ABOUT ROLAND
He didn’t set out to do this work.
His story began somewhere much more familiar. Family, responsibility, animals, work, and a farm in rural North Carolina.
Roland Walters
Walters Unlimited · Efland, North Carolina
ROOTED IN THE LAND
Before anything else, there was the farm.
Roland grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Efland, North Carolina. After graduating from NC State with a degree in Animal Science, he spent the next couple of years working on the farm before his career took him to Michigan, where he worked as a dairy cattle nutritionist.
After several years away, life brought him closer to home. Following a year in Virginia, where his son Evan was born in 2005, Roland returned to North Carolina and took over the family farming operation.
Back on the farm, Roland continued his career in dairy cattle nutrition while running the operation and raising his young family. Not long after returning home, his daughter Shayla was born with Down syndrome.
Roland could not have known how profoundly this little girl would change his life.
SHAYLA
One moment changed what Roland thought was possible.
When Shayla was just four months old, she was admitted to Duke Hospital for heart surgery. During her hospitalization, she went into heart failure and was critically ill.
As she lay beneath a heated light wearing only a diaper, Roland wondered whether she was warm enough. He reached toward her chest to feel her skin.
But his hand stopped several inches above her body.
He felt a firm resistance surrounding her chest, like an invisible dome. Unsure of what he was encountering, he pressed against it.
Shayla’s body moved with the pressure, even though his hand had never touched her.
Roland had simply reached out to see whether his daughter was warm. Instead, he encountered something he could feel and interact with, but could not explain.
Shayla survived the crisis, but she was left with profound medical challenges that would require significant care throughout the years that followed.
Roland didn’t yet understand what he had experienced. But he could no longer dismiss the possibility that there was more to understand.
Roland & Shayla
A STORY FROM HIS OWN FAMILY
Then there was Grandmother Talley.
Roland would also learn something about his grandmother that he had never known.
In rural North Carolina, there were people known for an old practice called “talking out the fire.” Grandmother Talley was one of them.
People suffering from painful burns, often associated with the tobacco farming of the time, might be brought to someone known for talking out the fire. Grandmother Talley was not said to heal the injury itself. People sought her out for relief from the pain.
By the time Roland knew this part of her story, there was no opportunity to ask her what she experienced or how she understood what she did.
For Roland, Grandmother Talley’s story became one more reminder that not everything we experience is easily explained.
THE SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING
One experience led to another.
What happened beside Shayla left Roland with questions he could not answer. Over time, he began paying closer attention to what he was experiencing rather than dismissing it simply because he could not explain it.
As he explored, something unexpected began to happen.
His experiences were no longer only about him.
Roland began noticing things when he was with other people. He could sense where someone seemed to be carrying emotional or physical pain, sometimes before they had told him it was there.
What began as curiosity gradually became something more purposeful. Roland learned to stay with what he was sensing, ask questions, listen, and allow the person in front of him to discover what might be beneath it.
Slowly, the work found him.
LEARNING TO FOLLOW WHAT WAS THERE
The work began to reveal itself.
Trying to understand what he had experienced beside Shayla, Roland explored different traditions and practices. He valued what he learned and the experiences of the people he met, but none of it completely matched what he had felt that day in the hospital.
Roland kept returning to one instinct. What he had encountered around Shayla felt like something that needed to be released.
He began seeing people in what would become the In The Healing Light space on the farm.
And that is where his understanding began to change.
As people shared their stories, Roland noticed that what they were saying often seemed connected to something he could physically or emotionally sense. A pain in the abdomen. An ache in a shoulder or knee. A sudden swell of emotion.
Rather than trying to make those sensations disappear, Roland began following them.
He found that when a deep hurt was given the space to be fully seen, felt, and witnessed, something could shift. What had been held so tightly no longer had to remain a barrier.
Session after session, the people who came to him helped shape the work.
THEN CAME A SIMPLE INSTRUCTION
Go to the core.
During one session, those words came clearly into Roland’s awareness.
They became central to how he works today.
He is not interested in simply quieting what appears on the surface. He listens for what may be underneath it. The old hurt. The belief. The fear. The experience that was never fully felt.
Not to fight it or push it away. To allow it to be seen and felt fully enough that it no longer has to stand in the way.
TODAY
Still rooted in the place where it began.
FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS WORKED WITH ROLAND
“I have received healing and counsel from Roland, both in person and long distance, and have found benefit on all those occasions.”
“I don’t want to give the idea that Roland thinks he is something special. Quite the opposite. He is genuinely humble. He offers what he does in a genuine, humble way.”
CONNIE BEDOYA