The Open WIndow


I hypnotized my first wife after reading a paperback book about how to do it. To say that I was surprised when I realized I had done it is putting it mildly. There she was, in a trance, and I had no idea what to do. "Open the window," I suggested. She went over and opened the window. "Freezing air is coming in," I said, and she pulled away, visibly chilled. She even had goose bumps. It was a hundred degrees outside. I felt like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

That first experiment with hypnosis came when I was 21, and just home from a deployment in Japan. I had married the woman I was living with before I left, suggesting that we do that so she'd get an allotment while I was gone. It wasn't a very good reason to get married, in retrospect, and it didn't last long when I returned. One of the reasons might have been her "waking up" and asking why she was up, sitting in a chair, instead of being in bed. I had hypnotized her from sleep, one of the methods discussed in the book. I delightedly told her what I had done. She wasn't nearly as amused as I was.

While she was under hypnosis I learned one important thing. I asked her what she was afraid of and she told me about an incident which, she believed, had happened to her when she was a child. But as I listened I realized that it was not grounded in reality, and determined it was a dream. I deduced that people can, and do, sometimes confuse dreams and reality. Later on, when I began my first formal study of hypnosis, the first thing I was taught was that one's past is, always, a fiction.

After that first session I put hypnosis out of my mind until several years later, when I got some Postural Integration work. That's like Rolfing; it entails deep facial work. The practitioner used hypnosis to make what is ordinarily painful not so painful. He taught me how to put myself into trance. He had mentored with a hypnotist named Pierre Clement, He, in turn, was mentored by a French Canadian faith healer whose only english was, "I can do this for you."

My friend was an excellent hypnotist. He was half Dutch and half Aztec, he said Actually he still is, last time I saw him, which was about a month ago. But back then we were a lot younger. He had long black hair and drove around on a BMW motorcycle at high speeds and under the influence of hallucinogens. He came back from Vietnam with some attitude adjustment problems. That was why he had been seeing Pierre, and attending his school.

It would be hard for somebody learning bodywork and hypnosis today to understand how wide open the field was in the late seventies and early eighties in Northern California. There was an explosion of knowledge as the Asian culture and European culture and several other cultures all combined in San Francisco in what was a true melting pot. It was unregulated by the government, as nobody could define what hypnosis was, or what bodywork was. You had Ida Rolf moving the fascia to restructure bodies, you had Milton Traeger -- an acrobat and boxer -- who found he had this intuitive ability to heal with rocking, shaking, touching, and other forms of movement.

This list is a long one, and kept getting longer as people who came into the field of body work realized their fortune could be made by getting their name attached to a type of work, and making other people pay them for instruction. Polarity Therapy was an amazing thing as practiced by Randolph Stone, but there were a lot of people who studied it and practiced it who were only effective with clients who were extremely suggestible. The person I studied it with was a nice guy, but I wouldn't have paid him for a session. That was equally true of other therapies I studied, such as SHEN, and a few I have mercifully forgotten. I would put the certificates away and eventually lose them, so I don't even have a record of how many types of work I studied in the eighties. But I was always learning something new.

In the field of hypnosis, Milton Erickson had transformed everything. (Check him out.) But there were schools around that were teaching more or less rote methods of contacting the inner child, finding lost objects, controlling habits, etc. Mostly the emphasis was on method, because there was precious little knowledge of psychology among the dedicated hypnotists. A couple of people I studied with, to get certifications -- you have to go to a certified school -- were nut cases. Luckily I had encountered a very good teacher, a psychologist from Santa Cruz, before I hit the woo woos. I knew that I had to be there to get the paper but that they should be medicated and given some water colors. What I did learn from them was that I didn't want to practice hypnosis separate from body work unless I had a very good grasp of the unconscious process, and knew what I was doing.

Much hypnosis is not called hypnosis, because the people practicing it don't realize that they are working with suggestion. There were a hundred different ways to practice, from primal scream to talking to an empty chair containing an imaginary parent to dancing in masks in various and sundry rituals. There was rebirthing, automatic writing --- well, suffice it to say that there were a host of therapeutic practices, as there still are today. I once worked with a MFCC licensed therapist who was making a fortune off addicts, mostly alcoholics. The first thing she gave me to read, to introduce me to "the work," was a copy of a book about some alien beings who are trying to help us earthlings evolve (I mercifully forgot the title), and a copy of "The Celestine Prophecy," which remains one of the worst novels I ever read. Like the current, "The Secret," it proves the astuteness of H.L. Mencken's observation: "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public."

I digress. Suffice it to say there's a lot of therapists teaching Clever Hans how to do arithmetic.

