Integrative Health Practitioner Melissa Deally explains how Hypnotherapy, Time Line Therapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can accelerate physical and emotional healing.    

We discuss the difference between traditional psychotherapy and hypnotherapy, and how maximizing the power of the unconscious mind (90% of the brain) can significantly shift your emotional state to overcome obstacles that prevent you from achieving your goals.  

Struggling with debilitating migraines, and searching for answers to her kids’ multiple health issues, Melissa was frustrated with conventional medicine’s hyper focus on symptoms. With the help of a naturopath, she was able to heal herself and her daughters with a systemic approach and personalized nutrition.   

The transformative experiences in her own family prompted Melissa to abandon a 24-year corporate career and become a holistic practitioner. While formulating wellness plans for clients, she was struck by the way some people were able to make necessary behavioral changes and others were not.   

Seeing the effectiveness of hypnotherapy to break through barriers that got in the way of people’s success, Melissa incorporated this alternate healing modality and others in her practice, with dramatic results.  

She’s fine-tuned techniques that empower people to release emotional trauma, move past limiting beliefs, manage triggers, and cultivate positive habits to achieve foundational change and quality of life.  

Melissa teaches us several of these techniques on the show so you can use them yourself to go after your next It Has To Be Me!  

TESS’S TAKEAWAYS: 

• Mind-Body Practitioners address your health—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Combining the power of the conscious and unconscious mind accelerates healing.  
• The conscious mind makes up 10% of our brain and the unconscious mind is 90% of it. Our unconscious mind stores all memories unfiltered, enabling fuller access for growth. 
• Triggers from past experiences not setbacks, but opportunities for greater awareness.  
• Time Line Therapy helps to release stored emotions and limiting beliefs from childhood. Hypnotherapy accesses the unconscious mind to break down barriers to change. Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques facilitate new behaviors and habits. 

ABOUT MELISSA DEALLY  

An Integrative Health Practitioner, Melissa Deally uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Time Line Therapy, and Hypnotherapy to help individuals heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  

Founders of the Amplify Impact Academy, Melissa and her colleagues train other practitioners in mind-body healing modalities. An author and speaker, Melissa also hosts the "Don’t Wait For Your Wake-Up Call” podcast, where she provides practical health tips.  

Melissa’s nonprofit, Girls Matter, works to keep girls in school in Uganda and Kenya. Businesses From The Heart recognized Melissa with the Quality Care Award in 2021 and 2022, and she’s received numerous other rewards and citations.  

Melissa enjoys paddleboarding, skiing, hiking and camping with her daughters, and planning the next adventure for her Girl Guides unit.  

CONNECT WITH MELISSA 

Website: https://yourguidedhealthjourney.com/ 

Impact Academy: https://amplifyimpactacademy.com 

Podcast: https://yourguidedhealthjourney.com/podcast 

Girls Matter Charity: https://girlsmatter.ca/ 

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/melissadeally 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guidedhealthjourney/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MelissaDeally 

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadeally/ 

Meet Tess Masters:  

Tess Masters is an actor, presenter, health coach, cook, and author of The Blender Girl, The Blender Girl Smoothies, and The Perfect Blend, published by Penguin Random House. She is also the creator of The Decadent Detox® and Skinny60® health programs.     

Health tips and recipes by Tess have been featured in the LA Times, Washington Post, InStyle, Prevention, Shape, Glamour, Real Simple, Yoga Journal, Yahoo Health, Hallmark Channel, The Today Show, and many others.   

Tess’s magnetic personality, infectious enthusiasm, and down-to-earth approach have made her a go-to personality for people of all dietary stripes who share her conviction that healthy living can be easy and fun. Get delicious recipes at TheBlenderGirl.com.  

Connect With Tess: 

Website: https://tessmasters.com/  

Podcast Website: https://ithastobeme.com/   

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theblendergirl/  

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theblendergirl/  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/theblendergirl  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/theblendergirl  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessmasters/  

Get Healthy With Tess 

Skinny60®: https://www.skinny60.com/  

Join the 60-Day Reset: https://www.skinny60.com/60-day-reset/ 

The Decadent Detox®: https://www.thedecadentdetox.com/  

Join the 14-Day Cleanse: https://www.thedecadentdetox.com/14-day-guided-cleanses/ 

The Blender Girl: https://www.theblendergirl.com/  

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Oh, Melissa, I am so excited to dive into your exploration of the unconscious mind. We've had such lovely conversations about health and nutrition, and there's so much synergy with what we do, and I just cannot wait for everybody to hear your story. So can we just start with that? It has to be me moment where you had those migraines and you realized it has to be me to look after my health.

Yes, and you know, I went to the doctor because they were suddenly worse, and I was getting them every day instead of monthly. And I wanted to know why. That was my question. Why are they worse? Because if I know why they're worse, I can do something about it. And she had no answers. She just wanted to give me more prescription drugs, a stronger dose, and I didn't want that. And so I actually did some research, and I found a naturopath in the area, and I went to her, and we had an in depth one hour session, during which time she took my entire medical history and then suggested, Why don't we do some lab testing and test where your hormones are at? And I went, you can do that. Yes, a

whole new world,

exactly. Let's do some testing. And it was a whole new world because the results showed that my progesterone levels were low relative to my estrogen levels, which I now know, clinically speaking, is very common. And the symptoms, of course, show up in different ways for different people. And for me, it was migraines, and all I had to do was rebalance my hormones, which did mean drinking a vile tasting tonic for two weeks of my cycle, for two months. However, my migraines went away for a good seven years, and then when they came back again, I knew why, and I was able to do something about it. I didn't have to go and get a drug. I went back to that doctor and said, Give me some of that horrible stuff, because it worked, and I'll do it again. And it worked.

But also understanding the systemic issues in your body, you know, and the relationship between hormones and the way that your body feels right. So take me into this next it has to be me moment, where, as a mother, you then had two daughters that had health issues, varying health issues, and then, you know, concussions and so forth. And as a mother, you had to step in and really find some answers for them as well. Yes.

