The Wholistic Hypnotist

The Wholistic Hypnotist Certified Hypnotist & QHHT
Reiki Master Teacher * Intuitive * Philip Permutt- Trained Certified Crystal Healer Master * Crystal Reiki Mastery Experience
(8)

09/01/2026

It’s the first of the month, so if you see me standing at my front door blowing cinnamon into my house, mind your business. I’ve got things to invite in. There’s an old practice of blowing cinnamon through the doorway on the first of the month. Cinnamon has long been tied to prosperity, and the doorway is a symbol of crossing a threshold. Before you do it, stop and set an intention. Not just money, but abundance in all its forms: opportunities, peace, creativity, friendship, whatever feels alive to you. And then say it, blow it, leave it there for a bit before cleaning it up. And this month feels especially meaningful because I am carrying Pisces energy with me. The real magic isn’t just the cinnamon. It’s the doorway. It’s the decision. I’m no longer standing at the threshold of my own life wondering if I’m allowed in. I’m opening the damn door.

And you don’t have to rush to clean it up. Some people leave it along the threshold as part of the ritual, and cinnamon is also traditionally used as a natural deterrent for certain insects. So let it sit if you want. Abundance invited in, unwanted little freeloaders encouraged to stay out.

08/28/2026

Last night, during the Pisces Lunar Eclipse, I had one of the most vivid dreams I’ve had in a very long time.

I was traveling in another country with people I loved. And then we were separated. I reached for my phone to call my husband, but my phone was gone. I couldn’t remember his number. I couldn’t find my way back. At first, it was absolute fear. I went from person to person begging to borrow a phone. Most said no. Finally, one man handed me his phone and said, “You can have it.” And then it hit me. I didn’t know the number.

Even with the phone in my hand, I couldn’t go back. There was nothing left to do but accept where I was. And that’s when everything changed.

Many astrologers describe this Pisces Lunar Eclipse as a kind of timeline jump, a moment where we release an old version of ourselves so fully that we simply begin living from a new one.

I’ve been talking about the mutable signs, Pisces, Virgo, Gemini, Sagittarius, and how this season may be especially significant for us. If you’re one of those signs and you had unusually vivid dreams last night, don’t dismiss them. Write them down. Sit with them. Something in there may be guiding you.

Looking back, what stands out most is that I didn’t start the dream alone. I started surrounded by people I loved, and the separation was the catalyst. It was as though my subconscious was asking me, “who are you when every familiar anchor is gone?” Even when the tool to reconnect was handed to me, the path backward was no longer there. That changed everything.

It was never about getting back. It was about realizing I could move forward. Sometimes the biggest shift isn’t the world around us changing. It’s the moment we do.

I’m a Pisces, and this dream didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like crossing a threshold into a version of myself that no longer needed to cling to the life behind me. Now I wanna know, what did you dream last night?

08/26/2026

Mutable signs, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces… I’m right here with you. I’m a Pisces, too. And I feel the exact same thing. This is a timeline shift. You might feel a tug of sadness, like a quiet goodbye to a version of your life you once lived or once longed for. That’s okay. That ache doesn’t mean you chose wrong. It just means you’re honoring what shaped you. And this matters… That door is closed. Nothing behind you gets to tug on you anymore. You’re not being dragged backward. You’re stepping forward. So let the tears be a blessing, not a detour. Say goodbye with love, then take the step. This next chapter’s ours.

08/25/2026

Apparently, I picked one hell of a week to decide I was going to feel every single feeling I have been trying to keep tucked away.

If you have been more emotional than usual lately, crying over things that normally would not get to you, feeling exhausted for reasons you cannot quite explain, wanting to pull away from the noise, or suddenly realizing that something you have been carrying just feels too damn heavy anymore, apparently we are not alone.

We are moving toward the August 28 lunar eclipse in Pisces, and Pisces energy has a way of bringing us into the places we cannot simply think our way through. It is emotional, intuitive, compassionate, spiritual, and deeply connected to surrender and release. Lunar eclipses are traditionally associated with endings, culmination, turning points, and those moments when something that has been quietly sitting beneath the surface decides it is not staying quiet anymore.

