Generations – A New Path

Renewal Academy Offers Help for Those Seeking Health and Healing

Katlyn Boucher and her husband, Brandon, have always lived a life of service and wanting to help others.

Seven years ago, Katlyn, a former elementary school teacher, and Brandon, a veteran, were individually struggling with trauma and mental health issues. Each were pointed to a new path that ultimately brought them together and allowed them to heal some parts of themselves that were hurting.

That journey led them to open Renewal Academy in 2018, a center for “Advanced Spiritual Training & Healing.” At the academy, they share those meditation and healing techniques to help others overcome challenges and trauma as they did.

Brandon served in the military for 8 years, returning after Sept. 11, 2001, to serve in Afghanistan for two years. Upon his release in 2003, he struggled with the lasting effects from the war. 

 

“I knew there was something that didn’t feel quite right,” he says. He tried self-medicating and numbing the pain. It was only after he attended the funeral of a friend he served alongside who died by suicide that Brandon says he had a wake-up call. He knew if he continued down the path he was on, he would also end up a statistic. In 2007, he visited the VA clinic and received a diagnosis — he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder like many other veterans who had been in Iraq.

He asked around for a cure and was told his best hope was to “manage” the disorder. As someone who refuses to take no for an answer, he set out to prove that theory wrong. He spent the next few years trying many different types of therapy and medication.

“There had to be something out there that could actually fix this,” he says.

In 2014, he found his answer when a friend invited him along to a meditation class. As he took part in the session, the underlying anger he’d lived with for the past decade since leaving the service dissipated. 

“I had a profound experience,” he says. “Literally, I felt peace. It was such a drastic shift — I noticed it immediately.”

He began practicing daily exercises and attending weekly sessions. He began studying the science behind why he was feeling better.

At his next doctor’s appointment when he completed his PTSD symptom checklist, the number was staggering — 19. When he was first diagnosed, it was at 54. This was the first time in 12 years of treating combat veterans that his doctor had seen such a drastic change. She told Brandon to keep doing whatever he was doing and to share that knowledge with other veterans.

He began training to become a healer himself. Through the program, he met his future wife, Katlyn, who got involved to face her own past traumas. After escaping one abusive relationship, she had found herself in another controlling relationship. “Women don’t survive those relationships,” her doctor explained.

Katlyn was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and prescribed medication. Like Brandon, she wanted to know how she could treat those conditions without a lifetime of medication.

“I started thinking, how do I heal what’s underneath the depression,” she says.

After leaving her teaching job, she found herself burnt out, trying to manage her mental health while deciding on her next career move. Her therapist suggested she attend a Life Activation Healing session. She also attended an Empower Thyself class, in which participants connect with their higher life purpose.

“It woke something up in me,” Katlyn says. She realized she would be OK and she would figure things out. Over time, she decided she wanted to learn how to bring this sense of understanding to others.

Seven years after attending the Healers’ Academy training, both Katlyn and Brandon are fully weaned off their medications. Katlyn has come through the other side of the abusive relationships she endured. 

They both are certified Healers and Life Activation Practitioners. 

“Together we have been this Team of Light to help people,” Katlyn says. They now help those going through struggles as they went through their own. They have seen their clients get new jobs and promotions and start new relationships.

“We get to serve people on a daily basis,” Brandon says. “We show them what’s possible when you align life with your life purpose.”             

Renewal Academy
Lowell, Mass.
(978) 710-8860
Renewal.Academy