What Happens in an Empowerment Healing Session
Wellness

What a Vogue Editor Learned at an Empowerment Healing Session

Photographed by Andrés Pérez

In a healing session with Nathan Alba, Vogue Philippines fashion director Pam Quiñones learns about uncovering narratives that block the path to self-empowerment.

“The stories we tell ourselves matter.” 

Our beliefs shape not only our self-confidence but also how we perceive and experience reality. This is how Nathan Alba explains the mechanism behind our empowerment healing session, my very first. The goal, he says, is to focus on identifying the unhealthy narratives playing in our minds and transform them into ones that serve our highest potential, and, ultimately, change our lives.

Alba describes himself as an empowerment teacher. As co-founder of wellness company Atma Prema Wellbeing Group and co-creator of the Self Love Solution Program, he collaborates closely alongside educator-behavior specialist Dr. Lia Bernardo in combining scientific principles with spiritual teachings to foster healing and empowerment. The approach is anything but conventional therapy. “I don’t like to be too serious,” he laughs. “In my sessions, we joke around. It’s really more friendly. That’s why I love this practice. A lot of our students later on become our good friends.”

True enough, speaking with Alba was much like conversing with a wise friend. I sat comfortably on a couch as he prefaced the session by first sharing how he began this practice. In his college years, he felt lost, unable to understand himself or the world around him. Seeking answers, he became a devoted student of healing, studying practices like Reiki, Theta healing, and hypnosis, until he “reached a point of no return.” Life shifted and began to feel like light. Despite pressures to follow a traditional path, he chose to help lead others down the same path of empowerment, dedicating himself to the work that had transformed his own life. 

With over 13 years of experience, Alba helps clients overcome the barriers to self-empowerment. But no session is the same. Unlike therapies that rely on feedback, empowerment healing uses a directive approach, providing clients with specific tools the healer deems necessary for their needs. Having explored other healing modalities myself, I approached the process with an open mind, and I was eager to understand its potential. 

“We are able to create lasting changes in our lives by changing on an Unconscious level.”

We began with a guided meditation. “Visualize your happiest place,” Alba instructs. With my eyes closed, I followed suit. He tells me to focus on building the memory in vivid detail, as though I were drawing each corner of the space. The exercise lasted about five minutes before Alba instructed me to open my eyes and sit in a rested state.

What followed was deeply personal: Alba shared two snippets that he had picked up during the meditation. One was about my state of being, the journey that brought me here, and the path still ahead. The other touched on a long-standing personal goal. These revelations resonated with me profoundly, and I acknowledged them as soon as they were mentioned. We spoke a lot about where the issues may come from and how I might be able to overcome them.

Alba later explains that this is an important step he calls the “induction phase.” These insights and observations help him gauge a client’s energy and determine their needs. Based on my own personal context, Alba moves on to Theta Healing, a meditation technique and spiritual philosophy that aims to foster physical, emotional, and spiritual healing by tapping into the Theta brainwave state. “Beliefs are changed in the Theta brainwave state,” Alba explains. “We are able to create lasting changes in our lives by changing on an Unconscious level. [Through this state] we turn beliefs installed that do not serve us anymore into new patterns and beliefs that serve us. These changes created at a deep level positively impact every area of our lives.”

The Theta Healing began with a muscle test, a form of kinesiology used to detect subconscious beliefs by identifying what the body holds as truth and lie. “I use muscle testing in order to appease the skeptical mind,” he muses. Typically, Alba guides clients to form a circle with their thumb and index finger, instructing them to resist as he gently pulls them apart. “The muscle will always respond if [the statement is] true through strength. The muscle will be strong if it is truthful to the person, but if it’s a lie, meaning the person really doesn’t believe this, it will register in the muscles as weakness.”

This step is crucial for unblocking traumas and limiting beliefs. “Many of our programs and the way we think are shaped by our childhood,” he explains. “Kids are always in a Theta brainwave state. That’s why they’re so imaginative. When we do this belief change, we guide [clients] to this [state of mind], we change the pattern, and then we muscle test them after so that they see that the belief was indeed changed.”

This work is about creating the foundation, he continues, who adds that the process usually requires repetitive practice. By accessing this state, he helps clients get started on this process by unearthing the beliefs that no longer serve us and offering affirmations that flip these internal narratives. After leading me through affirmations, our session concluded with a final meditation to relax the mind. 

The experience left me with a newfound clarity. While the issues we discussed weren’t news to me, Nathan’s insights and guidance helped me see them in a different light. I saw the session as guidance on how to move forward to a more positive state. My biggest takeaway was to honor my present, to see the now as a form of growth and progress, a positive change from the past, something I should be grateful for. It took time in the past to get here and I tend to forget that. By reframing my internal narrative, I felt equipped with an outlook that allows me to feel empowered for the future.

“We are living at a very important time in human history,” Alba shares. Once a skeptic, the healer still continues to read on scientific developments that further prove his practice. Among many, he cites The Institute of Noetic Sciences’ work on Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography (1993). In this published book, authors Caryle Hirshberg and Brendan O’Regan found that among the common characteristics cited of patients whose diseases or cancers disappeared without medical or inadequate treatment are (1) a will to live and (2) a development of a more spiritual life. Excitedly, he adds, “Now, technology is able to actually catch up to what the Eastern teachers many, many, many centuries ago have been teaching us.” 

Bridging science and spirituality, empowerment healing is as much about self-love as it is about practical tools for transformation. It’s an invitation to rewrite the stories we’ve outgrown and a reminder of the power we hold within to shape our lives.

As told to Bianca Custodio.

Vogue Philippines: February 2025

₱595.00
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