My journey with hypnosis
…began with a terrible experience
I had published a book after over a decade spent on research. It was to be the first of a series, an investigation of medicine and science from a historical, philosophical, psychological and finally personal perspective after I had fought off a flesh-eating parasite in the Amazon. I was very excited, therefore, to be invited onto the radio to talk about it, but on the day the interview went terribly. This simply could not be! This was my life’s work and my gift to history, I had a profound personal story to tell and thousands of academic citations to back it up, but I was tongue-tied and without the charisma to do it justice. It was so bad that the podcaster refused to broadcast it.
In desperation, I sought out a hypnotherapist who could help me with public speaking. He asked me what it would look like if I was a good public speaker, and I replied that there would be people eager to see me. They would have paid to see me, in fact, would be leaning forward in their seats in anticipation, and a ripple of excitement would pass through the classy-looking auditorium when I made my entrance. They would be fascinated as I spoke, and full of questions when I finished.
He then asked me to take a few breaths and relax a series of muscles, before counting from ten to one and then feeding back to me the scene I had described. It took about 15 minutes. I felt almost nothing during and after, I merely felt that I had been swindled.
I did get another speaking gig some months later, however, and when I entered a slightly shabby-looking auditorium I felt all eyes on me. This had always been a dreadful experience before, but I remembered - my glands remembered - that these people were all there to see me. That they had paid and made efforts to see me because I was about to present the delicious fruits of my research, and I would be appreciated for it. And that was exactly what happened. My talk was well received and I have been invited to bigger and better gigs ever since. These days I talk all over the place about all sorts of obsessions, from drugs in scripture and the history of science to the collective intelligence and, indeed, hypnosis. Last time I was in Berlin they were squeezed in like sardines, and the hypnosis session I delivered was fantastic.
It took me, with the aid of a skilled hypnotist, less than half an hour to dismantle the persona of me as a poor speaker and replace it with a better image of myself as a great speaker. Reality did the rest. Once I had an experience of speaking eloquently and confidently to an interested audience, I had a real memory to refer back to and a set of expectations, anchors and physiological reactions that would assist me in meeting my goals.
Beyond hypnotherapy
I returned to my hypnotherapist a few years later with a problem with anger. He said that he usually treats anger issues with counselling, not hypnosis, but I explained that I was in a situation I couldn’t fix and wanted to respond better to a trigger, so he dropped me into trance and asked me what it would look like if it was an entity. We evoked the feeling into a circle, engaged with it on my terms, and eventually it gave me a gift that I was to keep to myself.
“We’re doing Goetia!,” I exclaimed, as soon as I came back to waking consciousness. He agreed, and told me about how his teacher had put up a woodcut of Dr. Faustus when he was training.
My interest in comparative medicine had inevitably led me to magic, as these disciplines were deeply intertwined everywhere and always up until a few hundred years ago in a small part of post-Enlightenment Europe - the same part that successfully colonised much of the globe. Herbs, incantations and devotions were administered together as a matter of course in medical interventions from ancient Egyptian papyri and Babylonian tablets right up to the present in many folk healing traditions today. Hypnosis looked to me like the perfect way to bring magic words back into the healing arts. So I retrained as a hypnotherapist.
My approach
Hypnosis quickly became my new obsession. I learned how to do rapid inductions and started hypnotising everyone who was up for it. At a festival one time I had a queue, so I did an experiment to see if I could drop two people in at the same time. It was easy, but then hypnosis is just a modern incarnation of trance induction and group trance work has presumably been used for as long as humans have been in groups.
I have done street hypnosis, getting people to stick to lamp posts or act as if they are Chinese comedians. I’d still recommend it to hypnotists honing their skills, and I might do it again if you buy me a drink, but you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing happening in our sessions. I’m not interested in demonstrating the power of hypnosis by helping you forget the number three - for me, the real magic goes on in the quiet of the mind in a container where people feel they can let go and explore, and garish theatrics don’t help people to relax. I do this in three formats - one-to-one sessions, group sessions and streaming inductions. You can read about the differences here.
