How I Created Lifeprint Reiki: A Journey of Healing and Discovery

I was drowning in a lifetime of traumas until the 2020 pandemic when I finally had the solitude needed to heal and reconnect to my authentic self and purpose. The critical point in my spiritual development happened in 2018 after I moved to New York City in 2012 to pursue theater and playwriting, believing the darkest moments of my life had passed. But in 2014, I moved into a studio apartment with my 7-year old dog, Mossi. I didn’t know then, but my building was owned by New York’s most prolific, unindicted crime family, the Goldmans. Though patriarch Sol Goldman, a well documented racketeer and sex trafficking slumlord, died in 1987, his youngest daughter, Jane Goldman, took over, and runs the business, Solil Management, to this day, exactly as her father did. 

I was subjected to the unbearable jackhammering noise of constant illegal apartment renovations and filed several complaints with the city, only to find each case was closed after two denials of entry, not escalated.  Jane Goldman’s knowledge of obscure city laws and using them to her advantage is the definition of corruption.

Daily life with the unbearable illegal jackhammering, and knowing there was no one in the city government willing to help me deal with a criminal landlord who ignored her contractual obligations, dropped me into a deeper depression where I lost all interest in everything I used to love doing, like cooking, writing and art. But I finally had the wherewithal to seek professional help. 

At the age of 55, I was diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum, which then made my whole tumultuous life make sense. I needed medication to help with the depression and was also diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder. It became clear I had been suffering with undiagnosed anxiety my entire life.

Through all this, my inner drive for civil justice wasn’t dampened, and at the apartment, I was finally able to have illegal construction shut down, but that only lasted a day. I was so naive and felt brokers needed to know about the illegal apartments and started emailing the larger real estate brokers letting them know Jane Goldman’s apartments were illegal, as it’s also illegal in NYC for licensed brokers to show illegal apartments.

Jane found out about my activism and one afternoon in February 2018, called me to threaten a lawsuit against me and my mother as guarantor, if I didn’t stop, on some type of business interference grounds. Intimidation is another RICO violation, as of course, a lawsuit never happened.

Because the doormen were so hostile towards me, I moved before the end of my lease. Once I found a new safe place to live, I could really appreciate just how traumatizing the experience was and knew I needed to find a way to heal. I absolutely hated Jane Goldman but knew my journey was to find a way to love all the horrible experiences she brought to my life.

(To read more details of my experience with, and evidence of, the Goldman family’s 80-year unabated crime spree in New York City, please visit www.stevefogelman.com/poisonivyleague)

I thought I had hit rock bottom, but just a year later, in May of 2019, the love of my life of 13 years, my dog Mossi, had to be put down as his hip dysplasia degraded to where he could no longer walk. I was absolutely devastated realizing I was actually living my life for him; I was always thinking about getting home to feed or walk him and constantly checking the weather to be dressed appropriately for those walks. But now he was gone and the grief was unbearable. 

By this point, I had become familiar with many meditations available on YouTube.  But now I focused on Self Love videos and affirmations to heal, listening several times a day, and furiously journaled my feelings. I also scoured the internet on ways to properly grieve, and found an article about post-traumatic growth, making that my mantra. With the help of a therapist, I began the transformation to Steve 2.0, which I discuss more in chapter 6. 

I had met a shaman through a mutual friend who came over to perform a Tibetan Healing Bowl ceremony on me, which propelled me to search into the healing powers of sound, specifically the Solfeggio Frequencies.

These frequencies have been around for millenia, and in 16th century medieval Europe, the Solfeggio system was used extensively in church music. Gregorian chants were believed to have healing properties, and it was thought they could have a calming effect on the body and the mind.

But it was in the 1970s that Dr. Joseph Puleo, a naturopathic physician, and researcher, rediscovered them. He came across the Solfeggio Frequencies while studying the Book of Numbers in the Bible, and noticed that certain passages contained a series of six repeating codes, an ancient 6-tone scale which he believed corresponded to the six notes of the Solfeggio scale. He also found that these codes were linked to a set of ancient frequencies that had been used for healing purposes millennia ago.

