Life is Too Short to Stay Stuck or Hidden. 

Ailish Keating perhaps knows this better than anyone. About seven years ago, she developed a large lump in her breast that seemed to appear overnight.  She had been going through a very a stressful period at that time.  In addition to the stress, she was aware she had a lot of repressed emotions that likely also contributed to the appearance of the lump. Fortunately she possessed the self-awareness to realize what had caused it. Over the next few weeks she was able to reverse it by addressing her internal struggle, releasing the emotions using some healing methods she was familiar with as well as changing her diet and actions. Within a couple of weeks, the lump went from the size of a golf ball to the size of a small marble and continued to diminish. But that wasn’t the end of the lump.

About four years ago, she found herself in the middle of a similar set of conditions where she was under an enormous amount of stress, and the condition returned. This time, it did not matter what she did; nothing changed its direction. She was living in Maine and traveling back and forth to New York City for treatments when COVID arrived. Flights were soon canceled and she was unable to travel to appointments. Her condition worsened over the two months that followed. By the time she was able to be seen by a medical professional, her diagnosis was triple negative breast cancer with two to six months to live. It had metastasized and she was very weak. She then went on various chemotherapies which would work for about three weeks and then stop working. Eventually, after the third chemo was not working, the US doctors suggested that she return to Ireland as her condition was not improving. She returned to Ireland and due to COVID-inspired delays and required quarantines, there was an approximately two month delay between appointments from the period of July to September. Somehow, during this delay between treatments, she had started to improve. Ms. Keating was practicing holistic therapies on the side, and they were working. In case you were wondering, Ailish Keating is still alive.

Pretty inspiring, right?

I had the privilege of interviewing Ms. Keating, to find out where she is in her life now – a life that was declared over a few years ago.

Ailish now dedicates her life to helping others master their “inner game” to achieve healthy relationships, wealth, and happiness. She wants to help people discover why they are here, their authentic self, and uncover and achieve their highest potential. She believes that once someone does the inner work required, not only do they have improved finances, but relationships and life in general also start to improve. She says it is all an inner game.

By the inner game, she means mastering emotions, thoughts, memories and thinking – one’s entire vibration. This impacts how one shows up in life and also what happens to you and how you respond to what happens. As you get more skilled, you can handle situations and people with greater ease. It is not that things don’t happen, it is that you have increased skill sets to handle life and you master your response, your choices, and your reactions.

This shift allows opportunities and invites success into your life. You become more naturally confident and more congruent with who you are. Then the world outside of you changes to match who you are on the inside – it is an inside job.

“I don’t know you yet, but I know this: the world needs your gifts right now – you are here to transform lives and I am here to help you do that.”

Ailish Keating is a Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) Practitioner and a holistic coach who helps entrepreneurs and executives Master the Inner Game to achieve healthy relationships, wealth and happiness and so they don’t burn out. Ailish is trained in RTT, Hypnotherapy, Access Bars, Yoga and meditation.  She has developed a proprietary technique called Emotional Alchemy™, which allows her clients to process high levels of emotions and trauma, achieving powerful results in a short amount of time.

I asked Ailish to explain what Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) is, and how it works:

Rapid Transformational Therapy® (RTT®) is a complete solution-based treatment that combines the most beneficial principles of Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy, NLP, and Neuroscience. In short, RTT can deliver extraordinary change from physical, emotional, and psychological pain by reframing our core beliefs, values, habits, and emotions deep in the subconscious. By rapidly rewiring the brain’s neural pathways, RTT® replaces our outdated belief systems and negative behavior patterns. New life-affirming beliefs are formed, and the transformational process begins. In as little as 1-3 sessions, some lifelong issues can be resolved.

A session is typically 1.5-2 hours, after some initial investigative work between the practitioner and client, the client is placed in hypnosis. This simply serves to allow the conscious mind, which is the gatekeeper, to step aside so that the subconscious mind can answer questions. The client’s subconscious mind will present events from the past that contributed to the current issue/problem. These past events are then cleared from mental and emotional triggers. The problematic beliefs and values, many of which they have carried with them since childhood, are rewired and reframed using suggestions and reframing.

Often, these have been so deeply buried in their subconscious that they are unaware of them; by giving the client the potential to alter the way they think and put an end to self-sabotaging tendencies, the client can positively approach life and move forward. This technique allows a client to release the memory of the event responsible for the traumatic response. It can be used for a variety of issues such as stopping smoking, overcoming anxiety, improving memory and concentration, and clearing traumatic events from the past.

For example, one of her clients, at fifty-one years of age, had a fear of deep water and would panic if she was in water above her waist. She wanted to set a better example for her teenage son as she had found, during every family vacation, she would not go in the water and swim with her husband or child, which had a negative impact on what should have been a happy occasion. She wanted to swim in the deep end of the pool, she wanted to enjoy her time with her family, but something consistently held her back. During her RTT session, it surfaced that she had witnessed her sister almost drowning when she was a child. When that happened, she had promised herself that she would not be put in that position again. A week after the session she was back, swimming in the ocean, and shortly after that, swimming in the deep end of the pool. Swimming is now enjoyable for her and her family; the fear of deep water is completely gone.

In Ailish’s sessions she also uses a proprietary technique called Emotional Alchemy™. I asked her what this is:

Much like memories, emotions that have not been expressed are stored in the body; these stuck emotions then impede our ability to be fully present and can also be easily triggered.  As a protective mechanism, these emotions stack one on top of another.  In a session with my clients, I guide them through the process of feeling and releasing each emotion without judgment, and also to achieve a place of full acceptance of each emotion that surfaces. This acceptance then allows the client to go deep inside and clear and release emotional wounds that have been kept in place from a young age.  

