Janet Rotella: Faith, Energy Work, and What a Dog Named Little Big Daddy Knows About Healing

Janet Rotella: Faith, Energy Work, and What a Dog Named Little Big Daddy Knows About Healing

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Janet Rotella, certified professional hypnotist, Reiki practitioner, sound healer, meditation teacher, and the founder of Calm and Brite Holistic Wellness Services in Florida, for one of the most spiritually grounded and quietly emotional conversations the show has produced. Janet is presenting at HypnoThoughts Live for the second year in a row, this time for a full hour on hypnosis and energy work with autistic, special needs, neurodivergent, and non-to-low verbal communities. Little Big Daddy, her therapy dog and former service dog to her late sister, makes a brief but memorable cameo. Janet came to this work through a path that keeps proving her own point about coping skills: a background in marketing and communications, a mobile day spa that was the first business shut down during COVID, a COVID grant she used to go back to school for hypnotherapy, and a lifetime of watching her only sister, Andrea, navigate the world as a low-verbal special needs person who was given exactly two options at birth in 1968 or 1969 — an institution, or home with no support. Her parents took her home and did everything with her. Andrea learned to ride a bike, went to speech therapy for years, eventually developed a vocabulary that included a respectable collection of curse words, and became Janet's reason for every certification she ever earned. Janet brought her through nine months of terminal cancer using hypnosis, going all the way into OR rooms, inducing her at the edge of PET scan machines, and sitting with her every night to say a prayer they made up together. When Andrea passed at 55, Janet changed the last line of the prayer. She still says it. The conversation goes deep and moves around a lot. They talk about why the non-verbal community often responds to hypnosis better than anyone else — because they have no filters, no skepticism, no performance anxiety, just a lifetime of signals stuck inside them with nowhere to go. Janet's whole philosophy around the special needs community reframes autism and nonverbal behavior not as a cognitive absence but as a wiring short: everything is registering, nothing can get out. Her job is to give them a different way through. They get into the question Janet says comes up constantly: how does a devout Christian who serves at her Bible-based church every Sunday also run a Reiki and energy work center? Her answer is thorough, personal, and lands pretty simply. Nothing about holistic healing is new. Oils, laying on hands, healing through prayer, walking up to a bush and pulling off a berry to make a salve: that's biblical. She calls Reiki prayer on steroids and leaves it there. She also talks about doing explicitly Christian-based inductions for clients who want them, using scripture as suggestion, and finding that the framework of abundance and limiting belief maps almost perfectly onto what she was already reading in Jeremiah. There is also a conversation about God, the Holy Spirit, the soul, the subconscious, a corporate org chart, a Bentley with flat tires, a hard drive that needs defragging, and Dan Marino finally getting his Super Bowl ring in heaven. And then Little Big Daddy wanders onto camera, does his paws up, gives a big yawn, and the whole thing feels exactly like what Janet's center is actually trying to be: a place where you can just show up as you are, even if all you can do is make it to the parking lot. Three quotes from Janet worth writing down: "We have something for everyone, because everyone has something. And there is always help, and there is always hope." "I wanted her healed. I just didn't get her healed in the way I was expecting. But I got her healed." "If the ocean can calm itself down, so can you. Let's work on it together." Connect with Janet Rotella: Website: calmandbrite.com Janet is based in Florida and presents at HypnoThoughts Live in July — Little Big Daddy will be there too Calm and Brite also rents space to other practitioners and hosts group classes including Janet's signature Hypnoki sessions, a fusion of hypnosis, Reiki, sound healing, and meditation Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Grief, sorrow, and when the healing doesn’t seem to work (special episode with Lance Baker)

Yesterday, I broke down and cried in the middle of the grocery store. Here's an article I wrote about it: https://medium.com/trancewell/grief-sorrow-and-when-the-healing-doesnt-seem-to-work-592d48a353e6?sk=716685a230703bea6bed2babceae5e87 Please enjoy this episode. If you need support or want to explore what is possible in your life, write me at ryan@trancewell.help.

