“Oh, dear darling, it's not about what you do. It's about who you are—the light you emanate, the smile that you give freely, how you touch people’s hearts,” Cristina Kalyani intones to me in a channeled state, sharing a message from my spirit guides. It’s my third visit to the hypnotherapist to celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Gisele Bundchen, and it feels like this is the time when I’ll finally get it through my head that happiness can’t be reached by achievements.
Ask me a few years ago what I thought it would take to succeed in life, and I would’ve answered without hesitation: a solid plan. As a Virgo moon, having a five year, one year, and six-month plan and setting up my days up accordingly to hit my goals felt like a surefire way to guarantee success, and in turn, happiness. As I pursued my career in New York City, it was easy to keep going full throttle, blindly racing between work projects, date nights, and brand events without ever taking a moment to look at the signs, figuratively and literally.
It worked until it didn’t; one day, a few years back, I was forced to stop. I call it my “tower moment.” In tarot, it’s a card that signifies both destruction and liberation. Cue a breakup, altered living situation, and job change all at once. When my world came crumbling down around me, instead of attempting to immediately rebuild with the same technique I used before, I found myself on a two-year journey as a digital nomad around the world. Rather than just romance my daydreams of living out an Eat, Pray, Love journey to my friends over martinis on a Friday night, it was finally my turn to live it.
Kendall Becker
I spent the years bouncing between Central America, Southeast Asia, and Europe, yet the first place I visited was the one that kept calling me back time and time again: Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. This town is magic; there’s not a beach chair or commercial hotel in sight, just the lush canopy of palms meeting the energetically infused, rose quartz-colored sand while a subtle layer of mist lingers over the shoreline. There’s something to be uncovered here. The town runs along one dirt road where locals, ex-pats, and digital nomads drive ATVs up and down the muddy terrain, towing surfboards on the back, en route to cafes tucked in the foliage. Howler monkeys and brightly colored birds that you’d never be able to name dot the trees overhead. It feels like you’ve entered a place that would only be possible to exist behind a screen or within the pages of a book.
It only makes sense that this is where I met Cristina—a spiritual therapist of many modalities, from breathwork and massage to tarot, who’s worked with the likes of Gisele Bundchen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Olsen twins. We were introduced by our spiritually-attuned mutual friend—Andraya Kenton, the founder of the esoteric jewelry brand Celeste Starre. After the two met on a retreat in Egypt, Andraya encouraged me to try out a hypnotherapy session with Cristina on my next trip back to Costa Rica. She trained with the greats: hypnotherapists Dr. Brian Weiss and Dolores Cannon, who defined the field and wrote numerous best-selling books, and psychotherapist and shaman Sandra Ingerman.
At that point, I had lived a full year of solo travel and was confident in what I was releasing from my life: control from the “shoulds,” societal expectations of needing a man, or anyone for that matter, to make me happy. Now, the answers I was seeking were less about pinpointing what wasn’t working in the past and more about how to follow the tugs on my heartstrings to what would, hopefully, lead towards a more fulfilling existence. It was time to meet myself at soul-level—and that’s what literally can happen in a session with Cristina.
Her studio Casa Om is located atop a hill in Santa Teresa, overlooking the dense valley that holds an ocean of trees that is the living, breathing Costa Rican jungle. Cristina met me at the gate to the property, smiling, emitting her warm energy that immediately created a safe space as she led me inside of her studio. The walls were lined with various instruments used for her sound healings, certificates of study, and her book, Beyond Yoga: Healing Arts for Extraordinary States of Consciousness. In the center, cushions were set up with a pot of steaming herbal tea, ready for us to sip as we discussed the session to come. “I personally built a bridge between both [Eastern and Western practices] because I studied as a yoga teacher, hypnotherapist, breathworker and a bodyworker, and I went back to school to study transpersonal psychology,” says Cristina. “A good therapist asks you the questions that you need to come to a realization yourself.”
Everyone reacts differently, but for me, hypnotherapy feels like the state when you’re drifting asleep, but are conscious that your mind is wandering without being in control of where it’s going. The scenes appear to me like fog, slowly clearing to reveal a memory that my soul, somewhere deep inside, wants me to remember. To no surprise, my session focused on two aspects of my life that were undergoing transformation: work and love. Typical. My soul showed me two pairs of scenes, each with a contrast to one another, teaching me a lesson I needed to recall for the future. These weren’t necessarily moments I’d consciously pick out as defining, but that’s the beauty of hypnotherapy.
