Rearranging the Deck Chairs

I had a dream a few days ago. It didn’t mean much at the time, it just seemed silly, but the meaning became clear yesterday. I had a lot of dreams that night, but this one is the only one I remember. That seems how dreams work for me. when I wake up, I can remember snatches of many different dreams but only one is clear enough and detailed enough to recall.

This dream is set in sunny California in the early 60’s. The whole thing looked like a 60’s glam movie, with long, low convertibles, beautiful people, and bright sunshine with saturated colors. It took place in a large parking lot, mostly full, that seemed to be at the beach. I watched it all in third person, the person I take to be me was driving this blue convertible. The “me” in this dream was a “Rock Hudson” type with a pretty girlfriend, at least that’s what she seemed, she came a went throughout the scene. Everyone seemed happy, almost movie musical happy. You’ll see why that’s weird in a minute.

The whole parking lot was flooded with water. Over the doorsills in some places, a little lower in other places. Nobody seemed to care. My car was full of water that sloshed around as I drove. I didn’t look like I cared, smiling and happy. I drove around the lot for a while then found a new parking space where the water was a little less deep, actually below the doorsills. Maybe I thought that the water in the care would drain out. After I parked, the girlfriend re-appeared and I sat there, with my arms wide open, face up to sky, eyes closed, smiling like this was the best day ever. I watched this from above, like it was the ending of a great movie. Roll credits.

Yesterday it hit me, what it means. The water is the “sludge” in our lives and we spend our lives “being happy” and trying to find a place where the “sludge” is, perhaps, just a little shallower. And we celebrate if we find such a place. 

I was struck by the superficiality of the whole thing. Beautiful people, fancy cars, beautiful location, nice clothes, but we all ignore the sludge, for the most part. But we do spend a lot of time “driving around the parking lot” looking for a place with less sludge. Nobody every tries to leave the parking lot. Funny, huh?

What is “sludge?” All the crap that weighs us down, fills our time, yet, ultimately, never adds anything to our lives. Worries: About money, about what people think, about things we can do nothing about. Fear and hate: About just about anything. Fear and hate are two sides of the same coin, you distrust what you fear, you’re fear what you don’t like. 

We are all afraid of stuff, whether we admit it or not. (Not afraid of anything? What about “uncomfortable?” Are you uncomfortable around certain people, in certain situations, with certain subjects? “Discomfort” is mild fear, it doesn’t take a whole lot to turn “discomfort” into something far stronger.) The common way you’re supposed to deal with fear, is that you find the source of your fear and remove it from your life. Then you will “feel safe,” right? Except that doesn’t actually work. No matter how hard or how far you push your fear and discomfort away, it always finds you. I know how that works. I’ve lived in “unsafe” areas, then I get a chance to move to something better, and, for a while, I feel much better. Then, I begin to notice things, and hear things, neighbors talk, incidents on the news, and before long I feel “unsafe” again.

What are you afraid of? People different from you? Be it appearance, income, education, age, beliefs, clothes? The government? Liberals? Conservatives? The rich? The poor? Climate change? Poison, in your food, water, medicines? Look around you and you’ll have no trouble finding people who want to stoke your fears, for their own ends, and once they’ve go you hooked, truth no longer matters, facts don’t matter, all that matters is the “it” that “they” want you to fear. And it’s so easy, because the fear is always there, inside you, just waiting to be pointed at someone or something. What fear? The fear that they will all find out those things we hate about ourselves.

Ever wonder what the fear-peddelers get out of it? Think about it, they all want something and are willing to scare you into giving it to them. They want your money, time, support, or just the attention. There’s always some hidden motive, because, if they were on the up-and-up, there’d be no reason to use fear to sell you their agenda. The thing is, the world has a lot of problems, but none of them are unsolvable! We have the knowledge and technology to solve or, at least, mitigate, everyone of the world problems, and the only reason we don’t is fear: Greed is fear of not having enough. Conservatism is the fear of change, or losing what you have. The need for power comes from fear of loss of control. Bigotry, of all kinds, religious and racial, including misogyny, is fear of anyone who is different. There is enough of everything for everyone, money, food, living space, if we could only get over all the fears. 

