Joy Gardner (aka Joy Gardner-Gordon and Joyce Prensky) is the author of 11 published books that have collectively sold over 200,000 copies, a CD, and an audio cassette on self-healing. She has taught throughout the United States, Canada, England and Australia.

Living in the Southwest and then in the Northwest, Ms. Gardner studied with the Hopi, Apache, and Coast Salish Indians, learning herbal, shamanic and sound healing. This she combined with her own ancestral Hebraic tradition as the daughter of a precognitive mother and the granddaughter of a rabbi/cantor.

Joy knew she would be a writer from the time she was in the second grade. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, Roosevelt University in Chicago, the University of Chicago, Hunter College, and New York University, where she majored in English.

Persuing her healing career as an herbalist, Ms. Gardner was educated in the field, living in a rural commune with 80 people on 200 acres of land at Black Bear Ranch in Northern California. Her fellow communards provided the laboratory for one of the first contemporary experiments in holistic healing in 1966. From there, Joy worked at the Country Doctor Community Clinic in Seattle, where they published her first book, Healing Yourself, which eventually sold over 100,000 copies.

She also helped start the Siuslaw Rural Health Clinic between Florence and Eugene, Oregon, where she worked as an Alternative Practitioner. Later Ms. Gardner trained with death-and-loss pioneer Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and helped start a hospice in Nelson, B.C., in Canada, where she trained volunteers. Ms. Gardner studied spiritual healing with British Intuitive, Rev. Helena Ram, Gestalt and Reiki with Bethal Phaigh (author of Gestalt and the Wisdom of the Kahunas) and cellular consciousness with Dr. Graham Ferrant of Australia.

Her close relationship with nature gave rise to an intimate sense of communication with rocks and crystals, which led to the creation of her own unique method of healing, which she calls Vibrational Alignmentª. She has been featured in Susanne Sims's book, Healing Vacations in Hawaii. Ms. Gardner participated in a 2005 study by Jeanne Achterberg, Ph.D., author of Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine. Using a state-of-the-art MRI at North Hawaii Community Hospital in Waimea on the Island of Hawaii, Achterberg demonstrated that intentional sounds and energy sent by Ms. Gardner at random designated times to a recipient in the MRI registered definitively at specific centers of the brain (see below). Red areas are positive activation, blue are negative.

She has been a member of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM), a professional member of the American Herbalists Guild, and she helped start a Bioneers group in Asheville, NC. Her personal interests include lapidary work, silversmithing, creative dancing, hiking, biking, traveling, and swimming with dolphins. She is the mother of two sons: Kalon Prensky, who lives with his wife Petra and his son Keanu in Maui, Hawaii; and Reuben Prensky, who lives with his wife Zoey Wren in Vancouver, BC, Canada.