And so it was the same thing again, where I was asking, Why? Why is this happening? And no, I don't want a drug. There's got to be some underlying factor. And so I went back to the naturopath, and in each case, they happen at different times. But it turned out both my children had food sensitivities or food intolerances, and once we discovered what they were, through doing some testing at the naturopath office, I was able to remove those foods from their diet for my older daughter, with sugar and yeast, and you can actually remove them from someone's diet. It isn't easy. However you can do it, and it's worth it when your child is thriving at school and happy, versus, excuse me, versus having meltdowns all the time, which until the teacher brought the issue to my attention that her handwriting had regressed during the school year and that she wasn't able to pay attention in the classroom until the teacher brought that to my attention. I thought the behavior that I saw at home was normal childhood behavior. She's my oldest child, right?

A lot of people put it down to that, don't they exactly going through a phase? It's the naughty time, it's the rebellious time. Yeah,

exactly. And I just thought she's an emotional child, and it wasn't that. It was the sugar crashes that were causing the meltdowns. And so often the meltdowns would result in the tears and that she would be saying, I don't know why I'm crying, Mommy. She didn't even know what it was about, right? And it was because of what was going on chemically in her body, because she was sensitive to sugar and sugars and everything, and she was eating it, yeah, and then my younger daughter turned out she was intolerant to dairy and gluten, which I didn't know until we did the testing, and I'd literally been feeding her dairy and gluten, you know, three times a day. Yeah, exactly. And so once I knew that, we removed that from her diet, her tummy aches went away. And that was really powerful, because when you create the environment for the body to heal, it heals so quickly. So within two weeks, the tummy aches were completely gone. She was back to playing soccer, back to being the social kid that she you know, and going on play dates after school every day, and being able to function through the entire school day, versus at her worst, she was putting her head down on her desk after lunch because her poor digestive system was going I can't take any more gluten and dairy. Stop feeding it to. Me and would create these tummy aches, which was her body's way of saying, Can you do something different? Please? Yes. And when we got to the bottom of it again, the medical doctor said, oh, all little girls get tummy aches. She'll grow out of it. Well, she grew out of it when she was about 12, and I would say she hasn't fully grown out of it. However, at the around the age of 12, she could start tolerating more of it. This started when she was six. I as a mom, I don't want to watch my child suffer for six years, so it had to be me. I needed to figure out a solution for her.

Yeah, of course, to be a good mother and so much better when your kids are happy and healthy. Exactly. Take me into that. It has to be me where you went from. I've got to find answers for myself. I've got to find answers for my children to I want to do this as a career. I want to help other people find out why they you know, are not feeling as good as they want to feel.

Well, that was the beautiful synergy that the universe gives you when it you're not noticing the signs yourself. So it just gives you everything, pretty much at once, right? So I was let go of my 24 year corporate career when big fish bought little fish, and shortly after, my first daughter got a concussion, and I had in between that time, started working with a company that specialized in brain health supplementation, and this particular product was very good at helping people focus, have quicker reactionary speeds and improved sleep. It had some adaptogenic herbs in it to help with stress, and all of those things could help people with concussion recovery. So I had her using that particular supplement. Two months later, my younger daughter got a concussion in grade eight gym class, and in that moment when the school told me to go pick her up, I was driving down the highway, and I went, really, this is how you show me my path. Stop taking out my children, and I only have the two daughters. However, you know, what are the coincidences of two concussions in the same household at the same time? Right? Two very different concussions, and because I wasn't working full time, I was going to all of their appointments with them, to the physiotherapist and looking again for other ways to help support their healing journey and through that process, I found I was getting interested in how the body heals, and learning how when we're in the stress state, the body can't heal, we have to be in our rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system for healing to happen. And realized when people are trying to find ways to heal themselves, and they're on Dr Google, etc, they're in that stress state, and there's so much information, it's information overload. What's real, what's not, etc, etc. And I live in a small town too, so a lot of people knew what our family was going through. And it's a ski town and a bike town, so there's more concussions. And people started asking me organically. You know, my son got a concussion, what do I do? Or my husband got a concussion, what do I do? Or I have an employee coming back to work who has an incus, has a concussion, how do I support them? And then soon after that, a holistic clinic opened, and I was invited to work there, which I wanted to do, because I knew how much need there was. We have a lot of expertise in the realm of concussion. I was focusing it on it from a nutritional perspective, from supplementing and giving the brain the food that it needs in order that it can heal, and then looking at the lifestyle factors to help people calm their nervous systems. And I wanted to work at that clinic. However, I wasn't able to because I didn't have insurance, and when I applied for insurance, I couldn't get that because I didn't have any qualifications. And so that's when I contacted a friend who had a very successful life coaching business, and I said, You're a life coach. I need a certification. Where did you do your training? And he said to me, you don't need to be a life coach. You need to be a health coach. And I went, what? What's that? I'd never even heard that term. However, it landed immediately, and I started, you know, looking up health coaching schools, and I found one, and started within 10 days. And again, from that moment, I've never looked back, and it's really taken me down this beautiful path into becoming an integrative health practitioner and working with all four bodies, the spiritual body, the mental body, the emotional body and the physical body in someone's healing journey. And I truly believe I've literally been guided here every step of the way, from the moment that I was let go from my 24 year corporate career. So yes, it has to be me, and I had to wake up to the breadcrumbs that were being dropped for me to keep following them to get to where I'm at today.

Yeah. I mean, that's the way, isn't it? You know, so often the big no is a. Big yes to something that's really the right fear, you know, if you're trusting your intuition and giving yourself permission to be, to be guided by it. So take me into the next it has to be me, where you were working with the physical body and helping people, you know, move into a healing place. And then you really started experimenting with the on, on unconscious mind, and those healing modalities take me into to how that progressed.