So, in my dream we were all perfectly happy, walking and driving around shin deep in sludge. We enjoyed the sunshine and our fancy cars while carefully ignoring the mess and the reality that the sludge was rotting out the cars, inside and out. We cope by vying for better parking spots, with less sludge, but nobody considers leaving the parking lot. That would require leaving behind your car, your status and the “parking place” that you have worked so hard to secure. In the real world, things aren’t so cut and dried. Getting rid of all your material things, and walking away from you responsibilities and obligations doesn’t free you from the sludge, It’s not even a necessary step. The sludge is inside and, once you start cleaning that up, what you manifest on the outside will naturally follow as a natural consequence of your new values. In all things, it doesn’t matter what you have, or what you do, it’s why you have it or do it. Intension is everything. 

In my journey of a thousand miles, I have faced and expunged many hidden fears, small and large. They are usually linked to traumas, so the fears vanish when the traumatic emotions are acknowledged and released. This is difficult for us Westerners, we are taught to “forget about it,” and suppress any hurt, “get over it, nobody wants to know.” We are so uncomfortable with feelings. Or we dwell endlessly on how we feel about what happened, which just reinforces the trauma. Neither of these is helpful. It always comes out and haunts us, making us easy prey for any fear monger that comes along. It doesn’t matter how smart and logical we think we are, or how confident we are that our religious or other beliefs protect us, our sludge is there, effecting every decision and coloring every opinion.

The solution that I teach is to use a combination of tools and practices, including hypnosis, with meditation, shamanistic and other traditional and new-age concepts to discover, uncover and release the trapped emotions that keep us stuck in past events. This removes the “scales from our eyes” and allow us to see the world as it is, not as we feared it was, and the fears begin to melt away. This process takes time, and that’s good thing, for having too much change all at once would be a tremendous shock to our system, but it’s not so bad because it pays dividends all along the way. The slow progress allows you to adapt your lifestyle and values as your inner landscape changes. Many people want a new life, without, you know, actually, changing their life. They want to world to treat them differently without changing the way they view and treat the world. That, of course, never works. The simple and powerful fact is, you change yourself, you change the world. Anything else you do, from success seminars to positive affirmations, is no more that driving around the parking lot, or, as some say, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe it looks good, and may even make you feel like your acomplishing something, but it's untimately fultile if you're expecting any real change in your life.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

I held a group regression at my place yesterday. Only one person showed up, even though I had a large number of RSVPs. She is a woman in her 70’s, single, living with her daughter and her daughter’s husband. I don’t know whether she’s divorced or widowed. She’s been to four of my group meetings before, and been hypnotized twice before. She considers herself a poor subject, but, as you will see, she’s quite the opposite.

I showed this text to the client and she added some comments that I put in quotes in the text.

After she arrived, we chit-chatted for about half an hour, waiting for others to show up. After catching up, we got on to the subject of my next meeting, which is “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead,” by Gray Leon Hill. In the course of that conversation, we discussed the symptoms of spirit attachment and she suspected that she might have one, and she agreed to let me help her look into it, when we had time. Once enough time had passed that I was pretty sure no one else was showing up, I suggested that we skip the regression and explore the possibility of the “hitchhiker.”

My plan was to do a standard induction and then ask her subconscious (or higher self) if there were any other entities present. To that end, I had her imagine her beautiful place. But as she described that place, she mentioned that she was holding a book. That made me suspicious, and it only took a few more questions to determine that she was not in this lifetime. My guides said to go with it, so I did.

Client, “Either the book was written in a foreign language or I was unable to read, as I realized today that words in the book didn’t make any sense to me.”

She was a 12 year old girl, wearing an old, simple, dress that was too small. The left side of her face had some kind of defect or deformity that caused it to droop. She was sitting under a tree in a field of grass and could hear cows in the distance. There were trees around, but her area was mostly open.

