What Does Back to School Mean for You?

Every Season of Learning Offers Us Another Chance to Grow, Heal, and Become Someone New

By Rachel Y. Hill, DNP, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, AHN-BC, HWNC-BC

“Every season of learning ends the same way it began—with the chance to become someone new.”

Welcome back.

The cool thing about kids is that they grow up, follow their dreams, and go on to do genuinely great things.

Watching that unfold has been one of the real gifts of this season of my life.

Right now, kids are heading everywhere from Pre-K classrooms all the way through graduate and post-graduate programs.

There are so many versions of “back to school” happening at once this time of year that it would be nearly impossible to count them all.

Somewhere, someone is walking into kindergarten for the first time.

Somewhere else, someone is defending a dissertation.

And between those two moments is an entire world of people showing up for one more year, one more level, one more chance to learn.

When the Whole World Goes Back to School

In a way, the whole world is going back to school right now.

Not always to a classroom.

Sometimes we're going back to school in learning:

• How to heal.
• How to connect.
• How to love.
• How to grow.
• How to give back.
• How to reconnect with ourselves, with each other, and with whatever we've drifted away from.

Learning doesn't stop when we leave the classroom.

It simply changes form.

My kids are older now, so back to school means something different for me these days.

Mostly, it means slowing down in the school zones again.

I won't hear the laughter of kids on bikes going up and down the street quite as much anymore.

I'll miss the smell of new backpacks and lunch boxes.

The bells and whistles of a fresh school year.

All those small, loud signs that summer is over...

And something new is beginning.

I remember school for them.

And I remember school for me.

And since none of us are ever too old to learn new things...

I'm going back to school too.

Becoming the Student Again

This weekend, I'm taking a healing course at a school called Core Star.

And I'm genuinely excited about it.

I'll learn a bit more about the body, our energy fields, and how to bring ourselves back into balance—with ourselves and with the world we live in.

It's been a long time since I sat down as the student instead of the teacher.

The nurse.

Or the person who already has the answer.

There is something humbling—and healing—about allowing yourself to become a beginner again.

Stepping Into Core Star

Core Star Energy Healing School is a hands-on energy healing training program held through Gardens of Delight, a center for natural healing set in the rolling hills near the Missouri River, just outside Kansas City.

It was founded nearly three decades ago by Jim Crabtree.

He developed a seven-step process centered on what the school calls the “Wholeness Intention” and wrote about the approach in his book, The Seven Windows to Wholeness.

The school is now directed by Lynn Johnson Soulier—a graduate and longtime instructor of the program—alongside faculty members Karen Marie, Dawn Adams, and Denny Fitterling.

The training is built around hands-on healing techniques.

Students participate in individual one-to-one healing sessions alongside workshops, seminars, and classes.

The three-year program is structured around four-day intensives beginning Thursday evening and continuing through Sunday at noon.

When Healing Ourselves Ripples Outward

The philosophy behind the program is straightforward:

When we heal ourselves, we begin to transform our communities—and from there, the wider world.

Nature is treated as an actual teacher throughout the training.

Not simply scenery.

Students are taught that reconnecting with the natural world is itself part of returning to balance and wholeness.

In the body.

And beyond it.

I don't know yet exactly what this weekend will teach me.

But that not-knowing is, in itself, part of the point.

Sometimes growth begins when we stop needing to already know the answer.

The Healing Lineage Behind the Course

The course I'm taking this weekend didn't appear out of nowhere.

It traces back to Barbara Brennan, a name worth knowing if you're curious about where this kind of work comes from.

Brennan originally trained as a physicist and worked at NASA before turning her attention to the human energy field.

In 1987, she published Hands of Light, a book that became something close to a foundational text in the field.

She founded the Barbara Brennan School of Healing in 1982 to train professional healers in what she called Brennan Healing Science.

Her system combined hands-on energy work with psychological and spiritual process.

She continued teaching until her death in 2022.

Jim Crabtree, the founder of Core Star, graduated from Brennan's four-year program and taught there for two years before starting his own school.

Even the name “Core Star” has roots there.

It's the name Brennan's curriculum gives to the deepest level of work students reach in their final year of training—the place where a person's essence is meant to become most fully expressed.

So when I walk into this weekend's course, I'm not simply learning a technique.

I'm stepping into a lineage that runs back through decades of other people's healing, teaching, and learning.

