Emma Heywood -hypnotic wellness
Can I be more things? Yes you can. Emma can show you how you don’t have to choose nor have anything to prove. Choose to be and you are.
Emma and I met online… and it’s one of those beautiful and rare gifts of social media: occasionally you find a friend. After months of observing her work and actually buying a tailored hypno-recording, I felt it’s time to bring this lady on board. The conversation started off the official recording and basically we were rambling about “having to have and grow a social media account for our businesses”. Whereas on other occasions I would cut it out of the written conversation, this time I feel it’s a great testimony of someone who is doing it ALL her own damn way, taking full responsibility for her success and failures…
Emma Heywood: There’s so much out there! There’s so much coaching to do, so many programs to do… It’s overwhelming more than ever. And it’s not that I have a scarcity mindset if I don’t do this, it’s not that my money is precious but my energy and time is precious. I don’t want to just invest in somebody that I don’t truly truly love. But also, what if I just had this opportunity to try it on my own? To trust myself and my own intuition for a year. There are people in my orb I do want to work with eventually because I do want support, however it has been interesting to find my own voice first too… and I used to not be active on social media. I don’t want to be somebody else's voice, I want to be me first and then fine tune the skills like marketing and communication.
Tanya Gervasi: Do you sing?
That’s a good question. I don’t technically sing but I’m an actor and my mom would always tell me,“you need to take voice lessons because I feel you can sing”. I’ve taken a voice class but I’m not a natural singer, if it’s within a certain range I can hold a tune.
And so how is it going for you finding your own voice? Especially on social media…. I mean my social media is such a chaos with little sense.
The other day I had a call with a virtual assistant who wants to work with me and she asked me about my brand colours, fonts etc. and I smiled and said: I don’t have any. The only person I hired when I started was a designer to create the landing page of my website, so when I post some more text I use more colours that are on my website but I am not committed to that. When I was in Hawaii my Instagram feed was very oceanic and blue tones, but now I’m in Florence and I switched to more earth tones. When I go to someone’s page I just get a sense of who they are too on top of or without the perfect branding palette, I like to know and feel you’re a real person. I think there’s a place for both. To me, if you want to post…. post when you’re in the mood for it. I think you just gotta go with what feels right. I believe it’s about energy!! What energy are you bringing into the post? Now I will not post if I feel I have to.
I read the other day something in the lines of, “we became a society where everything is being sold and marketed”. I’d like to hear your take on this, because it’s refreshing to hear someone who started a business talk about her process of trial and error and not pushy marketing tactics and strategies. Also, tell us what’s your business.
Can I say it still blows my mind to say I’m a CEO? I had my business for almost a year now and it still feels like a baby to me. I just pinch myself sometimes, and there is still so much I have to figure out from taxes to retirement schemes. So it is very trial and error but they say that the first 3 to 5 years of a business are bonkers, I have just accepted that so I know it’s not gonna be perfect. Some weeks I have no clients, some weeks I have five, that’s the way that it is.
My business is Emma Heywood Hypnosis. I chose that name because I’m a certified hypnotherapist but I’m also a practitioner of Rapid Transformational Therapy, also known as RTT, which is a new kind of therapy and people are more acquainted with hypnotherapy. So, I am a hypnotherapist and I wanted to use my name since it’s my business, it’s not a product but my service. There are tons of other hypnotherapists and RTT practitioners yet there is only one me and I want people to feel that. In the beginning when you have to choose a brand name and an email I just didn’t think too much about it and went with my intuition. The problem with overthinking is that you’ll never get anything done.
Don’t wait for things to be perfect to take action! This is a reminder for myself too.
How did you decide to become a hypnotherapist?
When I was in hypnosis myself I went back to a memory of when I was 3, that actually I think has a lot to do with my business now, where I always felt that I had knowledge to bring to people and my task was to bring them along. So I’ve always had a passion for mental health, I struggled with sever depression since I was 12 years old. It was really bad and by 16 I had a suicide attempt, I’m in many ways very lucky to be alive. I dropped out of high-school because it was so bad I couldn’t function. I eventually finished high-school by taking my classes online. At 16 I needed freedom, which has to do with how I live my life now.