And well, that explains a few things.

I have spent a lot of time asking myself how I get through things. How do I keep going? How do I keep showing up? How do I keep taking care of everyone and everything without completely losing myself somewhere along the way? I think sometimes we become so accustomed to carrying things that we stop asking whether they were ever ours to carry in the first place.

Maybe that is not the question anymore. Maybe the question is what am I finally ready to put down, and once I put it down, what do I want to build in the space that is left behind?

There is such a huge difference between giving up and finally putting something down. There is a difference between shutting people out and realizing that your own energy deserves protection too. And there is definitely a difference between falling apart and finally allowing yourself to feel everything you have been holding together for far too long.

So if you are feeling unusually tender right now, maybe you do not need to fix it. Maybe you do not need to explain it, analyze it, turn it into a lesson, or convince yourself that you should be handling it better. Maybe you can just let yourself be human for a little while and listen to whatever is trying to come to the surface.

Cry if you need to cry. Rest if you are tired. Get quiet when the world feels too loud, and pay attention to what keeps coming up because sometimes release does not feel like freedom when it is happening. Sometimes liberation looks a whole lot like tears.

And judging by the last couple of days, apparently I had some things I was ready to let go of.

So if you are feeling this too, be gentle with yourself. I am going to take my overly emotional Pisces eclipse self, a ridiculous amount of Epsom salt, and whatever dignity I have left and go soak until further notice.

See you on the other side of the salt bath. We ride at dawn.

08/25/2026

I think one of the hardest things about being a healer is learning what to do with a heart that sometimes cares too much.

When caring for people is woven into who you are, it can be incredibly difficult to recognize when compassion has quietly turned into self-abandonment. You don’t always notice how tired you are because someone else needs you. You don’t always recognize how much you’re carrying because the person standing in front of you seems to be carrying something heavier. So you keep going. You make room. You hold space. You give a little more because you know you can, until eventually you look around and realize you’ve become so accustomed to being the warm place for everyone else that you’ve forgotten warmth was supposed to reach you, too.

There’s an old saying about setting yourself on fire to keep other people warm, and I understand that saying far more deeply than I’d like to. The strange thing is, even when I find myself depleted, I don’t regret the warmth I gave. I don’t regret loving people. I don’t regret showing up for them or holding space when they needed somewhere safe to fall apart. I don’t regret giving what I had because, in those moments, giving it felt like the most natural thing in the world. If there’s anything I regret, maybe it’s simply that somewhere along the way, I forgot to save some of that love for myself.

And maybe that’s the lesson in all of this. Maybe the problem was never that I cared too much. Maybe the problem was believing that caring deeply for someone else meant I had to abandon myself in the process.

Those of us who feel called to healing cannot spend our lives being the medicine for everyone else while refusing to receive any ourselves. We can’t keep pouring and pouring until there’s nothing left and then convince ourselves that our emptiness somehow proves how much we care. There’s nothing noble about disappearing inside the needs of other people, and there’s nothing selfish about recognizing that we have needs, limits, hearts, bodies and lives of our own.

Maybe I don’t need to become less compassionate. Maybe I simply need to include myself in my compassion. I can love people without carrying everything for them. I can hold space without becoming the space. I can care deeply and still say, “I love you, but I don’t have anything left to give today.” That doesn’t make me less of a healer. It makes me human.

And if you’re someone who has ever felt called to be a healer, a helper, a teacher, a guide, a caregiver, a light in the darkness, or simply the person everyone seems to find when their world is falling apart, I want to gently remind you of something that I’m having to remind myself of, too. Please be gentle with yourself, even when you don’t think you deserve that gentleness. Actually, be especially gentle with yourself then.

You don’t have to earn rest by completely exhausting yourself first. You don’t have to prove how much you love someone by how much of yourself you’re willing to sacrifice for them. You don’t have to prove that you’re a good healer by answering every call, carrying every burden or being available every moment someone else decides they need you.

Please, always, always, always put yourself first.

