Heather Riddle Healing Arts

10/11/2025

Today’s email:

Wrapping up Life South of the Border

This email is supposed to be a quick reminder that I’ve opened up a few extra time slots (available today and tomorrow), because I’m taking 11 days to go south of the border.

Many of you have entered my world in the past three years after I reopened my Roanoke practice in January of 2023. And many of you were with me when I closed it in 2017 to move to Mexico with my two youngest kids, 8 and 11. You came to visit me in the summers at Uttara when the heat and the rains of Nayarit washed out any hope of making money or not sweating. These are the times we visited Home #1.

I opened up my days off this week to make up for the sweet, sunny time I’ll be spending in Home #2. It’s also going to be a bit sad. I’m packing up the rest of my things and coming home for good.

Giving up the apartment, giving up the residency and saying goodbye to a Chacala that is very different from the place we called home.

Those of you who came down for retreat saw the final days before tall hotels and jet skis muted the magic of the once sleepy fisherman’s village. Tourism is sending 1st generations of kids to college, but it’s also mowing down jungle. I saw it happening when I arrived and was fully aware that I was part of the problem. The kids and I arrived in a pueblo with rutted muddy streets, hazing kids on the futbol cancha, and hammocks straddling tucked away trees. The whole place shut down for peaceful rest at 2:30 and 10pm every day. Full bellies in a hammock every afternoon to the sounds of the waves that never slept. I was restored to a state close to birth.

When we arrived, there were 6 families who spoke fluent English. All the kids attended a school that integrated Waldorf and Montessori principles into the mandatory Mexican curriculum. I paid the $150 tuition for both kids every month by working at the retreat spa, Mar de Jade.

This arrangement was cooked up by locals who wanted to see my kids thrive in the school and for us to be fully integrated into the community. The mother/daughter owners of the school and retreat center are bastians of service to their community. Focus on the wellbeing and happiness of the kids, as is common in Mexico, was obvious and unwavering.

With all this support, we integrated well and made this little fishing village our home. We loved to visit our Virginia home every summer and we loved returning to our Mexican home in time for school to begin. I always thought I would have a forever home in Nayarit and every time I arrive back in the region, my heart sighs. My nervous system calms.

But time marches on, never ending. Time keeps its own time.

What Mexico gave me and my kids can never be extracted from the warmest zones in our hearts, but sadly, logistically, focus must be paid to today’s climate, today’s family, today’s roots. Small Mexican fishing villages don’t offer much to blossoming young adults, so here we are.

Happily.

I’m so grateful to have a home base in the big blue house where I can offer what I love to the right people who find me. Those of you on the list are part of my world now and I’m forever grateful for you.
So send me a little love this week as I’m crying into my (many) bulging suitcases- saying goodbye to a cherished home that forever shaped the minds and hearts of the kids and me.

I’ll be back in the office on Sunday the 23rd and I’ll have plenty of open hours around Thanksgiving. Book online now or give a text/call.

I’ll be sure and blow some sunshine up this way.

With Love, Heather

To get on the list for infrequent updates, go to vagaro.com/hriddle

05/11/2025

Last live! 7 was good-learned plenty😅

29/10/2025

24/10/2025

Day 2!

23/10/2025

If you think I deserve a 5-star review, would you put that here? Time to do
Something with this page;)

I appreciate you 🙌🏻💕😊

20/06/2025

For the modern day goal-oriented, busy mind, it takes a lot of practice to develop the ability to feel the almost imperceptible softness of the skull sutures.

[I mean the skull is just one big round bone, right?]

And since the clients are on the same ambitious track, it can also take time for the them to be able to feel their own subtle movements as they happen within.

[I mean, we are just a super fancy, biomechanical apparatus, right?]

But often, even on the first session, the client will feel “something“ that they can’t quite explain with their mathematical minds. Memories, clarity, visuals, disappearing headaches, and softening joints.

The technique is osteopathic, but someone offering Craniosacral Therapy has focused on feeling these subtle movements and subtle restrictions. When they are practicing outside of a medical conglomerate, they have *time* to listen and feel and (ever-so-gently) respond.

And when you get on their table and let them put their hands on you, they help your body remember how to feel these things as well.

This skill is an innate skill that we were all born with, but have been cultured out of. But it’s right here at the surface, ready to be cultivated.

By slowing down.

Noticing your breath, your heartbeat, and…
those other rhythms.

Surges..

Pulses…

Movement in the stillness…

So…………

Can you feel them?

20/06/2025

Throughout the short lifetime of allopathic medicine, it has been believed that the bones of the skull fuse together as a child grows into adulthood. They become hard, inaccessible.

The osteopaths that pioneered Craniosacral Therapy noticed that some of the boundaries between the skull bones of a child grew together and ossified (became bone). Others however, grew together yet still maintained the abilty to move a little bit. As time and technology marched on, we learned that these microscopic spaces were housing nerves, blood vessels and more vascular fascial tissues.

That’s what these photos are… These are the fusions that still hold vascular tissues.

These are the junctures we are focusing on when we are gently touching your cranium, not moving, just listening, witnessing and allowing for movement.

This is where the tissues of your body self correct, freeing themselves from no-longer-necessary patterns.

These patterns may have been established in the birth canal. They may have been established during a trauma, thosectwo years in braces, or when you fell in love with the hat that was too small. Who knows? What’s better is you don’t need to know, because your body knows. And once the pattern is witnessed, it can begin to self-correct. But that’s another post🌊

So pictures like this bridge the modern scientific mind with the deeper wisdom of the body-which as of yet cannot be measured and therefore falls outside of calculable science.

Until we can measure the sigh, the peace of mind, the ease of pain, we will have to rely on correlations like these photos.

I hope this post helps to build more bridges of this sort and open more minds to more possibilities 🧠✨

28/04/2025

Thanks for visiting!

The link to check my schedule or book online is above. There is more information about me there and more reviews. I also have some reviews on the Google platform if you’re just checking me out 🙂

Feel free to call or text anytime!