So, yeah, so as an integrative health practitioner, I was really focused on the physical body, detoxing the physical body, and also running functional medicine lab tests, ironically, the same ones that I had run for my own hormones and my kids. Way back when, 20 years ago, I was now certified to be able to run and read for my clients and several others. And I really love the science of that and being able to show people what's going on inside your body and then write a wellness plan for them as to how we bring the body back into balance. Because when we bring it into balance, you will know it will heal itself. That's what it's designed to do. And first we have to discover what are the toxicities getting in the way of that, what are the nutrient deficiencies and what are the imbalances? And when we resolve those three, then the body will heal itself. So I would write wellness plans for people, and some people could follow that wellness plan perfectly and get great results and feel better than they'd ever felt before, and loved it. And obviously that's very fulfilling for me to see someone gain back their health. And then there were other people who, with the best of intentions, couldn't follow through on that wellness plan. They'd start, and then they'd fall off. And I started wondering why, why can some people do this and other people aren't successful with the wellness plan that I've written for them? And I started questioning my ability as a coach. Was I not really connecting with that person? What's going on? And the universe gifted me another resource in the name of a naturopathic doctor who reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, I love the work that you're doing. Let's have a coffee chat. And she started talking to me about the most powerful mind, body healing tools on the planet. And so of course, that piqued my interest, and when we had this conversation, I realized exactly why some people fell off and couldn't follow through, and it was because of the programming in their unconscious mind, and that programming happens when we're a very young child. We're literally born as the hardware of a computer, and then for the next seven years to nine years of our life, it's just download, download, download, all the software that we need in order to function as a human being in society, and the unconscious mind has a big job. It's it's keeping us alive every single day. It's storing all of our memories every single day. And it likes to be efficient, and so if it finds something that works, it doesn't bother to upgrade it. It just keeps using it right, and then you can get on with all the other things that it needs to be doing. And so we in adulthood, are running programs that worked for us as children, and they're no longer working for us in adulthood, and that's when we get stuck, and then we don't know why we're getting stuck, and then we try to change our behavior consciously, which requires willpower, because the conscious mind is 10% of our mind, and the unconscious mind is the other 90% Well, willpower is housed in the conscious mind, which means it's part of the 10% and we know that willpower doesn't work, because You see all the gyms on January 2, and they're full of people that are gonna get and by January 31 they're not looking nearly so full because of willpower. They don't want to get up at six o'clock in the morning in the dark to get to the gym, right, whereas, when we work with the power of the unconscious mind, the other 90% we have a lot more to work with, and that's where, in reality, all learning, all behavior and all change happens in that order, and we're just not taught that through society and through the school system. So this was all new learning for me, and I was so excited, because I realized, if I could work with people to shift the new, the neurology that has them doing a different behavior, that's such a beautiful, graceful, easy way to create a new habit.

So talk me through some of these modalities, some of the ways that we can work with our unconscious, unconscious mind and connect with it, so that we can use this 90% of our power.

Yes, so hypnotherapy is incredibly powerful. It's been around since the beginning of. Time, and it's been, you know, it's risen up as a very powerful healing modality, and then it's been squashed down. Because I believe anytime humans come across something that they don't fully understand, they get a little bit frightened of it, so they just push it down. However, hypnotherapy is incredible for helping people change of behavior and create something new in their life. And all we need is an unconscious mind, which we all have, and the ability to follow instructions. It gets really that simple. And so

what would you say to somebody who is just completely freaked out by just the idea of hypnotherapy and just going, No, no, no, no, that's too woo, woo. That's crazy. I'm not going to do it.

And I would say to that person, honestly, if that's how you feel right now, then you're not ready. If you'd like me to take you through a 32nd little experiential version of hypnotherapy, I'd be happy to do that. Oh, let's do that. Let's do that. Oh, we can do that. Because do that. Here's the thing is, when people are unfamiliar with hypnotherapy, they think that they're going to be out of control, or they think that it has to feel different to something that they normally feel, and someone's going to manipulate them, and someone's going to manipulate them, yeah. So when I work with clients, we do, I do go through this process in detail to explain how none of that is true. And here, in 30 seconds, though, I'm just going to show you what hypnotherapy feels like, so you can experience it for a moment. Do you want to do that? Yeah. So I'm just going to ask you to close your eyes. And listeners, you can close your eyes too, unless you're driving, please do not close your eyes. If you're driving, safety first everyone else, close your eyes. And as you close your eyes, I want you to just focus on the muscles around your eyes and just allow them to really relax. And as you allow those muscles around your eyes to really relax, just focus on the muscles on the rest of your face and allow all of those muscles to relax as well. Beautiful. And as you continue allowing all of the muscles around your face to relax, I want you to try and open your eyes and see if you can. And perhaps you'll find that you cannot open your eyes because the muscles around your eyes are so relaxed, so relaxed. Beautiful. Thank you Now you can open your eyes, come back into the room and look at that. I

just want to stay relaxed. I don't know about you, dear listener, I couldn't open my eyes. I was just very ah, you know, you just feel calm,

yes, yes, and that's what it is. And so often people don't want to come back from that beautiful state of being hypnotized, because it's really a deep state of relaxation, yeah, and we don't allow ourselves to go into that state very often. And so when people get there, they're like, Oh, this is so wonderful. And at the same time, their unconscious mind is working for them and allowing in the suggestions of whatever it is they've worked with the hypnotherapist to that they want to create in their

life. Do you know the other thing that happened when you were speaking for me was that I became really focused, really present, and all I was hearing was your voice and all the chatter you know about that this my to do list, my this. So I've done these. I couldn't get my microphone to work before this episode. All this is tough, right? It just, it just wasn't there, like there was, there wasn't any noise.

And that is also the power of hypnosis, in that it gives you 10,000 times the focus, 10,000 times the focus, because we're getting into the other 90% of our mind now that we always have with us. However, we're just so often in our thinking frontal cortex. Think, think, think all the noise and through the school system we're raised to believe that's the part of our brain that we should be using all the time.

