Path of the Healer

Returning to Yourself. Serving the World. A Story That Can Change Your Life

Adil Koishibayev

Zhanar Orazbekova

ISBN 978-5-0070-2443-3

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Review of Path of the Healer

Reading this book was a genuine privilege.

Despite a demanding schedule, I found myself returning to it daily — sometimes for just a few pages — yet even in the spaces between reading, it never truly left me. The story lingered: in quiet moments, in the middle of ordinary days, in the way I began to see the world around me.

This is not a book you simply read. It is a book you carry.

From the first pages, it draws you into something rare — an intimate, unhurried space where you are not merely following a story, but living through one. The heroine’s pain is rendered with such honesty that it becomes something larger than her own: it touches something universal, something most of us have felt but rarely had words for. There were moments when my body responded before my mind did — a quiet trembling, the sudden rise of goosebumps — as though the prose was reaching somewhere beneath the surface.

Each chapter opens with an aphorism — a still, grounding thought that sets the tone before the narrative begins. These moments of reflection create a gentle rhythm throughout the book, inviting not only understanding, but honest self-examination. You follow the heroine’s journey, yes — but you find yourself quietly tracing your own as well.

What moved me most was the book’s insistence on the present moment. Not as a concept, but as a felt reality. It slows you down. It reminds you to look at what is already here — the small, the quiet, the easily overlooked — and to find within it something worth honoring.

Path of the Healer has the rare quality of staying with you after the last page. It shifts something. Not loudly, not dramatically — but with the quiet certainty of something true. Each chapter leaves behind a thought, a realization, or simply a new way of sitting with yourself.

This is a book for anyone willing to be honest with themselves. It speaks to the heart without sentimentality. It awakens a desire to live with more intention — to appreciate, to connect, and above all, to be fully, unapologetically oneself.

Thank you, Zhanna khanym and Adil myrza, for the courage it takes to share work this personal. It has been a meaningful journey, and I look forward to witnessing whatever you create next.

With gratitude, Yulia Sitnikova

Chapter 1

We unconsciously believe that the Almighty

sees us from above — yet He sees us from within

Dear Reader,

If this book has found its way into your hands, it means that somewhere within you, questions have already begun to stir.

Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What does my future hold? When will I meet the person meant for me? Why do I face the difficulties I face? And why is it that someone who drinks every day can still build a business and drive a brand-new Toyota?

These questions don’t simply live in the mind. They live inside us. They unsettle us. They surface at 3 a.m. and follow us through ordinary afternoons.

Am I on the right path? Or have I been walking in the wrong direction all along?

I know this feeling well.

My name is Zhanar — though most people call me Zhanna. I come from Karaganda, a mining city where life teaches you resilience before you are old enough to ask for it.

I am a psychic, a medium, a healer — or, more simply, someone who perceives what most people cannot.

What does that mean in practice?

I can tune into a person’s energy and understand what is happening beneath the surface of their life. I help release what blocks them, what holds them in place. I can see patterns — in the past, in the present, and sometimes in what is yet to come.

My schedule is typically booked a week in advance. People reach out to me every day — from different cities, different countries, different lives. Some are searching for success. Others want to heal a relationship, find love, or find a way through illness.

Every story is different. Yet most people arrive with the same three desires:

Money. Relationships. Health.

From the outside, my work can seem almost unreal. People sometimes imagine something theatrical — a woman with extraordinary powers, surrounded by candles and shadows and ritual.

The reality is far quieter.

I work with energy — more precisely, with the way it moves.

Have you ever watched someone tune a piano? They listen carefully to each note, making small adjustments until everything falls into alignment.

That is what I do.

I begin by sensing a person’s state. Then, gently, I adjust — releasing tension here, restoring flow there. Over time, their energy begins to move freely again, filling the spaces where it had gone still.

Inside, something shifts. Outside, life begins to change.

Illness softens. Finances begin to open. Opportunities appear where there seemed to be none. Relationships find their footing.

From the outside, it can look like magic.

People often say: “You have the perfect work. You help people, and you have a gift.”

And yes — I can do many things.

But the greater the gift, the greater the weight of it.

Did I choose this path? Did I ask for this gift?

No one thinks to ask.

People see only the surface — the visible results — and assume it was always meant to be this way. Simple. Natural. Effortless.

But what did it cost me? What did I have to live through? What did I have to lose?

These are not easy questions.

But they deserve honest answers.

And I am ready to give them.

Chapter 2

Childhood is when you are insanely

happy because a soap bubble

touched the ground and did not burst

I don’t know about you, but I had a wonderful childhood.