My process of Emotional Alchemy allows the client to process what can be a backlog of emotions in a single session. What is important to understand is that emotions are chemicals in the body and these chemicals impact our vibration. So if you are attempting to achieve a positive outcome but you have a lot of negative emotions – fear, anger, resentment, etc. stored in the body, these emotions that are stored will impede you from achieving a different outcome, regardless of mindset or actions. Once these emotions are released, someone is standing on neutral ground and it is a very powerful place to create from.

I asked her what she finds is the most common fear her patients face?

Shame is often an underlying emotion that shows up, and fear around that. Fear also shows up indirectly through anxiety. While fear is an emotional reaction to a specific, real danger, anxiety is an excessive and unfocused fear that may be triggered by a variety of stimuli. Anxiety caused by stress may persist long after the trigger is removed or arise with no trigger at all.

Have you seen people’s fears change over the years of doing this kind of work, and if so, how?

A lot of fear can be overcome once you start doing the work. So the focus is on getting started. Once someone has overcome the resistance around starting whatever it is, then the focus switches to something else. Most fear and anxiety is associated with an earlier event, once we can clear and reprogram the earlier event that issue is resolved and the client can either move on or something else will show up to work on.

Through the work that I do, it is relatively simple to eliminate fears and anxieties. After they are eliminated, there needs to be positive actions to seal in a new experience. The ego likes the status quo. New actions and situations trigger the ego’s need to feel safe.  Once the ego/personality can learn that it is safe to do a new action and that this new thing won’t ‘get you killed,’ then the ego can be trained to respond positively in these scenarios with some positive experiences.

A lot of things that people consider fear are really just the discomfort around doing something new. These sensations in the body were probably first experienced when the client was a child, so it is very natural to want to move away from them. As an adult, once you can start to identify the sensations and triggers and look at them with an ‘adult’ mind, you can really help yourself move beyond them.

Her number one tip for dealing with anxiety or fear:

Visualizing a positive outcome before you leave the house. For example, if you are going for a new job interview – before you leave the house, visualize yourself arriving back home after the interview looking happy and calling up a friend to tell them how well it went. Somehow in that process, and I tell all my clients to use it, the outcome of the interviews is usually very favorable.  Keeping an eye on the rate of breath is very helpful also, slightly longer exhales than inhales can assist in keeping the mind calm.

Her number one tip for dealing with depression:

It really depends on the person; however, good sleep, adequate sunlight and grounding should all be a part of everyone’s life. Grounding is the practice of walking barefoot on the natural ground – such as grass, sand, etc. or for example, lying in a park for 20-30 minutes at a time. The direct physical connection to the earth calms the mind. Grounding offers many health benefits, including improved sleep, reduced inflammation, improved tissue and cell repair, enhanced blood flow, increased heart rate variability, and improved electrical activity in the brain. In addition, walking barefoot on the ground releases endorphins and it is free and available to almost everyone. 

Good gut health is also essential for healthy serotonin levels. Once you have these things working for you (sleep, sunlight, grounding and diet), then you are naturally in a better place to deal with whatever mental and emotional issues are present and causing the depression.

I asked Ailish what her biggest challenge in life has been:

My biggest challenge in life has been trusting myself to find my path. A lot of what I have done in life has been different from many family members and friends and pretty much all of my college friends. Particularly, when I was younger, I found there was a lack of good role models and mentors in the field that I am currently in.

What brought you from Ireland to the US? Where are you based now and why did you choose that location over the other?

When I was younger growing up in the west of Ireland, New York always seemed like the capital of the US, even though obviously DC is. After college in Ireland, I had the opportunity to do my Masters through Cornell at IMHI/ESSEC and spent some time at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. After I graduated, I received my green card and I had contacts in the city, so it was easy for me to start in NY. I worked there for over eighteen years and then in Maine for an additional eight years thereafter.

I moved back to Ireland in 2020 as I was sick at the time. As a single parent, it was the correct choice for me.  It took me over a year to settle back into Ireland.  Now that I am here, I am growing my business and my life here. There are advantages to both locations, and I see them both as home. It is fabulous to be in Ireland and Europe for so many reasons also.

What are the biggest differences you see between life in the US and life in Ireland?

Possibility and Potential are the words that always come to mind for me with the US. It is such a big country and has so many different landscapes. People do not generally judge a person for whatever they choose to pursue, so for example, someone who is fifty-five could start out on a new career and no one would think that was unusual at all. The opinions of the people and everything there are generally very diverse. Sometimes the places lack the character of Irish towns and villages though.

Connection is the word that comes to me for Ireland, and connection and community traditionally have been very important in Ireland. However, there is a sense of sameness in Ireland and a somewhat lack of diversity in opinion more so than in culture. The political landscape in Ireland is very mono; there is very little diversity in political opinions. The landscape in Ireland is so beautiful and intimate and there are sacred places everywhere, wells, ring forts and ancient sites, so it is a place of wonderment also.

If Ailish Keating’s biggest fear in life has been of having an ineffective, non-impactful life, I would say she has nothing to fear.

You can connect with Ailish Keating at ailish.com as well as on most of the regular social media platforms. Most of her work is directly one-on-one and custom tailored to each individual and the results they wish to achieve.