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About me…
Hello! I am Christine Engblom. I am a certified Alchemical Hypnotherapist and Reiki Master. I received a BA majoring in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and I am currently in process of earning a Masters in Depth Psychology. Please read my personal story below about how Reiki and Hypnosis have helped me with chronic pain, depression and stress. |
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My Personal Journey in Healing
When I was 11 years old I found out about the field of Psychology. My father was working in Berkeley for a Psychology Professor that spent some time explaining to me what psychology was really about. She mentioned consciousness and the unconscious mind and I became instantly fascinated and excited to pursue my path in psychology. I made a declaration to myself at that very moment. I would study psychology at Berkeley and someday become a psychologist.
Earlier that summer I had a major concussion and I lost my memory for several days. I remember waking up to my mom with a mirror and an ice pack explaining to me for the 20th time that I had hit my head while on my cousins bike and then showed me my bruised and swollen face. After this head trauma I began to remember memories of my childhood that I had not remembered before. I began to change. I had been getting D's in school, not fitting in and struggling with low self-esteem. However after this head trauma I changed and I began to feel strong unconditional love and a connectedness to what I only knew to be what a "God" was. I started to ask friends to take me to church with them and I began to have a series of premonitions that would happen for the next several years. I could see things before they would happen and I get intuitive information suddenly without my control. I started to understand the laws of science and math and got straight A's in school and had a level of confidence which I had not had before. I became a firm believer in the amazing power of the mind. I was drawn to learn about hypnosis and I read a book about it in my early teens. I was so intrigued by the stories the Psychologist reported about his hypnotherapy clients. I felt that the mind had so much more capacity to it than anyone was realizing at the time, but as I grew older and closer to my goal of attending UC Berkeley, more discoveries were being made and the hypnosis craze was fizzing out once again. Hypnosis has come in and out of popularity in the field of psychology and this time when I finally made it to Berkeley it was no longer mainstream. I was very disappointed to see that no one was teaching hypnosis at Berkeley. I was even more amazed of the lack of classes on human consciousness. I mean there could be lifetimes of work done to try to understand human consciousness, however Berkeley is a research funded institution and hypnosis was no longer mainstream and there simply was no funding for such topics. The field of Psychology has taken many other subject matters under its wing and has become more biological in nature. So working with the subconscious mind was no longer the focus at the University.
The study of psychology is changing all of the time as we learn more and more about the way our brains work and how our thoughts, health and well being are all interconnected.
Many holistic healing modalities work with energy, like Reiki, Acupuncture, Acupressure, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). These modalities work by changing your energy field by re-balancing energy in the body to help it come back to its healthy, vital default state of being. In eastern medicine there is a strong emphasis on am energtic body and the main energy centers found in the body are called Chakras. These are energy centers in our bodies that energy flows through. Unbalanced energy can cause illness and or other unwanted symptoms.
My belief in the "energetic body" did not arise until I had a Reiki session. In February 2017 I had a session with a local Reiki Master. I had experienced 4 years of increasingly worse chronic pain. My route to discover a diagnosis was long and difficult. I eventually learned that I had endometriosis. Endometriosis is a chronic disease with no one cause or cure. I was basically told that I would most likely live with this for the rest of my life and that the only "treatment" was hormone therapy, which meant I would have to be on medication for the rest of my life. I hated to be on hormone therapy but I chose to do it because I could not afford to miss work every month just because I was having an exceptionally difficult period. Later in 2016 things got much worse for me. I began to have pain during all times of the month and I would have "flare ups" whenever I would over exert myself. These times usually included time with family when I had to carry and chase my little baby around and it would irritate the lining of my abdominal cavity and cause severe swelling and pain. It started to effect my relationships with people because I could not handle exerting my self and triggering episodes of severe pain that would last for a week. After having surgery to remove cysts and tissues, birth, and hormone therapy things only got worse and I had spent many, many hours in the ER throughout the year wondering if there was something more wrong than just the endometriosis. There would be swelling of my kidneys and my colon, and there would be new cysts. Every time I went to the doctor they just handed me pain meds and said "good luck".