No “back to school” moment really starts from zero.

We're always building on something someone else went back to school to learn first.

School Zones and Empty Bike Lanes

There's a particular kind of grief that doesn't get talked about much.

The grief of a season ending well.

Nothing went wrong.

The kids grew up exactly the way they were supposed to.

And still, something in me slows the car down in those school zones now.

Half out of habit.

Half because some part of me is still listening for the sound of it.

That's the strange thing about “back to school.”

It was never really about school.

It was about a rhythm.

The specific, loud, beautiful chaos of a new year beginning.

New shoes.

New pencils.

New nerves.

When your own children age out of that rhythm, you don't stop needing it.

You simply have to find a new version of it.

What Starting Over Really Means

Back to school, at any age, is really a symbol for something bigger.

The chance to learn.

To grow.

To graduate.

And to move into the next phase of who you're becoming.

That happens on more than one level at once.

Mentally, it means recognizing that the brain is still available to you.

The adult brain remains capable of building new neural connections throughout life.

Lifelong learning can strengthen what researchers call cognitive reserve—the brain's ability to continue functioning well as it ages.

Emotionally, it means agreeing to become a beginner again.

That's humbling when you've spent years being the expert in the room.

Research by psychologist Becca Levy has also explored the relationship between positive beliefs about aging and longevity.

What we believe about our ability to continue growing matters.

Physically, it means showing up.

Putting your body in a new room.

A new chair.

A new posture.

A new practice.

Core Star's own work centers the body as a place where healing and learning happen—not merely as an afterthought to the mind.

Spiritually, it means trusting that endings and beginnings may be the same event viewed from opposite sides.

The school year ends so another can begin.

The children grow up so you can grow into whoever you are now.

Nothing here is lost. It's converted.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
— Lao Tzu

What If Healing Makes Room for More?

There's a verse that keeps coming back to me as I prepare for this weekend.

It's the one where Jesus tells his followers that whoever believes will do the works he did, and “greater works than these shall he do.”

It's a strange, almost audacious promise.

That the healing he did in his lifetime wasn't meant to be the ceiling.

It was meant to be the floor.

I'm not bringing that up to make a theological argument.

I'm bringing it up because it points toward a question worth sitting with, regardless of your own beliefs:

If we actually learned how to heal ourselves—really learned it in the body, mind, energy field, and spirit—what would we be free to do with everything we're no longer spending on being unwell?

Every healing tradition I've studied, from the clinical to the energetic, keeps pointing toward some version of the same quiet idea.

Much of what limits us isn't fixed.

It's held in place by old patterns.

Old wounds.

Old beliefs about what's possible for a body and a life.

Loosen that grip, even a little...

And the energy that used to go toward surviving becomes available for something else entirely.

• Creating.
• Connecting.
• Contributing.
• Growing.

I don't know exactly what “greater things” looks like for me yet.

But I suspect it has less to do with performing miracles...

And more to do with becoming someone so whole that healing simply moves through me without costing me anything to give it.

Graduation Is Another Word for Ready

Every real season of learning ends in some kind of graduation.

Sometimes it's small.

Sometimes private.

Sometimes nobody hands you a diploma for it.

But you don't outgrow the need for that feeling.

You simply have to keep choosing new rooms to walk into.

So this weekend...

I'll be the new student.

I'll probably feel a little nervous.

A little out of my depth.

A little like I did on the first day of anything.

And I'm going anyway.

Because sometimes that discomfort is the first sign that something inside us is getting ready to grow.

The Invitation Beneath It All

Whether or not Core Star specifically is the right fit for you, there is an invitation underneath this experience that belongs to all of us.

You don't have to wait for permission—or for the “right” age—to learn something that changes how you understand yourself.

Your body.

Your energy.

Your capacity to heal.

Your ability to contribute to the world around you.

Back to school doesn't have to mean walking into a classroom.

Sometimes it means walking into the next version of yourself.

And perhaps that's what every new season is quietly asking us to do.

Questions for Reflection

• What does “back to school” mean for you today compared with what it meant when you were young?
• What area of your life is quietly inviting you to become a beginner again?
• What would it look like to treat this season not as falling behind, but as the next phase of your evolution?
• If you were fully healed—physically, emotionally, energetically—what might you have the capacity to do that you don't have the capacity for now?

--Dr. Rachel