James Tsakalos: NLP as a Full-Contact Sport, the Art of Modeling, and Why Everyone Is Just Making It Up

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan goes down the rabbit hole straight through the Earth's core and comes out in Melbourne, Australia — where he finds James Tsakalos, one of the most respected and quietly influential figures in the NLP world, running a live Master Practitioner training in the room right behind him, whiteboards covered, Italian pasta lessons happening between sessions. James has been teaching NLP for over 30 years, and the reason people in the field — Lance Baker, Melissa Tears, James Tripp, Jonathan Alfelt, and others — keep saying his name with a particular kind of reverence is simple: he teaches NLP the way it was originally meant to be taught. Long, immersive, embodied, in-person. Not a 7-day certification. Not a Udemy click-through. The real thing. He describes it as a full-contact sport, and he means it literally — most of what NLP is actually about lives in the body and in unconscious competence, not in techniques and language patterns you can read from a slide. The conversation goes deep on what NLP actually is at its core — not a bag of tricks, but a process of reverse-engineering extraordinary human performance that most people never encounter. James draws a sharp distinction between the modeling process itself and the techniques that come out of that process, and explains why the field drifted toward selling the outputs rather than teaching the method. He introduces apprehension vs. comprehension — the difference between knowing something through your senses and nervous system versus knowing something through logic and explanation — and makes the case that most of the important things we learn in life, from language as children to reading a room as adults, we learn through apprehension. Trying to get there through comprehension is the thing that blocks it. They also cover: why kids are the best models for the state you need to do real modeling work, why the comparison and judgment that emerges around age 6 or 7 might be the original sin of learning, how Gregory Bateson introduced Bandler and Grinder to Milton Erickson, what metaphors like the "brain as computer" silently do to how we think about change, pattern detection vs. pattern understanding, language evolution, the funk, the Tao, and why if a trainer is being presented as a celebrity with the power to change your life you should run in the opposite direction. And then — what James did or said in the two minutes he stepped off camera while Ryan accidentally stopped recording — remains the secret to having everything you want in life. We'll never know. Three quotes from James worth writing down: "NLP is an attitude of wanton curiosity, and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques. The techniques are not NLP — they're what NLP left behind." "Your ability to understand something has nothing to do with your ability to perceive its existence. Pattern detection and understanding are completely different things. And one of them will prevent the other." "Everyone is just making it up as they go along. Everyone. The most successful people you've ever met — they're all just winging it. Be okay with that." Connect with James Tsakalos: Website: jamestsakalos.com  Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Brandi EMME: Energetic Medicine, Metaphysical Experiences, and the Art of Neutral

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Brandi EMME — certified clinical hypnotherapist, shamanic practitioner, astrologer, former fitness instructor, cuddle therapist, and the force behind EMME Therapy Lounge — for one of the most wide-open, spiritually electric, and quietly profound conversations the show has produced. Brandi joins from wherever her life has landed her, carrying two decades of vegan living, a Tibetan shaman master who changed everything, and a last name she invented — which turned out to mean exactly what it needed to mean. Before they even hit record, she pulled up Ryan's natal chart. Libra sun, Gemini moon, Sagittarius rising. She had notes. Brandi came into hypnosis through a Tibetan shamanic lineage — not a weekend certification, but years of deep practice with a master who refused to give her the one thing she showed up wanting: amnesia. She arrived with money in hand, ready to erase a childhood that included watching her father shoot her in the face and murder her mother. The shaman said no. Instead, he put her in neutral — and spent the next two years watching her fight it. When she finally stopped fighting, something shifted. The anger valve disconnected. She noticed it the day a stranger rode off on her bicycle and she just... let him go. The session that changed her relationship with hypnosis entirely came during a past life regression in school — when she found herself in a beautiful, lonely castle in a white satin slip gown, and then watched her mother roll in, in the same dress, in a glass casket. And heard, clearly, that she was doing exactly what her mother had done — staying loyal to a man who would destroy her. She left her ex-husband shortly after. She credits that regression with saving her life. From there the conversation goes everywhere it wants to: why Black and Hispanic communities are underrepresented in hypnosis (it's not mistrust of hypnosis specifically — it's mistrust of the category, rooted in religious culture and historical good reason), how Brandi accidentally discovered she was conducting body attunements during cuddle therapy sessions without knowing it, a woman who came for fertility work over Zoom and two days later had baby footprints mysteriously appear on the back of her car window — and three months after that, a baby. A smoking cessation session that turned into a full shamanic extraction. And why Brandi doesn't use scripts, doesn't guarantee specific outcomes, but does guarantee transformation. She also breaks down what EMME stands for — Energetic Medicine Metaphysical Experiences — which she didn't consciously know when she chose the name. It came to her a year later, as a joke, in a conversation over drinks. It clicked immediately. That's pretty much how her whole life works. Three quotes from Brandi worth writing down: "Whatever I'm doing to you, I'm doing to me too. Energy does not discriminate. We're just channels." "I went to look for my anger, and it wasn't there. I said, come on — where'd you go? And it just... wasn't there anymore." "You will never leave the same way that you came in. No one does. And you never will." Connect with Brandi EMME: EMME Therapy Lounge Linktree: linktr.ee/EMMETherapyLounge  Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Shawna Griffin: Breaking the Cycle of Molest, Rewiring the Brain, and the Calling You Can't Outrun

