The Transparent Hypnotist

 
Photography by net_efekt

There are are no walls covered with yellow, flowered wallpaper in my childhood home. However there was the children’s bath that featured blue walls with a contemporary (1970s) plaid, scary by today’s decorating standards. Interspersed in the plaid were patches of lavender paint, as though someone had a Jackson Pollack afterthought. I never thought much about the wallpaper. It was something that just ‘was.’ But then I remember reading some Victorian Horror story about a woman who went mad when she was locked in a room with yellow, flowered wallpaper. Only, when I was really young and I was once, I did not understand the idea of madness. I did not know this was a story about the ebbing sanity of a person. All I knew was that people were stuck in the wallpaper and wanted out. This horrified me. The plastic-like way they pushed out from between worlds, reaching, struggling and grasping for anything living.

And sure enough, that childhood bath took on a new and terrifying aspect. What if the people in the yellow wallpaper traveled to my blue wallpaper and wanted out while I was washing up? Would that splotch that looked like an eye materialize into one, becoming three-dimensional as a face pushed through?

As the years passed, I eventually forgot about the people in the wallpaper (though I admit when I get terribly bored, I tend to look for shapes and human features in wallpaper, cracks and such). Since beginning work with people’s phobias and fears (and discussing circle therapy yesterday), The Yellow Wallpaper popped back into my mind.

It was like synchronicity when it suddenly appeared in the proverbial shelves of the DailyLit, a site that sends you book installments in your email. So, I have now added one more thing to read (I am calling it a coffee break) to my list and am slowly making my way through it. Yes, I am reading The Yellow Wallpaper (it is free) and will have it done in eight days (eight installments). I am fairly sure this is the story I read that profoundly scared me as a child, but now being older and wiser (or just older - LOL), it should be interesting to see the main characters descent into madness from a professional point of view.

Care to join me in reading it?

This morning I awake to find that my mind is fairly quiet (or maybe just a bit like thick sludge) and I do not seem to have much to say. I have been doing a lot of reading lately such as The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, which everyday there is a passage that seems to have something that pertains to me and how I feel, and perhaps today, this is why I am quiet.

You may be wondering what a hypnotist is doing reading a such a book, but it is not a terribly curious thing. I have been around hypnotist who brag about their library and that they are reading this hypnosis book or that, but I have come to appreciate that there is more out than just books about hypnosis. We need a deeper perspective and knowledge base if we are truly going to help others. Meditation and evolution are a large part of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, as is finding a way to ease our own human suffering through consciousness. Sounds like what some of us do in our practices.

So, for those of you hypnotist who have rolled your eyes at this, for shame! For those who are shaking your head positively, good for you!

And since I have not asked this in a while, what books are you reading (hypnosis or otherwise)?

I am off to a late start so this will have to be a quick, throw down the Espresso conversation. I did not want you to think I had forgotten you.

Here’s a thought for meditation: According to Jack Kornfield in A Path with a Heart, we should look at our difficulties as challenges that lead to positive transformation, if we go about the challenges correctly. If we use what bothers us, little or big, learn from it and embrace it as a life lesson, we move forward in our evolution (this is paraphrased from chapter 6). all our little road blocks are really pitt-stops for refueling.

It is a very timely read with all the Internet page rank issues abounding for those of us who are paid bloggers.

Trying to stay positive.

Today’s wandering pondering is ongoing from yesterday’s conversation with Michael about subliminals. You cannot but help love all this stuff we learn about the mind and consciousness. One year, one thing is true. The next it is not. Then three years later it is true again. Perhaps this is why I did not do well in science classes when I was younger. There is too much that we do not know. There seems like there is little truth and a whole lot of hypothesis (I did better when we were allowed to do our own hypothesis). And that becomes a question of - is there ever truth? For one second it could seem so, but then reality shifts and bam, what was true is no longer.

Yes, I have been reading metaphysics again, well maybe not metaphysics, but about metaphysical concepts. I just finished Carlos Constanza’s Road to Ixland. And I am now beginning The Tibetan Book of the Death and Dying. How odd to find that you might be Buddhist if…But I digress.

Well, as I took my first sip of morning tea, a thought struck me about subliminals (okay tapped me, it is to early for a knock-down-drag-em-out mental conversation). The first ideas about them seemed to indicate a positive consumer response to visuals. Is it possible that indeed the old “put an image in the ice cube” type really did work well. Perhaps in those few years since then, our minds have adapted, subtly evolved? Perhaps we evolved enough for it to no longer be so effective. Now we are left with heftier tricks of subtle manipulation like the flashing of the image of a pretty girl and a one word command.

Just a thought.

So, were you with me? Did we connect?

After awaking, throwing on my Yoga pants and a t-shirt, sitting in the dampness of the new morning, I spent the first thoughts of the day in meditation, working on firing the grid. The morning was so quiet,except for the crickets and some deer in the field beyond the house. The solitude was as ever, very nice, just me and the morning…and maybe thousands of other people. I began to wonder who else was sitting in contemplation of healing the earth at the same moment. Such thoughts often filtered through and for a moment, I actually felt the connectedness, not just to the wood on the porch under me, but to all those who were doing the same thing. There was a slight sensation of euphoria with this thought, a lifting of the burdens, a breath of hope in what feels like an inevitable course of time.

And so, this turned into the theme of today’s post - the invisible processes of the group dynamic. Not really knowing what I would write about, the cup of tea and me have made it to this point.

The idea of groups intrigues me and I wonder about its potential. If you are a “Universal Consciousness” believer, it seems like group hypnosis could be very powerful with under currents running the gamut from intuitive support to helping with feelings canceling out loneliness. I wonder about the whole vibration or frequency concept with groups. I know little about the psychics involved with vibration or frequency, but it seems like they could be elevated by a group of simpatico souls (Yes, I have also just read The Tenth Insight and yes, I read the whole thing but did not enjoy it nearly as much as The Celestine Prophecy).

Before this morning, I might not have actually been aware of the potential of group hypnosis, perhaps did not understand it at all. I know it is not a new concept, it is just something that has been enigma to me. I think I will let this rest for now and come back to it tomorrow.

Hope your day is peaceful.

It is time for another book discussion since I just finished reading Edith Fiore’s The Unquiet Dead: A Psychologist Treats Spiritual Possession. Are you grimacing again with Ellie’s interest with the uncanny? Hopefully not.

A fellow hypnotist told me she was reading this and it sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a go. The premise is that a lot of our problems are caused by spirit possession. This sort of possession is not like demonic possession, apparently. Most people do not know that they are possessed and according to Fiore, feel much better after a simple hypnotic process. I have personally never worked with anything like this, nor have I been asked to do so, and I am not sure how I really feel about the idea. The positive thing is that the author does not hammer in a necessary belief in spirit co-habitation to be successful.

Anyway I really enjoyed it. Have any of you read it?

And by the by, what you currently reading?

Oh, also I suspect you may be a fan of AlibrisBooksellers (Over 60 million used, new, and out-of-print books!). I am pretty addicted to them as my book source, so if you have not tried them for your reading needs (and perhaps Edith Fiore’s book), you should! I have had great luck finding hard to find books there and even out of print publications. Here’s a fun trick, though. If you go to couponchief.com, they offer promo codes for various discounts and savings, including Alibris.com coupons. Click here for the deals at Alibris. For instance, at the moment, they have a $3 off $30 deal (before July 22). Pretty nice. And every hypnotist I know is a book junky, so enjoy. And the same site has other decent deals for many online stores, so check those out as well.

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