Aurora Shele DeAngelis is an Albanian hypnotherapist and the founder of Aurora Healing LLC in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is very likely the only Albanian business owner in the state. Born in Albania in 1988, she trained as a telecommunications engineer in Tirana, earned an engineering degree and a master’s in computer science in France, and worked eleven years as a data consultant before leaving the field in 2021. She has practiced hypnotherapy since 2013 and full-time since 2021, completing more than 2,000 sessions with over 1,200 clients. She works almost entirely in Albanian, teaching a community spread across Albania, Kosovo, and the diaspora.
Pikë kryesore:
- Aurora Shele DeAngelis is an engineer three times over who left an eleven-year data career to practice hypnotherapy full-time.
- She has completed more than two thousand sessions with over twelve hundred clients across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the United States.
- She chose to work in Albanian deliberately, because the material exists in abundance in other languages and almost not at all in hers.
- She is based in Honolulu and runs classes at 9:00 PM Tirana time, which is 9:00 AM in Hawaii, structuring her entire working day around her clients rather than her time zone.
- She is direct about the limits of her work, declines clients she does not believe she can help, and refers people to licensed medical and mental health professionals.
Albanian Hypnotherapist in Hawaii: Aurora Shele DeAngelis
Aurora Shele DeAngelis was 21 years old, sitting in a French class at the Alliance Française in Tirana, when the teacher asked why everyone was there.
She said she was looking for a master’s in France. It was not true.
Sitting in that room was a man who, as it turned out, knew the head of her department at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. That head of department knew a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne, and that professor was trying to build a partnership between the two universities. The call came down the chain to her. She and her friend were the first candidates in fourteen years, and the terms were plain: do well on the exams, and the partnership goes ahead; fail and it does not.
They passed. They finished every exam and a thesis by July to make the September semester.
“I had no picture of what my life would look like. What I had was a wish to leave Albania and see somewhere else, and one day that wish had a door in front of it. I walked through it.”
That flight was her first trip abroad. She has since visited forty countries and lived in four of them.
Profil i shpejtë
Emër Aurora Shele DeAngelis
Biznesi: Aurora Healing LLC
Based in: Honolulu, Hawaii, and likely the only Albanian business owner in the state
I lindur: Albania, 1988
Sfondi: Telecommunications engineering in Tirana; engineering degree and master’s in computer science in France; eleven years as a data and business analyst
Practice: Hypnotherapy since 2013, full-time since 2021. More than 2,000 sessions with over 1,200 clients
Works in Albanian for clients across Albania, Kosovo, and the diaspora
Gjeni atë: Instagram @aurora.healing.llc
From Albania to France to Hawaii
France was supposed to be a diploma. It became twelve years and half an identity.
“I always say that France adopted me,” Aurora says. “I arrived as a student, and I grew up there. … That is where I rebuilt myself, and half my culture is French.” Her closest friends in Honolulu today are French. It is still the language she is most comfortable in.
She also credits France with teaching her something she did not go looking for.
“The French are lovers of fine art, and they find beauty in small things, a meal, a table, an afternoon that is not for anything,” she says. “They do not treat work as the whole of a life.”
What eventually moved her was not dissatisfaction. During her studies at UTC, she could take a semester abroad, with sixty universities on the list and three choices allowed.
“I closed my eyes and picked three at random,” she says. She was selected for POSTECH in Pohang, South Korea, then ranked the world’s top university under fifty years old.
Among the people she met there was a researcher from Hawaii. He is now her husband.
They spent nine years long-distance before she moved to Honolulu in 2021. “Nothing was wrong with France. I left in 2021 because I said yes to him.”
She is also quick to correct a common assumption about arriving somewhere without a community.
“I have never had one. Not in Hawaii, and not in France either,” she says. “Whatever community I had there, I built, and at the beginning none of it was Albanian.” In Paris, where nobody around her practiced the method she trained in, she started a meet-up group that grew to more than 500 members. Many of her first clients came from it.
“I think of myself as a citizen of the world. I build community around my interests, not around my nationality.”
The Year That Changed Everything
Aurora’s father died on 9 May 2012, while she was in Korea. He had been ill with cirrhosis, and her family had kept how far it had advanced from her.
It was her last semester, and he had wished her to finish. She stayed. She was not at the funeral.
“Even when you are honoring someone’s wish, the body and the mind still need closure, and mine got none.”