That doesn’t mean nobody else matters. It doesn’t mean you stop caring, and it certainly doesn’t mean you become selfish. Putting yourself first simply means you finally understand that you matter, too. It means remembering that you’re one of the people you’ve been called here to care for. Your body matters. Your heart matters. Your energy matters. Your peace matters. Your joy matters. Your life outside of what you do for everyone else matters.

Maybe the fire was never supposed to consume us. Maybe we were simply supposed to learn how to tend it, protect it and know when it needed time to burn quietly for us.

I still want to be warmth in this world. I still want people to leave my presence remembering something beautiful about themselves. I still want to help people heal, remember, awaken and come home to who they are. I don’t think that part of me will ever change, and I don’t want it to.

I’m just finally beginning to understand that while I’m helping everyone else find their way home, I deserve to come home to myself, too.

08/23/2026

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ancestral chains and what it really means to be the person who finally decides that something that’s been carried for generations doesn’t have to be carried anymore.

We talk about generational patterns and generational healing all the time, but I don’t think we always stop and consider how much of who we believe we’re supposed to be was decided long before we ever had the ability to choose for ourselves. We’re born into families that already have beliefs about love, money, success, relationships, spirituality, religion, politics, gender, sacrifice, family, and what a “good life” is supposed to look like. We learn what’s acceptable, what’s expected, what we’re supposed to tolerate, what we’re supposed to hide, and even what we’re supposed to believe about ourselves before we’re old enough to realize that any of those things can actually be questioned.

What makes this even more interesting to me is that most of the people who taught us those things didn’t create those beliefs either. They learned them from the people who came before them, who learned them from the people who came before them, and somewhere along the way beliefs became traditions, traditions became expectations, and expectations became, “This is just the way things are because this is the way they’ve always been.”

The beautiful thing is that just because something has always been a certain way doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, and I think one of the greatest freedoms we have as human beings is the ability to become conscious enough to look at everything that was handed to us and decide for ourselves what still belongs in our lives.

Breaking an ancestral chain doesn’t mean rejecting the people who came before us, and it certainly doesn’t mean deciding that our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents got everything wrong. They lived according to what they knew, what they’d experienced, what they’d survived, and what they’d been taught was possible within the world they lived in. We can understand that and have compassion for it while also recognizing that their limitations don’t have to become ours.

We can love where we came from while still choosing to go somewhere different, and we can honor the people who came before us without believing that honoring them requires us to repeat their lives. We can change the way our families communicate, decide that silence isn’t going to be the way we deal with pain anymore, learn that love doesn’t have to hurt, and recognize that suffering isn’t some requirement we have to fulfill before we’re worthy of happiness. We can even reach a place where we realize that the person everyone told us we were supposed to become isn’t actually who we are at all.

And yes, this is one of the reasons I love the work I do so much, because so much of what I see through hypnosis, energy work, and the deeper work of examining our beliefs comes back to this very thing. Sometimes people discover that a belief they’ve carried for most of their lives was never really theirs to begin with. It was handed to them so early, repeated so often, or reinforced so deeply that they never realized they were allowed to question it, and there is something incredibly beautiful about watching someone recognize that being deeply ingrained doesn’t mean being permanent.

We get to question these things. We get to look at a belief that has shaped our lives and ask, “Do I actually believe this, or was I taught to believe this?” We get to decide whether the story we’ve been living still fits the person we’ve become, and when it doesn’t, we have the ability to choose something different.

Maybe that’s what breaking ancestral chains really looks like. It isn’t some dramatic rejection of everything and everyone who came before us. It’s becoming aware enough to look at what we’ve inherited and consciously decide what still belongs with us, what has served its purpose, and what we’re finally ready to put down.

We can keep the beautiful things. We can keep the stories, the traditions, the recipes, the laughter, the strength, the resilience, the wisdom, and all of those wonderful pieces that remind us where we came from and connect us to people whose lives ultimately made our own possible. At the same time, we can decide that the fear, shame, silence, scarcity, prejudice, pain, expectations, and limitations that were passed down alongside those beautiful things have traveled far enough.