When I asked her to go to the place where she lived, she chose, instead, to go to a cave. She always called it a “hole” for some reason, but, what she described was more like a large cave or system of caves. When she arrived, she was standing and looking up through an opening to the sky. She described the sky as so intense a blue as being almost purple. When she looked around, she saw a bunch of “little men” or elves working with fire and making metal things. (The client was laughing at this point, not believing what she was seeing) After a while, one of the “little men” took her out of the caves and back to her house. It was like she knew the way well enough, but one of the men always took her back when it was time.

She lived with a sister, that was a couple of years older, and a grown woman who seemed to be some kind of caretaker. The lived in a plain stone house off by itself. They seemed to be very poor, the house empty and very cold in the winter, and the food was pretty bad, yet they had this woman, who was not related to them, to cook and take care of them.

Long story short, her sister left four years later, she spend a lot of time with the elves, especially in the winter, when it was cold, and then she died at the age of 24. She apparently had some congenital problems, was constantly in pain or discomfort, and some injury had finally tipped the scales. The odd thing is, the buried her before she was dead. That’s not quite what you think, she felt herself being lowered into the grave and laid there looking at the sky, just a little indignant, but otherwise not particularly upset that they didn’t wait until she was dead. She died shortly thereafter, before they started to cover her up.

She then rose up, looked at the scene briefly, couldn’t answer any questions about the purpose of that life, then went to visit her sister. Apparently they were supposed to stay together their entire lives, and had tried this many times in the past, but each time, something always split them up. She seemed to be able to have this conversation with her sister, even though she wasn’t, physically, there.

After that, the client rose up into the sky, shedding the “weight” of her physical life, bit by bit, until she was just a few “molecules,” among countless other “molecules” of light. Each one a being. She was enraptured with the feeling of being part of the oneness again.

A remarkable thing happened at this point, her face changed: It looked dramatically younger, slimmer, and her skin looked like ivory. Her face reminded me of a classical greek statue. (At this point, I noticed a distinct scar, a straight line angling from her forehead to just outside of her right eye. Afterward, when we were talking, I couldn’t see it any more, and when I asked her about it she didn’t know what I was talking about.) She wanted to remain in this state, but something, or someone, was calling her to find another body and she didn’t want to.

Client, “I think this is fascinating. I saw my daughter’s face change that way once when she was describing a past life as a servant in an Egyptian temple whose job was to make sure that the lamps never went out.”

This seemed to be a good time to call in the subconscious, but there was a problem. Even though I got affirmatives when I requested to speak to the subconscious and ask questions, it wasn’t able to answer. The client saw a “big block” in front of the subconscious. So I started talking directly to the “big block.”

The blocks’ name turned out be Harry, and he’d been with the client since childhood. He joined her because she was self confident and he could undermine her confidence by constantly whispering discouraging and suicidal thought into her ear. (The client had mentioned earlier that she’d learned to distinguish these “not her” thoughts fairly early in her life and learned to block them out, mostly) Harry had died from indecision, his leg had been caught under a falling rock and he died from thirst before he could make up his mind about cutting off his leg.

Client, “I was told when I was in my 30s that I had an entity who had been attached to me for several lifetimes who sent me ‘death messages’ as a way of controlling me. The first time I consciously recognized this, I was driving over the bridge to Vancouver when I got a mental picture of myself driving off the bridge and being killed. From then on, I was able to recognize when those kind of messages were coming at me from the outside. When Rod asked Harry when Harry had attached himself to me, I ‘saw’ sets of numbers, and felt that Harry had attached himself in different lifetimes when I was 83, 49 and at birth.”

It took some convincing to get him to leave. He was very afraid of what “they” would do to him because of all the “bad” things he’d done. We eventually we able to locate a sister, I believe, that he cared about and trusted enough to let her take him into the light. At this point, the client was smiling and crying at the same time. I tried to find out what was happening here, but, between one thing and another, I didn’t get a clear answer.

Client, “I was overcome with joy at the point at which Harry left me, because I saw a large clay pot on its side with water pouring out. The falling water was unutterably beautiful and meaningful to me, and I can still visualize it and experience remnants of the feeling.”

Afterwards, she felt lighter, and smiled and shook her head whenever she mentioned the “little men.” She realized that her “sister” is here, in this lifetime, as a relative, but they are not close this time. Apparently they decided to “take this lifetime off” from whatever goal they are working on. I hope to see her again soon, and see what changes God has wrought.

