Laura Koniver, MD
I’m known as the “Intuition Physician.” I love what I do. I offer on-line health e-courses, private consultation, and inspirational artwork designed to reconnect you with Well-Being. But how did I make the transition from traditional medical doctor to an artist/intuitive? It was a long road, one I’m still traveling. Here’s how it all started:
I grew up in a very loving and wonderful family, who I am so thankful for. I had a wonderful childhood filled with love, lots and lots of laughter, games, travel, and most of all… support. Everyone in my family is super smart and super goal oriented. Very governed by the thinking and analytical mind, there was lots and lots of doing… lots of education, lots of competition, lots of goal oriented direction to achieve a certain grade, earn a certain allowance… thinking and cleverness and wit are very prized and made for a very fun and very busy atmosphere to grow up in.
Not a lot of sitting around *being*. Much more *doing* and *thinking*. I say all this to show you that I was not naturally at all open to focusing on feelings, or emotions, or meditating or being zen in any way… it wasn’t natural at all for me to open to intuition… I would have thought that was all *hippie thinking* and not for me. I was always very goal oriented as well… focused on: what am I doing, what am I achieving, what are my goals. What is the evidence that I am doing something with my life.
This was great for helping me on my path, because I got into college and then medical school quite easily and it all came very natural to me to accept this very conventional world. I went through medical school (where I met and married my husband) and finished my training and worked for a bit at a medical clinic.
Then, everything changed. I had my daughter Clara and it completely rocked my world.
It was the most intense thing I have ever been through. It completely dissolved my notions of what I should be doing and what I had worked so hard to achieve (which was my career) and opened me up.
It completely took me out of the equation. It no longer mattered what degree I had earned and what I was thinking and if I was clever. It only mattered that I hold a space for this precious amazing soul of my daughter. All I had to do was hold her and breathe and I felt complete. It was a spiritual awakening.
It was painful and intense and overwhelming and beautiful, all at the same time. I no longer cared about my goals and career and all I cared about was standing in awe of my child. I stopped working and exclusively devoted myself to mothering. During this time I also had my son Miles. I loved this babyhood time and never once desired to return to medicine.
But… after a few years of total devotion to motherhood, I started wondering what, if anything, I was going to do with my medical career.
I lightly stepped back into seeing patients… my husband in the meantime had opened up his private medical practice, and we had always had a goal of working together. So at the beginning he would see patients all day, and then once or twice a week he would come home after a full day and take over with the kids and I would run to the office and see a few more patients.
It was awful. I literally could not stand going in and seeing patients in the old medical model way. Taking a medical history and doing a physical exam and seeing a patient as a number or a statistic or a symptom or a prescription just horrified me. Here I was used to dealing all day and night with these lovely, amazing, glowing souls that were my children… and then going in to see a patient as a 2-dimensional problem to solve was just awful.
Seeing my children as the magical, amazing, eternal souls… then going in and ignoring the soul of my patient… just clinically touching and examining a person and viewing them as a puzzle to solve… it felt wrong to me.
I began to feel that I didn’t fit into medicine any more.
What I decided to do was just have fun with it. Since I didn’t like conventional medicine, but I still was in this goal-oriented mind-frame of wanting to do something with my doctorate degree and not *waste* it… I decide to do something frivolous and fun and that was cosmetic stuff — I gave physician grade facial peels and Botox and skin exams.
And I illustrate all of this to show you how very very conventional I was. Where I came from. Here I am in my 30’s and still not wanting to waste my medical degree and still trying to fit myself into some box, some career goal.
But doing fun medical stuff like giving facial peels was so much more enjoyable, because while the patient was laying on my table for an hour getting a chemical peel, I would be learning what I was never taught in medical school, and that is how to relate to a patient as a whole human being.
They never teach this in medical school… how to talk to a patient. And most folks who are accepted into medical school earned their way there because of having an achievement and competitive mind-frame, not a loving-kindness mind-frame. Hopefully that is changing a bit now. But it still stands that the vast majority of physicians today did not go to medical school because of their people skills. And that was my case too. I learned, through spending an hour giving a facial peel, how to go beyond small talk.
I learned how to ask them not just about what was going on in their health but how they *felt* about it.
Not just their dis-ease but how this disease has impacted their life and what they hoped would heal.
They would spend the entire hour pouring out their heart and their lives to me, and I found meaning in what I was doing again.
In the meantime, at home I began to homeschool our children (who were now school aged) and I also started to sell art in an on-line shop. I always enjoyed sketching and painting but never had all the time I had wanted for it… I felt that it was superfluous in life as it is not a goal oriented process it was not ever given a lot of weight in my life… but now that my thinking was changing so was how I wanted to spend my time.
I began feeling like my paintings were calling to me… and that what I painted had the ability to heal people just as much as a diagnosis or a prescription I could write them. I started painting souls… I started painting the interaction between what we can see in this tangible world with the energy around us in the spiritual world. I started painting things like the earth, covered with happy angels watching us. That painting is called All Is Well and is now my top selling print.
I found that there was room for both sides of me… the analytical mind and the intuitive one.
I began to blog about this… at first I blog mostly about my creating art and the meaning behind my artwork… I soon started throwing in health ideas into the mix.
I started a little series called Thoughts on Health. In Thoughts On Health, I would write about an organ system or a disease and what I felt that it energetically represented… why a person would be expressing this particular disease and the message that disease was conveying. So for example, I would take an illustration from my old anatomy book — LITERALLY rip it out of the book, and start painting the energy around it.
I took a heart out of the book and painted the movement of energy through the heart and how the heart represents our flexibility and strength, and why current treatments (drugs that prevent heart attack) work because they aim at restoring fluidity to the blood and blood vessels. That kind of thing. I profiled brain, and joints, and the immune system, and so forth. They are still on my blog and I add new Thoughts on Health on Mondays.
You can find my blog here.
This series really began to gain my blog readers and people began to write to me personally asking for advice on particular health issues.
When I would read these emails, I noticed that I would get a gut *knowing*… a color associated with each person. I figured this is because I’m an artist and I love color. But I began to really focus on this and open up even further to what this could mean. I started dropping down into my heart space and listening for a deeper meaning.
And what I found is that I usually got a very physical feeling — in my body — associated with this color, and a *knowing* about what it represented.
I started screwing up my courage and just point blank telling the people who were emailing me exactly what was coming through for me… what physical symptoms I was feeling and what information I was getting about their health condition.
To my surprise, over and over again, people were telling me I was right on target.
I began to figure out that I was using my intuition to sense the deeper meaning behind health issues. Not just what the issues were but more the reason behind the issue, the energetic imbalance and the energy work that was needed to resolve an issue.
Now I offer on-line medical intuition counseling to folks across the country and world, and I really deeply love what I do. I have also used the information I’ve gotten to create on-line health courses… I have a general health course, a skin care course, a detox course, a female empowerment course and a parenting course that helps incorporate intuition and health into your relationship with your child.
I love helping others access intuitive information because intuition can provide information that is simply NOT ACCESSIBLE to the rational mind… it’s not linear, it’s not something you can puzzle through, it’s not a feeling, it’s not an emotion… it is information from a higher power. It is gentle and kind and sure. It can be life changing.
So… am I an artist? Am I a physician? Am I a mother? Am I a soul? Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. And I am happy blurring the lines between all four each day. xoxo
