#3: Emotional Acupuncture, Clairvoyance (And That Time Paul McKenna Hypnotised Me In A Broom Cupboard)

Kelly's story continues as she discovers a very 'woo woo' way to shed the trauma of her abusive ex.

From desperately seeking a clairvoyant's help, to being hypnotised in a broom cupboard by Paul McKenna, Kelly unintentionally stumbles along her path towards higher conscious living.

The episode ends with a turnaround. An opportunity for you to reflect on your own life path and ask yourself, "What could open up for your future if you were willing to release the past?"

Free PDF of journal / conversation prompts for taking it deeper.

Read the Transcript for this Episode below:

 Episode three of The Project Me Podcast.

Hi, I'm Kelly Pietrangeli. I believe too many women are living in autopilot, waking up each day and hitting a long list of to dos, falling into bed at night and starting it all over again the next day. We become human doings and miss out on what it means to be a human being. I'm all about helping you to see life beyond your endless to do list.

I've got lots of tools to help you get the foundations of your outer world into a solid place so you can begin to explore your inner world. What lights you up? What brings you joy? What do you need to let go of so you can step into the fullest expression of yourself? This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Project WE, my online membership club for women who want to treat their lives like an exciting, ongoing project.

I run live online workshops with different themes each month. You get a whole Project WE membership site filled with mini courses on everything from productivity and time management, to family life, to health and fitness, work, love, fun and friendships. I've got all of your life areas covered. Far less expensive than one on one coaching, you become part of a whole power posse of over 120 members as I help you to become the expert of yourself.

Come and join Project WE and find out what it's all about. Myprojectme. com forward slash project WE. Hi there. Welcome back. If you're a regular, this is only episode three, so it doesn't take much to be a regular at this point. A huge thanks to those of you who've been clicking on the five stars in Apple podcast and leaving positive reviews.

It gives me the impetus to carry on with this crazy idea. Thank you LondonIrishPT wrote a review that says, Kelly is a high energy, funny, and unstoppable proponent for personal growth who simply refuses to let things stand in her or anyone else's way. A great addition to the podscape. Thank you for that.

I also appreciate what Simone in Australia wrote. I just listened to the second episode. It had me wanting to cry, give you a hug, and do a happy dance together all in one episode. I'm loving the content. You are a fabulous storyteller, and I love how brave you are in sharing your stories and your woo woo journey.

I totally agree that really terrible events can lead to really awesome ones. That's definitely been the case for me too. Looking forward to the next episode. Thank you, Simone. Well, one year ago, I used the futureme. org website to send an email to myself that would arrive a year later. I'd forgotten all about it until it arrived in my inbox yesterday.

Here's what it said. Hi dear Kelly, I trust you've had an incredible past year. I'm curious to know, have you come out of the woo woo closet yet? Right now I can see that this shift will lead to wonderful magic. No more playing it safe. And no more being buried in the busy work. You are now living the fullest expression of you.

That's it for today. I will drop you little notes like this more often. For now, know that I love you and I believe in you. Have a gorgeous year ahead. Loads of love. Kelly. I highly recommend writing these little love notes from your future self. That website is called futureme. org, and I'll put a link in the show notes for you.

Well, that prediction came true in the nick of time. I launched this podcast a couple of weeks ago, and I am fully out of the woo woo closet at last! Yeah! I'm coming out, I want the world to know. Got to let it show. I'd planned to drop a snippet of the Diana Ross track here, but then I realized I'd have to get the rights to do that.

So you have to settle for me. I am definitely going to add that to my feel good playlist on Spotify later today. Okay, let's slow things down and take a deep breath in together as we slide into episode three. In the last episode, I shared about my abusive relationship and how I thankfully got out of that one and bumped into the love of my life.

But what I didn't tell you is that even after I got married, I still wasn't over what happened to me. I thought I was, but certain things could unexpectedly trigger a flashback of the abuse. If my husband was play fighting with me in bed, you know, like rolling around, frolicking and wrestling as new lovers do.

