DIEM Hypnotherapy

08/01/2026

So I haven’t posted or been active for a long long time. So much time has passed and so much life has happened since I left my wee room and ventured out into ‘a full time job’

This space holds such a dear place in my heart. This business, the life and energy you all brought through that door and the connections that were made will not be forgotten. The place where time could stand still and true insight could take place.

It is too often that I think about returning. They say things happen for a reason and I truly believe in the bigger plan as the universe pulls and pushes us into situations that are often uncomfortable but bring growth and insight. For me, that’s been the last couple of years. In tenfold. Actually, a millionfold. But what those lessons have shown me is a path back to my true self. Through these years I have had a steady stream of people asking me to ‘keep them on my list’ if I ever return, and to make sure I consider it. And the truth has been that I have desperately wanted to, but I did what I advise others not to do. To create a narrative that because Covid made the business at that time unviable, that I couldn’t return.

Very recently, we lost a true friend and colleague who shared my room with me and provided the wisdom, professionalism, insight and knowledge of a thousand people. Someone who from the moment I met him, I knew was special. A lightworker. A spiritualist. A person who embodied a deeper spiritual insight and grounding to universal strength than I have ever seen.

I met Tom Rannachan around 2018 when he responded to an ad to rent my room to do hypnotherapy and psychic readings. His first meeting with me was scheduled for an hour and we sat for three. I left feeling that I had known him forever. He felt familiar in a way that I can’t describe. Safe and wise and his stories of the other side and his life growing up with his mum and his gran will stay with me forever. Although not too far from my age, he seemed like an ‘adultier adult’ as he was a person of deep wisdom. Is that the definition of a guru? A dedication to compassion and care for others that comes from deep within and an unwavering commitment to put good out into the world. From speaking to others, it is clear that Tom only brought out the best in people. He was dedicated to making this world a better place, to being the balance of good for all the bad. Whatever was going on in his life, he threw himself wholeheartedly into this mission. A friend told me recently that even through his final stages of illness he was showing up for them and coaching and teaching because he was dedicated to showing the way for more light workers/more coaches/more therapists as that was what the world needed. That was so Tom. To be thinking of what else could be done for the world rather than focusing on himself.

Tom believed in me and my vision. He was an amazing listening ear and a cheerleader. He believed in my insight and my skills and referred so many people to me that he thought would be a good match. And I did to him. He would joke that our wee room was our ‘wee Zen Den’ and that we could change the world with one action at a time. He would say to me to draw strength in grounding from my many ancestors who walked this earth before me and to look for the signs. I am doing that right now as I contemplate what it looks like not to know he is there for guidance and wisdom.

I know that Tom was this to many many people and his wife and son were his world and he lived for them and through them. His face would light up as he told me about them and told me about Chris and how he was doing and I felt I knew them through Tom.

We would often share our passion of singing and send each other wee clips of encouragement. I have played his most recent one on repeat for days as this makes me smile. I wasn’t around the last few months the way I should have been to show up and contact him and to offer support. I wasn’t aware how bad things were and I will always deeply regret that. The other life had got the better of me for a while and I wasn’t ready to engage with anyone really, as I had a lot of soul searching to do. I’m just deeply sorry I missed the chance to link more often with a person who had a life changing impact on me and to be there for him in the way he always was for us. Not just me but my children and Mark too.

I want to honour Tom in some way that means his memory lives through my work in some way. Returning to what he believed was meant for me is one part of this even if it is a work in progress and takes a different form from what it once was.

To Tom. My dear friend. Thank you for everything you brought to shaping the practitioner I was back then, and for being the friend you were. And thank you for making this world a better place, and I know your legacy will live on in the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives you changed.

