Patricia "Mechi" Garza shuffles around her one-bedroom apartment in north Tampa — her short, stooped body aided by a cane — searching through the filing cabinets that fill her home. Puzzled, she turns to a huge bookcase that covers one wall, filled with how-to writing books and Anne Perry mystery novels. Figures of Native American warriors stand below paintings of wolves and eagles.
Finally, Garza finds what she's looking for: a spiral-bound book — the first edition of a manual she published 25 years ago. She hobbles to a floral couch, eases herself down and opens it.
Throughout her tumultuous life, Garza has written dozens of romance novels, articles and even has a piece in the second Chicken Soup for a Woman's Soul, but none has changed her life, and others' lives, like Kolaimni: Connecting With the Healing Light.
The book, which teaches how to heal by channeling energy through one's hands, has garnered worldwide attention, sold thousands of copies and prompted her to teach adherents — ranging from Native American groups to a West Virginia gubernatorial candidate — across the country.
"Crazy as the whole thing may sound — it works," says Garza, who is of Choctaw and Cherokee descent. "If I hadn't seen it work over and over again, I wouldn't believe it."
Garza says she rarely does individual healings anymore, instead teaching other individuals to carry on the tradition. Still, she agrees to give me a short lesson.
"There are no secret passwords or anything like that," she says, chuckling. "There's no dogma. You just need a willingness to do it."
When Garza was an infant, her mother left her on the doorstep of a white family. It was the 1920s, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs regularly sent Native American children to live in boarding schools. Only when she was a teenager did Garza learn about her past and meet her Native American birth mother.
"I was surprised," she recalls, "but I wasn't shocked."
For the next three decades of her life, Garza rarely found time to connect with her culture. She moved often, working as a nurse and a fingerprint analyst for the FBI. She married three times, lived in Mexico for 18 years and wrote teen romance novels.
But in the early 1970s, longing to reconnect with her heritage, Garza moved to West Virginia, where she had family. She began attending intertribal meetings, gaining popularity as a storyteller. A local medicine man saw Garza had another talent: healer.
"At first, I wasn't confident in the whole thing," Garza says. But over time, she developed her own healing method that could manipulate the body's energy by massaging the recipient's "etheric body," or aura. She called it kolaimni, meaning "connecting with light."
Since 1981, Garza has given hundreds of workshops on kolaimni. She says the technique has healed cuts, gallstones and chronic pain. After moving to Tampa in the '90s, Garza became an elder for Wolf's Heart Lodge, an intertribal group in Hillsborough County, where she is known as "Grandmother Mechi." John Raymond, a member of the group, attended one of Garza's workshops last year to see if it could help his wife's chronic joint pain.
"Both on the receiving and giving end, there was some transferring [of energy] going on," he says of the experience. "I think it feels at least as effective as something like reiki."
Garza scoots closer to me on the couch. It's time to get my kolaimni on.
"Give me your hands," Garza orders and I lay both hands palm up in my lap.
Garza puts her hands two inches over mine and stares ahead. She keeps her hands still for several seconds and then moves them up my arms, always keeping about two inches away.
"Do you feel it?" she asks. "Do you feel the warmth?"
At first, I don't. But the longer I concentrate, the more I can feel a slight heat emanating from her hands. At certain points, I can feel a kind of electric tingling sensation.
Is it body heat? Static electricity?
I ask Garza, but she just smiles.
"There's always a rational explanation for everything, whether it's physical or metaphysical," she muses. "There is no magic. Only causes that are imperfectly understood."
For more information on kolaimni, visit kolaimni.org.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2007.
