CLOSE YOUR EYES. Imagine you have a wedge of a fresh, juicy, lemon in your hand. Now taste it. The flavor is tart, or maybe slightly bitter. Then let the juices flow into your imagination.

It almost feels real, right? As real as any negative thought, fear, or bad memory might feel when it creeps into your mind and causes you to sabotage your own success, happiness, or mental health.

Melissa Pas Blake of Lake Forest calls this the “lemon test” and it’s often the first step she takes when helping clients at Pasitive Solutions LLC. This exercise usually elicits a physical response and the purpose is to demonstrate that the pictures we make in our heads and the words that we say to ourselves become real. Blakes’s techniques help people overcome issues including anxiety, self-sabotage, loss, addiction, trauma, as well as variety of other issues that prevent them from reaching their true potential.

“The mind is powerful and a person’s mindset is critical to creating change,” explains Blake, a clinical hypnotherapist and life coach who utilizes hypnotherapy for her Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) and Hearthealing®. “The only thing we have control over are our thoughts. Our thoughts control our feelings, our feelings control our actions, and our actions control our behavior.”

With those principles in mind, she uses hypnotherapy techniques to help clients understand the root of whatever may be causing them pain, holding them back, or preventing them from realizing their full potential.

“Everything is a choice,” says Blake, who works with clients as young as 16 to transform their emotional and mental health. “We can let go of anger, we can let go of shame, and we can let go of resentment.”

As a mother of three who has endured her own trauma and loss, the journey to finding a career in positive healing was a personal one.

“When I discovered hypnotherapy, it helped me so quickly compared to sitting in a psychologist’s office for years. It’s really brilliant and powerful,” explains Blake, who wrote about her experiences and the power of heart healing in the best-selling book, When Women Heal: An Anthology Of The Magical Ripple Effect Of Success When Women Heal And Lead Themselves. “The fact that I overcame my fear and pushed ‘send’ on my little chapter, that I went outside my comfort zone … was life changing for me. I’m not a writer but I had the courage to do it, and that’s really when I healed the most.”

She says the difference between traditional psychology and what she does with hypnotherapy is—rather than telling someone what’s “wrong” with them, she is able to help the client go deep in their subconscious to uncover the source of their anxiety, self-sabotage, pain, or addiction and find self-love again.

Blake began her formal training in California with RTT pioneer Marissa Peer. Combining hypnotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and psychotherapy, RTT is used to tap into the subconscious mind to identify the root cause of limiting beliefs. The goal is then to transform, reprogram, and dispel the limiting beliefs. She also studied the HeartHealing® Technique with creator Natasha Leigh Bray. Weaving processes from hypnotherapy, shamanism, social work, and energy healing to deliver a holistic healing experience for the body, mind, and soul, HeartHealing® offers an integrative approach to mental health.

When she launched Pasitive Solutions LLC in Lake Forest in 2018, many of her first clients came to her through referrals or even on Facebook. Today, she helps people from all over the world—from Israel to London to Australia—both in person and on Zoom.

“My belief is that if I was able to heal, then healing is possible for everyone,” she says. “I help both men and women let go of negative feelings that have held them back from being their best selves. It often goes back to that hurt child who needs to feel safe and connected. Because when we don’t feel safe and connected, we don’t make good choices and it can turn into an unhealthy behavior pattern.”

For example, Blake believes that addiction, regardless of what form it takes, can often be the result of an inner wound that someone has been carrying with them for too long.

“Whatever the issue is, the underlying reason people come see me is most often some version of—they don’t feel ‘enough’ or they don’t feel like they fit in or they don’t feel connected. This causes people to go back to old habits and go back to what is familiar,” she adds.

The results are often transformational.

“With heart healing, we can be the change makers in our family,” says Blake, explaining that trauma can be passed down, generation after generation. “When we heal ourselves, there’s a ripple effect to our family, our friends, and everyone we care about.”

Looking ahead to her fifth year in business, the hope is to create more pathways and packages to serve those in need on the North Shore and beyond.

“Do I love my job? I do,” she says. “I know I can’t change the world, but if I can change the world for one person, or 100 people, that’s a beautiful thing.”

For more information about Pasitive Solutions LLC or to schedule an appointment, visit pasitivesolutions.com.