I was the middle child in the family — three years younger than my older brother Timur, and ten years older than my younger brother Damir.

I was born in a small settlement called Molodezhny, about seventy kilometers from Karaganda.

There were no mountains, no forests — just endless steppe, low rolling hills, and a shallow river that dried up almost completely in summer.

In summer, when the sun burns everything in its path, the steppe turns dry and brittle — like hay left too long in the sun.

But in spring, something magical happens.

The land comes alive. The grass turns a deep, vivid green. The river swells and overflows its banks. A vast yellow carpet of wildflowers stretches endlessly in every direction.

And then there are the hills — small ridges and mounds that seem to awaken, like the spine of a giant dragon stretching slowly across the horizon.

Even as a child, I had a vivid imagination.

My mother used to say that I began speaking when I was only a year and a half old. Very often, she would hear me talking while I was alone in the room.

“Zhanara, who are you talking to?” she would ask, surprised.

“Mom, can’t you see?” I would reply, frowning slightly. “There’s an old man standing here — my grandfather, Kadyrbay-ata. And over there is Altyn-apa.”

My mother would raise her hands in confusion. She didn’t know anyone by those names.

After that, she began taking me to different emshi and baksy — traditional healers and shamans.

They tried, without success, to drive away what they believed were spirits, and to close off my visions. I was too young to remember any of it. I only know this part of my story from my mother.

Otherwise, I was a completely ordinary child.

I ran through puddles in rubber boots and came home dirtier than a little piglet. I loved playing with my cousins and the neighborhood girls.

At the time, I had no idea that just a century earlier, there had been nothing here but nomadic routes across the open steppe.

Everything changed after coal was discovered in the region in the mid-nineteenth century. The Ivanovsky open-pit mine was established, and people from across the Russian Empire were sent here — many of them for forced labor.

After the fall of the Tsar, the Bolsheviks came to power, and Lenin approved the creation of Karlag.

Karlag — the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp — became one of the largest in the Soviet Union, operating from 1930 to 1959. It left behind hundreds of thousands of broken lives and shattered destinies.

And yet, life continued.

Karaganda and the surrounding region began to grow. People arrived — or stayed after serving their sentences.

Karaganda gradually became a major industrial center for coal and metal production. The blast furnaces of the Karaganda Metallurgical Plant forged not only steel, but an entirely new kind of community.

Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Belarusians, Poles, Germans, Chechens, Koreans — each people brought something of their own: traditions, customs, cuisine, and ways of life. Together, they formed something remarkable.

I clearly remember the day I met Baba Galya.

She was a strong, broad-shouldered Ukrainian woman — solid as oak, built to endure.

A large nose. Piercing dark eyes. A long braid.

The first time I saw her, I was a little afraid.

But over time, I came to understand what kind of woman she truly was — remarkable, shaped by a life that had asked too much of her.

Before the war, she had been sentenced for stealing a single bucket of wheat. She only wanted to feed her starving children, Yasha and Nikolai.

I knew Yasha. Nikolai, as far as I remember, had stayed behind in Ukraine.

But that is not what matters.

What matters is this:

Baba Galya was not an ordinary woman.

People came to her from all across the settlement. She healed. She whispered prayers over those struggling with alcoholism. She rolled eggs over people’s bodies to draw out negative energy. She spoke quietly over herbs, as if conversing with something unseen.

And it was through her that I first stepped into the world of the mystical.

Chapter 3

They say we’re “scary monsters,”

How does the earth bear us?

Give us cards in our hands

To tell fortunes for the king

Chorus:

Oy-lya-lya, oy-lya-lya,

To tell fortunes for the king,

Oy-lya-lya, oy-lya-lya,

Hey-ha!

Song from the cartoon

“The Bremen Town Musicians”

“You carry sorrow in your heart, a new beginning in your mind… and under your feet, you’re trampling the King of Spades,” Baba Galya said, looking at me reproachfully.

“Zhanara, where did you drift off to?”

“Baba Galya, I was just lost in thought.”

She rolled her eyes.

“The spread won’t read itself. Go on now.”

And I ran back to my friends.

School had ended just a week earlier.

I loved studying. I was the class leader, part of the editorial board, always active, always involved — a perfect little builder of the bright communist future.

A model October child. An exemplary Young Pioneer.

Once, as one of the most active and disciplined students, I was awarded a trip along the famous Golden Ring of Russia. For two weeks, surrounded by equally exemplary schoolchildren, we traveled across the Soviet Union aboard a train called Friendship.