I was fed up, and I had enough constipating pain meds and doctors bills. I decided to explore alternative avenues for my healing to occur. Thats when I discovered Reiki. I went in for my session not knowing what to expect. I had done some research about what Reiki was and I even read a short book about it. It sounded so simple but as I had learned in the book, Reiki had been around since the early 1900's and it has been a successful modality for a very long time and so there had to be something to it. I had never thought to get help with healing my "energetic" body, but here I was entering my first Reiki session. As the Reiki Master channeled "Reiki" which means "life-force energy" into my body to heal the body, I had a mental clarity that I had not had in years. It was as if she lifted so many voices of others disapproval, doubts and judgment from my energetic body. It was quiet and still in my mind. I heard only one voice and peace and calmness enveloped me completely. I felt the warmth emit from her hands when she would hold certain hand postures on my body, even at times when her hands were hovering above my body I could feel a warmth like fire. She was very intuitive and mentioned some personal things that she could not have known about me. One of the things she said was that my uterus wants me to work with it and to stop being mad at it. I laughed partly because what she said sounded so ridiculous and partly because she was so right. I hated this part of my body. I felt like it had betrayed me by growing cells where it shouldn't and for causing me so much pain and suffering. I had even considered getting a hysterectomy just so that I could get the dysfunctional part of myself out and stop the pain once and for all. She said I could talk to it and give it love and listen to what its trying to tell me. It was dysfunctional for a reason. This was a far cry from my earlier approaches to "shut up" my uterus with pain meds and hormones. I left feeling painless, and I have not had any severe uterine or ovarian pain since. I also got off of hormone therapy and pain meds. I started to do something so simple and strange... I began to speak to my body. I asked it to help transition me off of the hormones without going into a month of pain like the last 3 times I tried. I asked my uterus to work with my brain and natural hormones to do its best and most efficient job to run naturally without dysfunction. It was seriously like a miracle.
I was immediately amazed by the effects of one session and started to look into alternative healing modalities. Since then I have become a Reiki Master myself.
The main idea here is that our bodies have wisdom, they know how to heal and we just need to work with it to do so.
In search for other modalities that have the same perspective on healing I found Alchemical Hypnotherapy which has a somatic healing program in which you talk to your body as well. The Alchemical Hypnotherapy program I completed not only taught all of the tools of healing with Hypnosis but it allowed us as the students to experience the tools in our own healing process everyday of the training. It was half training and half experiential. I did further healing through that program in particular and now I believe any residing endometriosis is gone. It is truly amazing what these other healing modalities did for me in such a short amount of time.
After my quick healing with Reiki and ongoing work with Alchemical Hypnosis, I know that my job in this life is to bring healing to others. I guess my main message to my personal story here is that there are so many ways to heal than just the traditional mainstream ways and discovering the underlying cause of disease on an energetic or emotional level can have very quick and long lasting outcomes.
I invite you to try Reiki and Hypnotherapy for yourself. I explain more about these healing modalities in the menu above so please learn more about them and see if they resonate for you.
When I was 11 years old I found out about the field of Psychology. My father was working in Berkeley for a Psychology Professor that spent some time explaining to me what psychology was really about. She mentioned consciousness and the unconscious mind and I became instantly fascinated and excited to pursue my path in psychology. I made a declaration to myself at that very moment. I would study psychology at Berkeley and someday become a psychologist.
Earlier that summer I had a major concussion and I lost my memory for several days. I remember waking up to my mom with a mirror and an ice pack explaining to me for the 20th time that I had hit my head while on my cousins bike and then showed me my bruised and swollen face. After this head trauma I began to remember memories of my childhood that I had not remembered before. I began to change. I had been getting D's in school, not fitting in and struggling with low self-esteem. However after this head trauma I changed and I began to feel strong unconditional love and a connectedness to what I only knew to be what a "God" was. I started to ask friends to take me to church with them and I began to have a series of premonitions that would happen for the next several years. I could see things before they would happen and I get intuitive information suddenly without my control. I started to understand the laws of science and math and got straight A's in school and had a level of confidence which I had not had before. I became a firm believer in the amazing power of the mind. I was drawn to learn about hypnosis and I read a book about it in my early teens. I was so intrigued by the stories the Psychologist reported about his hypnotherapy clients. I felt that the mind had so much more capacity to it than anyone was realizing at the time, but as I grew older and closer to my goal of attending UC Berkeley, more discoveries were being made and the hypnosis craze was fizzing out once again. Hypnosis has come in and out of popularity in the field of psychology and this time when I finally made it to Berkeley it was no longer mainstream. I was very disappointed to see that no one was teaching hypnosis at Berkeley. I was even more amazed of the lack of classes on human consciousness. I mean there could be lifetimes of work done to try to understand human consciousness, however Berkeley is a research funded institution and hypnosis was no longer mainstream and there simply was no funding for such topics. The field of Psychology has taken many other subject matters under its wing and has become more biological in nature. So working with the subconscious mind was no longer the focus at the University.
The study of psychology is changing all of the time as we learn more and more about the way our brains work and how our thoughts, health and well being are all interconnected.