Client, “Actually, I was very close to that sister in this lifetime, and she was still my sister, although there were many years in which I didn’t live near each other. She’s the first person I knew who had psychic experiences and told me about them. Her husband told me that the last time the 3 of us were together we were Chinese, and my sister had me beheaded so I couldn’t take him away from her.”

“My feeling is that the lifetime I was regressed to wasn’t particularly important. The significant things in this experience were, to me – rising into the sky after my physical death and the sensation of ‘shedding’ material things. I actually had a sense of things ‘falling off of me’ as I rose until I was just consciousness; traveling in unison with the other ‘beings’ that I described – at least to myself- as ‘other cells in a body’; the untrammeled joy I felt at the sight of the water pouring from the jar, which occurred just as Harry was coming in contact with whoever came to fetch him.“

“Getting rid of Harry was also gratifying. I didn’t feel any anger toward him, as it was obvious to me that he hung on to me as a way of ignoring his own problems.”

“I think I just realized what the falling water symbolized. I think it was for Harry. He latched onto me after having died of thirst, and hung on to me because he was using me to supply him with spiritual nourishment because he didn’t know how to find his own. I think the water represented the immense amount of spiritual ‘thirst quenching’ that he realized was available to him once he had the courage to seek it for himself.”

A Question of Time?

I was talking to a potential client last night and she asked me how many sessions it would take to solve her problem. The stopped me. I ended up saying “just one,” but now, I’m not so sure. I hear other practitioners talking about clients that they see, regularly, for months or years. Most of my clients seem to get finished up in one session, and then I never hear from them again, and I always took that as a good sign. But I'm thinking now that different people, with different challenges, will probably need more time.

It’s dawned on me that many people need both education and treatment. Hypnosis sessions are good for uncovering what's behind the issues they face, but then what to do about it is up to the client. They will often get instructions about what they need to do to resolve the issue, but that still can leave them facing the same reluctance to act that created the issue in the first place. Knowledge is helpful, but the necessary next step is to understand what to do with that knowledge. In a couple of cases, I've had clients that discovered that the habits they wanted to get rid of, like smoking, or over eating, were a direct consequence of seemingly unrelated choices and their core values. In one case, an inflexible core of self-sacrifice forced an "somethings got to give" response from the subconscious, resulting in the habit, as compensation. These clients choose not to re-examine their beliefs, so they left with nothing changed. I hope you now have an understanding why simply laying on "good" suggestions and positive affirmations often don't work all that well.

Hypnosis is a powerful tool that allows us to uncover the source of challenges, and to release emotional charge around them. This often causes a shift in the client without them being consciously aware if it. They know something's up, but don't know what it is, and that can be confusing and frighting. The intensity of these feelings are directly related to the size of the shift. When I went through my shifts, it felt like the world had rewritten itself around me. Everyone was acting so differently towards me! Slowly I realized that what I was experiencing was due to both changes in how I acted, and how I interpreted other people's reactions. It would have been nice to have someone me navigate these strange waters, and guide me through the rough patches. I strive to offer my clients both relief and guidance.

So, what do I say when someone asks me “How long is this going to take?” It’s a valid question. If it was me, I sure would like to know what I’m signing up for, too. But I'm just not sure what to say, other than “It depends.” For people with just a "single issue," like to do one long session, which includes some counseling at the end, followed by a couple of short, followup sessions, as needed. For people who are on a path, or have a number of issues, we can work as long as they feel the need. I encourage clients to work as the feel the need and to quit when they're ready. When I was in therapy, and when I was working with any teacher or program, I knew when I was "done." I knew when I had reached the point where I got all I was going to get and it was time to move on. I want my clients to feel the same.

I don't think that any professional in this area really knows how long something is going to take. Every client is different, they work differently and have their own path. There really are two distinct types of clients, the ones that just want something "fixed," and those that recognize that life's a journey and that hypnosis is one effective tool to remove blocks and help clarify their path. In the best case, the "fixers" will evolve into "seekers," as they use the tools that I teach them, as they begin uncover and fulfill their life's purpose.

