Palisadian Inbal Gonen Helps Others with Calm Nest

By Lauren Fuchs | Intern

Prior to COVID-19’s outbreak, society had entered a mental health crisis, but the pandemic largely exacerbated such issues as people were pushed into isolation and faced with blatant uncertainty. Now more than ever, mental health resources and healthy coping mechanisms are in great demand. Palisadian Inbal Gonen hopes to help address the issue at hand.

Gonen had been dreaming of opening a brick-and-mortar wellness space that focused on intuitive healing practices even before the pandemic’s arrival, but when she realized that the highly transmissible disease would bar her from pursuing this dream, she decided to pivot.

Instead of giving up and allowing the pandemic to defeat her, she saw an opportunity. With the shift to exclusively virtual communication, Gonen decided to introduce her wellness space to the digital world with Calm Nest—a platform that connects energy healers and clients.

“The pandemic gave a lot of people the opportunity to look inwards. When you slow down it gives you time to reflect,” Gonen said to the Palisadian-Post. “And when you reflect, you often see things that maybe do not serve you or do not represent who you want to be or who are in your essence. Doing things like energy healing really helps you unlayer the things that do not serve you.”

Though she possesses many strengths as a professional in the wellness industry, Gonen shared that she lacked skill in the technological department when initially designing Calm Nest. Constructing an interactive website posed a much greater challenge than she anticipated.

Although challenges presented themselves, she reminded herself to “stay with it, to remember that there are good days and bad days, to not get discouraged, and to keep my eye on the prize,” she said.

Her platform Calm Nest officially launched in 2021.

Calm Nest acts as a “place where self-care is a priority, where clients can feel supported, where practitioners can expand their practice and where everyone can be an active participant in their personal growth journey,” according to the website.

Diagnosed with depression and anxiety at 12 years old, Gonen said she spent years experimenting with various methods of healing. According to the Calm Nest website, “her greatest time of calm came after she integrated energy healing into her life.”

This interaction with energy healing prompted Gonen to pursue a training in Reiki, a Japanese healing method that is said to transfer “universal energy” through a technique called “palm healing” and is among the practices that Calm Nest offers. Reiki “helps the flow of energy throughout the body in a way that is similar to acupuncture,” according to the website. Unlike acupuncture, “with Reiki therapy, the power of healing falls more within the client rather than the practitioner.”

In addition to Reiki, Calm Nest offers various modalities including ancestral healing, biofield tuning, sound therapy and more. Such practices can be transformative in coping with depression, anxiety, trauma, among a long list of other mental illnesses and disorders. Intuitive healing also initiates exterior improvements, further explaining the mind body connection, Gonen said.

“[These practices] are great for sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, chronic pain. In fact, UCLA, in their chronic pain and cancer patient department, uses Reiki because it helps reduce pain and anxiety significantly,” Gonen explained to the Post.

Because Gonen was a pre-med student at UCLA, she said she likes to approach the wellness and intuitive healing spaces with a scientific and medical perspective in mind. Starting off skeptical of the legitimacy of intuitive healing practices, she became increasingly confident in the field as she dove deeper into what occurs on the scientific level when an individual partakes in energy healing.

“Biofield tuning is really interesting because it works with the biofield that lives around the body,” Gonen said to the Post. “The world is full of different frequencies. Our body, because it has energy in it, has its own biofield. We carry this frequency around our body, and the frequency represents our history. And when we go through a type of trauma, disturbances are caused to our frequencies.

“When you get tuned, you actually use a tuning fork, and the practitioner moves the fork through your frequencies. When it hits a frequency that is out of whack, it stays there and it actually makes a different sound, and that different sound continues until the frequency in the air that it is hitting finds a balance. It brings it back to the normal frequency of the body and therefore releases the energy that is stuck in this wave. You are not gaining or losing energy, you are just playing with what you have.”

Though her company was originally set to fit an in-person, face-to-face model, Gonen’s digital platform has allowed her to expand on a level she never dreamed to be possible.

“The nice thing about us having an online platform is that we have practitioners that are from all over the world. It really allows us to reach the best healers that are around and we are not tied down to a demographic,” Gonen said.

The uniqueness of energy healing has worked to Gonen’s advantage as energy is everywhere and accessible to everyone, even through a screen.

Gonen said she hopes to continue to grow her impact and expand the Calm Nest community.

“My goal for Calm Nest this year is to reach an abundant amount of people. I want to teach people about energy healing, I want people to learn from it, and I want people to feel some relief from it,” she said. “We have gone through so much as a collective over the last few years, if we can ease the tension and the anxiety and the frustration and the pain, let’s do it.”