Many holistic healing modalities work with energy, like Reiki, Acupuncture, Acupressure, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). These modalities work by changing your energy field by re-balancing energy in the body to help it come back to its healthy, vital default state of being. In eastern medicine there is a strong emphasis on am energtic body and the main energy centers found in the body are called Chakras. These are energy centers in our bodies that energy flows through. Unbalanced energy can cause illness and or other unwanted symptoms.
My belief in the "energetic body" did not arise until I had a Reiki session. In February 2017 I had a session with a local Reiki Master. I had experienced 4 years of increasingly worse chronic pain. My route to discover a diagnosis was long and difficult. I eventually learned that I had endometriosis. Endometriosis is a chronic disease with no one cause or cure. I was basically told that I would most likely live with this for the rest of my life and that the only "treatment" was hormone therapy, which meant I would have to be on medication for the rest of my life. I hated to be on hormone therapy but I chose to do it because I could not afford to miss work every month just because I was having an exceptionally difficult period. Later in 2016 things got much worse for me. I began to have pain during all times of the month and I would have "flare ups" whenever I would over exert myself. These times usually included time with family when I had to carry and chase my little baby around and it would irritate the lining of my abdominal cavity and cause severe swelling and pain. It started to effect my relationships with people because I could not handle exerting my self and triggering episodes of severe pain that would last for a week. After having surgery to remove cysts and tissues, birth, and hormone therapy things only got worse and I had spent many, many hours in the ER throughout the year wondering if there was something more wrong than just the endometriosis. There would be swelling of my kidneys and my colon, and there would be new cysts. Every time I went to the doctor they just handed me pain meds and said "good luck".
I was fed up, and I had enough constipating pain meds and doctors bills. I decided to explore alternative avenues for my healing to occur. Thats when I discovered Reiki. I went in for my session not knowing what to expect. I had done some research about what Reiki was and I even read a short book about it. It sounded so simple but as I had learned in the book, Reiki had been around since the early 1900's and it has been a successful modality for a very long time and so there had to be something to it. I had never thought to get help with healing my "energetic" body, but here I was entering my first Reiki session. As the Reiki Master channeled "Reiki" which means "life-force energy" into my body to heal the body, I had a mental clarity that I had not had in years. It was as if she lifted so many voices of others disapproval, doubts and judgment from my energetic body. It was quiet and still in my mind. I heard only one voice and peace and calmness enveloped me completely. I felt the warmth emit from her hands when she would hold certain hand postures on my body, even at times when her hands were hovering above my body I could feel a warmth like fire. She was very intuitive and mentioned some personal things that she could not have known about me. One of the things she said was that my uterus wants me to work with it and to stop being mad at it. I laughed partly because what she said sounded so ridiculous and partly because she was so right. I hated this part of my body. I felt like it had betrayed me by growing cells where it shouldn't and for causing me so much pain and suffering. I had even considered getting a hysterectomy just so that I could get the dysfunctional part of myself out and stop the pain once and for all. She said I could talk to it and give it love and listen to what its trying to tell me. It was dysfunctional for a reason. This was a far cry from my earlier approaches to "shut up" my uterus with pain meds and hormones. I left feeling painless, and I have not had any severe uterine or ovarian pain since. I also got off of hormone therapy and pain meds. I started to do something so simple and strange... I began to speak to my body. I asked it to help transition me off of the hormones without going into a month of pain like the last 3 times I tried. I asked my uterus to work with my brain and natural hormones to do its best and most efficient job to run naturally without dysfunction. It was seriously like a miracle.
I was immediately amazed by the effects of one session and started to look into alternative healing modalities. Since then I have become a Reiki Master myself.
The main idea here is that our bodies have wisdom, they know how to heal and we just need to work with it to do so.
In search for other modalities that have the same perspective on healing I found Alchemical Hypnotherapy which has a somatic healing program in which you talk to your body as well. The Alchemical Hypnotherapy program I completed not only taught all of the tools of healing with Hypnosis but it allowed us as the students to experience the tools in our own healing process everyday of the training. It was half training and half experiential. I did further healing through that program in particular and now I believe any residing endometriosis is gone. It is truly amazing what these other healing modalities did for me in such a short amount of time.
After my quick healing with Reiki and ongoing work with Alchemical Hypnosis, I know that my job in this life is to bring healing to others. I guess my main message to my personal story here is that there are so many ways to heal than just the traditional mainstream ways and discovering the underlying cause of disease on an energetic or emotional level can have very quick and long lasting outcomes.
I invite you to try Reiki and Hypnotherapy for yourself. I explain more about these healing modalities in the menu above so please learn more about them and see if they resonate for you.