From ‘our wee Zen Den’-Rest in peace big guy 💔x

17/04/2022

Happy Easter to you all. I saw this today and it stopped me in my tracks as it spoke right to me. After a really tricky week, I found joy today in the smell of the cut grass, the sun on my face, the joy of chatting to strangers as we walked, wishing them a happy Easter. Smelling fresh laundry on the line, egg hunts, movies together and having the older kids here for a meal,
laughing and connecting. The little things in life are truly the big things❤️

04/04/2022

16/02/2022

My clients and I often chat about this. We can feel like life is being done to us, or that others do things ‘to’ us. When we live with a ‘hard done by’ attitude, we create barriers to our own peace of mind. Forgiveness sets us free as much as the person who has wronged us. It’s not an act of martyrdom, it’s not about saying this thing they did, did not matter to us. It’s about setting ourselves free from allowing it to hurt us any further. And that’s the best gift we can ever give ourselves ❤️

27/01/2022

Tonight was an emotional night for me. Packing up what feels like a lifetime of stuff in my wee room as the trajectory of face to face therapy has changed course due to good old covid.

This place has felt like home and these walls have held so many secrets. So much joy and pain has been released and felt in these four walls and I have been with you all on those journeys. I am immensely proud of everything you have achieved to find more peace and I am honoured to have been a part of it.

I am so grateful that the room will continue on under the loving care of its new owner, who has very kindly agreed for me to use it as and when we need so I’ll still be here, albeit in a different way.

Hopefully the batteries in my old clock won’t be replaced as I kinda take comfort from this being the ‘place where time stands still’ and allows us just to breathe…

I will still be doing therapy and can still see you face to face as needed, but for now will be focusing on remote work. I held on for a wee bit too long until it dawned on me that I was only holding on for nostalgia sake, and I needed to truly listen to the changing needs of my clients and my business.

To each and every one of you who has graced my beautiful wee ‘zen den’, I thank you. I thank you for your warmth and positive energy and the light you brought to this space. And if you need me, I’m still here. To all my clients who have outstanding sessions, these will be honoured and nothing will change in that regard.

But for now, I feel a need to sit with my feelings of nostalgia, as the acceptance of this loss is to respect how much this wee place meant to me. The place that represented the transition from black and white to colour, back to black and white for now…❤️

21/01/2022

Thought for today ❤️

10/01/2022

This really resonated with me today. What we seek we will find. There is badness out there but there is also the good. Even when we are in the thick of it, and feel swamped by it, the goodness of people and humanity is always there to be found. We just need to keep looking ❤️

31/12/2021

This explains self care so well. I don’t make New Years resolutions as such, as these can be unobtainable. Years ago for me, self care was overindulgence, having the cake and eating it, and that led to a whole host of problems… 😂… the notion of parenting myself brought a whole new level of responsibility but also fulfilment. I now take time during the year though to recalibrate, reassess and realign. And New Year always seems like a good point to pause and reflect and realign to the things we need to continue or introduce into our lives.

The last year has brought lots of unexpected challenges for us and the recalibration process has sometimes felt like steering a ship through an almighty storm 😂 We can’t always change external factors but we can work on our reactions to them.

From our home to yours, I wish each and every one of you a truly reflective, peaceful and happy New Year, and time spent on realigning to true self care will truly be time well spent!❤️

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
-Brianna Wiest
https://ko-fi.com/donate_nepenthe



[Illustration: Yaoyao Ma Van As Art ]

18/12/2021

How to maintain peace, love and connection while staying safe at Christmas!!

I remember years ago when I first studied social sciences, and the notion of ‘globalisation’ and ‘moral panic’ were introduced to me. The way in which our anxieties can be raised by the media over things that we otherwise would never have known about, brought right to our living room door. The introduction of the internet meant that news spread round the globe in an instant and we therefore had access to pretty much everything that ever happened in every household across the world if shared with us. (Yes, I am that old to remember this as a thing!)😂

Sure, we need to stay informed and we have a moral duty to shape change globally. Take the plastic crisis for example. There is benefit and necessity to getting involved and doing our bit for the environment.

But what is happening now, mid pandemic, is that we are exposed to an explosion of heightened opinions, many many of which are fuelled by anxiety, individual experience, individual motivations and all constantly at our fingertips through social media. Local news reporters sharing live updates and asking for ‘people’s opinions’ fuelling animosities across the world.