I actually wonder sometimes whether this is part of what we’re supposed to do with each generation. Maybe we’re supposed to take what the people before us learned and then learn a little more. Maybe we’re supposed to understand a little more, heal a little more, question a little more, and become conscious enough to make different choices when different choices are needed. I don’t see that as dishonoring the people who came before us at all. If anything, I think there can be something incredibly loving about taking everything they survived and using the life they helped make possible to go a little farther.

I don’t believe we’re here simply to become copies of the people who came before us, and I don’t believe “this is how it’s always been” is a good enough reason to keep something alive that is hurting us. We’re allowed to take everything that was handed to us, appreciate the pieces that helped shape us, understand the pieces that wounded us, and then decide for ourselves what happens next.

Because something being passed down to you doesn’t mean it has to be passed through you, and sometimes you get to be the person who looks at something that’s been carried for generations and lovingly decides that it has traveled far enough.

Your ancestors gave you a beginning, and everything they lived, loved, learned, survived, and carried eventually became part of the road that brought you here. What you do with that inheritance, what you carry forward, what you lovingly leave behind, and who you choose to become from here belongs to you.
-Gretchen Herrera

08/21/2026

Okay, so if you’ve been wondering why everybody seems to be a little more sensitive, a little more irritated, a little more emotional, and about two seconds away from saying, “You know what? I have had ENOUGH,” there is some interesting astrology happening right now that might explain why everything feels so intense.

Mars moved into Cancer on August 11 and will stay there until September 27, and Mars does NOT particularly like being in Cancer. In traditional astrology, Mars is considered to be in its fall here, which means the natural expression of Mars has a harder time operating the way it normally wants to.

Mars is action, anger, passion, desire, courage, motivation, and that part of us that finally reaches a point where we say, “Enough. Something has to change.”

Cancer, on the other hand, is connected with our emotions, home, family, security, memories, belonging, and those tender places inside of us that we tend to protect because they actually mean something to us.

So now we have this fiery, action-oriented planet moving through one of the most emotional and protective signs of the zodiac, and I think we can all imagine what happens when you put those two energies together.

This is where the whole “passive-aggressive AF” reputation of Mars in Cancer comes from. Mars naturally wants to confront something directly, while Cancer tends to approach the world through emotion, protection, instinct, and feeling. When we aren’t paying attention to what is actually happening underneath those feelings, all of that Mars energy can start coming out sideways.

You might find yourself getting irritated by things that normally wouldn’t bother you. Something somebody said three days ago might suddenly get under your skin all over again. Something that happened ten years ago might wander back into your head while you’re standing in the shower, and suddenly you’re having the entire argument again, complete with all the brilliant responses you wish you’d thought of the first time. 😂

You may even start looking at situations you have tolerated for YEARS and suddenly wonder, “Why have I been putting up with this?”

But THIS is where I think Mars in Cancer gets really interesting, because I don’t think this transit is simply showing us what we’re angry about.

I think it’s showing us what we CARE about.

Anger is information, and sometimes anger is simply the moment when something inside of you finally recognizes that a boundary has been crossed, a need has been ignored, or something you deeply value deserves to be protected.

And sometimes that something is YOU.

That’s why I keep seeing people referring to this transit as a kind of “revenge tour,” and while I understand what they mean, I think there is a much more powerful way of looking at it.

Maybe your revenge isn’t getting even with anybody.

Maybe your revenge is getting YOURSELF back.

Maybe it’s finally learning how to say no without spending the next three hours explaining why you said it. Maybe it’s realizing that you don’t have to continue participating in something simply because you’ve participated in it for twenty years. Maybe it’s releasing the exhausting need to make everybody understand you, especially when some people are absolutely committed to misunderstanding you anyway.

And maybe it’s finally looking at some of the beliefs, responsibilities, guilt, expectations, and emotional baggage you’ve been carrying around for years and asking yourself one very important question:

“Who told me this was mine to carry?”

Because THAT is the kind of revenge tour I can get behind.

