She had been a therapist for 17 years when she began to learn some new methods of emotional healing that would profoundly transform both her practice and her own life. She was first introduced to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, www.emdria.com), in 1997. At the time it was the most effective treatment for trauma and anxiety-based disorders, even though as a new therapy it was not yet accepted as a legitimate therapeutic modality. Since then, EMDR has become perhaps the most well-known and respected trauma modality. Then, in the fall of 1999, she began studying EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, www.emofree.com), a kind of emotional acupressure, that, like EMDR, is highly effective in resolving past traumas and releasing anxiety and phobias.

While having been interested in energy and metaphysical or transpersonal levels of experience for years, EFT was the first energy modality that could be easily interwoven into traditional psychotherapy. She took to it like a duck takes to water! Healthier clients were able to move through blockages and limiting issues much more quickly. Other clients, whose lives and sense of self had been more wounded developed, greater strengths and abilities to cope with stress and to make positive changes in themselves and their lives. Exciting advances were being made no matter what level of treatment a person needed.

Since then, Holly opened Nakaia Healing Arts, an integrated wellness and healing arts center, which operated in Stow for 5 years before revamping and downsizing the business to develop into other areas professionally. All along, she has continued to build, refine and interweave elements she has found essential for healthy emotional functioning—healthy emotional response and management (healing past traumas, emotional scars, and their effects in lasting behaviors that sabotage well-being), increasing beliefs that support well-being rather than detract from it, improving communication and relational life, and naturally supporting healthy neuro-chemical functioning (serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine and nor-epinephrine levels, etc.). These methods increase the speed, the ease, and the scope of emotional healing.

As a therapist she offers skills or tools to help people become more empowered in their own lives by being able to address issues as they arise and clearing the path for more effective handling of whatever challenges life present, while helping people to release the effects of past traumas, which are oftentimes issues and memories that people haven’t wanted to think about, or didn’t think were affecting them anymore. Additionally, she helps people free themselves to experience the illusoriness of life and living–the place where we recognize the power we have to create our own experiences, to unleash the vastness of our own potential!

Many clients come to her because they have heard of her effectiveness using natural and holistic approaches and because she is respected by many for the work she does. It is very common for people to come because they’ve been to traditional talk therapy and are still hurting or discover after some time that the issues they had worked on are still with them.

Practices that combine the amazingly effective EMDR, Energy Psychology (EFT and more), and holographic methods with guided imagery, transpersonal, Gestalt, cultural and gendered awareness modalities, creates a holistic and integrative approach that increases your chances of breaking through to the life your have always dreamed was yours to live. Actually, that’s not quite right, for what really happens is that as we heal and expand our awareness our visions of what is possible for us to experience expand as well. When we live lives circumscribed by fear, we cannot know what it is like to live free from fear. Yet the more we heal, the farther we see, the clearer we see, the “bigger” we see, and we learn that there is so much more than we thought possible!