You have the choice to end your session by “asking questions” to your higher self. Cristina reads the list I prepared while I remained in the meditative state. This part made me nervous. “How would I know what to say? Would my consciousness take over?” Somehow, I knew exactly what to say, without hesitation, but it wasn’t conscious in the slightest. I asked myself when I’d meet my partner and started sharing the situation, what he’d be like, and the timeline. I also encouraged myself that my work needed a shift to focus on contributing back to the world and how it makes people feel, rather than the surface-level facets of the fashion industry. With those two lessons in mind, I had a renewed sense of potential.
Kendall Becker
I knew what to do to live closer to alignment, but I was still figuring out how to do it all. I began writing, a project I showed myself in a vision in hypnotherapy, and I gave myself permission to start opening up my heart again. And to no one’s surprise, I ended up back in Santa Teresa, back into the “energy vortex,” for what would turn into an annual trip around my birthday. Because of Cristina’s extensive training, she’s “created a menu of my services that are divided into healing through body, healing through mind, and healing through energy,” as she puts it. This time, I chose to do a sound journey for healing.
Cristina “paint” the experience with instruments that she’s collected through her travels over the years. “I like to use instruments that connect us with the elements of nature: drums, didgeridoo, and string for earth, chimes and gongs for water, leaves and seeds for fire, and flutes and feathers for air,” she says. Most of the instruments are tuned to 432 hertz, a frequency that’s known for relaxation and aids in reaching a meditative state.
Cristina started the sound journey with guided visualizations, and from there, my mind began to wander, involuntarily. I found myself as a part of nature. I was a small, gentle stream with perfectly cool water flowing in the middle of a valley, surrounded by the quietness of the forest while butterflies danced overhead. (And, yes, I did take mushrooms for the experience, but it’s not a requirement for any of Cristina’s sessions.) Somehow, this visualization touched my heart chakra, and it softened me in a way that it felt safe, and even encouraged, to feel my emotions. I’m a hyper-independent Scorpio and my worst nightmare is looking weak, but, the sound healing allowed me to understand that the only way I could make truly great art or experience a love as deep as what I was looking for would require me to accept vulnerability as strength.
Kendall Becker
After my last trip, I started putting my heart-led learnings into action: breaking loops of toxicity in my relationships, grounding myself with new roots versus running away, opening up through my creative work, and dating with intention for the first time in a long time. This year’s visit to Santa Teresa would mark a new decade for me; I knew it needed to be kicked off with intention. This time, I was seeking confirmation, from my guides, on what my intuition was already telling me, and it led me to the Akashic Records.
If you’re not deep enough in the spiritual depths to have uncovered the records, they’re essentially an energetic database of every universal occurrence and emotion in the past, present and future. Rather than channeling answers yourself, like you do in hypnotherapy, Cristina connects through “mantra chanting to take [herself] into a trance state to channel information from the ethers or Akashic field—what quantum scientists call ‘unified field.’” Now, I wouldn’t just go to anyone for a channeled reading; make sure it’s a practitioner who you resonate with. For me, Cristina has become a trusted therapist and dear friend who I admire personally, professionally, and spiritually. And if you’d like to work with her, too, this is an offering that she can do from afar, sans a trip to the jungle.
Right ahead of my 30th birthday, I joined Cristina in her meditation practice with my five questions, outlining life, love, and creativity to receive the advice my guides thought I should hear at this point in my spiritual journey. Truthfully, I went in looking for answers, hoping for affirmation on my latest set of “achievements,” but what I found instead was perspective. “Yes, you can find that inner sun within yourself, which radiates so beautifully, but you can also allow yourself to receive that light. So, yes, you can be self-sustaining, but ultimately, you are receiving the light of the sun that shines through you as the moon. So, allow it then, that light of the sun to shine through you,” Cristina shared back to me, reiterating the lessons that led me over the past few years. That it’s less about doing—the project, the goal list, the partnership—but more about the way of being and embodying an approach that supports your growth and lights up the world.
My takeaway after three visits to Cristina: There’s no one clear path, rigid Google calendar agenda, or strict set of directions to the answers that you’re looking for. Instead, other modalities, be it through mind, body, or spirit, can help you get to wherever it is that you’re going. My sessions with Cristina proved that ditching my structured life and going on an Eat, Pray, Love journey was never about the act itself, but the people and experiences along the way. Those who go looking for magic always find it. That’s the real cheat code.