Yeah. You know the other thing too, what you were saying before about how hypnosis has been done for centuries, and then it got squashed down, and then it's been, you know, vilified as this woo, woo crazy thing, and now in mainstream medicine with digestive health conditions and other health conditions, it has really been embraced in the mainstream now as very valid form of therapy. So with IBS patients, for example, you know that it could really remove some of the stress and anxiety that are some of the main triggers and other digestive health conditions, like all these gastroenterology conferences, you know, in the mainstream, they're getting up talking about the effectiveness of. Move of hypnotherapy,

yes, and it it literally is that powerful. And it wasn't until 1958 that the American Medical Association allowed it to be recognized as, you know, a form of of healing modality, right? And in some places it's still not recognized, depending on the laws of the state and the country, and it is so powerful. And of course, any digestive and first off, Hippocrates said all disease starts in the gut. I love to say all health starts in the gut again, and stress and poor sleep that often goes hand in hand with stress will destroy that fine balance of our gut microbiome. Yeah. And so the fact that hypnotherapy gets us out of that stress state and create such a powerful result for people.

And so example of one of your clients, you know, give me a general example of of where working with hypnosis has really helped someone to change a habit.

Well, there's some funny ones. Actually, I taught, I teach hypnosis as well, and I taught a course, and all three people in the course all were just fed up with the bad habit of having a really untidy office and then never being able to find anything. And it's funny with the morphogenic field, how like people come together. So in this one, course, they all had the same issue. That happens a lot, and so that's what we worked on, was having a tidy office. And it's always really important when we're talking generally. However, even more so with the unconscious mind, it doesn't process negatives and and it's like a two year old. So we have to be very clear and precise with our instructions. So rather than saying, I don't want a messy office, the unconscious mind hears I want a messy office, we have to turn it around into I want to have a tidy office. And we literally hypnotized all three of them into having a tidy office. And then the feedback, you know, from that one session, right, that I get over the next week and several months, is they all have beautifully tidy offices. Now they've all the papers are filed. They get filed all the time. They know where everything is. And it was literally a 15 minute hypnosis session to create that kind of a change a lifetime of a messy office. And I have to do better to a 15 minute session and all three of them with tidy offices. And we've got lots of techniques like that. Another fun technique, which comes from another stream that I work with, which is Neuro Linguistic Programming, is something that we call swish. And so that's, again, taking somebody's neurology, and instead of them always doing something this way, we swish so they do a new behavior instead at the trigger point. And again, in our trainings, we teach this, and so everybody gets to have a new behavior. And one of them in my most recent training program was a lady who, you know, every night, when she got undressed for bed, she just leave her clothes on the floor. And she'd done it her whole life, and we switched, and she was finding herself either putting the dirty clothes in the laundry hamper or hanging up the clothes that weren't dirty. And she's so thrilled. And you know, it started three weeks ago, and she's like, I'm still hanging on my clothes. I'm still doing it. I don't even think about it, and then someone else. Yeah, that's

incredible. What's the difference between hypnotherapy and neuro linguistic programming?

So hypnotherapy is where we are working with the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, and bringing people down into a deep enough state of trance that their critical faculty, which is a barrier between the two minds, completely comes down. So that critical faculty is something that we develop at age seven to nine years old, where we start to develop logical thinking and getting critical about things and wondering, Hmm, how can Santa Claus get all the way around the world in one night? Right prior to that, kids are 100% in their unconscious mind, in their imagination, in the state of trance. That's the only way they could learn everything they have to learn in those first few years of life, so easily and effortlessly, right? So hypnotherapy takes us back to that state of when we were in that zero to six age group. So it's nothing that is new, anything.

Oh, that's so beautiful,

yes, and the conscious, sorry, the unconscious mind is always keeping us safe, right? So you mentioned earlier about someone's going to, you know, brainwash. You or take have mind control?

Well, I only, I only use that example because I'm sure, I don't know if you've seen those, you know, funny shows where they bring in a hypnotherapist, and there's an audience full of people, and they put them all under and then they make them do crazy, silly things, and everybody laughs at you, right? And so, you know, we've all seen those on TV, but you know that that's

great stage hypnosis versus hypnotherapy. And there is a difference, because stage hypnosis is obviously for entertainment, right? So they do it in a very specific way, on purpose to create the laughter. And I will tell you that each and every single person that's on that stage doing those silly things. Would do it anyway if they'd had a beer or two. And you might notice and watch again next time, if you didn't notice before they ask for volunteers, which right away you get all the extroverts putting up their hand pick me, and you get all the introverts hiding under and when they get up on stage, they put you through a series of tests, and some people don't do them because it's not safe for their unconscious mind. So they get popped out of trance. They don't do them. They get quietly walked off and back to their seat. So you only have the people that are the most willing to play all out on stage for the benefit of the laughs of the audience who have paid a ticket to be there, right? Because hypnotherapy would not sell tickets. Hypnotherapy looks like this,

where you just completely relax. So relax, my head's down, my Chin's at my chest, and I'm out. Nobody's buying a ticket for that. So hypnotherapy has a very different purpose, obviously, and the hypnotherapist is working with the client in order to help them achieve whatever behavioral change that they're looking for. And if their unconscious mind doesn't feel safe, it will just snap them out, and then they won't be in that state of trance, and the hypnotherapy isn't going to work. And so for someone who is concerned that you're going to make me do something I don't want to do, no, your unconscious mind will snap you out, and you'll be completely out of trance, and you'll be saying, No, I don't want to do it. That's not for me. It. That's not for me. And you are always in control. And that's something that's really important for people to know, is it's not the hypnotherapist doing anything to you. This is a do with with the hypnotherapist as the guide. Your unconscious mind is the coach, and it's in charge of whether you're going to go through with whatever you're being asked to do or not. Of course, for stage hypnosis, you're going to be asked to do silly things. In hypnotherapy, you're not being asked to do anything other than what you want to do.