What followed was a long, dark stretch. She lost the man she had just met, who stayed in Korea, and the group of friends around them, all at once. She returned to a Paris where her friends had graduated and moved on.
“What I did first was very small. I sat every day and put my attention on my breath, and I let myself grieve in my own way.”
She tried everything available: psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, Reiki, yoga, grief counseling in online groups. All of it helped a little. Hypnotherapy helped most, which is why she trained in it.
Then she says something she wants Albanian readers to hear plainly.
“I want to say something simply, because in our community people rarely do. I am well now. Not coping, not managing. I feel healed and at peace.”
She still misses him. “I wish he knew where I live now. I wish he knew the man I married. He would have liked him. And he would have loved Hawaii. It was his dream to live by the beach.”
Then the part she wanted included: “It took years, and I know exactly what it cost, but it is possible, and someone reading this should know that. Life does get better, and it is possible to heal.”
The Engineer’s Approach
Aurora describes herself as an engineer three times over, and she does not treat that as a former life.
“It is less different than it looks. What I run is, in practice, an IT business,” she says. She builds her own website, platform, and systems, and eleven years of analyzing data let her look at the business and see what works.
The deeper inheritance is two habits.
“The first is that I know how to learn. When I find I am not good at something- business, marketing- I do not conclude that it is not for me. I take a class, find the best person in that field, learn it, and then practice it. That is engineering school more than it is talent.”
The second is how she frames problems. It is also why she works in Albanian.
“In English this material is everywhere … Almost none of it exists in Albanian, and there is effectively no training that I know of,” she says. “That is a problem with a very obvious shape, and my instinct was the engineer’s instinct: build the missing thing.”
She could work in English, French, or Italian. She chose not to. “It was not a sentimental decision. In other languages this material exists in enormous quantity, and anyone who wants it can find it. In Albanian there was a real need and very little serious information.”
Her decision to go independent came with a test, which she describes as the engineer in her. When she and the American hypnotherapist she had worked with for two years went separate ways, she gave herself three months to earn a living from the work or return to engineering.
“In those three months I earned three or four times what I had expected.”
What She Will Not Promise
Aurora is unusually direct about the boundaries of her work, and she raises them before anyone asks.
“There is something I say even though my business is called Aurora Healing: we do not promise that we will heal you. It is an experience, and every person responds to it differently.”
She declines clients on that basis. She does not take people with cancer or other serious illness, because “they would hang everything on the result, and I cannot promise a result.” She does not take people with active psychiatric conditions. She does not take people carrying heavy trauma, who she says need specialists with continuous follow-up rather than one long session. She refers them.
“I do not diagnose. That is not my role, and I am not qualified for it.”
She is clearest on crisis.
“When someone is in acute crisis, when they feel at risk or cannot control themselves, it is not a question of hypnosis or an appointment next week. That person needs mental health services or emergency care now,” she says. “I say this because I know information about those services is still scarce in the Albanian-speaking world and many people do not know where to go, but a hypnosis session is not the answer to a crisis.”
She is equally careful about belief. Asked whether her work has proven anything to her about the soul, she does not overreach.
“I want to be careful about how I say that, because I have no proof and I will not pretend otherwise,” she says. What she has is what she felt herself and what she has observed across thousands of sessions. “That is what people experience. It is not the same thing as evidence, and I would not insult anyone by calling it evidence.”
She adds a practical reason for all of this: “I have far more requests than I can take. So I have no reason to accept anyone I do not believe I can help.”
Building a Practice in Albanian
Aurora’s clients are scattered across Europe, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Korea, Norway, Greece, France, and Hawaii. Today her focus is Albanian speakers.
Her whole day runs backward from the island she lives on. Classes run at 9:00 PM Tirana time, which lands at 9:00 AM in Honolulu.
“When I wake up, it is night for them. I start with Albania, Kosovo and Europe, and by the time Hawaii is properly awake my working day is done,” she says. “I chose the hour for them, not for me.”
She has never advertised. “Whoever I worked with sent me someone else, a friend, a sister, a husband. At some point my days were simply full.”
Asked whether stigma around emotional health has shifted in Albanian families, she declines to claim progress she has not seen.
“Honestly, I cannot tell you whether it has shifted,” she says. Some women hide the work from their families. Others have husbands who write on their behalf. “What I can say is that more people want to work on themselves than before, and more Albanians are curious. What has not changed is that almost nobody talks about it openly.”