We’re also getting ready to leave Leo season and move into Virgo season, which adds another interesting layer to all of this. Leo has been shining a light on the heart, identity, creativity, self-expression, and the courage to be fully seen, while Virgo comes along afterward and asks us what we’re actually going to DO with everything we’ve discovered.

Virgo wants us to sort through the mess. It wants us to look carefully at our lives and determine what works, what doesn’t, what belongs, what needs healing, what deserves our energy, and what has simply been taking up space because we became accustomed to carrying it.

So if you’ve been feeling a little strange lately, instead of immediately deciding that something is wrong, maybe get curious about what is coming up.

Pay attention to what you’re suddenly tired of tolerating. Pay attention to the old emotions and memories that keep resurfacing, and especially pay attention to the things you suddenly feel passionate about again. Notice where your anger is pointing, because underneath that anger there may be something incredibly important asking to be seen, acknowledged, protected, or changed.

And while you’re doing all of that, remember something my guides have been telling me forever, and something nearly every one of my clients has heard me say:

Be the observer, not the absorber.

Awareness doesn’t require absorption.

You can notice what is happening around you without taking ownership of it. You can feel an emotion without becoming that emotion, and you can recognize someone else’s chaos without inviting it to move into your nervous system and start rearranging the furniture.

Maybe Mars in Cancer isn’t here simply to make everybody angry, sensitive, defensive, or ready to walk away.

Maybe it’s showing us exactly where we’ve been giving away our energy, our passion, our peace, and pieces of ourselves simply because we thought keeping the peace was more important than protecting our own.

And maybe this “revenge tour” isn’t about making anybody pay for what they did to us at all.

Maybe the greatest revenge is reaching a place where you no longer need them to.

Because when you become so completely aligned with who you are that the people, situations, beliefs, and wounds that once controlled your emotional world simply don’t have that power anymore, you haven’t gotten even.

You’ve gotten free.

And THAT is one hell of a revenge tour. 🔥

08/19/2026

Lately, I have been thinking deeply about the idea that nothing is quite as it seems. The more I observe life, people, patterns, and even my own experiences, the more I wonder how much of what we call “reality” is actually reality, and how much of it is the meaning we have learned to place upon what we see.

From the moment we enter this world, we begin receiving information about who we are and how life works. We are taught what is possible and what is impossible. We are taught what success should look like, what relationships should look like, what kind of person we should become, what we should fear, what we should value, and even what we should believe about ourselves. Some of those beliefs come from people who love us deeply. Some come from painful experiences. Some come from religion, culture, family, school, society, television, social media, and generations of people repeating what they were taught before anyone ever stopped to ask whether it was actually true.

Eventually, something fascinating happens. We stop recognizing those ideas as beliefs and begin experiencing them as reality.

If I believe that I am incapable, I will see evidence of my limitations everywhere I look. If I believe that I am worthy, capable, creative, and powerful, I begin noticing possibilities that may have been sitting in front of me all along. The world itself may not have changed in that exact moment, yet the world available to me has changed because I have changed the lens through which I am seeing it.

That is what I mean when I say this world is an illusion.

I am not saying that our experiences are imaginary or that painful things simply disappear because we think differently. I mean something much deeper. We rarely experience life without interpretation. We experience life through perception, memory, expectation, emotion, conditioning, and belief. Two people can stand in the same room, witness the same event, hear the same words, and walk away carrying completely different realities because each person experienced that moment through a different inner world.

And that makes me wonder how much power we actually have as creators.

Perhaps creation is not about controlling every circumstance or pretending that difficult things never happen. Perhaps being a creator means recognizing that we participate in shaping our lives every single day through what we believe, what we expect, what we give meaning to, what we continue carrying, and what we finally decide we are ready to question.

There are beliefs inside every one of us that have been there for so long that they sound like our own voice. “I cannot do that.” “People like me never get that.” “This is just who I am.” “Life has always been this way.” “I have to be this person because this is who everyone expects me to be.”

But what happens when we become curious about those sentences instead of automatically believing them?

What happens when we ask, “Where did I learn this?” “Whose belief was this before it became mine?” “What experiences convinced me this was true?” “Does this belief still belong in the life I am creating now?”