Yes. Yes. Important distinction. Okay, so then

with neurotherapy. So let's go back to the neuro linguistic programming, which is all working with the tools, again, of the unconscious mind, so the neurology, the linguistic, the language and the programming. Now, in this case, the critical faculty doesn't come right down when we're working with people, we're using tools to go around it. Ooh, okay. And so there is just a different set of tools to work with the unconscious mind. And when we do the swish, for instance, that's literally going around the unconscious mind, to have that person now hang up their clothes, or another person just always left their dishes from the day their work day, all over their office, and at the end of the day, they just leave their office, and then they come back the next morning to all of yesterday's dirty dishes. And we did a swish so that when they leave the office, each time they leave the office, they take their dirty dishes with them. And she couldn't believe that she started doing it immediately. Didn't even think about it. And that's because you don't have to think about it. It's new neurology, so you just start following that neurology, and the more you follow that neurology, the deeper it gets, the more it becomes a habit,

right? So do you do hypnotherapy with Neuro Linguistic Programming?

Yes, and I have one more, which is called timeline therapy. And so,

okay, let me, let me, let, let's talk through how you do the hypnotherapy with the neuro linguistic program, and then let, yes, let's get into the timeline therapy. So is this sort of a progression that you do? Do you know what I mean, like, do you start somebody with a basic hypnotherapy, then go into neuro linguistic program and then into timeline therapy. Or can you is this a box of tools that you use with clients, you know, and you sort of see what's appropriate for people. How does that work?

So when we do a full breakthrough with the client, we actually start with timeline therapy.

Okay? Why is that?

Because timeline therapy. Releases the seven negative emotions that have been stuffed down in their physical being for their entire life. So anger, sadness, hurt, guilt, rage, shame and fear. We release all of it. Everyone's been carrying around a bag of rocks because society teaches us to suck it up and be strong, and boys don't cry and Big Girls Don't Cry either, etc, so we have all of this stuffed down emotion which, over time, becomes toxic in the body. So we release it. We also release the limiting decisions which come forth during the intake session. As well as every single human being shares one of the following four, which is unlovable, unworthy, powerless or not good enough. And again, these are,

I think a lot of us would say, and I've got all four of those. Do you know what I mean Exactly?

And they happen again when we're a young child. You know the not good enough? You a report card comes home from school, and you get all A's and 1b and the parent goes, well, next time, get all A's, and your little mind goes, I'm not good enough. Cancel, cancel, cancel. And you start to run that program, right? So you can see how innocently they start. And the great news is we can release them, and that's what I call the mental toxicity. So we've released the emotional toxicity of all that weighted down emotion, and we release the mental toxicity of the limiting decisions. There can be a myriad of limiting decisions that people have come up with in their lives through the stories they tell themselves, whether it's around money, relationships, work, whatever it is. So we start there, because in order to create change, we need to clear out the past, get rid of the junk. So that's all the junk. And then from there, we will look at doing some NLP techniques based on where the person's at. So it's all very individualized. So

NLP is linguistic programming, Yes, yep,

yes. And so think of it this way. Timeline therapy is about cleaning up the past. The NLP tools that we have is about what's happening now in the present, and then the hypnotherapy is actually at the end, because it's about creating the future. Yes, right, right? Yes. And we have to clear out the past in order to create that future. And so I liken the hypnotherapy to being a beautiful, big red bow to tie everything all the other work up that we've done, and we've started to create new neurology. And we need to deepen it. We build a bunny trail, and then the more we use it, it becomes a two lane road and a four lane road, and it's an eight lane highway. So we have the hypnotherapy there to help us use the new neurology that we've created with the NLP, if that makes

sense, yes, I want to know and understand better what a timeline therapy session looks like. So you talk about, we release these, these from the past. How do you release it? Like you talked us through, you know, gave us a little bit of a taste of what a hypnotherapy session feels like, yeah, if we're not doing hypnotherapy therapy till the end, when we're looking at looking to take action in the future, how do we release it, the things from the past?

So timeline therapy is a form of hypnotherapy. So in terms of how it feels, it's very similar to exactly what you just went through. Okay, we are again working with the unconscious mind. Now, as I said earlier, our unconscious mind stores all of our memories for our entire life without judgment, I will add so that the conscious mind can access it later, if needed. So we all have a timeline. Now again, I can take you through an experience of just finding your timeline.

If you would like, I would like that. Yes, please. Okay,

so I'm going to ask you to, again, close your eyes, and I just want you to ground down into your body, take a couple of deep breaths in and so I'm going to ask you, if I were to ask you where your past is in relation to your body, I have a feeling that you would tell me that it's left to right or up to down or back to front, in some relation to your body. And it's not your conscious thought of where your past is that I'm asking about. It's your unconscious thought. So I would like you just to use your finger and point right now to what direction is your past, and I can't see your full body, so I'm going to have you at your verbal. I would say back,

it's behind you activated in my lower back. Yeah, okay,

so it's behind you. Then, yes, beautiful. And to what direction is your future

in front of me, perfect, and sides as well. I would. Say and above,

everywhere I'm going to go with you, have that initial reaction, because the unconscious mind is always faster than the conscious mind, okay, five seconds faster. So in front of you is likely the unconscious and then you started thinking about

it, okay, yes, I think you're right. And as as

you just sit there and acknowledge that your past is behind you and your future is in front of you, are you recognizing that there is a linear relationship between your past and your future right now? Yes, beautiful. So that's your timeline, and you can open your eyes and come back into the room. Now, our timelines can actually change as well. So before we do a timeline session, even if someone's done it with me before, I'll always check that for this session, that's where their timeline is. And then what we do is, again, it's all using imagination, because imagination is housed in the unconscious mind, and we're again going for the root cause. So we're asking someone to go up and we give very specific instructions. We have very specific scripts that we use, and all the person has to do is just listen and follow our direction. And we ask them to go above the first event of anger that they ever had, and we ask what age it is. When did that happen? And again, very specific scripts, if you were to know, what age were you at the root cause of this anger? And for some people, it could be in a past life. It could be generally generationally, several generations back. It could be while they were in the womb. It could be in that zero to six window. Remember when we're learning so much and we're entirely in our unconscious mind? If somebody tells me it was when they were 15 years old, was the first time they felt anger. They've gone back to a significant emotional event that they consciously remember. They haven't gone back to the root cause. Because, let's face it, every single baby has expressed anger with a screaming fit over not being fed when they're hungry or having a wet nappy when they need to have that nappy changed, right? So we know anger is younger than 15 years old, and so that's what makes this technique so powerful, because we go back to the root and like a weed in the garden, if you pull the entire weed at the root, it doesn't come back. So if we pull the root of the anger, it actually adjusts across our timeline all the way back to now, and releases all the anger that we've held stuck. And the way we can get the unconscious mind to release it is by having it give us the learnings. Because the foundation is that everything is happening for us, even when crappy things are happening in our life, it's so that we can learn something. And if we learn what we're supposed to learn, we get to move through that with greater ease and grace. And if we don't learn what we're supposed to learn, that's when we stuff it down and it feels awful, and we hang out on victim Island and can tell our sob story to everybody that will listen.