In 1999, Dr. Puleo published the book The Healing Codes of Biological Apocalypse, which not only detailed his findings on the Solfeggio Frequencies, but also included a series of meditations and affirmations designed to help people harness the healing power of the ancient scale, which gained popularity as part of New Age spirituality. 

I discovered Reiki at this time too. After one in-person session, the pandemic hit, making it necessary to continue remotely. My practitioner felt I had negative entities attached to me. (Shamans and healers across cultures often describe negative energetic attachments that can drain a person's vitality, as during trauma, a person's energetic field can become weakened or fractured. This emotional vulnerability can create an opening for negative entities -some we even create ourselves- that can interact with living beings and even exert some level of influence on thoughts and emotions.) Ten remote sessions with my teacher effectively rid me of the negative entities and I was gaining back my inner strength.

Ever since I was a young boy, I felt there was something different about me and looked to astrology and other spiritual practices in search for answers about the otherness I felt. I was born into a Jewish family and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, made famous by the Billy Joel song, even though the steel mills were in Bethlehem. I’m the third of four children, and definitely developed the Middle Child Syndrome, which is now simply called trauma. My eldest sibling, a sister, is nearly eight years older, because after her, my mother suffered a couple miscarriages before my brother was born, and then just fourteen months later, I arrived. I was nearly five when my younger sister was born.

I was born two weeks late and jaundiced and had to be put under a bright light, unswaddled for hours a day and never developed an initial secure feeling. A week later was the ceremony of my circumcision, which Psychology Today confirms can create sex abuse trauma when done without anesthesia. At age one I had to have surgery for an undescended testicle and my mother said I absolutely howled with distress when she had to leave. Off to a great start setting the stage for a lifetime of anxiety and abandonment issues.

As a toddler, I was a rocker. At night to fall asleep, or if I’d wake up in the middle of the night, I’d have to rock myself to sleep banging my head against the plaster wall while hugging a pillow. Today we recognize that as a stimming behavior to soothe deep feelings of a lack of safety. But back then, I was judged as a weird child never getting any help to deal with my overwhelming emotions. Instead of my family being sympathetic or even compassionate to the situation, I was further teased about the bald spot the head banging left on my scalp.

There were psychologists in the 1960’s, so I always wondered, as a parent, why you wouldn’t want to figure out why your kid banged his head every night. I experienced what’s called “Benign Neglect,” which is when your physical needs like food, clothing and shelter are met, but emotional needs are ignored. It creates a feeling of not being important.

What I remember most about growing up is always being nauseous. Everyday it seemed. But the unhelpful response from my exasperated parents was always: “Take a shower, you’ll feel better.” “Go for a walk, you’ll feel better.” “Have something to eat, you’ll feel better.” This was the 1960’s, so my daily stomach issue was trivialized, where today it would be considered a symptom of something much more complicated, along with my other behavioral issues. 

I also suffered severe motion sickness, which is a psychological sign of lack of control. If I would even get in a car, I would throw up. Motion sickness manifested the trauma of humiliation, because it’s impossible to control and everybody knew about it. Even close friends of my parents, if they took a flight somewhere, would collect air sickness bags from the plane to bring back for me, which didn’t make me feel good about myself. They were kept in the backseat pocket of our station wagon, just like on a plane.

I was sent to an orthodox Jewish day school from kindergarten through sixth grade, although we were reform at home, meaning all the rituals I was taught at school as important parts of my religion, were not practiced at home, adding religious trauma to an ever growing list of traumas I had to deal with.

