How I Became a Healer of the Soul
By Anna Biela, Ph.D.
This is a story of my life and how my experience inspires the He[art] Art Movement
This story of how I became a healer of the soul is quite long. As you can see, it starts when I was a little girl. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a nun.
From early childhood, I felt God calling me, and I always felt quite close to His loving nature. I was always a happy child, a problem-free child. I was never sick, rarely cried, and ate everything — a dream child for my parents.
I was always one of the smartest kids in school. I never needed my parents’ help with homework. I figured everything out on my own, even when I didn’t speak the language.
Right after my First Communion, which I received in Grade 1 together with my brother, who was in Grade 2 — the more usual age for First Communion — my parents decided to speed things up because they already had plans to leave our homeland, cross the Iron Curtain, and try to build a better life for themselves and for us.
It was 1987. I was still only seven years old.
On August 13, we left Poland under the pretext that we were going on vacation to Greece. Little did I know that my life was about to change drastically.
As soon as my parents realized that we had been allowed to cross the border and that we were now in West Germany, they told my brother and me that we were not going back.
We were not going back to our school.
We were not going back to our home.
We were not going back to our family.
I remember my grandmother crying her eyes out as we were leaving. She had come with us all the way to the border to make sure that we would be able to cross with everything we had.
At the border, they searched our trailer and would not allow us to take most of the things my parents had brought with us. Their plan had been to sell those things after crossing the border so we would have some money for our new life.
At that time, the Polish złoty had extremely little value. The average monthly salary was only around ten dollars, so money itself had very little purchasing power. Things that could be sold, however, had much more value.
We ended up in Germany and spent three weeks in Karlsruhe in what felt, to me as a child, almost like a concentration camp for refugees. It felt like a prison.
Eventually, we were relocated to Freiburg, on the edge of the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), one of the most beautiful cities I had ever seen. To me, it looked like heaven.
I started primary school there, and so did my brother. By the time we finished the school year, we could both speak German.
Then our lives changed again.
We moved to Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, where we lived in a motel for two months before housing was found for us. We were sponsored by the Canadian government for a year. My parents were sent to school to learn English, and after that first year, they opened their own business selling leather goods, jackets, furs, and accessories.
We moved several times while I was still in primary school, and I attended three different Catholic primary schools in Newmarket. By the time I entered high school, I was the popular kid. I seemed to know everyone, and I had no trouble making friends — or getting boyfriends. I dated a hockey player in Grade 9 and hung out with the jocks before I eventually became a pothead.
In Grade 8, before entering high school, I decided that I wanted to have my Confirmation and continue with my Catholic faith. At the same time, however, I was becoming a bit of an atheist.
Then I started Catholic high school.
That was when I started smoking weed, going to raves, and experimenting with ecstasy, mushrooms, and LSD.
Around that same time, my Mama became involved with some friends her age who were interested in prayer, meditation, and hands-on healing. I started hanging out with them.
I picked it up very quickly.
I was a natural at it.
This was around 1997. I was seventeen, and I decided to get my Reiki certificate from a Russian Jewish woman living in Israel named Zoya.
Something interesting happened to me when I started healing.
I started believing in God.
Until then, my relationship with God had been complicated. But through healing, I began to experience something that made me feel that there was something greater than myself.
Zoya was so impressed with my abilities that she recommended that I stop going to school, move to Israel with her, and study full-time at a school for the healing arts.
But I was already in the middle of completing my Grade 12 art thesis, and I told her I wasn’t moving to Israel.
I wanted to go to art school.
I wanted to start an Art Movement.
At the same time, I was incredibly passionate about healing. I would heal all my friends. I would do it at school, and they would come to my house after school.
Things became more complicated when I started healing people at raves and after raves.
It was during this period that I experienced what I understood to be my first demonic attack.
I was eighteen years old.
I had been healing people on a daily basis for about a year when I experienced my first attack. It was extremely traumatic. The experience manifested through what I understood as loud, intrusive thought forms telling me to kill or harm myself.
Zoya, my Reiki Master, happened to be visiting from Israel at the time. She helped me through the experience, and I went on to complete Level 2 Reiki with her.
This happened during my first year at OCAD, around the same time that I had decided I wanted to stop doing drugs — and, specifically, stop smoking weed.
After this very traumatic experience, I decided to put the Healing Arts on the back burner and focus on my education in Art and Design.
I had entered OCAD in the first year of the Art and Design program. For my second year, I applied to the Graphic Design department.
I was accepted.
I completed my college degree in Graphic Design and Packaging and then worked for three years at an advertising studio, where I learned the trade of being a graphic designer. I worked on projects for the Hummingbird Centre for the Performing Arts.