So how many sessions I know this is like, how long is a piece of string, because everybody is different, but how many sessions on average, does a person need in terms of the timeline therapy in order to feel like they can break those patterns of the past and make different choices in the future, because we get triggered. You know, something will happen in the present that will trigger that, that that that root and threaten to to pull it and again, you know, is that the right way to say it?

Yeah, it is. So there's a couple of things there. So one session will create massive shift for people. And we, when we run our trainings, people get a timeline therapy clinic as part of the training, and at the end of the day, they're all like these happy, shiny new, glowing people, because they've released all of that garbage. Now, as practitioners, we do a timeline therapy session every single month, because when we're working with our clients, their stuff is coming on to us, and we need to make sure we're clear as well, so that we're not projecting our stuff onto other people. So we're bored, required to do a session every single month. Clients that do a whole breakthrough, they really just need that one session, and then we go on and we do some NLP Techniques To for touch ups, and that's often addressing the triggers that you talk about. We actually celebrate the triggers, because the triggers are the unconscious mind going, you're ready to deal with this. Let's bring it to your attention and have you deal with it, bring it into the awareness. And so often we put the hand up, nope, not ready to deal with that. Go away, squash it back down.

So do you put awareness in the conscious mind? Yes, awareness sits in the conscious mind, doesn't it? Yes, yeah,

okay, absolutely. So

sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just I'm. But this is just, Oh, I love this. So, so if you are working with hypnotherapy, timeline therapy, which is a form of hypnotherapy, neuro linguistic programming, which is, you know, new conditioning, new neurology, where do we cross over into the conscious mind? Where, if we're going to train like like, we're retraining ourselves to stay in awareness so that we can make more mindful choices moving forward, where in your therapeutic timeline with a client, do you move into the conscious mind? You know? And then we put these two things together. So we've got the 90 and the 10.

We start in the conscious mind, because that's the awareness. So that person is coming to me because they have awareness of an issue, a problem in their life, something isn't working, they're stuck, they're in relationship trouble, whatever it is, right? They have that awareness and they don't know what to do about it. Now, what we say one of the first questions we ask on the intake form is, why are you here? And they'll start telling us why they're here, and we'll ask that multiple times, because that first answer is the conscious awareness answer. That's the story they've been telling themselves. We again, want to go deeper, because we joke that if they can name it, that ain't it, there's always something underlying that's in the unconscious that they have no awareness of. And if we resolve that, it resolves everything else. And that's what we're doing with timeline therapy. So in our awareness, we have what we call presenting problems. And everybody has problems in their lives, little problems, big problems, and they're the problems we're aware of that's at the conscious level. Then we have issues, and all of those presenting problems can be themed into a few issues that's in the semi conscious, and then in the unconscious is what we call the root. And those are those uns that I told you all of those funnel down into those four uns, unlovable, unworthy, not good enough, and powerless. And so rather than addressing all the little presenting problems, which would take some time. We pull the on and it knocks everything else out.

Yes, okay, thank you for that. Alright, I want to get some other tools from you, because I know you have a very deep toolbox, like berry Poppins. It's so fabulous. Can you share the stop sign tool? Because I think that is such a good one, good

one. And so first off, one of our key things that we love to tell people is focus on what you want. It's really important remember the unconscious mind doesn't even process negatives anyway, so we want to focus on what we want rather than what we don't want. And in that process, we have to pay attention how we're talking to ourselves, because our unconscious mind is always listening in and my question is, are you talking to yourselves, yourself as someone you love, as your own best cheerleader? Are you celebrating that you are brilliant and beautiful and perfect for whatever it is your mission is here on Earth, and you've got this, etc, etc. Or are the stories in your head very different? And in my experience, the stories in our head are very different. We talk ourselves down out of things all the time, so the stop sign is a little strategy to help you start to bring to awareness, how often you talk yourself down, how often you talk negatively to yourself. And every time you bring this into awareness, you just put the stop sign up and then say the opposite. And put the stop sign up and say the opposite, I'm not smart enough. Yes, I am. I am rocking smart. I know exactly what I'm doing, and if I don't how to do it myself, I can find the resources to help me get there.

Yeah, so this is a really powerful, you know, conscious redirection tool.

It is yes, and initially it might take people a while just to get into the habit of putting up their stop sign. Then they find they're putting their stop sign up a lot. Yay. You keep putting it up right? And then you'll find you don't need to put it up so often, because you've changed how you talk to yourself, and you don't talk to yourself that way anymore. And you do celebrate how brilliant you are. Yes, you have the tools and the ability to do what you need to do. And if you don't have them right here, right now, in you, you will be able to find them. And that's the beauty of collaboration and working with other people.