Individualist views clashing deeply with collectivist views, leaving us bruised and battered emotionally as we struggle to see the viewpoints of those people we love and value. Fear and anxiety heightening our arguments. Anger at the opinions of what we read on social media….

I too have been there and it’s troubling. Last week, I read a post by a local influencer, again reminding young people to go out and live life to the full, and not to get their booster. This person not speaking from a scientific perspective, but from an extreme individualist viewpoint, ie ‘they are our bodies and we had the right to protect them and make decisions that are best for us.’ I then read a social media comment from an extreme collectivist approach, where the person was urging others to stay at home, and that those who continue to visit pubs and restaurants are selfish and only care about themselves.

When my daughter phoned me last night asking for a run home, I thought I was taking a measured yet fun approach, wearing a mask and ventilating the car as she’s not in my household. Christmas tunes blaring and me in good spirits I was jokingly advised that she will ‘pass on a ride in my psycho sleigh next time, as she didn’t approve of the mask requirement…’😂 She too is overwhelmed by the mass moral panic around us…

So how do we protect our mental health?

The pandemic has caused a mental health crisis no doubt, due to increased isolation and disconnection from others. We all need connection and love in our lives and facing another Christmas with the risk of further restrictions can feel very bleak. However, what is more bleak and I cannot stress this enough, is the constant exposure to unrest. There is nothing more disruptive to the human spirit than heightened unrest, and we have a duty to ourselves right now to change the things we can, even when other things are outwith our control.

Stay informed but choose your informant wisely.

This is the single most important thing you can do for your own mental well-being. There are restrictions we have a legal requirement to follow, but too many times we are being caught up in the moral outrage, and losing hours on social media becoming horrified at the fallout of every decision and opinion. Suddenly, the opinion of Johnny, with the Pug profile picture who we have never met before and will likely never meet, is so important that we are delving into an online rant with him and losing ourselves to the black hole of social media for several hours. And making ourselves feel rubbish in the process.

In order to stay peaceful, a step away from heightened opinions and reactions and emotions are needed. Turn off the local news alerts that ask for your opinion, set boundaries with family and friends that you are happy with in terms of contact, and set a limit on discussions about the pandemic over Christmas dinner. Do what needs done to stay safe.

If you are isolating yourself at home and feeling well enough, spend some time planning for a special meal and indulge in some Christmas comedy. There is nothing that takes my mind off it more than Smithy and Pam singing Step into Christmas’, or Buddy asking his dad to make ‘gingerbread houses, and eat cookie dough, go ice-skating and maybe even hold hands…’

Our children…

If you have children who have access to social media, check in with them about how they are feeling. I often hear the argument against following restrictions as our mental health is too precious. But what we don’t often take responsibility for, is our part in fuelling tensions by widely sharing our views and opinions. There may be a Tsumani of omicron cases coming our way, but there is equally a Tsunami of global opinions and unrest at the fingertips of ourselves and our precious children and we need to minimise that.

Children are most resilient when they feel connected with the greater good, their moral compass ignited to help others. A reflective approach on the small things they can do to make a difference will help them make sense of this world they live in, and also give them back a tiny part of that control they feel they have lost, which is so beneficial to their wellbeing. In the same way that giving to charity and reducing plastic waste ignites a sense of moral purpose for children, the ones who will fare best are those who feel they have been able to contribute something towards collective change. The hard facts are that children will struggle to cope with restrictions. But they will struggle to cope even more with bickering, unrest, arguments over political opinions, and a sense of hopelessness, and we need to protect them from this in person, and online.

A peaceful and connected Christmas

So making the best of what we can control this year is key. We have control over doing our bit, however small that is, and the benefit will be an individual and collective one. We have an opportunity to find peace within our homes, and reduce our exposure to conflict and unrest where possible. And that is exactly what I aim to do this year.

From our home to yours, I wish you all a Merry and peaceful Christmas, and a healthy happy and safe New Year x

17/12/2021