Healed by Healing A POCKET WOMAN FINDS HER NEW CALLING
J
ana Din’s life changed the day someone set fire to her car. Din, a lifelong Pocket resident and a popular teacher at Galt High School, recalled the long-ago event that started her spiritual and healing quest. We were in one of the treatment rooms at the Tao Center for Healing, the Sacramento-based business she co-founded with her husband. The center offers a range of services, from acupressure to chiropractic treatments. On that life-changing day, someone snuck into Din’s Galt High classroom and took the TV/VCR, the photocopier and her purse. The thief also stole her car and later torched it. Although the police never found the culprit, Din says, “I felt terrible that someone who knew me would do this.” That event, which happened around the four-year anniversary of her mother’s death from cancer, altered her life. Around that time, Din started a sixyear apprenticeship with a shamanic healer. Her mother’s death, along with the trauma from having her car stolen, compelled her to explore alternative healing practices. In 2005, she began offering shamanic sessions to clients, often using a percussive instrument along with guided imagery to promote healing energy in the mind, body and soul. She had found her second calling even though she never pictured herself doing healing work.
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Jana Din Before that eventful day, Din, now 55, said her life was “traditional.” She grew up with her sisters in a house on Seamus and Fruitridge. “We used the river as a playground,” Din said. She attended John F. Kennedy High School and received a teaching degree from San Francisco State University in 1984. In 2011, the Galt Joint Union
High School District named her teacher of the year. She has taught there for more than 30 years. Dr. David Steinhorn, who was an attending physician at UC Davis Children’s Hospital, contacted Din’s healing mentor three years ago. He wanted to start a volunteer program to provide alternative healing services
to his critically ill patients and their parents. Din fit the bill. Din started volunteering at UC Davis, working with Steinhorn to “treat the whole person” by integrating Western medicine with ancient shamanic practices. She uses her drum to induce a relaxed state of mind, which has a calming effect on patients, and guided imagery to promote healing. Din showed me a scrapbook she’d made for Steinhorn. It is a heartbreaking and heartwarming collection of photos and stories of children she and Steinhorn worked with. Here’s a photo of Raiden. He was left brain-dead after a car accident, and his parents had to remove him from life support. Here’s Xavier; he was born with Type 2 Gaucher disease and spent his short life attached to a ventilator. Xavier’s parents devoted his last days to holding him close, something they were not able to do when he was on the ventilator. “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve witnessed,” Din said. Din understands that many people are skeptical about alternative healing. “I was really uncomfortable about the parents at school finding out,” she said. “What I realized was that it was my own discomfort at acknowledging that this was something I was called to do, just like teaching. They actually wove themselves together pretty easily.” She shares her patients’ stories with her students, and they create getwell cards for the children and their families. Before he moved out of the area last fall, Steinhorn praised Din in a letter: “While it is not yet a