It was the first time in my life I had seen Russia.

Smolensk. Kostroma. Leningrad. We visited Vilnius in the Baltics, and of course the capital of our Motherland — Moscow.

Golden domes. Cathedrals. Churches. Castles. Fortresses.

Red Square. GUM. Lenin’s Mausoleum.

People — an endless, living sea of people.

It felt as though an entirely new world had opened inside my mind.

That was during my younger school years. I graduated from high school in 1994, almost with top honors — just a couple of B’s kept me from a gold medal.

In my final year, I had allowed myself to relax. I gave in to laziness, drifted into procrastination, and simply enjoyed spending time with my friends.

Still, my reputation held. All my teachers knew me as a participant in mathematics and physics Olympiads.

At the same time, I had a deep love for Russian literature and poetry. I was constantly writing — experimenting with prose, scribbling verses.

Two-line poems. Three-line poems. Haiku. Rhymed and unrhymed.

But above all — I wrote about love.

Like every girl my age, I dreamed of a prince.

Everything just as it was in the books: he would come for me on a white horse, and we would ride off together into the sunset.

It didn’t matter that boys at school had already asked me out several times.

I wasn’t interested in small change.

How could they possibly understand the depth of my soul? They wanted something simple. Something ordinary.

I was looking for something else — something like a star to light the way.

After all, I was a star myself. Or at least a small one, shining somewhere in the depths of the unknown and the mystical.

It was no coincidence that Baba Galya had taught me to read cards when I was still a child.

And like all proper teenagers, we sometimes held séances — trying to summon the spirits of famous people.

Count Tolstoy. Lermontov. Pushkin. Dostoevsky.

They were probably turning in their graves.

But that didn’t make it any less thrilling.

Spirit of the departed, come to us… appear before us!

Beyond summoning spirits, there was something even more fascinating — reading cards.

“Zhanara, please, tell our fortunes,” Samal said one afternoon.

“Alright, girls, sit down.”

I carefully shuffled the deck and began.

I don’t remember exactly what I told them.

But later, they would say it all came true.

Aiman became a mother of four. Samal had two children. Ira moved to Russia — just as the cards had shown.

The most important thing, though, is this:

For me, it was never fortune-telling.

It was something closer to foresight.

“What’s the difference?” you might ask.

Fortune-telling gives you a fixed, absolute answer.

“Miss, you will have three husbands, and the last one will beat you.”

“But I’m not even married yet…”

“It doesn’t matter — I said three!”

And from that moment on, the girl begins to believe it. To program herself around it. And eventually — it happens. Three failed marriages. The last one ends in suffering.

That is the danger.

Experienced practitioners who work with divination — beans, coffee grounds, tarot cards — will tell you something different: the future is not fixed. It is layered. It holds many possible paths.

Any reading is only a projection of the near future based on current conditions.

If a person begins to change — to grow, to develop, to move toward the light — a different path opens. One that is brighter.

But if they fall into depression, into alcohol, into despair — the outcome will likely be far darker than anything initially seen.

In the end, we are each responsible for our own lives.

For every action.

For every inaction.

For every thought.

Chapter 4

Gold is tested by fire,

A woman is tested by gold,

And a man is tested by a woman

The Chinese say the hardest thing is to live in times of change.

As for me, I was lucky enough — or unlucky enough — to grow up during Perestroika. A time when stores carried only one kind of sausage, and even that required ration coupons.

It was the time when a once unbreakable superpower collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, shattering into pieces.

There was something bittersweet about it.

Because of the Soviet Union, I had the chance to travel — to see Russia, the Baltic states, to walk across Red Square, lay flowers at the Eternal Flame, buy ice cream at GUM, and stand before the preserved body of Lenin, the so-called leader of all peoples.

But to be honest, those historical shifts stayed with me only vaguely.

What I remember far more vividly were the early 1990s — independence, the arrival of our own currency, the tenge… and the sudden flood of things we had never seen before.

Snickers. Mars. Bounty.

“Love is…” chewing gum with little paper inserts about a boy and a girl.

An ocean of soda — Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta.

Frozen “Bush legs.”

Shuttle traders hauling enormous Chinese bags across the border.

Factories shutting down. Mines going silent.

Men in leather coats — the so-called bratki.

Back then, Ryzhiy Almaz was one of the most influential criminal figures in Kazakhstan. I recently read a book about him — Ryzhiy Almaz: The Price of Betrayal. It’s gripping. I highly recommend it.

And of course — the cherry-colored VAZ-2109. The undisputed peak of the Russian auto industry.