If he held my hands down or my arms back. I began screaming in panic. He kept reassuring me that he'd never ever hurt me, but clearly the trauma was trapped inside and I'd dissolve into inconsolable tears. I also had this problem where, when I was signing a card to him, like a valentine or an anniversary card, whenever I go to sign off, I couldn't bring my pen to write forever or yours forever.

I'd written that at the end of Cards to My Ex, and that didn't last forever. I just couldn't quite trust again, and that pained me so much. Soon after we got married, I was doing a side freelance design job for an alternative health clinic in Notting Hill called The Grove. I did their logo and branding, I advised on interiors, I loved this 3D form of creativity that went beyond the squares I was confined to in my job as a record cover designer.

One day, the head nutritionist there, Max Tomlinson, asked if I'd be a guinea pig in a new detox program they wanted to roll out. I'd get an eating detox plan from him, emotional detoxing, whatever that meant, and detoxification mud wraps, all kinds of cool stuff at no cost to me, so of course, I eagerly agreed.

When it came time to have my emotional detox session with the acupuncturist, Justine Hankin, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. In the consultation, Justine asked me if there was anything emotional that I wanted to shed. I said, yeah, my ex boyfriend. Without going into the abuse, I said that I wasn't entirely over our breakup and that I still had to see him sometimes as we both worked in the music industry and our paths still crossed.

So she had me lay down on a kind of massage table with my face through a hole. And the reason I remember that part so much is because As she moved some kind of a clicker down my spine, I began sobbing, and the tears and snot were plopping through this hole, splattering on the floor, and I swear they were hitting her feet.

She asked me to think about my ex and every bad emotion I had about him. She encouraged me to really feel into my emotions and to let them all out, and boy did I ever. Then she had me turn over onto my back, and she put tiny needles into different places on my body. She told me to think about how good it would feel to be free from those emotions, to be able to see him at an event, and to be able to know we've been in a relationship and to know what happened, but to feel neutral about him, to see him as a part of my past, but nothing to do with my present.

She left the needles in, dimmed the lights, and left the room. I'm not sure how long she was gone, but when she returned and gently turned the lights back up. I met her with a grin. She said, hmm, you look different. And I said, I feel really good. I walked out of that room and never again felt any strong emotion about my ex.

It was even unexpectedly put to the test when I saw him soon after that session. I felt nothing, nada, like there's my ex, end of story, incredible. Even today, I feel very matter of fact about it. It happened, it's the past, I'm free of it, really. And the best part? I could now write Forever Yours on cards to my husband.

And I threw myself into total trust in him without fear of losing him or getting hurt. Thank you Justine Hankin. I got in touch with her just last year to share this story with her. She's still practicing in Fulham in London if you want to look her up. I feel so grateful that something that could have had a hold on me for the rest of my life.

Was able to be released so effortlessly. I see all of the time, how many people remain held captive by their past? You lose your freedom when you carry around the burden of past hurts, grudges, disappointments, and resentments. They begin to define who you are and limit who you can become in the future.

They become your story. Whenever there is anything in my life now that I can identify as a story that is no longer serving me, I face it head on. I dare to go there. I do what I need to do to let go of it. In future episodes, I'll continue to share other modalities that have shown up just when I needed them, like the way emotional acupuncture appeared in my life without me even looking for it or realizing I needed it.

Something else happened too, right around the same period in my life and it's just too good of a woo woo story to pass by. When we got married, my mother in law gave me a pair of beautiful, tiny, diamond stud earrings from Tiffany. Very simple, very me. I loved them. When we went away on honeymoon to Thailand, I didn't want to take them with me, and my younger, paranoid self worried that someone might break into our home and see the distinguishable blue Tiffany box and steal them.

So I hid them in the house. A few weeks after we got back from honeymoon, I thought, ah, the earrings. And I went into the spare bedroom and I stood on a chair and I reached up to the top shelf in the closet to get down this basket where I'd put them and they were gone. I turned that basket upside down and they were not there.

