Get to know Lia
Lia Russ started life in an isolated town, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
The town itself was lost in time and in 1962 looked much as it had back in the Gold Rush era.
Lia was born with a condition that required her to wear casts from the knees down for the first six months of her life (and then corrective shoes until she was 7).
Being weighed down by the casts caused Lia to be less active than other children and she learned to entertain herself from a place of stillness, becoming introspective and hyper-aware of her surroundings. Interestingly, the effects of this restriction were similar to those resulting from a Lakota child being cradle board trained. Not being mobile, Lia learned to study her surroundings quietly, observing cause and effect. It is from this place that she has looked at life since, and you can see this in all her writings.
It wasn’t long before Lia’s small world fell apart as her mom left Lia’s dad in the middle of the day and he disappeared from their lives forever.
As time passed, Lia found herself in more and more pain. She struggled to fit in, as she and her mom moved from town to town and school to school in a never-ending nightmare.
Eventually her mom remarried and Lia hoped to finally have a father, a family and roots — but that was far from what she encountered. At nine years old Lia healed a horse destined for a dog food cannery. She did this by following inner promptings that she normally ignored… which was both elating and frightening. Because she had no context for this experience, she put it away for decades, never telling anyone about it.
Although Lia is neurodivergent, struggling with both dyslexia and being on the ADHD spectrum, her mind absorbs information like a sponge — only she can’t control what information will be stored and what will not. This has often caused Lia to feel like a stranger in her own life.
Over her lifetime Lia has amassed a huge volume of facts about the natural world — biology, microbiology, physics, and plant life — as well as about nutrition, herbs, psychology and feelings.
Lia often refers to herself as an Emotional Mage, able to ride the strongest emotions into the depths, and come out the other side, singing or laughing.
However, awareness of this developed over time. When young, Lia did not have a sense of being good at anything, so much so that by 7th grade she was terrified of never having a career that could support her. After being told she could not continue her college studies unless she took a remedial English class (her spelling and punctuation were sixth grade level), Lia — fearing more humiliation — fled the country.
For a decade, she had felt a powerful connection to Japan and to Buddhism, so when she got the opportunity to leave the USA for Tokyo with a boyfriend’s class trip, she jumped at the opportunity.
Leaving the country with a backpack, a tent, a sleeping bag and $500, Lia went looking for hope and possibly self-redemption. This trip to Asia lasted two and a half years, and it is from this journey that her latest book, Winging It: A Memoir of My Journey to Asia, was born.
She began Winging It in the early 2000s, writing during the winter months when her landscape design business was dormant. However, life had other plans for Lia.
When she was asked in 2014 to give a lecture on a theory she developed about why crystals are able to affect certain organs and chakras. She got involved in researching new discoveries; she was sure that with the more sensitive scientific instruments now available, others would have substantiated her theories. What she found instead is that only theories that will be profitable receive grant money for research. Science didn’t care about low EMFs — even though they had been found to heal the body — because they could not be controlled by big pharma; so they were by and largely ignored.
Lia had four months to write the paper for her lecture and she researched physics and molecular biology eight to ten hours a day the entire time.
It wasn’t until the last week before her lecture that she discovered phonons — which proved her theory correct! She went to the American Society of Dowsers, gave her very successful lecture, and came home expecting to get back to editing Winging It.
Instead, Lia found that she had gotten pregnant! All the research she did was causing a cascade of information in her brain that would not let her sleep. This persisted until she stopped working on Winging It (putting it aside for almost ten years) to create a book she had no intention of writing. It took eight years to amass the 450 pages, 77 chapters and 250 footnotes of Connecting the Dots: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, an Amazon best seller.
Lia has co-written two other books, both about energy work, Lightworkers Archetypes and The Ascension Guide. Believing that we are all eternal students, Lia continues to pursue esoteric knowledge to advance her healing abilities.
Lia’s Aura
Lia is a natural healer, a Shamanic Reiki Master, and a Usui Reiki Master and teacher. She has been initiated as an Incan Shaman and into the Tetzkatlipolka healing tradition. She is a certified yoga instructor, a Creative Arts Therapy and Sand Play Practitioner as well as a Flower Essence Practitioner.
Recently a new aspect of Lia’s healing work has emerged. She can activate people’s ability to access information through their third eye during her sessions with them, often after the first one.
Lia is available for book signings, talks, readings, classes and remote healings.