Graduation

A few days ago, I graduated from HCH Institute with my certificate in hypnotherapy. Cool! It’s been an amazing journey. I needed to plow through a lot of self-doubt, and other issues, that came up throughout the process. Fortunately, we were constantly working on each other so that there was ample opportunity to process stuff. I know now that if you decide to take on this kind of work, it’s always best to have issues to work on. Nothing beats personal experience with each technique from the inside!

We had a graduation ceremony on the last day. As you might expect, it was more spiritual than ceremonial. And I have to add here the qualification “spiritual but not religious,” because the things you learn and deal with in this course of study simply cannot be completely contained within any of the religions that I know of. From my point of view, all the mainstream religions have dumbed-down their metaphysical aspects to the point of simplistic absurdity, then imply that any evidence or experience or philosophical idea that doesn’t fit should be ignored and discarded. I don’t know, call me crazy, but where I come from, if the evidence doesn’t fit the paradigm, it’s time to change the paradigm. I have witnessed and experienced many things that don’t fit into any materialist or religious framework, and they are simply to practical and useful to discard simply because certain people find them unacceptable.

To complete the graduation ceremony, the head of the school lead us in a guided, group meditation. This meditation is known as the Crystal Cave meditation. It takes you on a  journey to a round cave with a fire in the center and the walls lined with crystals. Once in the cave, you are invited to study the flickering firelight dancing through the crystals, looking for inspiration in the ever-changing patterns and colors of light. This time, we were invited to all enter the cave together and form a circle around the fire. Once there, we each had the opportunity to share whatever we wanted about the class and our time together, over the past four months.

I was the last one to go, which gave me plenty of time to consider what I wanted to say. Actually, there wasn’t really many options for me. As soon as we settled into the cave, an image came into my head, and my only options were to either share it, or not. I chose to break from my usual paradigm of questioning everything and keeping all the weird stuff to myself, and tell everyone what I saw.

What is saw was each one of my classmates standing around a fire, each one was a avatar that, I suppose, represented them to me. 

The first person was a female figure dressed in black and white that I knew was Quan Yin, a Buddhist deity that I know little about, I just knew that’s who it was. The next was a cross between a leopard and tiger: fierce, protective, clever and tenacious. The next was a bear: strong, yet gentle, loving and, perhaps, a little clumsy, not yet in full control of her power. The next was a female figure I still didn’t recognize: She had dark hair, was dressed in robes of red, orange and yellow, reminding me of fire, and held a thin, golden staff with a ball on the top, which spoke to me of power, guidance, leadership, and intuitive wisdom, still trying to find her way. 

At the time, I skipped myself, having no idea what I looked like. Looking at it later, I just get the impression of a mineral with black, white and brown streaks, and a sense of licorice, whatever that means.

That covered all the people in the class, but there was one more figure in the circle, a tall figure of light. There were no real details, it was too bright for that. As I talked, it seemed to me that the figure had it’s hands open and, from them came a circle of light that passed through each of us, binding us together through experience and support, from now on. 

I’m not generally the kind of person that “sees” things or usually speaks in this fashion. But times and people change. I know now that it’s time to speak my truth, and let the chips fall where they may.

Clients, Dentists and Spirits

Lots has been going on and I’ve had a hard time focusing on things to write about. Finances have been on my mind. It doesn’t look like I’ll have enough savings to make it through to my my retirement kicks in. I’ve been looking for work, but no dice so far. I have a trickle of income from my practice, but it’s no enough to make much difference. I do feel like I’m starting to get some traction getting clients through connections, and that’s good, unfortunately that will take more time to pay off. I have a couple of steady clients, pro bono, but they have connections that could steer more clients my way. But first I have to prove that I can deliver the goods. Things are looking good so far….

I started to do the rounds of local dentists in the area, but just a couple of conversations made it pretty clear to me that I need to finish my certification first. Ouch. So I need to sit on my hands, so to speak, for another four weeks. That will be hard. I also need to put together a flyer tailored to dentists and physicians. Maybe my dentist will be willing to give me a few minutes to help with that.

