Kristen Bedrick
Speaker • Group Facilitator • Registered Nurse • Reiki Master • Massage Therapist
I first met Kristen Bedrick at a meeting of the Holistic Practitioners Collaborative, a community my dear friend Leigh Berry and I helped create for holistic healers finding their way as they built businesses around their work.
I don’t remember the exact context of the conversation. I remember Kristen.
Her perfectly coiffed red hair and unmistakable I-belong-in-every-room-I’m-in energy announced her presence before she even raised her hand. Then, in a gathering filled with healers looking for support in promoting their work, she had the audacity to say that she had made money doing hers.
I was riveted.
There was something magnetic about her unapologetic understanding that her work had value—and that receiving money for it did not diminish its sacredness. At the time, I was still learning how much cultural discomfort gathers around a healer who wants to serve people, build something meaningful, and also be well compensated. Kristen seemed to have crossed that particular threshold already.
Then I learned that she was a registered nurse, licensed massage therapist, Reiki Master Teacher, and former director of a healthcare wellness program. I had never encountered this particular combination of Western medicine, alternative healing, institutional leadership, and boss-bitch certainty.
And she did it with exceptional hair.
As I have gotten to know Kristen, I have come to understand that she doesn’t simply move between these worlds with confidence and grace. She helps other people cross the threshold between them. She has an extraordinary ability to recognize the next iteration of someone’s identity before they have fully inhabited it—and to reflect back precisely what they need to hear in order to step toward it.
I once complained to Kristen about how difficult I find it to be around people who take up too much airtime: people who speak far more than they listen, rarely ask questions, and seem unaware that anyone else might have something to contribute.
Kristen looked directly at me and said:
“You need to take up more airtime.”
It was uncomfortable as hell to hear. It was also exactly the truth I needed.
Kristen understood that my frustration wasn’t only about other people taking too much space. It was also about my reluctance to claim enough of it for myself. And because her wisdom is practical rather than merely observational, she did not stop at naming the pattern. She offered me airtime at the next gathering of Liberated Healers, the community she founded for people exploring new relationships among healthcare, holistic healing, inner wisdom, and meaningful work.
She didn’t simply tell me to use my voice; she handed me the microphone.
This is one of Kristen’s particular forms of medicine: she recognizes authority in people before they fully recognize it in themselves, then creates a real place for that authority to be practiced.
I have watched her do this again and again in the rooms she holds. Kristen possesses an uncanny sensitivity to the inner life of a group. She knows when to ask someone quiet what they are thinking. She knows when a silence is generative and should be allowed to breathe. She knows when a conversation has become unproductive and how to redirect it without making anyone feel diminished.
Whether the room is virtual or brick-and-mortar, I genuinely enjoy being in it when Kristen is holding the group. Her facilitation feels both spacious and purposeful. People are welcomed as they are, but we are not permitted to remain entirely hidden there.
Kristen is also my Reiki Master Teacher. Through her teaching and attunement, she helped me claim another dimension of my own healing identity. This feels inseparable from everything else she has offered me. An attunement is not simply the transmission of a practice; it is an invitation to recognize a capacity within yourself and accept responsibility for how you will carry it into the world.
That is what Kristen does so beautifully.
She sees the capacity. She names it. She helps make it inhabitable.
Healthcare needs voices like hers now: voices capable of honoring clinical knowledge without treating it as the only form of knowledge available to us; voices that can speak about intuition without abandoning discernment; voices that understand healing as both deeply personal and profoundly communal.
Kristen brings precision, potent reflection, practical action, and an unmistakable princess aesthetic to the work of imagining what healthcare might become. She reminds healers that their gifts have value, that community is medicine, and that joy, empowerment, and inner authority belong in conversations about health.
Some teachers give you answers.
Kristen looks directly at you and tells you the truth you were a little afraid to hear. But it’s all right—she’s got you. Then she opens the room, hands you the microphone, and asks you to speak.