Now I questioned if I'd actually hidden them there or somewhere else in the house. I searched high and low and I could not find them. I became anxious and beside myself over this. How would I explain this to my new mother in law, why I never wore the Tiffany earrings? Nobody had been into the house, except our cleaner.

Oh my god, our cleaner stole them? I loved Juanita. She wouldn't do that, would she? I was a mess. My wonderful friend Erin knew how upset I was and she said she'd heard a clairvoyant called John Starkey on a talk radio show. And he'd help someone find something that went missing. She got me the number of his secretary, and I found out that he was coming to London the following weekend to do sessions out of a hotel.

I immediately booked in for a session with him. This was not a normal thing for me to book in to see a clairvoyant. I found that kind of thing really creepy back then, so clearly you can see how desperate I become at this point. My husband was shaking his head in total disbelief That he was sitting beside me, in a folding chair, outside of a strange hotel room, in a dodgy part of Kings Cross, as I waited to see this clairvoyant.

He thought I was absolutely bonkers. When it was my turn, I went in by myself, and I sat down. He immediately pressed play on a cassette recorder. This was 1998, guys. And without asking me why I was there or what I wanted to know, he went into this weird floaty voice and began telling me all kinds of random stuff.

I remember him saying I would soon have a baby boy and he would be raised as a very hectic child in a very hectic time of my life. And I would be moving abroad with a view of mountains, which would be a real turning point in my life. And I'd be very happily writing. And something else about me needing to apply a surge of spiritual energy that I wasn't using at the moment, nothing he was saying made any kind of sense to me.

I was like, Huh? Um, can I just tell you why I came here and what I really want to know? He switched off the tape player. I told him about the missing earrings, and he said, in his normal voice, a man named Paul will help you. My time was up, I left more confused than ever, and my husband was pissed off that I just wasted our money and a Saturday doing something so idiotic.

The next Monday at work, I was telling my colleague Terry the story. Just as I got to the part about a man named Paul will help you, my other colleague poked his head in and said, Kelly, I've got Paul McKenna for you on line two. Terry and I looked at each other with wide eyes of disbelief. Terry said, uh, I guess you better take that.

Now, if you live in the UK, you've probably heard of the TV hypnotist Paul McKenna. He was huge in the late 90s. He had a TV show where he hypnotized audience members. I was designing a series of CD covers for him at the time, with titles like How to Lose Weight in 30 Days and How to Stop Smoking. He was ringing me to talk about the covers, but I quickly filled him in on this story.

He said, I'm coming in. When Paul arrived at the offices of Sony Music, he said we needed to find a quiet space. There were no free offices, so we ended up in a broom cupboard together, on two folding chairs facing each other, knees touching in the dark. It was kinda weird. And you can only imagine the commotion going on outside with all of my colleagues going, Huh?

Kelly's just gone into the broom cupboard with Paul McKenna? Apparently, they all had ears up against the door. So here's the thing. He was trying to get me to go back to where I'd hidden the earrings and I just didn't know. I didn't actually feel hypnotized, and I felt really disappointed in myself that I couldn't just let go of my rational brain and surrender to being hypnotized.

After a while he said, anything come up for you? I was like, and he said, well, okay, just wait a while and your subconscious will take the cues I've given you. Just go home and relax. As we emerged from the broom cupboard, the crowd quickly dispersed, everyone trying to act normal and like they weren't all ears up against the door.

After Paul left, I told everyone I hadn't been hypnotized at all. And I was really bummed that he hadn't given me more time. I felt like we'd been in there for a few quick minutes. They said we'd been in for about twenty. Hmm. A few nights later, I was at home on the sofa reading, when suddenly, I put my book down, and I went upstairs, like a robot.

