ServiceSpace · Awakin Calls · April 25, 2026

The Space Between Worlds

Margaretta Mcilvaine with Melinda Edwards and Charles Gibbs

Margaretta Mcilvaine has spent decades moving between worlds — a traumatic Pennsylvania childhood, 13 years teaching in Tokyo, healing immersions across Asia, a Barbara Brennan training that cracked open her sense of what the self even is, and finally 20 wooded acres in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia where she founded Bridge Between the Worlds, a retreat center co-created with the land itself. In this Awakin Call, she sits with Stanford psychiatrist and fellow traveler Melinda Edwards, and together they trace a map of the inner journey: from the conditioned layers that keep us in our heads, through the wounding that cannot be bypassed, and into the heart intelligence that was always waiting underneath. As the host of this call described it: two wise women — both healed healers still on the journey — in deep, heartful, soulful, experience-centered conversation in these troubled times that hold the promise of heart-centered rebirth.

No notes can do this deep conversation justice. Please watch the recording. Still, here are the highlights — and scroll to the bottom for Margaretta's quotes and a curated set of resources, stories, and further reading.

Contents

1. Natural Intuition — and What Suppresses It
2. "Darkness Creates the Space into Which the Light Can Grow"
3. Guided by the Heart's Intelligence (Even When the Mind Had Other Plans)
4. Deepest Healing: Not Technique, But Presence
5. "Energy Follows Thought"
6. Bridge Between the Worlds: The Land Has a Seat at the Table
7. Phenomena: When Science Meets the Biofield
8. Questions from the Circle
9. The Heart's Pearl: Closing Words
10. Margaretta, in Her Own Words
11. Resources, Stories & Further Reading

01 · Natural Intuition

Each of Us Is Gifted — and What Suppresses the Gift

When Melinda asks how Margaretta's sensitivity developed, she begins by gently dismantling the premise. Intuition, she says, is not a special gift given to a few. Each of us is gifted with natural intuition and wisdom — though they are often suppressed by life experience.

The healing journey, which can help us claim our natural gifts as healers, demands that we face and move through the challenges, the conditioned protective layers, that can stifle our natural gifts, our heart wisdom. To do this, we need safe spaces and wise guides — the very things Bridge Between the Worlds was built to offer.

This reframe — from "some people have the gift, and some don't" to "everyone has it, and we have different amounts of layering on top of it" — runs quietly beneath the entire conversation. It is perhaps its most democratizing idea.

02 · Origins

"Darkness Creates the Space into Which the Light Can Grow"

Margaretta's own opening happened early and hard. Her mother was an alcoholic; her father left when she was six months old. In an unstable home, survival meant learning to "read the room" energetically — a hypervigilance that, turned outward toward the woods and fields she spent hours in, became something else entirely: a first, powerful teacher in the deep energy wisdom of the natural world.

A traumatic childhood, she reflects, can be a gift that opens into healing — if you stay in your heart. She eventually made peace with both parents; she told her mother she was her first teacher. The reconciliation wasn't fast or painless: "a lot of layers on my own heart had to be tended to, and be released, and transmuted, for sure."

Moving in with her grandparents at 13 — largely only seeing them at dinnertime — turned out to be another unexpected freedom: less parental conditioning meant more room to locate her own inner compass. As Melinda gently reframes it: "the gift of a lack of conditioning." Margaretta had worked with many people burdened by overbearing parents, she notes, and it took them years to begin to feel what they actually wanted. She had been spared that particular weight.

03 · The Path Opens

Guided by the Heart's Intelligence (Even When the Mind Had Other Plans)

Following her heart led her from Pennsylvania to California, then to Tokyo — where she taught English for 13 years and understood it was a stepping stone, not the destination. She began traveling through Asia exploring healing modalities, visiting India, the Philippines, Aboriginal Australia, and China — and each encounter expanded what she thought possible.

The turning point came through Tokyo's Circle of Light, where she met someone training at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing in New York. She booked a session. "I got off the table and just looked at her and said, what is this?" What she had experienced was a profound somatic encounter with her energetic beingness — much bigger than her human body — and a deep sense of its interconnectedness with all beings. She left Tokyo nine months later, bound for Virginia.

Virginia had been calling, in its way, before that session. Recurring dreams. A person from Virginia in her Japanese class. A roommate from Virginia at her Buddhism studies in Kathmandu. A quiet insistence she could only name as heart intelligence — even though her plans were for Bali and northern Australia.

She and Melinda spend time here on the skill of discernment: learning to tell, in the body, which pull is coming from the heart and which from the mind. The mind can be very loud. The heart, quieter, has a different texture — a different quality of knowing. Refining that sensitivity, Melinda notes, may take years. And it asks something beyond skill: a willingness to listen, and the courage to follow even when it doesn't make obvious sense.

