Elena Yudakova

Short bio

About Elena

I work with people who are carrying something heavy — grief, shame, a pattern that keeps repeating — and who are ready, even if only just, to put it down. My background is in clinical hypnotherapy, and I work at the level of the body and the subconscious, finding where a feeling lives and following it back to where it started. I don't think you need to be spiritually inclined for this to work. Pain is universal, and that's where I begin. What most people leave with is a sense of permission — to stop being so hard on themselves.

An Orykl Session

What to expect

We start by talking — no agenda, just following what's actually present for you. The conversation moves quickly, and somewhere in it, the real thing tends to surface. From there, depending on what you bring, we may move into a slower, deeper state where the body gets to do some of the work: locating where a feeling sits, amplifying it rather than avoiding it, and letting it shift. You'll likely leave feeling lighter than when you arrived — not because anything was fixed, but because something that had been held quietly got to be seen.

The longer story

How Elena got here

I trained as a lawyer in Russia, graduated, and then didn't practice a single day. Something in me just knew it wasn't the path — and I followed that knowing even when I couldn't explain it. I left, worked as an au pair in Cape Town, spent time on cruise ships, opened a modelling agency, closed it, opened a travel agency. For years I moved like I was searching for something I couldn't name. In 2019, I went to hypnotherapy for myself. I'd been in relationships where the same thing kept happening — different people, same ending. After four sessions, something rearranged. Six months later I met my partner, and for the first time I understood what it felt like to actually be loved. That experience is the reason I do this work. Not the theory — the lived proof that a pattern formed early in life can be interrupted. I trained at the South African Institute of Hypnotism and graduated in 2023. Every weekend of that training felt like a green light. I'd spent years moving toward things that didn't quite fit; this was the first professional environment that felt completely like home. My sports massage practice runs alongside the hypnotherapy — the bodywork has given me a somatic literacy, an understanding of how people hold things physically, that quietly informs everything I do. What I've come to believe is that all human pain is essentially the same pain. Shame feels the same in a 52-year-old man as it did in a child of six. Rejection lives in the same part of the body across cultures, across histories. When I work with someone, I begin there — at that shared human ground — and we follow the feeling back to where it was first decided that they weren't enough, or weren't safe, or had to hold everything together alone. Then we let it go. Not by talking around it, but by staying with it long enough that it loses its charge. I work best with people who are ready to be real — not necessarily people who have words for everything, but people who are willing to open the door. If you've been carrying something for a long time and you're tired of carrying it, that's usually enough.

Areas of focus