And perhaps the most powerful question of all is this: “Who might I become if I stopped requiring my future to agree with my past?”

I think there is something extraordinary waiting inside that question.

Maybe awakening is not about discovering one great secret about the universe. Maybe part of awakening is recognizing how much of our reality has been built from beliefs we never consciously chose, and realizing that we are allowed to examine them. We are allowed to change them. We are allowed to discover something new about ourselves. We are allowed to create from a different place.

I would genuinely love to open this conversation because I think there are many people quietly questioning these same things.

What is one belief you carried for years that you eventually discovered was never really true?

Was there something you were taught about yourself, relationships, success, money, spirituality, aging, happiness, or life itself that you eventually questioned and realized you no longer believed?

And once that belief changed, did your experience of life begin changing with it?

I would love to hear your stories, because I have a feeling that when we begin sharing the beliefs we have outgrown, somebody else may suddenly recognize the invisible walls they have been living inside.

Sometimes the most powerful moment is simply realizing that a wall we thought was made of stone was actually made of belief.

08/18/2026

People hear the word grounding and sometimes imagine they need to be barefoot in the grass with a crystal in each hand, incense burning somewhere nearby, soft music playing, and twenty uninterrupted minutes where nobody needs anything from them. And while that sounds absolutely lovely, grounding can happen in much more ordinary moments. Sometimes grounding is standing in your kitchen with your hand resting against the counter because your nervous system has apparently decided there’s a tiger in the room when there is, in fact, only Tuesday.

Grounding is really about bringing yourself back into the moment you’re actually living. Our minds are incredible travelers. We can be standing perfectly safe in our own home while our mind is replaying something someone said three days ago, rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, worrying about next week, or wandering through seventeen different possibilities before we’ve even finished making coffee. Meanwhile, our body is still standing right here, waiting for us to come back.

That’s why some of the simplest grounding techniques can be so powerful. Put both feet on the floor and take a moment to actually feel what’s underneath them. Notice the pressure against your heels and the way the floor supports your weight. Let yourself become curious about something you can physically feel instead of trying to think your way into feeling better. You can hold something cool in your hands and notice its temperature, wash your hands slowly and pay attention to the sensation of the water moving across your skin, or look around the room and really study what’s there. Notice the colors, the shapes, the light coming through the window, the texture of the chair beside you, or some tiny detail you’ve walked past a hundred times without really seeing it.

Your breath can become another beautiful way of returning to yourself. Take a comfortable breath in and allow the exhale to become a little slower and longer. You don’t have to make anything happen. You’re simply giving your attention something steady and familiar to follow. Sometimes I like placing one hand over my heart and the other over my belly and simply feeling my body breathe beneath my hands. There’s something incredibly reassuring about realizing that underneath all the thoughts racing around, your body is still quietly doing what it knows how to do.

If crystals are part of your practice, grounding can be as simple as holding one and allowing yourself to become aware of its weight, temperature, texture, and presence in your hand. You don’t have to make something mystical happen. Let the physical experience itself become an anchor. Feel the stone against your palm. Notice where your body meets the chair beneath you. Feel your feet against the floor. Hear the sounds around you. Let each sensation gently remind you of where you are.

And one of my favorite grounding practices may be the simplest of all. I say to myself, “I’m here.”

There’s something powerful about those two words because the mind can travel into yesterday and relive something as though it’s happening again. It can race into tomorrow and experience something that hasn’t even happened yet. It can create conversations, possibilities, fears, and entire stories while the body remains right here in the present moment.

So when everything inside feels scattered, overwhelming, or simply too loud, give your attention something real to come home to. Feel the floor beneath your feet. Notice the chair supporting your body. Feel the temperature of the air against your skin. Listen to the sounds that are actually happening around you. Take one comfortable breath and let yourself experience the place where you truly are.

Then quietly remind yourself, “I’m here.”

Sometimes coming back to yourself begins with nothing more complicated than realizing you never actually left. Your attention simply wandered for a while, and you can gently invite it home.

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