice Magazine - March 2026. Downolad the full magazine for free at https://www.relatable-media.com/the-relatable-voice-magazine