I climbed onto a chair in the spare bedroom, and once again, I took down that same basket that I'd searched in countless times before. This time, I unfolded a scarf, and That had always been sitting at the very top inside was a little blue Tiffany box. They'd been there the entire time. So let's take a look at John Starkey, the clairvoyance predictions.

I did become pregnant with a baby boy just two months after that session, and if you'd read my book, you'd know that life was indeed hectic just as he'd predicted. I did unexpectedly move abroad to the outskirts of Madrid into a house with a view of mountains, and it was indeed a real turning point in my life.

I did become a writer, and here we are, 24 years later, and I'm finally making sense out of that surge of spiritual energy he was talking about. I still have that cassette tape John Starkey recorded during our session back in 1998, but I can't find a tape player to listen to it. I need a tape player, people!

Someone has a spare one. I'd love to hear what else he said that I don't remember. I literally, a few minutes ago, before I started recording this podcast, decided to quickly Google John Starkey, and I discovered that he is still very much practicing out of Wolverhampton in the UK, and he has a nice website and a Facebook page.

I'll have to send him this podcast. Hi John! Sorry I was so cynical. I have once again visited a clairvoyant only just a couple of years ago, and I'll share that really incredible story in a future episode. So I want to ask you now, have you ever been to see a clairvoyant? Have you ever been hypnotized?

What about emotional acupuncture? I now realize the amazing powers that a lot of these seemingly woo woo modalities can help us with. I have since used EFT tapping, emotion code, the energy alignment method. Transformational breathwork. I'm going to be sharing about these two because there are some really gifted people walking on this earth who can help us when we're open and willing to let go of skepticism.

Why live with phobias, emotional trauma, past hurts and grudges when we can have a session or two with somebody who can eradicate them from our lives completely? To me, I would rather spend a bitty money on this than pretty much anything else I can think of, really. The freedom and lightness that comes when these heavy burdens are lifted, it's indescribable, really.

We don't realize what's possible for us in our lives until we shed what's holding us back. I have absolutely found this to be true in my life.

Dear listener, relax your forehead, take a deep breath in and let it out with a sigh. Keep breathing as you reflect on these questions. I will include a worksheet in the show notes so you don't have to write these down and you can go deeper with them in your own time whenever you're ready. Identify something from your past that still has a hold on you, a hurt, a disappointment, a grudge.

What's the cost of holding on to this? Does it cost you confidence, self worth, energy? Peace of mind, the ability to truly love yourself and others.

What if this experience was designed to deliver you something valuable, or contained a deeper wisdom or a hidden gift? What might that be?

Imagine what it would be like to feel absolutely neutral about what's happened, with no physical sensations or emotional reactions when you think about it. How would it feel to be free from this past situation completely?

What could open up in your life if you release this? What might be possible?

Have you ever tried any of the modalities out there to help release the past? Are you open and willing to try any of them?

Be sure to head to the show notes to grab the free PDF of journal and conversation prompts that go with this episode. In the next episode of the Project Me podcast, I'll share the joy of journaling. How keeping a journal has saved me years of therapy. It's my go to tool for self understanding, intentions and goals, unleashing creativity, and more recently as a vehicle for tapping into my intuition.

Project Me is a global movement, helping women to step out of autopilot and into higher levels of conscious living. Head to myprojectme. com for the free Project Me life wheel tool. It'll help you get a fresh perspective on your eight key life areas. So you can see what needs your focus. First, doing the self check in once a month is the key to getting a firm foundation beneath you in your outer world.

So you have the head and heart space to turn inwards. You'll also find details on the website about how to join project. We it's my amazing, super low cost online membership club. Come and create your own project. Me alongside me and over 120 other like minded women. We are all stepping out of autopilot and into higher levels of conscious living together.

Come and join in. I'd love to meet you there. Good karma comes to those who share the Project Me podcast or leave a positive rating or review. If you have anything you'd like to share with me, you can find me on Instagram, KellyProjectMe or Facebook, Project Me Kelly P. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious.

We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.