I am pursuing other avenues though. MeetUp, for instance, produces a slow trickle of leads and other ideas. One of the people there suggested ParaCon, the Paranormal Convention, that’s only a few miles up the road this year. (Is that a coincidence or what?) I though I could be a speaker, but that ship has sailed, but I signed up to be a vender and I’m working on a short presentation/dialogue I can give people as they stop by. Maybe all those times I spent manning a both at trade shows will finally pay off!

Change of subject: More things happening around spirit releasement. (That’s really a mouthful, isn’t it: “spirit releasement.” I’m going to have to come up with a better term than that.) Working on my own, after class, I’ve released about ten additional entities. I can’t help but ask my self, am I making all this up? I mean, it does seem a bit excessive. I guess you can never be sure, but I have seen some tell-tail signs that maybe there’s really something to it after all.

The first sign is the different feeling of each personality. They are really different. They speak differently, they feel different. The emotions they express as they tell their stories are sometimes quite strong. The children especially. For example, there was the twelve year old girl who was stripped, raped repeatedly in some dark place, was told it was all her fault, and then shot. The boy of eight who, with a bunch of others, was told to hide in a cave during a really bad storm. Then the cave filled with water so that they were trapped and drowned. There was the three year old who really didn’t know what happened to him, he just was looney and scared. And then there was an eighteen year old girl that died in someplace very cold and very dark. You know, after a while you reach a point where you just don’t want to know any more. But am I really making all this up? It sure doesn’t feel like it.

The other sign I get is what I feel physically when these entities leave. In one case, when the spirit was present and active, I felt a pressure on the back of my neck, almost like a hand, and there was a distinct jittery, cold sweat, nervousness throughout my body. This is something I’d been noticing, on and off, for as long as I can remember. This feeling tended to come up when I found myself alone without something “important” to occupy myself. As soon as the spirit left, I felt my whole body relax. Those feelings haven’t been back, and I’ve been sleeping better as well. I’d gotten so used to having this guy around, and I had no idea how much trouble he was causing me.

Most spirit attachments don’t have such obvious effects. Good thing, since most people have attachments, to some degree or other, we’d all be running around like possessed wackos, otherwise. On the other hand, when you look at all the stuff you see on the news every day, you have to wonder now many of those people are really running on their own recognizance.

I also feel something else when they leave, an intense, not unpleasant, tingling. It varies in intensity and how much of my body it covers. That might have something to do with how strong the entity was or how strongly it was attached to me. Could be either, or something else entirely. But it a pretty clear sign. I can feel it, even if I wasn’t expecting them to leave when they did. I suspect it has to do with the the return of the energy that they were taking from me. Spirit attachments cause a constant energy drain on your system. Usually it’s too small to notice, but sometimes it can be a real problem. Like an app running in the background on your phone, slowing things down and draining the battery. Shut it down and everything runs that much more sprightly. I think that the tingling is a momentary jolt caused by energy being returned to me.

It’s interesting that I’m getting so much experience with all these kind of things, things I wouldn’t have admitted knowing anything about ten years ago. And I seem to be starting to run unto people who need help in these areas as well, so cross fingers and put stuff out there.

Healer, Heal Thyself

I just finished my hypnotherapy training, level II. So much to remember! But to tell the truth, it’s not as much about remembering facts and techniques, as being confronted with my own issues. I’m not alone, pretty much every one of us seem to be dealing with a certain amount of overwhelm. From my personal, and selfish, perspective, I feel that the more you allow yourself to deal with your stuff now, the better you’ll be able to understand and work with your clients later. I can’t help but feel that walling yourself off from the process during training will be counterproductive in the long run, the stuff you refuse to deal with now will come to haunt you later.

I think I’ve mentioned before how much of my own stuff comes up while I’m engaged in these studies, but it’s interesting to note that this training is somewhat different than most courses of study, because we don’t study illnesses, per se, but therapeutic techniques that can be applied to a range of conditions. And we do exercises were we gain experience being both the therapist and the client. For instance, last week we were working with a technique called Soul Families, where you work to heal your relationships with relatives. For our exercise we used parents and grandparents. (Working with father and mother in separate sessions) In my case, I found that I could do the work just fine with my dad as the target, but I could not work with my mother at all. I just could not envision her as anything but the mess I she was in her later years.