She takes criticism herself. “I get criticism myself whenever I talk about what I do, from people who have no idea what hypnosis is … I do not let them reach me, because they come from not knowing.”
Her practical answer to anyone hesitant is about privacy. “Every session is completely private, between me and you. … Your family does not have to know. Nobody has to know. Whether you keep this personal or tell the world is entirely your choice, and either choice is fine.”
Advice, and What Is Next
Asked what she would tell an Albanian woman starting a business alone, far from home, Aurora leads with money.
“Be financially independent. That is number one,” she says. “If you knew how many women come to me who depend entirely on a husband or a family, you would understand why I say it so plainly.”
She has been independent since she left home. “One of my favorite sayings is that the hand that feeds you can starve you. So you must be the hand that feeds itself.”
Her second piece of advice is simpler. “Just try. You have nothing to lose. Give your idea everything you can: time, patience, real education in the subject. Even if it does not work, you will know you did something for yourself.” She adds that any business is self-development, and that she knows because she has done both.
What comes next is a rebuild. She is constructing a website and platform to hold her teaching in one place, “so that it reaches as many people as possible instead of only the people who can book a session with me.” The subjects stay what they have always been: self-development, spiritual growth, and the blockages people actually bring her, which are relationships, money, and work.
She hopes to have it ready within a couple of months.
Find Aurora Shele DeAngelis on Instagram at @aurora.healing.llc, dhe shfletoni qindra biznese të tjera të verifikuara në pronësi të shqiptarëve në Drejtoria e Lidhjes ALB. Own a business you would like featured? Submit your story, and we will be in touch.
Paraqitur në ALB Connection, Albanian Excellence Worldwide.
Pyetje të shpeshta
Who is Aurora Shele DeAngelis?
Aurora Shele DeAngelis is an Albanian hypnotherapist and the founder of Aurora Healing LLC in Honolulu, Hawaii. Born in Albania in 1988, she trained as an engineer in Tirana and France, worked eleven years as a data consultant, and moved into hypnotherapy full-time in 2021.
How did an engineer end up doing this work?
She began training after hypnotherapy helped her more than anything else during a long period of grief following her father’s death in 2012. She practiced alongside her engineering career from 2013 and went full time in 2021 after giving herself a three-month test to earn a living from it.
Why does she work in Albanian rather than English?
She describes it as a practical decision rather than a sentimental one. Material on this subject exists in enormous quantity in English, French, and Italian, and almost none in Albanian. She saw a gap and built for it.
Who are her clients?
More than twelve hundred clients across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the United States, totaling over two thousand sessions. Today, she focuses on Albanian speakers in Albania, Kosovo, and the diaspora, and she has never advertised. All of her work has come through word of mouth.
What does she say about the limits of her work?
She is explicit that she does not promise healing, does not diagnose, and is not qualified to. She declines clients with serious illness, active psychiatric conditions, or heavy trauma, and refers them to specialists. She states plainly that anyone in acute crisis needs mental health services or emergency care rather than a session.
Why do her classes run at 9:00 PM Tirana time?
Because Tirana is eleven to twelve hours ahead of Hawaii, that hour lands at 9:00 AM in Honolulu. She built her working day around her clients rather than her own time zone, starting with Albania, Kosovo, and Europe and finishing before Hawaii is fully awake.
Is she the only Albanian business owner in Hawaii?
Very likely. Aurora raised it herself when she was first contacted, noting that ALB Connection could add Hawaii to its list of states with an Albanian business owner and that she is probably the only one there.
What is she working on now?
She is rebuilding her website and building a platform to hold her teaching in one place, so it reaches more people than can book individual sessions. She expects it to be ready within a couple of months. Until then, she announces her current offerings on Instagram.
Autor: Val Demiri
Valbona është redaktore dhe shkrimtare në ALB Connection, ku ajo mbulon njerëzit, bizneset dhe kulturën që formësojnë diasporën shqiptare. E diplomuar në gazetari në Universitetin e Ajovës, puna e saj përfshin profile të komunitetit, histori suksesi dhe reportazhe mbi jetën shqiptare në të gjithë SHBA-në, Evropën dhe më gjerë. Ajo tërhiqet nga historitë që festojnë arritjet e shqiptarëve dhe e mbajnë komunitetin të lidhur përtej kufijve.