Although I had friends, I suffered from such emotional arrested development, that intimate relationships eluded me since I never felt safe talking about my feelings or asking for what I needed. Not to mention, when puberty hit, I was alone dealing with all the changes in my body, and turned to food for comfort. I was considered an overweight tween, and when my mother took me to the doctor to figure out a way for me to lose weight, it sent the subliminal message that I was not loveable as I was. My sixth grade class photo exists as a record of all the pain I was feeling.

On top of all that, I was a closeted gay teen in the 70’s which created shame for being who I was. I could never be myself, even around friends, and even after I came out around 30, intimate gay relationships eluded me as I was scarred with self-hatred where being with another gay man meant the world would know and judge me.

When I was 20, sadly, my uncle Arnold, my mother’s brother-in-law, dropped dead from a heart attack at the age of 44. This set the stage for the future revelation about deep ancestral trauma. He was the only one in the family that tolerated me and we spent a lot of time together since I was interested in all his crafting hobbies and DIY projects. He was part of the inspiration behind my pursuing a degree in architecture. 

Arnold, along with my father, ran the family garment business after my maternal grandfather retired. My father was in the process of leaving the business, wanting to open a popcorn store at the local mall. But since he was still legally involved, my father had to return. Contractually, my uncle’s share in the business was sold to my father, who then became the sole proprietor. It was at this time that the factory became phenomenally successful, leaving my aunt and her family out of the ensuing financial windfall, instigating a building resentment between my aunt’s family and ours.

I was now 36 and in the midst of launching a private chef business. I had sent my parents a copy of my marketing brochure to keep them in the loop of what I was doing and received a voice message from my father congratulating me and wishing me luck in the business. I had always considered him a ‘dream killer’ because everytime I had an idea for something, all he could offer was why it wouldn’t work. That voicemail was a message I had waited all my life to hear, but the next day he was dead.

My brother took over running the family business, though it was now owned by my mother. My aunt had remarried, and her new husband came to work for us as head of Human Resources. This was the late 1990’s and much work was going overseas and the business found itself in tough times. My brother had asked all office executives to take a temporary 20% pay cut to help. which prompted my aunt’s husband to quit and sue us over the matter two weeks before my brother’s second wedding. I was understandably furious and sent my aunt a scathing letter expressing how I felt. Because I had apologized for it the next day, I was shocked to find out I had been villainized over it by not only my cousins, but also friends of my aunt who now looked down on me, but not the guy who filed the lawsuit. I was confused and deeply saddened how writing a letter expressing feelings could be worse than suing your own family, and plummeted me into the beginning of my midnight of the soul.

The situation tore the family apart. Although several months later, all executives were reimbursed for their temporary sacrifice, it would be another 20 years before I put the pieces together to realize I was the subject of what psychologists call a narcissistic smear campaign with transfer of blame, and that narcissism was an ancestral trauma.

My mother was especially upset as the relationship with her sister was in turmoil and I was searching for comfort and answers when I discovered the Kabbalah Center. I enrolled in classes and attended regular shabbat services because I felt welcomed, and stayed an active member for over four years, despite it being a cult of Judaism.

The true Kabbalah is an esoteric practice with hidden meanings in multiple layers of consciousness, instilling the need to look at all things for deeper, hidden personal meaning and insight. I learned Kabbalah’s ten interdimensional aspects of life through which the Divine manifests in the world, and that the Divine energy flows and interacts with creation. That everything in the universe is interconnected, forming a single tapestry of existence, fostering a sense of unity and belonging, and the ability to see myself as part of something larger than myself. Kabbalah also emphasizes the importance of personal growth and transformation to refine character, overcome negative tendencies, and cultivate positive qualities.

At the end of my tenure at the Kabbalah Center, the 2008 mortgage crisis hit and I lost my house and most of my savings. My midnight of the soul became a deeper depression that only went away when I went off to improv classes. Otherwise there were days I didn’t even have the energy to walk the dog past the front lawn. I didn’t have the wherewithal to seek the needed professional help, as it’s common for traumatized people to find asking for help difficult, since they never had helpful people in their life as a child.

