When you join The Healing Exchange you start with three credits to
receive free sessions and promise to give three free sessions to other
members. Every time you give a session you earn a credit to get a
session from someone else; and every time you receive a session your
credit goes down by one.
At the moment I keep track of the credits and debits manually.
When you arrange to provide a session for someone, send me an email, and I will
update the information on this web site. The Healing Exchange does
not guarantee that you will receive all the free sessions you have earned.
It is up to you to make the match between the sessions you want and the
people available to provide them.
I hope that The Healing Exchange will attract a broad range of healers.
Members will include body workers, energy healer, therapists, coaches,
acupuncturist and so on. If you think that your work belongs in this
community, then it probably does.
The Healing Exchange is for professional healers. It is not
for people who are still in training or who do healing as a part-time
avocation.
Also people who are in the business of selling products (nutritional
supplements, magnets or any other products) are not eligible to join The
Healing Exchange.
The initial people being invited to join The Healing Exchange live in the
Greater Boston Area. If you live in a different area and want to
participate in The Healing Exchange, simply invite your healing friends and
colleagues to join, and start building up a community in your area.
Membership in The Healing Exchange is free. See also Who runs The Healing Exchange?
and What is the future of The Healing Exchange? below.
To join The Healing Exchange, send an email to Mark Fourman at exchange@mfourman.com with the following information:
As a condition of joining, you initially promise to
provide three free sessions to other members, and you receive the right to
request three free sessions from other members.
To remove yourself from The Healing Exchange, please send an email to exchange@mfourman.com, and I
will remove you. As a matter of professional courtesy, I request
that you do not leave having received more sessions than you have
provided. You started out with credits for three free sessions, and
I ask that when you leave you have no
more than three sessions promised to provide to others.
Go to the Members page and find a person you
would like to request a session from. If the number next to
"Sessions promised to give" on their profile is greater than zero, then
you can request a session from them. Click on the "Request a
session" button to send
them an email requesting a session. If you use this button, it will
automatically send an email to The Healing Exchange, which is how we track
people's healing credits and debits.
As soon as I receive the email with the session request, I enter the
appropriate credit and debit into the system. If for any reason, you
do not end up scheduling the session, then send an email to exchange@mfourman.com
letting me know the session did not occur, so that I can keep the credits
and debits straight.
If you want to cancel a session, contact the provider directly.
Whenever a session is cancelled, send an email to exchange@mfourman.com so that I
can keep track of the credits and debits for sessions provided.
Go to the Members page, and click on the link
to your personal page on the web site. You will see a history
there of all the sessions you have given and received, and the current
number of sessions you have promised to give and are eligible to receive.
If you see any errors, send email to exchange@mfourman.com.
You can only provide as many free sessions as your "Sessions
promised to give" number shows on your personal page. It's counter
intuitive, but providing extra free sessions would mess up the balance of
credits and debits in the community.
If you would like to give more free sessions than your "Sessions
promised to give" number shows, please arrange this separately from the
community, so that the "Sessions earned to receive" number does not go
down for the people receiving your extra sessions.
The first time a member requests a free session from you, you are
obliged to provide the session to them. however, there are two valid
reasons not to provide a session to someone the first time they
request
it: (1) Your "Sessions promised to give" shows zero or (2) For some
professional reason you think that it would not be appropriate for you to
provide your service to the person requesting it (for example, someone who
just had surgery is requesting a service that could be dangerous for
them).
After the first free session you provide to a person, it is up to you
whether or not you provide additional free sessions when they request
them. The Healing Exchange is intended to encourage networking
amongst its members, so we encourage receiving sessions from many
different members rather than from the same person repeatedly.
If someone does want multiple sessions from you, you have the choice of
continuing to provide them sessions for free as part of The Healing
Exchange or to ask them to become a paying customer.
No. You are the only person who is entitled to use your
healing credits.
Exchanges are not based on the price you charge your paying
clients. Most people offer sessions of an hour in length, so we
simply expect that the exchange is an hour for an hour. You may also
offer participation in a one-day workshop as equivalent to a one-hour
individual session.
The provider is responsible for covering all the facilities costs for a
session. The provider must not charge the receiver for room fees or
rental fees.
The Healing Exchange is hosted by Mark Fourman LLP as a service to the
healing community. Mark Fourman, is an Integrated Awareness Teacher
practicing in Cambridge, MA. You can find out more about my work at www.mfourman.com. I came up
with the idea of The Healing Exchange after attending a business
networking meeting. Most of the people there were traditional
business people (an insurance salesman, a real estate broker, a copier
salesperson), but there were also four other health and wellness people
there. One of them suggested that we exchange sessions as a way to
get to know each other and our services. I thought it was a great
idea, and started thinking about how great it would be to have a
networking and exchange community focused on what we love - healing -
rather than traditional business pursuits. The same week I pulled a
muscle in my shoulder and wished I knew a Rolfer I could exchange a
session with. Thinking about both of these over Thanksgiving, the
idea of The Healing Exchange was hatched.
Initially, I plan on running The Healing Exchange on zero budget.
I have it running off my web site (i.e. www..mfourman.com/exchange.htm)
rather than as a totally separate domain (i.e. www.thehealingexchange.org)
because I can do that at no extra cost. There is work in maintaining
the web site, setting up new members and tracking the credits and debits
each time people exchange sessions. I expect that as long as the
numbers are fairly small, this work will be well worth the satisfaction of
being a part of the community I hope to create.
For the time being I just want to establish and be a part of the
community we create through The Healing Exchange. If it stays fairly
small and the work load is manageable for me, I will continue to run it
for free.
If the community grows to the point where the work starts to become a
burden for me, I will invest in some web tools to automate the processes
involved in running the web site. When that happens, I'll figure out
some way of charging for membership that is reasonable for members and
covers my time and costs. By the time the need arises, there should
be enough members for the membership cost per person to be quite small.
As soon as there is money to cover the costs, I also would like The
Healing Exchange to have it's own domain rather than being attached to the web site
for my Integrated Awareness practice..
More than anything else, the needs of the community will emerge and
evolve over time, and that is what I will follow.