Yes, and I mean, it's all just practiced every day, and the more we practice, the better we get at things. Alright, let's get some other tools for you. I know that you're a really big fan of a gratitude journal, and that's we all sort of hear this term, you know, out and about. What's your version of that? How do you teach that as a practitioner? So my

version of that is to start small with three things that you're grateful for from your day, and write them in a journal every night as the last thing you do before you turn out the light and go to sleep. Be for several reasons. First off, the unconscious mind will work on whatever you feed it before you go to bed all night long. So what are you feeding your unconscious mind right now? Are you watching the news and then turning out the light and going to bed because your unconscious mind is not getting a restful sleep? If that's the case, because it's all in a turmoil over all of the drama that's in the news which is deliberately dramatized to make you pay attention,

yes. Are you

watching a shoot em up movie, which is fun and great entertainment, however, it doesn't make for a restful sleep even, what are you reading? Right? So I love to put my mind to bed on gratitude, because I know that I'm going to get a lovely, deep, restorative sleep thinking about the positive things. Yes, and sometimes, because we're all human, right? Sometimes I, well, I like to read before bed every night anyway. And sometimes the book is so good that I just have to keep reading. And then it's like, Oh, I'm so tired. I'm falling asleep reading the book, and the gratitude journal doesn't get written, right? And do you know what happens all night long, that night, my unconscious mind is trying to write the end of the story. Yes, then I pause and turn all night while my unconscious mind writes the end of the story. And if I had just stopped reading earlier and written my gratitude journal, I wouldn't have that situation. That's how powerful it is to have that separation between whatever you're doing for entertainment before bed and actually going to bed. And I like to make a half hour experience of a few, a few things to just, you know, stretch, to breathe, to calm the nervous system, get ready for bed, and then get into bed, and then consciously think about my gratitude and feel into it, feel the emotion of how grateful you are for whatever happened today. Because let's face it, we all have a lot to be grateful for, and yet our unconscious mind is actually programmed to look for danger, because its job is to keep you alive and keep you safe. And so when we're out there looking for danger, then the world can seem like a scary place, and we focus on that. When we start to work with a gratitude journal, we're actually reprogramming our mind, our reticular activation system, which is like the century of our mind, into looking for the positive as we go through each day and think, Oh, I have to write that in my gratitude journal tonight, and it will literally shift how you show up in your world every single day.

And I mean, this is about discipline, all these things that you're talking about. You know, we have to be disciplined to put ourselves in a container where we're able to show up as our best selves and go after what we want. So it does take a disciplined, focused approach to things. So yeah,

and we can get help with that. It's not all about willpower, to create that discipline, yes, and create that discipline out of habits using the tools of the unconscious mind,

yes. So what's the superhero exercise? The

superhero exercise. So how often have you you know you've just been in kind of a crappy mood, maybe someone's annoyed you, and you're just feeling blah, and you don't like how you're feeling like that, and you want to shake it off, and you want to feel great. So what this exercise is, is I'll do it with you, and I'll talk every all the listeners through it. And this is a great exercise for kids. In fact, I think every kindergarten child should learn how to do this, because it helps them manage their state. And if and kindergartens can do it, and if every kindergartner in the world could manage their state, those kindergarten classrooms would be a whole lot easier for the teachers. So what we do is we ask you to, again, close your eyes and ground into your body. And can you think of it an emotion test, that frustration, annoyance. We're talking minor negative emotions here that you want to shift that maybe it's somebody, every time you hear their voice, it irritates you, or a certain ring tone or something like that. Can you think of, oh, yeah, I've got one. Yeah. Okay, so I want you to just go into that state right now. And I want you to and we're going to do some action here. I want you to physically gather up all of the feeling around your body. Of all of that, is it? Annoyance? What is it? What's the emotion?

Yeah, annoyance, disgust, disgust, okay,

I want you to move your arms all around your body as you gather up all of that annoyance and disgust and clear it out of your area. And I want you to bring it in front of you in your hands, like in a giant bowl of annoyance and disgust, perfect. And now you can open your eyes so that you can see me through the screen. I want you to pass that to me through the screen. And I'm going to take that from you, pass it through beautiful. And now I'm going to throw it out my window and out towards the sun. And I want you to again, close your eyes and just envision that just getting burned up in the sun, and the dust from it burning is just falling down to the ground, and it's all gone, and it's released from your body, beautiful. And now I want to ask you, who's your superhero? Who's that person that cheers you on no matter what, they're always there going, Yeah, Tess, you're the best.

Oh, my dad, your dad, oh my mom and

your mom. Okay, you get two of them, beautiful. Now I want you to imagine your dad and mom coming out of that son and coming towards you and bring them into you and just they're wrapping you in this beautiful hug, and wrap your arms around your body as you feel that beautiful hug, all that joyous energy and love and Just beautiful superhero love, wrapping around all of you unconditional support and cheering and take that in. And when you're ready, I just want you to snap your fingers and lock that in place beautiful and open your eyes.

Well. That's a lovely exercise. I feel like shield. I feel like I'm a shield dog.

Yeah, beautiful. I was just gonna say, how is that different? Exactly? You just bring your superhero with you, right? And I did it with you. You can do that for yourself. You don't have to pass the emotion to me. You can just take it and throw it up into the sun and let it burn up, and then bring call your superhero in and wrap your superhero around you. And, yeah,

a taste of why you you need to do it once a month. You need to have a timeline therapy session once a month to empty all of that stuff when you're taking that on. I mean, we will, yeah, okay, I get that. So I

just want to say one thing too with timeline therapy that I didn't get a chance to say earlier, that I want people to know that we're releasing all of the stuffed down emotion. We're not making you not feel emotions ever again. We're not turning people into zombies. We want you to feel your emotions. You're supposed to feel your emotions, and we want you to feel them and process them in the moment and not stuff it back down again, right? So we're releasing all the past stuffed emotion and then having you process your future emotion and current emotion in a really healthy way. And so with clients after they've done a full breakthrough session, depending on the degree of trauma that they've been through, they might need a couple more timeline therapy sessions, or they might go out and be fine for six months, and then something happens, and they know they've stuffed it, and they'll come back and do a session to release it.

Yeah, so you talk, you've spoken to me before about creating an anchor is that what you mean by that, like, how do you create that anchor that sort of keeps you connected to the way that you want to be moving through the world, and the habits that you want to cultivate and and the the conversations you want to have?