Later, just going through life: depression was kind of u and down, anxiety, sexual assault, ptsd, there was a lot of stuff happening. Then in my early twenties it’s when I started to become more spiritual. I think when you go through mental health issues you either go the logical way or the spiritual way, not always but I’ve noticed that is what tends to happen. I went the spiritual way because I felt I needed a purpose and a reason to exist and want to live because for so long I didn’t want to live. So in my early twenties I was living in Montreal and I found a Shaman, she’s now probably in her 80s. To me she is my Fairy God-Mother, she just rescued me in so many ways and introduced me to so many things. I started to open up spiritually at that point - and I was in talk-therapy this whole time, since I was 16, thus I’m very aware of the therapeutic process - and decide to go to theatre school because I’ve always wanted to become an actor.
After I finished theatre school I moved to Toronto and began that “artist-husstler life”: going on auditions, side jobs, exhausting moments of “what am I doing with my life?”. That’s when I got into burlesque performance because I needed that autonomy over my art and creativity, I didn’t want to wait for an audition and just create myself. That helped but I was still in a place in my life when I was not satisfied. I felt I was not being honest with myself, I kept thinking, “I don’t want to just do this, I know I want to feel, I know I want to do something in wellness, I know I want to do something in mental health”, that was a voice I always had deep inside. The idea of going back to school to study psychology did not resonate with me, but that’s what you have to do…
And then I experienced, not RTT, but hypnosis on myself the first time I went to a hypnotherapist. And I was mind blown, damn what is this? What is this magic? Also I want to mention that I was still in therapy and I was really bored with my therapist, I’ve been in therapy for so long I knew what she was going to say, I knew how the sessions would go, and I was like I NEED SOMETHING MORE. I needed something deeper so that’s why I sought out hypnotherapy. When I experienced it that’s when I knew I found what I’m meant to do. It’s when I found depth to my own healing and found answers to my depression that I couldn’t have found in 10 years of other therapy, it was just so profound. I did my research, for there is so much out there and I was picky, all at the time when covid started to happen: the world went nuts and I was alone in Toronto, since my roommate left. I found RTT, they interviewed me and I got accepted. I had a feeling that this is it, this is for me, and the reason why this approach resonated more with me is because yes it’s hypnosis but there are elements of talk therapy in it. In classical hypnotherapy you don’t always go to find the root cause, you do suggestions and relaxation. In RTT you combine hypnosis with regression to find the root cause, then use some elements of talk therapy to kind of dig around a bit. Then it had aspects of NLP, the neuro-linguistic-programming, so it felt like the recipe for all the things I’ve been wanting to do in one place. Bingo! I’ve hit the jackpot!!
Basically I spent the lockdown studying, since I couldn’t work and I was getting unemployment from the government. My training took much less time because I was devoting to it day and night, I had nothing else to do. After the lockdown was over I decided to leave Toronto and move back to Seattle, which is where I grew up. I wanted to be close to my family as I launch this business, just to have the emotional support while doing something I’ve never done before, and I haven’t lived with them for twelve years so I wanted to be back closer. But now that I’ve been there I’m like, “no I can’t stay here”. I’m so happy I launched my business there, and there’s very specific laws about hypnotherapy in this state that I live in. So it’s all registered there and I can go off work from Hawaii, or Italy.
I’m kind of pinching myself because I’m living the life I’ve always dreamed of! Going back to that sixteen year old who wanted freedom, and now that’s all I wanted. When I started my journey with hypnosis I made my own recordings constantly and I’m literally living my recording. I said I’m going to be in Italy, and I’m manifesting the things that are in my recordings.
This shows again that it didn’t have to happen overnight. The first 2 to 6 months of the business were so hard, so soul-searching, so vulnerable. I thought doing burlesque was the most vulnerable thing I’d ever do, no! Opening a business is the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. It gets easier though, however the first six months all those inner child wounds and visibility issues come up - and I know I’m an actor but this is different from stage, this is me, I am me here in my business. That’s scary.
Also, transitioning from my personal life as an actor into this… What are people going to think? Will they think I’m weird and crazy? And now I’m at this place where I just don’t care, because I realised early on that it’s not about me. It’s about my clients. To me it’s all worth everything when I get my clients the results that they want and have been aching for for years. I get chills every time that happens, when they get those aha moments, those transformations, after a three-week program.
What do you find in acting? What does acting give you?
That is such a great questions, I haven’t been asked this in a while. I think everyone is an artist and everyone is a creative. Look at children, when they are given the opportunity to play, the video-games and all that stuff is gone. We are creative beings. You know I had depression hit when I was 12 but from 0 to 10 I was in my creativity, taking acting classes and playing and accessing a part of myself where I felt that freedom to move, to express, to play. I felt that’s when my light was the highest, and when the depression hit my light was just completely gone, it was dim, it was nothing.
