About Diana Marie
Where this work began, and why it continues.
Where It Began
Aspects & Alchemy was not created overnight.
It emerged slowly — through lived experience, years of study, deep listening, and a growing understanding of how profoundly body, mind, heart, and spirit are interconnected.
More than thirty years ago, the birth of my first child — and later, navigating complex health challenges within my family — led me to question the traditional separation of physical symptoms from emotional experience.
I could see, firsthand, that stress, trauma, belief systems, nervous system regulation, and environment were not side notes to health — they were central to it.
These experiences didn’t send me looking for a technique.
They sent me looking for a different way of understanding.
A more honest map of how human beings actually function under pressure, under load, under the accumulation of things they were never given space to set down.
Why Aspects & Alchemy
Aspects & Alchemy was created because healing is not one-size-fits-all.
People do not arrive with the same histories, nervous systems, beliefs, relationships, bodies, capacities, cultures, or ways of making meaning. What supports one person may overwhelm another. What opens a door for one client may not be the right doorway for someone else.
I needed a framework that could honour that complexity without losing structure.
The roots of this work reach across many areas of study and lived experience: ancient healing practices, meditation, breathwork, body-based traditions, cultural and spiritual teachings, religious and philosophical inquiry, psychology, trauma-informed practice, nervous-system regulation, and psychoneuroimmunology — the study of how the mind, body, nervous system, immune system, and lived experience interact.
Across these paths, one truth kept returning:
Human beings are not separate parts.
The body, mind, heart, and spirit are always in conversation. Stress, belief, emotion, environment, meaning, relationship, and physiology all shape how a person survives, adapts, heals, and grows.
This is also why body-based awareness matters in the work. Your body may show where support is needed before your mind has words for it. Sensation, breath, posture, tension, numbness, energy, emotion, or ease can all become gentle information — especially when language is hard to access.
In this work, body-based reflection is never used to assign fixed meaning. We may gently explore what can sometimes arise in the areas a client identifies, but the client’s own experience leads the meaning. We listen with curiosity, consent, and respect for what the system is ready to reveal.
Aspects & Alchemy allows the work to be both personalized and grounded. It gives us a map without turning the map into a rule. It helps us listen for what is most needed first — regulation, clarity, emotional integration, meaning, expression, or support for returning to daily life.
The four aspects — Body, Mind, Heart, and Spirit — offer a way to understand the whole person without reducing anyone to one symptom, one story, one diagnosis, or one method.
Alchemy is the process of bringing those aspects back into relationship.
Not all clients need the same path.
Not all healing begins in the same place.
Not all depth is useful before capacity is present.
That is why this framework exists: to meet the individual in front of me, not force the individual into a method.
The body was not separate from the story.
It was speaking in the language it had.The Aspects & Alchemy Framework
Body • Mind • Heart • Spirit • Expression LayerAspects & Alchemy is the container that allows each pathway to be used at the right time, for the right person.
Hypnosis is woven through much of this work as both a method and a language of inner communication — through relaxation, focused attention, imagery, suggestion, receptive awareness, and the words used to speak with the different aspects of the self. This does not mean every session involves deep hypnosis. The depth of the work is always guided by consent, comfort, capacity, and readiness.
The work is body-led, trauma-informed, and capacity-based. It follows a clear sequence: regulation before depth, release before meaning, integration before expansion.
We begin in the body — not because the other aspects matter less, but because safety lives there first.
When the body feels safe, the mind can soften.
When the mind has space, the heart can be honest.
When the heart is met, the spirit can return.
Running through all four is the Expression Layer — the place where movement, sound, creative release, rhythm, and story can do what language alone cannot.
The body initiates.
The heart receives.
The mind clarifies.
The spirit lands.
What Changes
People don’t always notice the shift in session.
They notice it later —
in the conversation they had differently,
the reaction that didn’t come,
the morning they woke up and something felt lighter
without being able to name why.
They notice it in the body first.
A loosening where there used to be tightness.
A breath that goes somewhere it didn’t used to go.
The chest not rising the way it did
when that particular thing happens.
Then in the patterns.
The impulse to manage everyone in the room — quieter.
The story that used to run on its own — slower to start.
The version of themselves that disappeared in certain situations
— beginning to stay.
Then in relationship.
Words that weren’t available before.
Responses instead of reactions.
The ability to feel something
without becoming it.
This is not dramatic.
It does not announce itself.
It arrives the way real change arrives —
quietly, in ordinary moments,
when you realize something is different
and you cannot point to the exact day it changed.
That is the work.
There is no moment where this suddenly becomes finished.
What This Can Look Like in Your Life
Choosing how you respond instead of reacting before you realize you've started.
Recognizing a feeling in your body before it becomes a behaviour.
Saying what you actually mean without bracing for what comes after.
Being in a hard conversation and staying present instead of going somewhere else.
Noticing an old pattern starting and having enough space — just enough — to do something different.
Setting a boundary without the guilt that used to follow it immediately.
Sleeping through things that used to wake you.
Feeling something fully without being swept away by it.
Being in a room where the energy is difficult and knowing it isn't yours to fix.
Returning to yourself faster after something knocks you sideways.
Being someone your nervous system no longer has to protect you from.
Credentials & Integrity
Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist (CCHt)
The Marisa Peer School of RTT®, 2022
Certified Hypnotherapist (RTT®)
The Marisa Peer School of RTT®, 2021
Certified Trauma-Informed Coach
The Centre for Healing, 2023
Full Member — International Institute for Complementary Therapists (IICT)
Membership No. 2012170987
Accredited & insured practitioner in good standing
Coverage maintained through BMS Canada Risk Services Ltd. (Lloyd’s Underwriters) in partnership with the IICT.
All services are complementary to medical care and are not intended to replace licensed health treatment.
"These credentials reflect not only training and accountability — but a devotion to the art and integrity of healing."
I am dedicated to lifelong learning and continued professional development — maintaining alignment with current research, ethics, and trauma-informed best practices in holistic wellness.
Each client is a teacher.
Each session, a reflection of shared healing.
Something brought you here. Trust that.