ABOUT ME
Hi! I’m Areena,
Clinical Hypnotherapist, Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner, Somatic Family Constellation Practitioner, Psychedelic Coach, Reiki Master Teacher & Intuitive Counselor.
For over a decade, I’ve supported people in understanding and transforming the deeper patterns beneath their struggles.
But my relationship with healing began long before I ever imagined it would become my life’s work.
At a conference with Dr. Gabor Maté, one of the teachers who has deeply influenced my therapeutic work.
My Soulful Healing Journey
My own healing journey began long before I knew I was on one.
At five, I was sent to boarding school — my first experience of separation anxiety, long before I had the words for it.
Growing up as a third-generation Thai-Indian shaped me too. Between two cultures, I often felt like I didn't fully belong anywhere.
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When I returned to Bangkok at twelve, my parents' relationship was struggling, and as the eldest daughter, I became the one who held space and stood in the middle.
I learned to be strong, to keep going, to stay busy — not realizing that busyness had become how I coped with what I felt.
Those patterns followed me into adulthood.
kept finding myself drawn to emotionally unavailable partners, while my own anxious attachment making those relationships especially activating.
I knew what I was feeling.
I just didn’t yet understand why my body reacted so strongly — or why the same patterns seemed to keep finding me.
After my parents divorced, my relationship with my mother became increasingly difficult.
She was carrying immense pain of her own, and there was anger, control and pressure to take sides.
I loved her deeply and having a relationship with her was also incredibly hard.
At twenty-four, I left home with my youngest sister, then only fifteen.
Once again, I found myself in a familiar role:
Being the strong one, holding space and feeling responsible for someone else
For years, my healing was driven by a desire to fix our relationship — to heal her, to change us, to finally have the closeness I longed for.
Eventually, I had to face one of the hardest lessons of my life:
"I could do my healing, but I couldn't do hers."
My mother didn't see herself as needing the healing I wished for her.
Slowly, my healing became less about changing my mother and more about accepting the mother I actually had — while grieving the relationship I wished we could have.
In many ways, I began grieving her long before she died.
I had to move through anger, guilt and disappointment, and understand that acceptance didn't mean saying everything was okay.
It meant releasing myself from the endless struggle to make someone else different.
Family Constellation brought another layer of healing
Later, Family Constellation gave me another way of understanding what happens within families.
It allowed me to look beyond one person’s behaviour and begin seeing the larger system: the relationships, loyalties, losses and patterns that can move through generations.
Through my own healing journey I finally came to acceptance and peace about my relationship with my mother.
Shortly before my mother's death, my sister took part in a Family Constellation in which our grandmother and great-grandmother became significant figures.
Two months later, my mother passed peacefully in her sleep. I can't claim to know exactly what happened, but spiritually, the timing carried profound meaning — as though the women who came before her were somehow present as she completed her own journey.
When she passed, the grief felt different from what I'd already lived through in the years before.
There was sadness.
But there was also acceptance.
Spirituality came first
My spiritual path began even earlier. From around fifteen, I was aware I could sense energy and had a strong intuitive sensitivity.
But the real turning point came at twenty-seven, with what I describe as a spiritual awakening and Reiki.
Reiki became a doorway.
From there came hypnotherapy, energy work, subconscious work, nervous-system healing, somatic practices, Compassionate Inquiry and Family Constellation.
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I wasn’t only studying these modalities.
I was experiencing them, often while training, receiving sessions and exchanging work with colleagues.
Layer by layer, things I had never had words for began to make sense.
I started understanding why certain situations activated my body.
Why I struggled to rest.
Why I felt responsible for other people’s emotions.
Why I repeatedly entered particular relationship dynamics.
Why belonging had always felt complicated.
The patterns I had once judged began to make sense as adaptations.
Instead of asking:
“What’s wrong with me?”
I began becoming curious about:
“What happened that made this response necessary?”
That shift changed the way I understood myself.
And eventually, it changed the way I worked with others.
My journey into psychedelic work
Later, psychedelic work became another part of my personal and professional exploration.
One particularly meaningful psychedelic experience brought me face-to-face with a guilt I had carried for much of my life.
My mother had returned to her marriage when she was pregnant with me, and somewhere inside, I had carried a sense of responsibility for that.
Through that experience, I was able to see something differently:
"It was never my burden to carry"
That realization became another layer of letting go.
Microdosing later became part of my personal exploration around self-doubt, productivity & my lifelong tendency to keep myself busy.
"I am allowed to rest. Rest can be medicine too"
These experiences led me to train in psychedelic coaching, deepening my understanding of preparation and integration alongside the somatic, subconscious and nervous-system work I already practised.
If there's one thing this exploration reinforced, it's this:
There is no single medicine, modality or healing path that is right for everyone.
One lesson was simple, yet hard for the part of me that had learned to survive by constantly doing:
Why I work the way I do today
My own journey is why Soulful Healing Journey was never going to fit neatly into one modality.
I don’t believe we are only our thoughts.
We are also our bodies, our nervous systems, our subconscious beliefs, our childhood experiences, our attachment patterns, our family systems and ancestral stories — and, for those who resonate with it, our spiritual lives.
That’s why my work is integrative rather than based on one single approach.
MY CERTIFICATIONS
When you work with me
In an individual session, we may focus more deeply on one particular modality depending on what you need.
But in my longer healing journeys and packages, we have the space to work through multiple layers.
Bringing together hypnotherapy, somatic and nervous-system work, Compassionate Inquiry, inner-child and parts work, Family Constellation, and energy or intuitive work where appropriate.
Rather than treating each modality as something separate, I use them as different ways of accessing and understanding the same person.
This is why I believe healing often happens in layers.
Because sometimes a pattern is understood intellectually but still held in the body, and sometimes something deeply personal only makes sense once we look at attachment, family dynamics or intergenerational patterns.
I don’t believe every person needs every modality, or that healing follows the same sequence for everyone.
The work evolves according to what emerges and what feels appropriate for you.
The modality is not the destination.
My intention is to help you understand where your patterns come from, what they may have been protecting you from, and gradually create a different relationship with yourself.
One where you can feel safer in your body.
Trust yourself more deeply.
Release what was never yours to carry.
And stop repeating what no longer serves you.
Because healing isn’t about becoming someone new.
Sometimes it’s about finally understanding the person you had to become — and discovering who you are when you no longer have to live from survival.
Areena
With love, light & gratitude,
