Healing Business Continues To Progress

Holomua Healing Arts founder Brittany Yap celebrated the company’s first anniversary last week
NICOLE KATO PHOTO

It’s only been a year since Brittany Yap launched Holomua Healing Arts, but she’s already collected a laundry list of client success stories.

Take, for example, the woman who came in with a knee injury. She’d been through rounds of physical therapy, but nothing worked — until she came to Yap for reiki, a natural healing technique used to reduce stress and promote rejuvination. Through that process, Yap also coached her through the emotional distress surrounding the injury.

“It healed her knee completely,” Yap says. “After seven days, she took her brace off.”

Holomua Healing Arts, which is based in Kapolei in Holomua Professional Center (the similar names are a stroke of kismet), offers reiki along with hypnotherapy and life coaching. Through these services, Yap addresses a range of issues, from fear of public speaking to dealing with the loss of loved ones.

For Yap, her healing skills are the culmination of some hard-earned knowledge.

Yap was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at age 20 — a chronic condition that she had learned to live with. But in 2012, after moving to California, her symptoms began to flare up.

“Because I was far away from what I knew and all of these changes, I think my body was reacting to that,” she says. “My stress was at an all-time high.”

The pain got so bad that Yap couldn’t go to work, so she was forced to quit her job in marketing and communications at Santa Clara University. Soon after, she ended up in the emergency room, where she was pumped full of meds that didn’t work. The only solution, doctors told her, was to remove her colon.

Yap was skeptical and asked to have a couple of days alone to reflect. She thought about her life — and the stress that she had allowed to come into it. A high achiever, she founded her own magazine when she was just 24. Later, she worked in marketing at Hawaii Pacific University, where she also earned her master’s degree.

Her career had always been important to her, sometimes at the cost of other facets of her life.

But lying in the hospital bed, she realized that none of that really matters if she’s not healthy.

“During that time, I had a revelation that I had gotten myself into that mess,” she recalls. “And I realized that I could get myself out of it.”

So, instead of having surgery, she left the hospital and looked into alternative treatments. She stumbled upon hypnotherapy, and after just a few sessions, she saw a huge improvement: She learned to manage her pain, as well as to keep her stress in check. More than anything, it helped her believe it was possible to get better.

“Your mind is seriously the most powerful thing you have,” Yap muses.

It’s that concept she promotes through Holomua Healing Arts, which celebrated its first anniversary last week. Yap admits there are a lot of misconceptions about what she does; sometimes people think hypnotherapy involves mind control. But she explains it like this: “It can get your mind to work for you, rather than against you.”

In addition to hypnotherapy and reiki, Yap provides business and life coaching, often working with clients who find themselves at a crossroads as she once was. Whether it be a dead-end job or an unhappy relationship, Yap helps them fine-tune their goals and enact a plan to achieve them.

Many of her clients are women — which suits her just fine. Yap has a particular passion for helping women. In her spare time, she runs Femfessionals Honolulu, the local chapter of a national women’s networking group that promotes both business and personal development.

Holomua means “to improve” or “to progress.” It’s what she helps her clients do, but it’s also become something of a personal mantra for Yap: She refuses to stay stagnant. And although her company still is young, she’s already got some new features in the works. She’s currently studying essential oils and plans to earn a clinical hypnotherapy license later this year.

After a varied career, Yap feels that she has found her passion — something she wants for all of her clients, too.

“I just want everybody to be happy and find their purpose,” she says.

For more information, call 1-832-819-4325 or visit holomuahealingarts.com.

coconnor@midweek.com