Experiences with Hypnosis

[Writing Teacher]

I have seen some crazy and unbeleivable things including someone under hypnosis speak a foreign dialect over a thousand years old, and another who couldn’t play chop sticks awake play a beautiful Strauss waltz when his sub-conscious was alert.

Has anyone else here had any experiences with hypnosis or wittnessed anything?

[Solya]

I have been put under hypnosis quite a few times, but most of the things I said and experienced were from past lives of mine. :) It was pretty intense and scary sometimes, especially around the time when I relived my death, but I really enjoyed the experience at the same time. Nothing remotely amazing on this end, but it did make me feel a lot better.

[brymble]

I am a Master Practioner of NLP, which is related to Eriksonian hypnosis. I trained under Phil Farber, best known in the magickal community as the author of FutureRitual, and in other circles as an expert on hypnosis. Phil is the creator of a system called Meta-Magick, which combines NLP and ritual magick, the book due out from Weiser in a few weeks. I'm seeking more training and certification in more traditional hypnosis, but haven't picked a training program yet.

Phil is a real trip. So it's not really necessary to be hypnotized to have strange experiences around him. In fact, I will go so far as to suggest that being around Phil IS a strange experience in itself. (In a good way.) But I digress.

I had some pretty interesting experiences in during training. During the first seminar, we learned how to do sliding anchors, which sort of programs a spectrum of experience that you can access and control any time you need it. I have a learning disability that affects my ability to separate and understand sounds. Two voices in a room will throw me into utter confusion, and small sounds will usually blend together and get lost. Phil was inspired by my challenges understanding sound, and my description of the listening meditation I use to cope when sound becomes overwhelming and unbearable, and modified one of the training exercises to create a sliding anchor for the ability to notice and concentrate on sound. There were a couple of crickets chirping in the room, and when we tested it, I was not only able to hear the crickets, I could distinguish one cricket from the other, even with people talking in the room. I'd never experienced anything like it before. I have to admit I was really distracted for the rest of the day, and missed a lot of the training, because that cricket was the sweetest sound I ever heard. I'm not "cured", I still have to rely on lip-reading much of the time when people are talking to me, but the anchor still works, and I use it when I'm on the phone and can't use the lip-reading, or when I'm listening to music, which is a real joy for me. Phil was just playing around with a neat idea, I don't think he knows what a gift he gave me with that little experiment.

But probably the most far-out experience happened during master prac. During the first seminar, I had chosen learning the banjo as a goal for the purpose of one of the exercises, and had joked with Phil that if I ended up spending hundreds of dollars on a banjo instead of going to master prac, it'd be his fault. He joked back that when I came to master prac, I would be expected to play the banjo. It was just a joke, so we both put it out of our minds. Although between practioner training and master prac, I did shop for banjos (not buy one) and I did buy some books and look up some picking patterns online.

I suffer from migraines, and I had a particularly nasty one during master prac, that seemed to flare up everytime it was my turn to sit in the "client chair" for a practice exercise. Either Phil or his wife, DJ, also noticed that I was doing this weird, nervous finger-tapping thing that I'd never done before. One day after lunch the headache was just unbearable, and so Phil decided to change the lesson plan for the day and do pain relief. The first thing he did was relate the pain to the nervous finger-tapping. It was kind of clear there was something bothering me. Phil's a writer of course, and was interested in seeing what I was "typing". He had me slow the tapping down, and the pain lessened. A little slower, and I suddenly realized it was the Earl Skruggs roll, the only roll I actually learned. There I was, at master prac, and I was "playing the banjo", just as expected! The pain went away, and we all had a good laugh over that one.

Aside from training, have I ever actually been hypnotized? Well, no, but there's kind of a joke about that too. I'd met Phil at Starwood, and as soon as he told me he was from Kingston I started gushing about how I missed the area. My new friend, unbeknownst to me at that time a master of hypnosis, then suggested I consider looking into a little town called Rosendale. I got home and checked out Rosendale's webpage, for the hell of it, and saw "The Festival Town", and thought, damn you, Phil! (I was a festival vendor before my inventory was lost in the fire.) Sure enough I ended up staying there during practioner training, and before master prac started, I was shopping for apartments in the Kingston/New Paltz area. Phil still insisted he thought Rosendale was the perfect place for me, and wouldn't you know it, that's where my apartment materialized. Did he hypnotize me into moving to Rosendale? No, he didn't have to, because Rosendale "hypnotized" me itself. That wasn't hypnosis, he was just right about it. Rosendale is the perfect fit for me, and my kids. Seriously, it's like Mayberry, only full of hippies. There's amazing community here, and the kids and I love it here so much. We were overwhelmed with community kindness and support after the fire, we're really blessed. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, not because of hypnosis, but because my neighbors are feckin' awesome! Of course, I'm still going to snicker about being hypnotized into moving to Rosendale!

Phil might soon be helping me with some birth issues with NLP and hypnosis. I may or may not post the results of that, it's bound to be interesting.

BTW, it just occurred to me that one of the other goals I picked for a training exercise had to do with the blocks I had to writing and speaking about some various projects, including creating the alternative drug education resource for parents. I've posted elsewhere about how I'll be speaking at Starwood this year, and yes, one of the workshop proposals I submitted was an open disucssion group for parents as the first step to creating such a resource.