Accessing Inner Secrets to Healing – An Interview with Leonie Blackwell

Leonie Blackwell is a leader in emotional wellness, with over 30 years of experience as a naturopath and educator. She is the creator of Empowered Tapping® and founder of the Bwell Institute, offering accredited practitioner training and transformational personal development. Leonie has worked with thousands of clients, trained hundreds of students, and has taught internationally, including trauma recovery programs for refugees. Her published works include, "Making Sense of the Insensible, The Box of Inner Secrets, and Accessing Your Inner Secrets". She is passionate about helping others live with authenticity, purpose, and joy.

Leonie Blackwell, Naturopath, Author & Teacher

What is Leonie Blackwell’s background, and how did she become a personal development expert?

Leonie Blackwell’s journey into personal development didn’t begin in adulthood. It began in childhood, long before she had words for what she was doing. Known among her neighbours as the child who voiced “uncomfortable truths,” she had an innate ability to observe and reflect the hidden dynamics around her.

“By the time I was seven,” she says, “my dad told me I already understood the world better than he did.”

From a young age, Leonie was journaling her inner thoughts and writing to her future self, offering reminders not to forget the wisdom of youth. Today, we might call her an “old soul,” but back in the 1960s, there wasn’t language for that kind of insight.

Throughout school, she naturally took on the role of counsellor to her peers. It surprised no one when she pursued a career in teaching, fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming an educator. Leonie worked in a socially disadvantaged technical school and quickly developed a reputation for being passionate, unconventional, and unwavering in her belief in her students’ potential.

After her first year, the school psychologist encouraged her to apply for a specialist counselling program, despite her being too young and not meeting the formal criteria. She was accepted.

Those early teaching and counselling years deepened Leonie’s natural ability to centre her work on the person in front of her. But when the education system began to shift toward standardisation and control, she made the difficult decision to leave.

“I couldn’t participate in policies that diminished young people’s confidence or limited their sense of possibility.”

Her next chapter as a youth worker, while short-lived, was no less impactful. Working in youth refuges and family group homes, Leonie quickly became known for challenging the status quo. It was during this time that she faced a life-altering health condition, one with no clear solution.

Diagnosed with a rare condition known as human seminal plasma hypersensitivity, she was told by doctors, “You’ll just have to live with it.” But Leonie had never been someone to settle for helplessness.

That experience led her into the field of naturopathy, where she could finally weave together all her passions–teaching, counselling, and holistic health, addressing the emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental dimensions of her clients’ lives.

Having survived a life-threatening illness and committed herself to the full-spectrum healing process, she was uniquely positioned to support others on their own journeys.

It was Leonie’s clients who first urged her to write a book. They wanted a way to access her insights whenever they needed them. That book, 'Making Sense of the Insensible,' became a foundational resource in her body of work.

And it was through her writing and teaching that her signature method, Empowered Tapping®, was born, a technique that continues to transform lives through its compassionate, practical, and deeply personal approach to emotional healing.

What is the core philosophy that drives her work?

Leonie Blackwell doesn’t do light and fluffy. Her work dives deep into the unmet needs and buried fears that drive human behaviour and emotional pain. At the heart of her philosophy is this unwavering truth, our emotional responses are not random.

Despite a culture that often paints emotions as irrational, inconvenient, or mystical, Leonie has spent decades helping people understand that their feelings are not only logical but often entirely predictable.

“There’s nothing mysterious about how we feel,” she often says. “It’s all there, if you know how to listen.”

Her work is anchored in a belief that everyone has the capacity to grow beyond their challenges, not by escaping them, but by understanding the patterns beneath them. With every client, she introduces two foundational frameworks – the 'Four Phases of the Healing Journey' and the 'Nine Levels of the Beliefs Continuum'. These tools help people make sense of where they’ve been and what’s unfolding, replacing unrealistic, linear healing narratives with an empowered, personalised roadmap.

One of the most common issues Leonie sees is people over-identifying with their conscious thoughts, assuming that if they’re thinking something painful, that must be the root cause. But, as she explains, the true source of our emotional distress often lies in what’s unconscious, submerged fears, protective beliefs, and unmet emotional needs that quietly shape our lives.

“A client once gave me a little wooden sculpture of a person holding their head,” Leonie recalls with a smile. “She said, ‘That’s how I feel after talking to you – like my brain aches.’”

“I told her that’s what rewiring neural pathways feels like. It’s not confusion. It’s clarity from being given language that makes your experiences make sense.”

Leonie believes that healing isn’t about becoming someone new, it’s about uncovering who we’ve always been. Too often, life’s pain, trauma, and survival strategies bury our true selves beneath layers of coping. Her work helps peel those layers back, revealing the essence that was never lost, only hidden.

“Our coping mechanisms are not our personality,” she explains. “They’re adaptations, not identity.”

She also holds that pain doesn't dissolve until we find our own answers. Healing can’t be templated or crammed into a “one-size-fits-all” program. Instead, it’s a deeply personal expedition of meaning-making, one that honours the individual’s story, survival strategies, and capacity to evolve.

At its core, Leonie’s philosophy celebrates the awe and wonder of being human, living as a spiritual being in a physical body, with all the messiness, beauty, and insight that journey entails.

How is Empowered Tapping® different from other tapping techniques, and who is it designed for?

Empowered Tapping® is Leonie Blackwell’s original contribution to the field of emotional healing – a method that rewires not just thought patterns, but the neural circuitry behind emotional pain, survival strategies, and limiting beliefs.

What makes it different is its unique use of brain-targeted language. Each Empowered Tapping® script functions as a guided conversation with the brain’s key centres – the limbic system, right and left hemispheres, and the prefrontal cortex. With precise phrasing, the scripts unlock entrenched patterns and mark them for neural dissolution during sleep.