Note: This episode contains open, honest conversation about childhood sexual abuse. It is handled with care and courage by both Ryan and Shawna — but please be mindful of your own readiness before listening. In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Shawna Griffin — hypnotherapist, manifestor, former real estate powerhouse, world traveler, and the woman behind both Trance-formed Hypnosis and The Butterfly Theory Podcast — for one of the most raw, courageous, and unexpectedly hopeful conversations the show has ever had. Shawna didn't plan to become a hypnotist. She was in real estate, thriving by most measures, when she got so sick she couldn't get out of bed. Doctors found nothing. But the downloads kept coming — first a pull toward talking about childhood sexual abuse, a subject she'd never discussed publicly, then the word hypnosis, arriving three or four times in the span of a week until she finally booked a last-minute flight to a cram course and never looked back. She describes the whole arc like Jonah and the whale: she kept saying no, and the universe kept saying actually, yes. She didn't get well until she said she was all in. Within a few days of surrendering to it, she was back on her feet. The mission she landed on is both specific and profound: breaking the cycle of molest by working with at-risk individuals — not primarily the survivors, but the people at risk of perpetrating. Her working theory, still forming, is that most people who commit these acts had a neurological wiring event in childhood — their own abuse, early exposure, a moment of shame that froze them in time — and that hypnosis can reach the root cause in a way nothing else can. She's considering building a non-profit around it so that no one who genuinely wants help can be turned away for financial reasons. Ryan meets her there completely — sharing his own experience of being abused as a child, dragged into a basement, screaming for help while people walked by. He talks about eventually realizing that the cycle of self-abuse — holding onto the identity of a discarded tissue — was something he was perpetuating on himself long after the original perpetrator was gone. And that forgiving himself for that was the door to forgiving the man who hurt him, a man who later murdered his wife and went to prison. The conversation moves through parts work, intuition vs. fear, manifestation without force, the Bhagavad Gita, Pentecostal downloads, the movie The Drama, cholesterol, Popeyes, and why the best practitioners in any field show up not because they need clients but because they're simply here to help. It is heavy in places and strangely light in others. That balance is the whole point. Three quotes from Shawna worth writing down: "If you're hearing two different things — should I, should I not — one of them is your intuition. And the other one is probably fear." "I believe that most people who commit these acts had a wiring in their brain at childhood. And if we can get to the root cause of that and shift it — they don't do that anymore." "I didn't get well until I said I was all in. And within a few days, I was feeling better." Connect with Shawna Griffin: Email: tranceformedhypnosis@gmail.com [tranceformedhypnosis@gmail.com] Podcast: The Butterfly Theory Podcast — search YouTube and major platforms Shawna's podcast is brand new and just launching — now is a great time to find it early and follow along as the mission unfolds Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]