The early nineties were a time of sharp contrasts.

On one hand — fear. Collapsing production, mass unemployment, the loss of everything familiar.

On the other — a strange, electric sense of possibility. Open markets, imported goods, the feeling that the rules had changed and no one quite knew what came next.

Everything has two sides.

For me, it was one of the best times of my life.

I was a teenager, nearly a graduate. My whole life felt like it was just beginning. The old Soviet ruble disappeared, replaced by the tenge. In 1993, my older brother Timur got married.

Around that time, I loved visiting relatives — especially my mother’s hometown, the settlement of Bestobe in the Akmola region.

At first glance, Bestobe looked like any other working settlement: gray apartment blocks, small white houses, broken roads, sparse vegetation, the Selet River winding quietly through, and open pits along the outskirts.

But, just like in the Karaganda region, its real wealth lay underground.

Bestobe was rich in gold.

Mining there had begun in 1932, and the concentration was unusually high — twenty to thirty grams per ton. Sometimes people found nuggets weighing several kilograms.

Naturally, this gave rise to illegal prospecting. Tens of thousands of people were arrested trying to get rich that way. Many risked their lives for it.

And yet, life in the settlement was vibrant. Some earned good money. Others built the infrastructure. And some took on the dirtiest and most dangerous work.

But at that age, I didn’t think about any of that.

At seventeen or eighteen, you are too full of life to worry about such things. Your thoughts revolve around something far simpler — fun, freedom, and friends.

Every visit to Bestobe felt like a celebration — for me, and for my cousins: Almagul, Nazgul, Aigul, and Raikhan.

We were like the Three Musketeers… and D’Artagnan.

I was especially close to Almagul.

At the time, she was seeing Gaziz — a man who was both respected and feared in the settlement. He was what people called a fixer, someone through whom all the gray flows passed.

Aigul and I were something like local celebrities. The boys were always around.

I was a devoted follower of fashion — a puffer jacket, Levi’s jeans, stylish dresses. In the early nineties, that was a serious statement.

But everything has its price.

Life in that world moved like a roller coaster.

Gaziz was like a proud eagle — always watching over his nest, always aware. Sometimes he had to disappear, to hide from the police.

How many times did Almagul and I bring him food and water in the silence of the night?

It was exciting… and quietly sad at the same time.

Then came the moment I didn’t expect.

Gaziz invited us to his house.

We arrived without suspecting anything. But instead of a quiet visit, we walked into a house full of people — his mother, his grandmother, other women gathered together.

The moment Almagul stepped inside, they placed a scarf over her head and began to sing.

Zhar-zhar.

That was when I understood.

I had just witnessed a traditional bride kidnapping.

Chapter 5

Memento mori (Latin)

Remember your mortality

And so, we slowly approached the end of school — and the beginning of something new.

It was 1993.

Factories worked only sporadically. Some had shut down completely. Crime was everywhere. It was the golden age of the bold — and the dangerous.

But I was still a schoolgirl. Or rather, a graduate.

My thoughts were elsewhere.

All I wanted was to break free — to leave my parents’ home and step out into the wide, open world.

But before that, there was one moment I will never forget.

It was summer. Hot, suffocating heat. Only one month remained before university entrance exams. Our small settlement seemed to be melting under the sun.

And for some reason, all I could think about was a Snickers.

Today, it’s just a chocolate bar you can buy anywhere.

Back then, it was something else entirely.

Kids were ready to do almost anything just to taste that combination of caramel, peanuts, and thick chocolate.

I don’t remember exactly why it was so hard to get — maybe there simply wasn’t enough money.

So there we were — our little group: me, Danka, Aizhan, Samal, Bibigul, Ira… and of course, the boys — my brother’s friends.

We were sitting in the village park, talking about everything and nothing.

Somehow, the conversation drifted toward the cemetery.

“Girls, would you dare to walk through the cemetery?” Arman asked casually.

“Easy,” Aizhan shot back.

“Right now?” Samal asked.

“No,” Arman smiled. “That’s too simple. Besides, it’s still hot. Let’s go at night… around midnight.”

“You’re not supposed to go to a cemetery at night,” Ira said, going pale. “My mom and grandmother always said that. It’s the world of the dead. You shouldn’t disturb it… you might bring something back.”

“Maybe we should change the subject,” Bibigul said quietly.

But something in me snapped.

Instead of staying quiet, I raised the stakes.

Path of the Healer. Returning to Yourself. Serving the World. A Story That Can Change Your Life

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