When the exercise was over, I had an Ah Ha moment: I had not realized that I still could not forgive my mother! It’s funny how I never noticed that before. I always considered my dad to be the worst of the two, but, underneath I held a different opinion. Mom was a much bigger embarrassment and had a much bigger impact on my relationships, especially with women.

This was two weeks ago. At the time, I made a mental note to look into that whole issue, but hadn’t really gotten around to it. Despite that, I noticed this week that something had shifted, and my view of her had undergone a definite change. This week I chose her as the target of another exercise where we contacted a “dearly departed” for healing. (For you purists out there, you could say that I imagined a conversation with my subconscious that allowed me to restructure my memories of that person in order to let go of hurts and grudges, and find peace around that person) When we are the “client” in this exercise, we chose a person, then write questions for the “therapist” to ask that person while we are in trance. In my case, the process of formulating the questions led me to consider that the few facts I had of her life could be interpreted in a very different than I always assumed. Maybe she was actually the victim serious trauma, and was surviving as best she could, without and any treatment or even any recognition of her pain. Put in that light, the facts of her life make a lot more sense, and allow me room for understanding and, perhaps, forgiveness.

Everybody’s experience is different, and your milage may vary, but I have found that studying hypnotherapy, in this way, to be a profoundly healing experience, in a way that studying “standard” medicine could not be. I can only hope that this translates into being a better resource for my clients.

Going places together

Another week of the Mutual Awaking seminar. This week I did the class exercise an additional two times outside of the course. The exercise attempts to bring two people into the same collective space of consciousness. It works like this: There are two people, first one says “I’m experiencing…” finishing that statement with whatever they want, over and over again, for ten minutes, while the other listens in silence. Then the other does the same while the first listens. Then they alternate, saying “We experience…” for ten minutes. Yes, that sounds a bit strange, and I can’t say definitely that anything psychic happens, but it can be a pretty cool exercise.

While you can probably do it in person, I have always done it over the phone, with my eyes closed. I find that I just follow my intuition and say whatever comes into my head. If I’m not the first, I start by feeding off of things the other person says. The first time, the other person started out being very concrete, just talking about what was around them: Sights, sounds, the feel of the sun, and so on. When it was my turn, I started out talking about what I was seeing in my mind’s eye: Bright yellows and greens, among other things. But later on I talked about seeing the other person sitting in shadow. I didn’t think much of that at the time, but later the person mentioned that while I was talking they had moved inside. I thought that was kind of cool.

When we got to the “we” portion, we started to build a shared “imagining.” I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I started with a beach and we both kept adding to it with more details and events. Eventually night fell and the starts came out and we ended up with something glorious!

I did the exercise again, a short while later, with someone else. I noticed, right off the bat, how different the experience was. We both commented afterwards that the “shared space” felt completely different each time we did it. The more times I do it the the cooler it gets. Maybe I’m getting better at it. If nothing else, it’s a really cool way to stimulate shared creativity. If I was a visual artist, I would try and capture some of the images I see in these sessions. As it is, I will just have to remember them.

It doesn’t always work out so well. One time, last week, I was paired with someone who mumbled through their portion, and I couldn’t understand a word they said. Then, when we got to the “we” portion, I said “We are experiencing…” and the response ways “No we’re not.” I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, and the other person had nothing either and we just waited out the rest of the time. I think it’s kind of sad, that person spent a lot of money on the seminar and wasn’t willing try and get any value out of it. On the other hand, I was probably that person ten years ago, so, perhaps they are just beginning their own journey.

On a positive note, I started my hypnotherapy training today. Fun, a little confronting, but I plan to make it all worth it. I fumbled through my practice sessions like a rank beginner, but that’s alright, it’s my first day. And hypnosis is pretty forgiving, especially when you are working with experienced and cooperative people. We are a class of five people, and I expect we will know each other pretty well four months from now. There’s a lot of tricks to get under my belt, but I’m not worried. I have time.