04 · The Pivotal Moment

The Deepest Healing Comes Not from Technique, But from Presence

Barbara Brennan's vision was for healers to work alongside surgeons. After graduating, Margaretta was invited by a client having her atrial valve replaced at UVA to be present in the operating room. A respectful team, a female surgeon from California, and a beating heart visible through an open chest — "Nobody should ever see someone's heart beating inside their chest in this manner."

She was stabilizing her client's field, working through everything she'd been trained to do, when something no training had prepared her for happened: the consciousness of the patient's heart — as if in fear at the transition to life support — jumped to Margaretta's heart, seeking support. And Margaretta found herself watching the exchange from a strange distance. Two hearts in direct communication. Who was the "me" being left out? Who was actually speaking?

She had to get her head and her training out of the way and let the hearts communicate with each other. "I just need to get out of the way," she realized. She released everything — the light to bring in, the protocols, the things she felt she needed to do. None of that needed to happen. What was needed was to hold space for the deep wisdom already moving, spontaneously, on its own.

Charles's summary, offered live in the Q&A, captures it cleanly: "It sounds like a combination of showing up fully and surrendering." Margaretta: "Yes. Showing up fully and surrendering."

The story has a coda. When Margaretta came downstairs to tell the family everything was fine, the patient's boyfriend ran across the waiting room, shaken. He had felt a huge tug on his heart — the moment he was certain he'd lost her. The time: just after 10:30 AM. The same moment Margaretta had looked at the clock in the operating room. Heart consciousness is non-local. It reaches out to the people we love, across any distance, without asking permission.

05 · Heart Wisdom & the Inner Path

"Energy Follows Thought"

Accessing heart wisdom, Margaretta explains, follows openness, vulnerability, and the courage to go into and through the wounding darknesses — facing them, but not allowing them to overwhelm us. The path to healing invites us to bend our thoughts toward the freeing light of healing.

But there is no shortcut. There is no way to drop into the heart and bypass your wounding. You cannot circumvent the layers — trauma, conditioning, heartbreak — to get there. "There's no way in but through," Margaretta says. That path requires being resourced, supported, working in small, digestible increments. Forcing open a heart that isn't ready is not wisdom; it's harm. Energy medicine, she says, checks first: how resourced is this person? What are they ready for?

The reward, though, is not something you have to build. "It's already there — it just has some layers of mud over it." The lotus, not the construction project. This reframe — uncovering what was always present, rather than building something new — changes everything for clients who arrive feeling overwhelmed, as if they have nothing inside. They do. Everyone does.

The contagion of open-heartedness is real. When one person drops into the heart in a group, it breaks the energetic path for others. The nervous system of everyone present begins to regulate. "We all know what it feels like," Margaretta says, "to be in the presence of somebody who is brave enough and feeling safe enough to be there." Each of us can be that person. Each of us can break the path.

06 · The Center

Bridge Between the Worlds: The Land Has a Seat at the Table

Following what Charles calls "an initially almost unintelligible heart insistence" — persistent dreams, seemingly chance encounters, a pull she couldn't logically explain — Margaretta founded Bridge Between the Worlds on 20 wooded acres in the Virginia countryside. She had no business background and no clear roadmap. What she had was a vision, seeded in the healing retreat centers of Northern California: a safe space with wise guides, where people could come home to themselves.

From the beginning, the land itself was treated as a partner. Margaretta and a dear friend who co-founded the center with her read the land, introduced themselves to it, and gave it a seat on the board of directors. Before accepting any program or teacher, they would sit in silence and listen. The land, Margaretta says, is perhaps the wisest and most listened-to wisdom keeper at Bridge Between the Worlds. Sometimes a proposal that seemed obviously right would receive a quiet, unmistakable no. Later, they'd understand why.

Drawing on the models of Findhorn in Scotland and Perelandra in Virginia (run by Machaelle Small Wright), they worked with elemental beings and the spirits of nature — consulting which plants wanted to be where, dividing the land into a wild portion that would always remain untouched and a cultivated section for human retreat and communion. Respect was not a principle; it was a practice, renewed constantly.

Melinda — who once lived at Findhorn and remembers the laughter of medical school classmates when she spoke about communing with plants — reflects on how rare it is to find someone who can hold both worlds with equal seriousness. Margaretta, she says, has both feet planted: the practical capacity to build and run a healing center, and the receptivity to hear what the land has to say. "When I travel for work, I miss this place like you would miss your most deeply loved one."

07 · Science Catches Up

Phenomena: When Science Meets the Biofield

Melinda raises the documentary Phenomena: Exploring the Science and Stories of Energy Healing, produced by the Subtle Energy Funders Collective. The film is building evidence-based studies to demonstrate that biofield therapy has measurable, cellular-level effects — and Margaretta is connected to its creation through the Collective.

The goal is to change the narrative — and ultimately to bring subtle energy into hospitals, covered by insurance and Medicare, so patients have real choice. The vision Barbara Brennan carried for decades — energy healers working alongside surgeons — is closer than it once seemed. As a speaker at UVA once noted: there is nothing "alternative" about alternative medicine. It is the traditional medicine of ancient times. We are not discovering something new. We are reviving something old.