This is partly why I don’t like musicals. I used to get free tickets to all the Broadway shows!
But graphic design wasn’t really for me.
I didn’t like not having complete creative freedom.
So I decided to apply to art school in Wrocław, Poland, to the Printmaking Department, because I wanted to become a printmaker.
Before moving to Wrocław, on August 13, 2005, I took time to prepare myself spiritually for the journey.
I asked God for a spiritual reason for why I was moving to Europe.
And that was when I received what I understood as my mission:
To create an energy wave generated by the He[art] Art Movement — the healing energy of the heart — and watch it spread through art.
That became my mission in Europe.
Two years after moving to Poland, I received my MFA degree from the Printmaking Department at the Academy of Fine Arts of Wrocław.
But something unexpected happened during those two years of study.
I fell in love with life drawing.
Instead of going back to Canada, I decided to stay in Poland and moved to Kraków, where I began a doctoral degree in the Printmaking Department, in the Typography Studio.
That did not work out so well for me.
Eventually, I changed departments and moved into Painting.
That decision changed the direction of my artistic life once again and brought me closer to healing, as painting itself is a meditative process.
In 2016, I received my Ph.D. in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. I defended my thesis, which was based on the aesthetics of Plotinus and his theory of the One as the source of all creation. My MFA thesis, meanwhile, was centered around the idea of Pantheism.
The change of departments eventually also inspired my graffiti and street art practice. I started painting murals in 2012.
Throughout all those years of studying, creating, and developing as an artist, I was no longer healing.
I wasn’t even meditating.
The Healing Arts had been put completely on the back burner.
Until about two years ago.
I decided that I needed to start going to doctors and getting regular check-ups. During that process, some of the things I was told began to frighten me, especially when the possibility of cancer was raised.
Fear brought me back to healing.
I began working with energy, breathwork, and meditation again, initially with the intention of healing myself. I am still in this process of healing myself, as apparently I have an unusual ability: I believe I can heal myself, even though many people who have a gift for healing believe they cannot heal themselves.
This eventually led me into encounters with Slavic spiritual practitioners who told me that I had parasitic entities feeding on my life force. It also led me to understand that I had the ability to cast out what I experienced as demonic presences from my own energetic field.
One of the wise women who told me about these attachments also told me that I have a natural gift for healing and for casting out demons.
Once again, I feel as though I am back at square one, standing at the threshold of healing.
I have asked God to use me as an instrument of His love and to guide me through this process of returning to healing — and, specifically, to healing the world through art.
Because I had been struggling with what I understood as spiritual attacks myself, I began turning my healing practice inward.
I started healing myself — not from cancer, but from what I understood to be spiritual attacks.
And then something happened that I had not expected.
My spiritual journey led me back to the Catholic faith.
I went through the Charismatic Renewal and began rediscovering my relationship with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
Through this process, I came to understand healing not simply as something I could do, but as a charism of healing — a gift that I believe God had placed within me long before I understood what it meant.
Looking back now, I can see that the story was always there.
The little girl who wanted to become a nun.
The child who felt close to God.
The seventeen-year-old who discovered healing and, through it, began to believe in God.
The young woman who practiced Reiki and healed her friends.
The artist who wanted to create an He[art] Art Movement.
The woman who moved across continents, studied graphic design, printmaking, and painting, and eventually received a Ph.D. in Art.
And now, the artist who has returned to healing.
For me, these are not separate stories.
They are one story.
The He[art] Art Movement is a healing movement.
I believe that art can reach places that words cannot reach. It can touch the soul, open the heart, awaken something within us, and remind us of our connection to love.
And this is where I understand my own purpose today:
I am an artist, and I am a healer. I am a He[art]ist.
I believe I am here to help heal the world through art.
And Jesus is my Teacher.
I want to learn from the way Jesus loved, healed, forgave, and brought light into the world. I want to create art that carries that same intention — art that moves the soul and opens the heart.
I don’t want to die for my mission.
I want to live.
I want to spend the rest of my life creating art, loving deeply, growing spiritually, and sharing this journey with my Twin Flame.
I want to make art that moves people.
Art that makes people feel.
Art that opens hearts.
Art that reminds us that love is still possible.
Perhaps this is what I was asking for all those years ago when, as a little girl, I said I wanted to become a nun.
Maybe I didn’t understand then what it meant to dedicate your life to God.
Maybe I was simply responding to a calling I could already feel.
And maybe the path was never supposed to be a straight line.
Maybe it was always supposed to flow through faith, rebellion, healing, art, pain, discovery, loss, love, and finally — back to the heart.
This is how I became a healer.
And this is only the beginning.
Abracadabra.
Amen.
