
I was skeptical
“You’ve got to attend this Theta Healing course,” my friend Chrystel kept telling me five years ago when I was working in Dubai.
During a Theta Healing session, a healer relaxes him/herself and the client into a theta state and guides the client to access and reprogram subconscious beliefs. Experienced healers can scan the body of the client to identify unbalances. Theta Healing has been used to heal people from physical and mental illnesses.
I was spiritual and interested in energy healing, but I was trained as a scientist and skeptical about what I couldn’t understand.
I’d reached a dead end
By thirty-three, my mother, father, brother, grandparents, an aunt, two uncles, and two cousins had passed away from sickness, accidents, and suicides.
At thirty-five, I started therapy to deal with childhood traumas of loss and abuse. Therapy opened Pandora’s box and led to night sweats, flashbacks, anxiety, and struggles with food. Hypnosis and meditation helped me calm down. Therapy helped me gain insight and self-awareness but seemed to exacerbate rather than solve problematic behaviors. I’d become a controlling perfectionist, which I knew was detrimental but couldn’t fix. I was also frustrated that I couldn’t remember periods of my childhood. Energy healing practices like Reiki and Pranic Energy Healing helped me rebalance my chakras but did not help me identify or address the root cause of issues I struggled with.
I wondered if Theta Healing could help.
Beliefs
Most of our beliefs are formed between zero and seven to make sense of the world. A lot of our beliefs are assimilated from the people around us. We rarely pay attention to our beliefs, but they guide most of our behaviors. As Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
Beliefs lead to emotions, which lead to actions. If you’d grown up forty years ago in a safe village in Brittany, France, you might have formed the belief, as I did, that the world is benevolent. Consequently, when meeting a stranger, the emotion you feel might be curiosity, leading you to lean in and start a conversation.
On the contrary, if you’d grown up being told “strangers equal dangers,” your behavior today might be very different. Even if you know rationally that the people around you at a networking event could lead to interesting conversations, a stranger walking toward you might prompt a feeling of caution, maybe even anxiety, with your palm sweating and your stepping back.
Uncovering limiting beliefs
I don’t like to label beliefs as good or bad. I prefer to talk about empowering beliefs — beliefs that help us become who we want to be and achieve our goals, and limiting beliefs — beliefs that distance us from health and happiness.
With therapy, I became aware I’d become a controlling perfectionist. My psychotherapist gave me exercises that annoyed me and didn’t help. With Theta Healing, I understood how losing caregivers at a young age and growing up with a father who was physically present but emotionally and mentally absent led me to believe that I needed to be perfect to be loved. Irrational, of course. But logical for the mind of a young child’s developing brain. Every session revealed a layer deeper within my belief constructs and helped me understand myself better. Months after starting to practice Theta Healing, I hit a belief that had been hindering a lot of my relationships: if I love people, they will die.
Accessing memories
My father and sister refused to talk about my mother after her death. I had no memories of her and accepted relatives and therapists telling me that I was too young when she died to ever be able to remember her.
Until one training session when I accessed an early memory of my mother. I was about ten months old. My mother was holding me in her arms. I saw her looking at me, with love. I could feel her arms supporting my back. I’d seen photos of my mother holding me as a baby. But with Theta Healing, I was able to access and anchor the memory and associated feelings of joy, safety, and love.
Becoming an instructor
What I loved about Theta Healing was that, unlike most other therapies I’d experienced, I could practice it on myself without a therapist. I relaxed in a theta state, dug into the issue that was bothering me, and wrote down the subconscious thoughts that came up. I had to write the thoughts down; otherwise, trying to remember subconscious thoughts snapped me out of my theta state.
Before realizing the shortage of therapists and launching Akesa Health, I wanted to empower people to independently get back to mental and physical wellness. I saw how Theta Healing could help and became certified as an instructor so that I could help spread the approach.
Coaching
When I trained as a coach, I realized how the aspect of Theta Healing that helps clients access and reprogram disempowering beliefs is similar to coaching. To me, Theta Healing is closer to coaching than energy healing practices such as Reiki and Pranic Energy Healing, where a healer would use his or her hands to sense and move energy.
Brainwaves
Theta Healing triggered my interest in brainwaves and binaural beats (stay tuned for a post coming soon). Theta brainwaves (4–8Hz) are observed when we’re in REM sleep or daydreaming. They’re involved when we’re processing information and making memories.
Theta brainwaves are also involved during hypnosis, and this made me more accepting.
Reconnecting with the Spirits
As with most therapies, the more we trust and participate in the process, the more we get out of it. Theta Healing can be a spiritual experience. Theta Healing brought back long-forgotten childhood memories and also let go.
I’d started therapy in my thirties to understand who my mother was and indirectly who I was. Theta Healing helped me access early memories of my mother and I’d placed a photo of her in my living room. A year ago, while meditating, my mother’s spirit came. “It’s time to let go,” she said. I knew what she meant. I took the frame, unframed the photo, and placed it at the bottom of my office drawer with a handful of relatives’ photos. I’d reconnected with my mother and had found closure. It was time to let go.