A line from the documentary that lands hard: "We don't have healthcare. We have disease care."

08 · Questions from the Circle

Six Threads Worth Holding

On collective healing. Margaretta describes a group of six people who regularly connect hearts to send healing energy, long distance, to a friend undergoing medical procedures. Two weeks prior, this friend had a procedure after which the nurse said she had never seen anyone get up and walk out so quickly. The question of collective healing isn't theoretical. It's already happening.

On how energy healing actually works. The healer is not the source of the energy; they are its channel. The technique: connect to your higher self, connect to universal energy, allow it to flow through the top of the head, down through the heart, and out through the hands. Then, as Fools Crow's prayer says: become a hollow bone. Stop directing. Let the intelligence move on its own. Charles's summary: "Showing up fully, and surrendering."

On non-human teachers. A listener asks about a rock in Iriomote, Japan that once spoke to Margaretta; about swimming with whales; about flowers and animals as guides. Her response: there are many more intelligences in the world than Western culture acknowledges. Shintoism — which places its red torii gates wherever priests sense the energies of intelligence — knew this. When a whale looked at her in the ocean, she couldn't speak for a while. Humans arrived at the 11th hour of creation. We are not the summit; we are late arrivals. Charles names it plainly: "an invitation to humility."

On distant healing and political reality. Can you send healing energy to someone who hasn't asked for it — to the current U.S. government, say? Margaretta's answer is careful: direct energy requires consent. But prayer is different — it can be offered and received or not. The intention to hold higher consciousness and heart-opening for those in power: that, she says, can only help. How we do this must be consistent with the kind of energy we're working with. It cannot be coercive. She closes with a prayer she received once about a president: "Always do your best, and be kind to everybody." She thought: I can do that.

On navigating disturbing dreams. For someone entering the "space between worlds" at night in disconcerting ways: connect to the higher self before sleep, place one hand on the heart, and create an intentional screen — sacred geometry around the beingness, with the clear intention that only energies for your highest good may enter. The underlying principle repeats: energy follows thought. Be mindful of what thoughts you are sending ahead of you into sleep.

On the ghost restaurant in Phuket. A listener had read Margaretta's account of walking into a bustling restaurant — red checkered tablecloths, candles, a German couple by the water — only to return the next day and find it in ruins, abandoned for months. A local waiter turned white: "That place is haunted. Nothing can be built there." Margaretta's best understanding: a timeline overlay — a glimpse of what had been, before something terrible happened on that land. "Very, very mysterious." And Charles: "Let's leave space for the mystery."

09 · Closing

The Heart's Pearl

Margaretta's one takeaway — her "heart's pearl" before the circle of questions: she senses we are in a time of cardiogenesis. A rebirth. A collective invitation to look honestly at who we really are, and to land in the truth that there is an intelligence in our hearts — and that you don't have to be special to access it.

"You don't have to have a gift. To enter into that. It's a natural, natural beingness that we are."

The path she has been describing throughout — through trauma, through conditioning, through layers of fear and heartbreak — is not a path toward something exotic. It is a path home. And in a world in the middle of what she calls a "huge shift," this is, she suggests, how the new Earth gets made: one heart at a time, each opening giving the next one permission.

The call opened and closed with a minute of silence. Whatever was in the room between those two silences — the stories, the science, the ghost restaurant, the operating room heart — it left a field. And as Charles said, we're really just getting going. Do yourself a favor and watch the recording.

Margaretta, in Her Own Words

Resources, Stories & Further Reading

• Bridge Between the Worlds — Margaretta's website, to know more about her, her work, and the retreat center in Virginia.
• Phenomena: The Science & Stories of Energy Healing — The documentary Margaretta discussed at length; evidence-based studies, including on mitochondria in pancreatic cancer, building the scientific case for biofield therapy entering mainstream medicine.
• Margaretta's Curated Reading List — Books she has drawn on across decades, including Barbara Brennan's Hands of Light, Dr. Larry Dossey, Bruce Lipton, Carolyn Myss, and Dr. Joe Dispenza; she also cited Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary directly in the call when speaking about the left brain's dominance in Western culture.
• Margaretta's Stories — Four experiences she referenced on the call, each pointing to intelligence beyond the ordinary: a rock in Japan that spoke to her, swimming with whales, a haunted restaurant in Phuket, and the hearts that spoke to each other in the operating room.
• The Monroe Institute — Named in the Q&A on working with troubled presences and energies; also situated in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, near Bridge Between the Worlds.
• Findhorn Foundation and Perelandra — Both cited as direct influences on how Margaretta co-created Bridge Between the Worlds with the land; Findhorn for its work with nature spirits, Perelandra (Machaelle Small Wright) for its practice of consulting the land before any decision about it.