I’ve got a really fun story that I want to share with you. Back in the ’80’s there was a movie that came out about a spiritual healer called Resurrection. I need to tell you about the movie so that you’ll understand why I’m blogging about my gas station. The movie opens up with a young woman (Ellen Burstyn) buying a very fun, red convertible sports car for her husband for his birthday. He totally loves with his car and they take it for a spin, laughing and having a very happy time driving on windy mountain roads.

A car comes out of nowhere and they have to swerve to miss them. Their car goes over the embankment, he dies in the accident and her legs are almost paralyzed. She needs to walk with crutches and she needs to move in with her horrible fundamentalist father.

Next scene, family picnic. Her nephew gets a nose bleed and he’s a hemophiliac so everyone is running around panicking about getting him to town. She asks them to bring the boy to her where upon she puts her hands on him (not knowing why) and his nose bleed stops. Everyone kind of gasps and wonders what in the heck just happened and she has no explanation for it. The movie progresses. Word spreads. More people come by her house to get healed and slowly her fanatical father decides this is the work of Satan and tells her she has to live out in the little house out back. He doesn’t want anything to do with it.

She agonizes over her “gift” quite a bit. Wonders why her hands won’t heal her own legs but will heal others. Eventually she gets her legs healed. She moves into doing big tent revival healing services and people come from all over.

Enter Sam Shepard. Handsome, charming young man who sweeps her off her feet. They fall in love and get married. On a road trip that they take together, they come across a rickety old gas station in the middle of nowhere. It’s the kind where they sell hard boiled eggs in those big glass jars and in one of the jars is a two headed snake. It’s a cool little place. The man that runs it is a cool old man.

Soon after, ol’ Sam starts reading his Bible alot, starts the same b.s her dad did, and starts accusing her of working for the devil.

As he gets more and more obsessed with her abilities, she is very busy doing healings on people, getting tested by the local University and going through some pretty tough stuff with her gift of healing.

One day her husband shows up to one of her tent revival healing sessions with a shot gun. He pulls out a gun to shoot her, yelling about needing to do this to kill satan or some goofy thing like that and someone in the crowd kills him instead.

The next scene in the movie, we see an RV pulling into that rickety old gas station. A young couple come out of the van with a bald,very pale little boy about 6 and you can tell right away he’s very sick. Out of the gas station comes our friendly healer, carrying an old oil rag in her hand and greeting the folks as she proceeds to fill up their gas tank. She asks the mom what’s going on with the little boy and she says that he has leukemia and not much longer to live so they decided to take him on a road trip across country.

The healer stoops down to the little boy and asks him if he’s ever seen a two headed snake.
She asks the mom if it’s okay if she shows him the snake and into the gas station they go.
As the little boy is standing admiring the snake, she puts her hands on his body and the audience knows that she is channeling a healing to him. She walks him back to the Rv, bids everyone good bye and that’s the end of the story.

I remember three distinct feelings when I left the theater that day. That spiritual healing had a long way to go before it was accepted by people and I wondered if I had what it would take to travel down the road of a healer and the third thought was that if I were to walk this path as a spiritual teacher and healer, I wanted a gas station at the end of my journey where I could just heal people that came into the station without even having to tell them what it was.
Just doing God’s work without all the fuss and being in a place that made me happy.

Well…………………here I am. Thirty years later. It’s been a long (very long) journey and this week I found my gas station although it’s not actually in the form of a gas station.

If you get my weekly emailing’s about Happenings at the Center, you know that I send out a monthly reminder about a place I love to shop at called The Cottage House. I refer to it as “my happy place” because it’s incredibly creative, colorful, funky, reasonably priced, and full of surprises every month.

Three days ago my landlord called to tell me that the place 2 doors down from the Center is available to rent and my intuition immediately jumped in and told me to get it.
At first I wasn’t sure if it was for more class space or private offices for healers and psychics but the next morning when I woke up, I heard my inner voice tell me that this was my gas station and that I needed to create my own Cottage House.

So in usual Echo Bodine fashion, with no money in my pockets and no idea how to run that kind of business, I called my landlord and told him I wanted the place!

Now comes the magical part where I get to watch all the pieces fall into place.

So stay tuned. I’ll let you know when the grand opening is. Oh and the name that came to me tonight that I’m going to call it is… My Happy Place.

I need to warn you though………………if you come into the store to shop and you’re not feeling so good, don’t be surprised if you leave with a bag full of goodies and feeling great.

I’m gonna be doin’ God’s work with no more hassles or drama. Just healing people when I feel led to and selling to the rest!!!

And yes, my work at the Center will continue. I’ll still be doing my career things. But My Happy Place will be a whole new chapter in my life and I can’t wait to share it with you.