When I went back to acting I was 22-23, I just had this feeling of “I don’t want to have regrets one day”. I don’t want to say, “what if I never try to do this?” even if I fail. So it’s interesting that you ask me what it gives me… when I went back to theatre school it was right after I was sexually assaulted so I was in ptsd: the combination of that was profound. The healing that I did in theatre school for that was the most transformational time in my life. So for me acting gives me a way to express that I can’t fully do in words, whether it’s through a movement or through a character or a piece. I can express a rage or an anger or a deep sadness, that I can’t as Emma fully but I have a character to make it safer. I can access things that I can’t in other ways.
The interesting thing is that in my business I never thought I could use so much acting. Not only for the technical things like using my voice in a session or in my recordings, but also my intuition. I never know exactly where a session is going to go, I never know where someone’s subconscious mind is going to take us, so it’s a journey into the unknown and I have to deal with what emerges just like on stage. And I get to use my imagination when I do these recordings, I get to tape what people say and mesh it all together.
What I’m realising in both things that I do is the freedom to express and the freedom to create. Acting is giving me the healing that I needed. And this summer I will go study theatre in Italy for a month, I was hesitating wondering if I should do it or not since I’ve been focusing so much on my business but truth is: yes! I don’t care if I never make money acting, I don’t care. It makes me feel human. It makes me feel like my soul is alive. It makes me feel joyful. I just want to be happy, I want to chase joy, I want to chase the challenge.
I love this so much! It makes me happy to hear you say this especially because you used to live the cliche artist life that still 99?% of artists do, so many actors I met whilst living in New York had 3 jobs while trying to “make it”. You just understood that life didn’t make you happy and went your way. So I wonder, have you ever dreamt of Hollywood, or do you? And another reflection I have is that having your own business doesn’t make you less of an artist nor did you quit acting. Rather, you support your artist-self with your own business. That is so cool! I think a lot of artists tend to be overly stubborn when it comes to their art, refusing to do anything otherwise… but I see big actors digressing and starting businesses at some point after their career took off yet we have a hard time to see (and accept) the multidimensionality of people. As if there is no way you can be as good at doing multiple things. What is your take on that?
People have a hard time with that. People have a hard time saying you can do more than one thing. Bullshit! I don’t want to do the hustling thing, I’m still an artist whether I don’t work for five year, whether I work and don’t get paid… I’m still an artist. I even have a degree in it. Never in any other profession you have to prove that you can do it. But I think people have a hard time accepting that you can be different things, and I think I’ve been so busy in my business that I didn’t fully realise I’ve been supporting myself and I can take a month off thanks to my business.
When I moved to Toronto, everyone’s goal was to go to Hollywood, and everyone asked me why I was not in LA… suggesting I should be in LA. But it never appealed to me. My main focus was theatre and in Toronto I also started to take film classes, and shoot short films. I was trying to get into the film scene but it wasn’t working because I hated it and I wouldn’t admit to myself that I hated it. I mean that was what everyone wanted to do, that’s what being an actor meant. I can’t tell you how many people talked down to me when I booked a play or referred to my audition as “my little audition”.
So I think for a time I dreamed of Hollywood because I thought that’s what I was supposed to dream of. Now, I don’t. To me, the stage is something that makes me happier, there’s something pure about that. Don’t get me wrong, I think film is a beautiful art form, it’s just not what I resonate with fully. And I’m not saying I’m never going to make another film project again - I never know where life is going to take me. I’m very curious about how this summer is going to go, am I going to go back seriously into theatre again?
Emma, how did you endure for 6 months not seeing the results you were expecting? Why didn’t you give up?
First of all when I went back to Seattle I lived with my parents because I needed to save money on rent. Toronto is very expensive and I knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. My parents were so kind! On weeks I didn’t have any clients, I was ok because I didn’t have rent to pay and I didn’t have to go crazy into my savings. That makes a huge difference. On top of that I gave up a lot of freedom and a few other things too. It wasn’t easy but I wouldn’t change anything … There were days where I just cried, “How do I do this?”.