Perhaps the greatest hypnotist of the modern era was Milton Erickson. Paralysed by polio at a young age, with his brilliant mind trapped in a frozen body, he developed two great powers: an appreciation of positive thinking, which he used to cure himself, and extraordinary powers of observation to perceive people’s motivations as expressed in their body language and other subtle elements of their communication.
He understood that people have within them everything they need to heal, and though his inductions form the basis of what later became neurolinguistic programming, unlike many NLP practitioners, he also brought an almost superhuman kindness to his practice.
Where his peers hypnotised clients by telling them what to imagine in a directive or authoritarian style, Erickson offered them an invitation to explore appropriate metaphors based on what he had observed in their non-verbal language. His form of trancework was generative; he would go into trance and take the client with him.
I work in the spirit of Milton Erickson, and have successfully treated various conditions using a conventional hypnotherapy format from sleep disruption, phobia and overeating to migraine, tinnitus, dermatitis and digestive issues. But I find it can be a bit cold and clinical, especially in the way it has become formalised since then. John Grinder and Richard Bandler tried to distil Erickson’s language model into the Neuro-Linguistic Programming system they co-founded, but Erickson wasn’t impressed by how they had oversimplified what he was doing.
I depart from Erikson in that while he felt that being extremely perceptive to non-verbal cues can seem almost like magic, I suspect that magic can seem like being extremely perceptive to non-verbal cues. I’ve seen enough weird and wonderful things in and out of sessions that I’m open to all kinds of influences being brought to bear on the process.
Pushing boundaries with care
I like to extend what is possible with the art form, and I approach it with radical transparency. For example, many people with a smattering of NLP training set embedded commands into their conversation to manipulate the people they are talking to, and advertising uses this technique all the time, as in “Don’t make this purchase until you’ve looked at all the options”. All hypnotists worth their salt use embedded commands, almost always with the best intentions and the benefit of their client in mind, but that presumes that they know what those best outcomes are in the first place. My own life furnishes me with enough experiences of self-sabotage to know that I sometimes don’t know what is best for myself, let alone for another person.
By way of illustration, someone described to me how their friend had stopped smoking with a single hypnotherapy session. It was a total success, so much so that when everyone went out for a cigarette, that person went outside with them and didn’t have a cigarette. He smashed up his father’s car instead. I asked if the father was strict and sure enough he was completely overbearing, and the son had struggled terribly to emerge from his shadow. The smoking was an act of sabotage and a declaration of independence, and since smoking was no longer available to him the next best thing was vandalism.
The embedded command is a means of ducking the radar of the conscious mind to communicate with the unconscious without setting off alarm bells and defence mechanisms, but given the complex dynamics unfolding and folding up again inside our heads, I prefer to be explicit. I know enough to know that often I don’t know enough, so I go carefully into the unconscious and make sure that all the various characters that live there are in the know. I’ve not met another hypnotist who explains what embedded commands and other hypnotic techniques are in the pre-talk before deploying them, but it works for me and maybe it will work for you. I believe that, on a fundamental level, my true will and yours are expressions of something unified that is deeper than both of us. For that reason, when we are true to ourselves we come into alliance, and we can even bring into harmony those parts of ourselves that are out of balance including the saboteur and the authoritarian being sabotaged.
I’m on a mission to democratise trance and unleash the powers of the mind unfettered, partly because it is healing on an individual level and partly because directed trance can subvert the collective power structures that keep us from achieving our potentials. To that end, I offer group workshops and affordable audio inductions that take listeners to various zones of the imaginal, and I teach hypnosis. I also offer private trance work both online and in person, and hypnotherapy (which is more conventional but still with my own twist).
If you want to dip your toe into the waters of trance, try the free 30-minute induction for those who subscribe to my mailing list. And yes, those hyperlinks are also embedded commands.
