Hypnotherapist Saps Uttam underscores the importance of confronting and understanding our “inner children” before they start to fester, drag us down and cause all sorts of ailments, including cancer, diabetes and psoriasis.
By Alex Y. Vergara
Hypnotherapist Saps Uttam knows whereof she speaks. Whether pleasant or traumatic, humdrum or dramatic, a person’s early childhood experiences—specifically incidents that happen until one reaches eight years old, are all stored in his or her subconscious.
In the case of negative experiences, particularly those related to parental neglect, cruelty, or outright abuse, such events, if left unaddressed, could fester in the person’s subconscious and weigh him or her down emotionally, mentally and even physically. They could even lead to chronic diseases, from diabetes to heart condition, eczema to psoriasis, clinical depression to cancer.
But the body, based on a series of American-produced videos Saps shares, also has this amazing ability to heal itself. Through diet, exercise, positive outlook and the sheer will to grow and survive, goaded in no small way by a pressing need to rise above one’s limitations or achieve a greater purpose in life, there have been plenty of documented cases wherein cancer patients, for instance, went into remission and even full recovery.
Life-defining trigger
Saps, who finished a pre-law course with the objective of someday becoming a lawyer, experienced a “trigger” some years back that caused her to feel the blues. She couldn’t pinpoint the actual cause of such “immense” sadness, but the “signs,” she says, were all there.
In psychology, she was experiencing a mild form of depression, a more benign form compared to full-blown clinical depression. She wasn’t even feeling suicidal, but the hurt that was dragging her down and gnawing inside her was far from normal.
“I realized that I had to address it,” says Saps to PeopleAsia. “But I wanted to approach it the organic way. I didn’t want to sit down in a doctor’s office and tell him that I’m sad without ever getting to the bottom of it. I certainly didn’t want to take pills.”
To cut a long story short, Saps, who didn’t reveal the main cause of her woes, found herself attending a cousin’s wedding in Bangkok. As fate would have it, she met several “like-minded people” there, including a number of wellness practitioners and hypnotherapists rooted in the discipline’s Western iteration.
The aspiring lawyer reached a fork in the road. Soon after going into therapy and getting healed, she abandoned her legal studies and decided to train as a hypnotherapist. She eventually earned her affiliation papers to practice from Heilen Medical Wellness in the Philippines. Saps, who’s of Indian descent, chose to practice in the Philippines, the land of her birth. Since food plays an important part in helping heal the body, she also studied nutrition to supplement her practice.
“When I went into therapy myself, I soon felt so right,” Saps shares. “It felt like everything was just flowing. I soon realized why I was feeling that way. I needed to access my subconscious mind.”
Playback
Since our subconscious mind holds the files of our existence, we need some sort of playback to retrace our past and connect it with what’s eating us at present. In Saps’ case, pinpointing certain emotions, down to the events that led to them, felt cathartic.
“I realized I was liking it, especially after I cried my heart out,” she continues. “I wasn’t blaming myself. I wasn’t blaming anybody. Maybe I had to go through it in order for me to get where I need to be.”
The process is similar to a playback mechanism to ascertain when and why a person feels a certain way. What were your emotions at that time? Where were you? Who were you with? Who or what triggered those emotions in the first place?
Fast forward several years later when Saps, as a trained psychotherapist, shares with us cases she has come across during her practice. But first things first. As a practitioner, Saps isn’t asking people to stop taking their prescribed medicines. What she offers instead is a supplementary course of action that could lead a person to either learn the root cause of his or her ailments or, at the very least, better understand how to deal with them.
“When you sit in front of me, you’re accessing the subconscious mind. It holds the files of your existence,” she says.
Like in a shrink’s office, you’re also made to lie down on a couch before the start of each session with Saps. But unlike countless funny and overplayed images we see in movies, she doesn’t resort to swinging pendulums or necklaces with round pendants to put you in a trance. Although the patient seems like he or she is in a sleeping position, the person is very conscious throughout the session, as he or she repeats everything that comes to mind to Saps.
Don’t hold back
Believe it or not, tapping into your subconscious enables you to remember scenes your, say, two-year-old self experienced, including what you wore and who you were with that day. Everyone has the ability to bring those memories out as long as the person isn’t holding back. What’s even more amazing is you’re not in a trance. In other words, you remember these recollections in detail long after the sessions are over, Saps claims.
The person should be willing to make changes in his or her life for a session, which lasts an hour to an hour and a half and typically costs P6,000, to work. Otherwise, it would be useless, says Saps.
“If a person holds back, then I don’t want to probe. I want to respect whatever his or her decision is. Everything has to flow naturally. If we go deep inside (a person’s subconscious), we access the inner children. Every human being that walks this earth has inner children,” she continues.
Inner children have nothing to do with babies. An inner child, in this case, is an event or even an instance, usually unpleasant, that happened to you in the past. If you recall the animated movie In and Out, the protagonist was traveling through her head retrieving multicolored balls. Those balls, which contain particular memories and the emotions that went with them, are her inner children.
It seems too good to be true, but Saps insists that once you’ve successfully tapped into your subconscious, you’d remember everything that happened to you “as if you’re watching a movie.” For you to resolve what’s eating you, it’s important to achieve an “integration” between your inner children and the “you” of today.
Metaphysical meaning
It also pays to know the metaphysical “meaning” of certain ailments, says Saps. Cancer’s metaphysical meaning, for instance, is linked to an “emotional level.” In not a few cases, it could be traced to being abandoned emotionally as children. More often than not, the underlying issue involves a parent or sibling.
“While growing up, we didn’t have the tools to tell our parents that they’ve hurt us emotionally,” she says. “So, we just keep these emotions inside us. We just move on with life. If these things happen to us once too often, we start feeling abandoned. We start feeling angry towards a parent, usually the mother.”
Cancer isn’t always traced to some form of abandonment. It’s a case-to-case basis depending on the severity of the issue. But based on Saps’ practice, a patient, for instance, who has issues with her ovaries told her that she also has issues with her mother. Her first words to Saps? “I hate her!”
“What a word to use, don’t you think? It wasn’t upset, it wasn’t disagree. Instead, it was plain and simple hate. She was carrying that hate towards her mother for so long. When we went into hypnotherapy, we realized that there were many instances when her mother never nurtured her,” says Saps.
For you to even begin healing these little inner children who were hurt by their so-called mothers, you must first acknowledge that these hurts exist. Since she’s also a nutritionist, Saps also guides a patient through proper nutrition and supplementation. But the journey, says Saps, is “yours and yours alone.”
“I’m just here to help,” she says. “Hopefully, this is going to be something you’re okay with, something that’s going to give you a lot of cathartic release. As a whole, the entire thing is organic and wonderful. You learn about yourself while learning to forgive.”
Don’t be afraid to face up to your inner children, she says. Surprisingly, unearthing such hurts and trying to understand them won’t open up old wounds. And if they do, such a state would be much better than to allow them to fester even further, which, in turn, could lead to certain chronic and even dreaded illnesses. As is often the case in life, acknowledging that a hurt exists is usually the first step toward healing.
Hypnotherapist, holistic health coach and nutritionist Saps Uttam can be reached at hypno8@icloud.com; or at +63977-8577788