While many suffered through the 2020 pandemic, it was the best time of my life. While I was able to empathize with the loss and grieving everyone experienced from my own past loss, I was also overjoyed I no longer had social obligations to my toxic family. Zoom became the way to connect, and my younger sister organized a family chat. I remember being in the group chat talking and trying to engage but nobody was listening to me. There were about ten of us all trying to talk at once, and while it seemed other people were connecting, nobody was connecting to what I was saying. Nobody heard me. I had grown to realize the level of toxicity in my own family and how no one was willing to listen to me my entire life. Striving to fill the need to be heard and seen is a common human experience.

The pandemic also awakened my inner need to help. As a professional actor, all my theater friends were out of work for who knew how long. Would theater ever return? Everyone might need help finding new passions in life so I enrolled in an online life coaching certificate program through Life Purpose Institute. LPI has been around for nearly 40 years and is the forerunner of the style of life coaching we have today. Within four months, I was a certified life coach with clients in NYC, Los Angeles, Canada, England and Cyprus.

I never in a million years thought my destiny included being a spiritual coach, but realizing my own spiritual growth, soon felt adding a spiritual component to my coaching would help me succeed. I returned to LPI to add certified spiritual coach to my resume.

Once I was learning all types of effective techniques to help people clear toxic energies, I found myself healing even deeper from my past, and connecting to more of my own self love. The most effective tool was Body Tracking, which helps find where the traumatic energy is stored in the body and release it through visualization and breathing. I became so attuned to the subtleties of energy in my body, I could easily practice it walking down the street.

With all these distracting sensations gone from my body, I found myself able to stop dwelling on my painful past with self pity and to view it merely as opportunities that led me to be the authentic person I was now becoming.  I had the epiphany that my life couldn’t possibly be as fantastic as it is now if I hadn’t gone through those difficulties, because working through them is what brought me to now.

As an actor myself, I realized that most actors suffer trauma and wanting to be seen is an unconscious search for love. Acting also helps process trauma, and why play acting is used in trauma therapy. Self care was a popular buzzword at the time, and self love now, is more than massages and walks in the woods, but actually a spiritual lifestyle and mindset rooted in one’s humanity, and fulfilling one’s soul’s purpose. I wrote an ebook all about this subtle but important difference between self care and self love called The Self Love Journey. Writing that preliminary book was an important part of creating what has now become the 11 Insights of Lifeprint Reiki.

After a series of non-coincidental coincidences, learning Reiki healing became an obvious path to explore. My level 1 Reiki master mentioned he attuned Autistic children to Reiki to help heal themselves, as the energy’s effective at healing the brain. Before then, it never occurred to me that an individual could be attuned to Reiki merely to heal themselves. How empowering to unlock one’s inherent power of healing! Think about when something hurts in your body, your hands automatically go to the point of pain. We’re wired to heal ourselves, but society teaches us we need someone outside ourselves to complete the healing. When you perform Reiki on yourself, in addition to calming your mind, you can also clear your chakras, heal joint pain, body aches, and pains, and grow confidence in your proactive strength.

As I continued healing myself and offered to help friends and family, I had another empowering epiphany that Reiki was also a way to heal my ancestral trauma of a lifetime of narcissistic abuse. It became clear: gaining the ability to heal ourselves and our families is part of many souls’ purpose, 

I went through the levels of Reiki training, while practicing meditation and journaling with the solitude of the pandemic and finally was no longer drowning in trauma.  Although there’s still plenty to heal and integrate, I became empowered with a new emotional intelligence, gaining agency to feel safe speaking up for what I wanted and needed.

Lifeprint Reiki was born as a new non-religious spiritual lifestyle and societal blueprint based on the empowerment of first and foremost healing your and your family’s traumas to widen the path to happiness. I offer complete details and exercises to facilitate your own healing process in my book. Lifeprint Reiki's 11 Isights to Happiness which can be purchased HERE.