So creating an anchor is another NLP tool that, again, is very powerful, which connects people with the positive emotions that they want to feel. So if, in a moment they are feeling frustrated, annoyed, some kind of, you know, negative emotion, and maybe they don't want to do their son strategy or their superhero, some strategy technique and anger is another way to shift their emotion. So an anchor occurs at any time that somebody is in a peak state of intensity of an emotion and that you then simultaneously touch something else. The two become neurologically intertwined. So when we work with people, we might create an anchor on a knuckle where, because you're not touching your knuckles very often, right? So you want it to be somewhere you don't touch. Somewhere you don't touch that often. And we might stack five positive feelings onto that knuckle, and we take them through it, and we get them into that state where they're really feeling that joy and that happiness and curiosity, whatever their good emotions are, and we anchor them into that knuckle, and. And then later, if they're out, going around their daily life, they get annoyed by something, and then they're like annoyed that they're feeling annoyed, right? They've got awareness around I don't like feeling this way. They can touch their anchor, and they will be flooded with the chemicals of all positive emotions that we've created for them. Okay, now anchors, they're very, very easy to create you, literally, in five to 15 seconds, can shift how you feel. However. They're a little bit like a battery, so as you use them, they lose their charge, so you have to recharge them. And so we teach clients how to do that for themselves, because they can absolutely do that, because they actually the best anchors are the ones that are naturally occurring. So if you're watching a movie and literally laugh, it's so funny and you're out loud, rolling down laughing, you could make an anchor during that time instead of bring yourself to that state. So anchors are a beautiful, really easy tool to create and have people be able to take away and use for themselves, and that's for changing state. We can also use anchors to take someone from a position of procrastination and get them to motivation through a series of anchors.

Yeah.

We can also collapse, use anchors to collapse minor negative emotion instead of the Sun strategy, superhero technique we just did. Yeah. So there's many uses for all of these different tools, which is why I said earlier that we always start with timeline therapy, and then we'll use whichever NLP techniques are appropriate for that individual based on what's going on in their life, and we always end with hypnotherapy.

And so how would you describe the benefits of these kinds of modalities that work with the conscious mind, the timeline? Sorry, the unconscious mind. Pardon me. Thank you for correcting me. The the unconscious mind versus traditional psychotherapy, talk therapy.

So traditional talk therapy is great for bringing awareness to people. It's very much in the conscious mind. It doesn't change anything. And unfortunately, if we keep telling the same story over and over again, we're deepening that neurology, which is why people will go to talk therapy and then feel like they've been hit by a bus when they leave every time, and every modality works, it's just, are you using the right modality for where you're at right now. So talk therapy is great about bringing it to awareness, and from there, you want to get into these techniques with timeline therapy, the unconscious minority knows what happened. They don't have to say a thing about what happened with their trauma. They just have to tell me the learnings and the learnings are always positive about self and present and future tense, right? So they're beautiful learnings like I am powerful, I am beautiful, I am strong, I am independent, etc, etc. And those are all the learnings that their unconscious mind needed to learn whenever that incident happened. That was when they were really young, or in a past life. And once the unconscious mind has those learnings, it can release the emotion it's holding on to. Yes, that's the difference. And there's actually been research that's been done in regards to the number of sessions of just using hypnotherapy without timeline therapy. And because I use both, it's even faster for people, but talk therapy was started by Freud when he gave up on using hypnotherapy. And he gave up on using hypnotherapy because it didn't work for him, because he had wooden teeth, and he had wooden teeth because he chewed on the leaves of cocaine plants, and all his teeth fell out. Now, if you have wooden teeth, you mumble and remember I said earlier, with hypnotherapy, all that you need is an unconscious mind, and you need to follow the instructions. Well, if you can't understand the instructions, because the hypnotherapist mumbles so much get into a deep state of trance. So therefore, he was unsuccessful with hypnotherapy. So he decided he was going to create a whole new form of therapy that was going to be talk therapy. It was going to require 600 sessions, and would not be for the poor. And then he had people come into his office, and he had them sit in a chair facing away from him, and he had them do all the talking. And the reason they had to face away from him is because if you've got wooden teeth in your mouth and saliva, you have really bad breath. I. Isn't that fascinating?

Oh, gosh, I've never heard these stories about freight. Oh, that's funny. Oh, my goodness. Therapy

started. Couldn't help people with hypnotherapy, it comes down to the right tool for the job. And yes, my mission is to let people know about these tools. Hypnotherapy has been around since the beginning of time. Timeline therapy is, you know, 33 years in. And really was only the first few years. Was all research. And really since, you know, the year 2000 is when we started using it with clients. So it's very well. People have never

heard of it. Yeah, it's, it's a newer modality, for sure. Yeah. And NLP,

has been around since the late 70s, early 80s. So I just want people to know that a they have an unconscious mind. It's the other 90% and what if you could tap into that?

Yes, I mean, it look. It's just so great that there are so many tools that can be better, that can help us things, process things, make different choices, make the changes we want to make, go after the things that we want. And I just, I just, thank you for telling us a little bit about these things that you know, a lot of people don't know about, and I certainly do not have experience with, so I'm really, really excited to know more about it. And there's just so many wonderful things that you do, you know, as a practice, you know, helping people with physical body, but all of this unconscious mind work as well, and you're training people, and, oh my goodness, we have all of Melissa's links in the show notes. You can learn more about her stuff at your guided health journey.com and, oh my goodness. I mean, I could talk to you forever. You know about your your amazing podcast. I love that we're doing that swath, you know, so we can, you know, there's so many amazing interviews on that podcast. So thank you so much for the way that you show up in the world and the work that you're doing to help people. I always close every episode with the same question, which is, for somebody who has a dream in their heart and doesn't quite think they have what it makes you know what have what it takes to make it happen? What would you say to them? I'm

going to say they absolutely have what it takes to make it happen, and the only reason they might feel that they don't is because some limiting decision that came when they were a young child and someone else told them something, and it was all about the other person and nothing to do with them. And it's true now in adulthood, you know, people will go out and say, I want to do this, and somebody will say, you can't. All that you can't is, is the other person saying that about themselves. And they don't have your dream, they don't have your skill set, they don't have your passion, and they don't have your mission. So you absolutely can go out there and do it.

Oh, amen to that. Thank you so much for this lovely conversation.

You are most welcome to us. It's been a pleasure to be here. I.