I want to say that in the beginning, when you’re not getting clients, you can't help but think, “OMG it’s me, I’m bad, I’m this, I’m that”, and actually at the same time, literally when I was birthing my business, I was feeling a severe pain in my pelvis. I never experienced it before nor the doctors could figure out what it was, so one evening while taking a bath I put myself in hypnosis and I used a tool that I use with my clients: I started to talk to the pain, I asked her “What’s your role? Why are you here?”. And turns out it was totally to protect me from the world because it’s very vulnerable to put myself out there and I don’t want to be hurt. The pain was in my place of creation, where women birth life and business! Once I started to work on the emotional part of things - through different modalities from sessions with colleagues to sound healing with friends - my pain was gone, and I mean for 4 to 5 months it was so bad that some days I could barely do anything.
I would say the very first 4 months were rocky. Then something happened in January when it took off! This is the thing, sometimes you put in so much work and you don’t see the benefits straight away and I want to say you will get that back. If you don’t see it straight away it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. Even when I got here in Italy, I didn’t know how or when it was going to happen… and I don’t know my plans after this program.
You exude so much light and positive energy that I could just assume you had a childhood of rainbows and butterflies.
You know the actor Robin Williams? He battled with severe depression and you never would’ve guessed that. At last he committed suicide. I’m not depressed now, and during the first 4 years of my depression nobody knew, nobody noticed until it got so bad. I hid it that well because I didn’t want people to know, because I was so ashamed and so embarrassed. When the suicide attempt happened everyone had no choice but to know.
I appreciate you saying that because it took me a long time to come back to myself. Since theatre school is when I got my joy and my light back.
This is so powerful and this is how you become THE medicine. Having chosen to keep your name for your business makes you officially the vessel for the healing that you are here to bring… Everything you do is connected to healing. You’re like Persephone who went to the Underworld and back… in a way you can accompany people through it too, or show them the way through and say, “there’s light at the end, I know because I’ve been”.
I love that and I really do see that because as I said earlier nobody is me, nobody has my specific energy and nobody has my story. Even when I see people with depression and anxiety I know what it’s like. I know the thoughts going through their head because those used to be my thoughts, so that also helps when I make certain recordings for them. I know what to say to lower the intensity of what they’re feeling.
I guess also being an actor helps with the confidence, in the way that I do have a sense of myself. I got to do a lot of work on myself through therapy and theatre school, to the point where I know who I am and I like who I am and I love who I am. I want to share that with people. That is my name and is part of who I am in my business. I want people to get a feel of me.
What’s your favourite book? Pick one.
The first that came to my mind is A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. It captures depression so well, it captures the mysteries of time and life and different cultures. There is so much from that book that I took from.
Though let me give you something that has been with me longer…
It’s a book of poems by the Persian poet Hafiz. My parents gifted it to me for my 23rd birthday. Nobody knew about my sexual assault yet, I received this book of poetry and, when I started to read, every poem touched a part of my soul. I would take a bath and flip randomly open to a page, whatever I was going through I found the poem that I needed to read. So to this day, this book stays on my nightstand and I read it through hundreds of times. It’s a book that got me through a lot.
From this conversation it feels to me that you quite literally created your life. In the past two years, after working with children I observed how easily and automatically we pick up habits and beliefs … Kids copy how to wash dishes and notice who washes the dishes at home. Then we get to a point as grown ups when we get to pause and actually choose to create a life that we enjoy and feels good to us. So because what gets “programmed” is the mind, I believe hypnosis is THE tool through which we get to update our system. Like, “hey we got the 1976 software here and it’s kinda not working properly”. Tell me, how does it work? Do you delete the old programming - if deleting is even possible!! Or do you write on top? In the wellness world they tell you to release and let go, but I’m here wondering, how does it actually happen?
I think it’s different for everybody. In a session with somebody, in the moment they can be so ready to let go because they’re so deep in it, they affirm: yes I release, I let go. A week later a trigger comes and they fall back into certain things, and I know that’s going to happen because it’s part of the process so often it's not just about letting go but basically writing over it. Reframing it. The majority of what I do with people is not about changing the past because you can’t, shit happened to you and that sucks, but you always have the opportunity to rewrite your story and the narrative. To me it’s about giving people the power to take their power back and claim “yes that happened to me and it defined me for twenty years, I’m not going to let it define me for another 20 years”.