My friend lived in a flat in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco, with his girlfriend, a couple of dogs, and several birds. One of the birds was an African Gray parrot with a fondness for calling the dogs and then swearing at them. He also liked books. He didn't read them, he ate them. He had gotten through the introduction and contents of "Hypnosis for Therapists," by Pierre Clement, which was not in published form, but typewritten in a soft binder.

The reason I don't name my friend is he lives in the underground economy. I'll call him Dutch. He always talks about getting his bona fides, but when it comes down to it, he can't stand the idea that he has to pay a bunch of money to people who don't know a fraction of what he knows to be legitimized. When I went to a massage school I studied Swedish and Shiatsu, and. in retrospect, the guy who taught Shaitsu was not very bright or very talented. The Swedish teacher was a very good spa masseur, but no more than that. Neither one of them was even in the same league as Dutch.

Another major mentor was the late Dub Leigh. If I couldn't fix somebody I'd have them make an appointment with Dub, and he'd let me watch him work, showing me what he was doing for that particular problem. I also did seminar work with him at Easlen Institute.

Learning to give a massage is just a first step in becoming a body worker. It serves the beginner in the same way as having a script helps a telephone solicitor. If you know a routine you don't get lost. But if you don't get beyond the routine you think the scaffolding is the building. I used to try getting a spa massage sometimes, when I was in pain. I'd say, "I need you to concentrate on the multifidus and levator muscles and the trapezius, points ..." but no matter how specific I was about what I needed, usually the massage person would go through the one hour session like she or he always did, and I left with the same pain I came in with.

Dutch didn't do anything routine. He was a strongman from a long line of strongmen, and he could pick up a muscle and take then tension out of it with no problem. He taught me that most bodywork is also hypnosis, and that you can induce trance non-verbally, through calculated movement. I began to understand that this was what made practitioners like Traeger and Stone healers, and why you can't teach this to somebody whose body doesn't already know it. It's not intellectual knowledge; it's something the hands know.

This came home to me in a dream I had. I was in Washington Square, in North Beach. I was in three aspects. I was observing myself as a Native American who radiated energy and, I must say, charm. He was laughing at another aspect of me, who was talking to some people, and who sounded self-important. The Indian, very amused, said, "He knows how to teach it, but I know how to do it." I realized that the part of me doing the talking could never use his hands the way the Indian could. On the other hand, that's not his job. He is the intellectual aspect, who knows about things.

When my interest in the subject of bodywork and hypnosis first coalesced, I went to the library and began to read, starting with Janet and Charcot. I read about obscure faith healers, and, of course, Anton Mesmer. When I read about Mesmer I became, well -- mesmerized -- that he was labeled a charlatan by a group of examiners which included Benjamin Franklin, because he dared to suggest it was him who was healing people, and not, as he had originally postulated, magnetism.

What fascinated me was that he was trying to be objective, but objectivity went against the tide of thought in his time (which coincided with the beginnings of America), which was the concept of all men being created equal. So long as he believed that it was magnetism doing the healing, he was cool. But when he realized he didn't need the magnets, that it was he, himself, doing the healing, he got into trouble. There was no tolerance for one person being specially gifted over others in taking away pain. It was, surely, a matter of knowing a procedure, and could be duplicated by others. This didn't fit with the predominant cultural consciousness in Europe and America at the time.

But the more I read and the more I studied, the more convinced I became that hypnosis, or body work, depends a lot on the access the individual practitioner has to the collective unconscious. As the old French Canadian said, "I can do this for you." It was his only english because it was all he needed. He could move into the collective unconscious, which was the same in him as it was in the other person, and he could "handle intent." This isn't something that can be easily taught, and perhaps it can't be taught at all. More likely it is like musical intelligence, and is discovered and encouraged rather than born of instruction.

But back to the bird who chewed books ....

Dutch held the ragged manuscript up and cursed the bird, saying this was a book Pierre gave him before he died and now it was all mangled. I took a look at it and realized that the parrot had only made it to the first page of the first chapter. "Let me take that home and redo it for you," I said. "All I have to do is rebuild the table of contents and title page."

It was the first book I learned through a method which I subsequently used with several other books on hypnosis and healing. I would not just read the book, but would rewrite it in my own words as I read it, so that I was forced to concentrate at an extraordinary level, and "learn" the book. By the time I was done with it I knew all the inductions and all the information about them. That was my first education in how to do hypnosis. But my real education was to come later, when I had my first experience of moving into a different reality.

(next: The Rabbit Hole)

Posted: Thu - March 29, 2007 at 03:18 PM