While the rhythmic tapping on meridian points is shared with other methods, Empowered Tapping® goes further. It creates an immediate shift in perception, with the most profound changes often occurring after sleep, as the brain reprocesses and remaps.

This approach is ideal for people who want to do deep emotional work without re-traumatising themselves. It’s a safe yet powerfully direct technique that gets beneath the surface of symptoms and speaks to the root of emotional reactivity.

“Leonie recalls a client who initially requested Emotional Freedom Technique. Progress was slow until she tried Empowered Tapping®, and the shift was immediate. After that session, the client never wanted to go back to the old method.”

Clients may experience yawning, burping, stumbling over script words, disagreeing with phrases, or feeling tired or thirsty. These are all signs the process is actively working.

At its core, Empowered Tapping® doesn’t just soothe symptoms. It dissolves the emotional architecture that created them.

In her experience, what do people most often get wrong about healing and self-development?

According to Leonie, the greatest misconception is that healing must be perfect.

From childhood, people are taught to “get things right”, making being human itself feel flawed. Emotional pain becomes a sign of failure. Healing becomes performance.

As a result, people judge themselves for struggling.

“We internalise shame, humiliation, and guilt as if being imperfect means being unworthy,” Leonie explains. “So, when people set out to heal, they often judge themselves more harshly in the process.”

Leonie sees this self-judgment as the biggest block to healing. Positive affirmations, fast-track coaching, and spiritual bypassing often ignore the real roots of suffering, leaving people to believe they must be doing something wrong if they’re still in pain.

Her approach is grounded in what she calls 'Empowered Realism' – the radical acceptance of reality, without judgement. When people stop resisting what is, they begin reclaiming their agency.

“When we stop resisting reality, we start reclaiming our power,” she says. “That’s when we can grow. That’s when we get to choose.”

By exploring how identity has been shaped by cultural, familial, generational, and societal conditioning, Leonie helps people make sense of their lives.

“Our freedom isn’t found in becoming someone new,” she says. “It’s found in remembering who we already are, beneath the pain, beyond the coping.”

In Leonie’s philosophy, pain doesn’t make us better; it disconnects us. Healing is about clearing the layers that cloud our view so we can once again see the self we’ve always been.

“You don’t need to grow into your best self,” she says. “You are already whole. Healing is just about uncovering that truth.”

What is one message Leonie wishes everyone could hear about personal growth?

That being human is not a problem to solve. It’s an experience to honour.

You are allowed to grieve, to hurt, to be confused, and still be growing. You are allowed to ask for help and still be strong.

Healing is not about arriving at a flawless version of yourself. It’s about returning to the version of you that never needed to be hidden in the first place.

What inspired her latest book, and what can readers expect to gain from it?

Leonie’s latest book, 'Accessing Your Inner Secrets, was born from the thousands of emotional breakthroughs she has witnessed over decades in practice. 

Her goal was to create a resource that feels like a private session, one that helps people recognise their emotional habits, map their needs, and gently dissolve what’s been keeping them stuck.

“This book is for anyone who’s ever felt like they’re repeating the same emotional cycles but can’t work out why,” she explains. “It helps you name the patterns, understand the needs behind them, and shift the fear responses they’ve created, with compassion and clarity.”

She sees modern life as one of emotional accumulation that we are social beings living in cultural cages. As we suppress rather than release emotion, we create layers of miniature trauma responses. Each one is tied to an unmet need and its corresponding fear.

The book guides readers through this need-fear cycle and offers Empowered Tapping® scripts that unravel the pattern. Each script targets a specific emotional dynamic and is designed to gently dissolve trauma, clear confusion, and reconnect the reader to their authentic self. The process is accessible, practical, and highly effective.

“Each script takes just five minutes,” Leonie says. “And everyone can find five minutes to liberate themselves from emotional angst and discontent.”

Far from just another self-help book, 'Accessing Your Inner Secrets' provides compassionate, practical tools to reconnect people to their truth, one layer at a time.

Where to next? How can people connect with Leonie and explore her work?

There are many ways to explore Leonie Blackwell’s work. Each designed to meet people where they are and guide them into deeper emotional clarity:

• Work with me: 'The Quiet Room' is Leonie’s one-on-one Empowered Tapping® experience, ideal for those ready to release emotional blocks and reconnect with their truth.

• Study with me: Accredited practitioner training in Holistic Flower Essence Therapy and Empowered Tapping® Mentoring.

• Learn with me: Short courses on money, boundaries, forgiveness, and more. Join the Tappers Tribe or the HOW (Healthy. Optimal. Wellness.) community for regular support.

• Immerse with me: Deep-dive healing retreats in Australia and abroad, combining inner work with soul-restoring surroundings.

• Read with me: Her books, 'Accessing Your Inner Secrets' and 'Making Sense of the Insensible,' offer transformative tools for those seeking emotional empowerment.

Leonie also shares ongoing insights through her blog at leonieblackwell.au/blog, and readers can follow her on Facebook and Instagram to stay connected with her latest reflections, offerings, and upcoming events.

If you’re looking for a refreshingly honest, emotionally intelligent, and deeply respectful approach to healing, one that invites you to stretch beyond old stories and reconnect with your truth, Leonie’s work may be your next step.

“Leonie doesn’t offer quick fixes. She offers real transformation. The kind that honours your story, respects your pace, and leads you back to who you’ve always been.”

Explore 'The Quiet Room'. Browse a course. Read a chapter. Your next step doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be real. Start here!

Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info!

Read more from Leonie Blackwell