We all have deep deep conditioning, that’s mostly family and society. I don’t think we can fully erase it, it’s just so deep. Though what I love about what I do is, I take people back to very specific moments that help them understand why they formed those beliefs and then how it protected them or punished them, whatever it did for them. It’s in that understanding that they can then desire to release it or desire to reframe it, because we want to know… when I found out why my depression came it was such a moment of “wow there you go! I was in therapy for 10 years for that!” - and for me it was more about the spiritual, but it’s not like that for everybody. What I do works with both a spiritual person and someone who is very logical, because it’s about you and your story. So I don’t think we can fully erase, I love how you said that we can just write over.
What is “spiritual” to you?
Religion is such an interesting thing in my family because my mom is jewish and my dad is not. When she married him, she was shunned by her family because he wasn’t jewish. I grew up in a very not-religious household by any means. I even considered myself an atheist for most of my life. It’s during my depression that I started opening my mind more.
For me, spirituality is a combination of science and spirit together. We know we are in this universe and energy. I don’t resonate with the word God so much, I resonate with the word Universe, or Spirit, or Higher Power, or Source, or Greater Consciousness. I read a book recently that was saying that there’s one universal subconscious mind, and ever since I read that I know that’s what it is for me. When I was a child I remember lying in bed wondering whether we are in someone’s dream, and then they’re in a dream, and so on… so spirituality for me is not knowing.
I don’t want the answers, I want the magic. I want the unknown. I want those synchronicities’ moments. I prefer the word magic over manifest, but it’s not as marketable.
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While I was writing down our conversation, I noticed something I believe it’s worth spending a few more lines on, that is Emma’s Quantum Leap in her business. She never mentioned it, but she described it as this moment of nothing in the beginning until after 4 months BAM💥 something just happened and it took off. Quantum Leaps are cool and I like to put an accent on them so that you may identify yours, but they should not be the main focus of our lives and businesses. By the way, I identified another beautiful Quantum Leap in this interview with Eleonora & Sonia.
And so I went back to Emma and asked her…
Do you remember what you were doing, new habits you were adopting during those first months of your business? How were you embodying the “Emma CEO”?
Reflecting back on those first few months of my business it was a few things, I think. One, I made my own hypnosis recordings of kind of “my future self” and I would listen to them everyday. Even what I ‘m living here in Italy right now I was saying how I want to travel, I want to be in Italy, working and getting clients, also just calling in how effortless it would be. I wanted the work to speak for itself so that me as the CEO would not be rushing nor hustling all the time. So I would put in the recordings that it would just come to me.
Another thing I would do was go for a lot of walks because when I’m learning something new and you’re at the desk it’s not really “me”. For me to integrate things I would need that time to let things settle, so have that “out of the office” time.
The other thing I did was making sure I got dressed in my work clothes every day. Even if I didn’t have a client that day, even if I was just figuring stuff out with the business, I would always go into my office, put on my work-clothes and feel like I work 9 to 5. I would give myself breaks to really feel grounded in my work and that this is my job, even when in those few months it wasn’t bringing money in. Nonetheless I wanted it to feel like this is my job and this is what I’m doing.
My sister would remind me that all the effort I’m putting in is going to come back, and I kept going. So giving myself that structure, putting on those professional clothes, closing the office door, giving myself that time was really important to me.
I talked to my mom a lot too because she is a CEO, and just her energy and the way she approach things, even though I didn’t have a staff the way she has a staff, how does she still conduct herself on calls or the way she approaches her work. That was part of my embodying.
There was another thing I did do. There were a lot of resources for women where I was living about women who were starting businesses and just going to meet ups with other women once a week and talking to other women-business-owners even if they weren’t in my field at all… it was just so important for me to be around other female entrepreneurs and female CEOs. Being around other like minded women helped me normalise being myself a CEO.
Thank you for saying that about Quantum Leaping because I never would’ve realised that about myself. I don’t know why I sometimes have a hard time seeing what I’ve done in the same light, so when you said that I realised, “holy shit! I did Quantum Leap!”. Getting to do our interview now when I am literally living what I was calling in … I HAVE CHILLS RIGHT NOW. This is everything, because I am living the result of what I was bringing in in those few months. We often think we need to see everything right away, and worry we don’t see any tangible results… yet everything is always in movements in the Universe.
Everything I was doing during those months was, as you said, planting a seed. In this world of instant gratification and social media we always think it just happens, and people forget that it’s about patience and surrender and allowing.
Thank you for showing me I Quantum Leaped, I now know I can do it.
If you want to work with Emma, take advantage of an amazing 10% discount we offer thanks to our partnership. Just mention IN HER GENIUS to her when you book your RTT clarity call here. It is also valid for one persona hypnosis recording.
