Maybe you think of some film you’ve seen like, The Manchurian Candidate, where it is used to turn people into helpless slaves to the hypnotist’s suggestions.
- Queen of Diamonds from The Manchurian Candidate
Or maybe you’ve seen (also probably in a movie) some unfortunate person lured onto a stage and made to behave in silly or embarrassing ways for the entertainment of an audience?
If that’s the extent of your familiarity with hypnotism (it was mine) then you will no doubt find this interview with Cult of Tarot Member, dodalisque, a real eye-opener.
Dodalisque is a licensed hypnotherapist who has spent more time in hypnotic trances with clients than you could swing a pocket-watch on a chain at. (see his brief biography at the end of this interview)
What you will no doubt find really surprising are the many connections and parallels hypnotism and reading tarot share. And with all the emphasis on the conscious and unconscious, it has quite a lot to do with shadow work as well.
I’ll keep this intro short because his answers are so complete and wonderfully generous that we should get right to them. I want to thank dodalisque for agreeing to this Cult of Tarot Interview and for opening up this absolutely fascinating topic for us. And please feel free to post your questions for him at the end.
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To begin with, are there any parallels between hypnosis and tarot reading?
Your tarot card readers at Cult of Tarot may be surprised to learn that, in fact, they are already working as hypnotherapists. A reader typically faces a client across a desk - the mood is quiet and contemplative - both are focused completely on the issues of the client - both are so concentrated on the images on the cards that their surroundings recede into the background - all that can be heard is the voice of the reader. I could be describing a hypnotherapy session. Readers are always advised to phrase their insights in a way that leaves their client with a positive or inspiring message. If this isn't therapy then I don't know what is.
A typical hypnotherapy session looks something like this:
- 2 of pents
- 4 of swords
- ace of cups
The client decides to go to a hypnotherapist because his life is caught in a loop (2 of Coins); while lying on the hypnotherapist's couch his conscious mind is made quiet and still (4 of Swords); this allows the heart to open (Ace of Cups). If this sounds like meditation, it is. The sensation of entering hypnosis is more or less identical to meditation, minus the gently rhythmical voice of the hypnotist. The constant restless activity of the conscious mind is exhausting , so when that part of us is at rest we feel tremendously energised and a different sort of intelligence awakens.
Is hypnosis older than the tarot?
The gender metaphor that is so familiar to all of us who know the tarot is a very concise and beautiful poetic expression of the mechanism of human consciousness that makes hypnosis possible: "masculine" = conscious mind, "feminine" = unconscious mind. Many assume that this clinical distinction originated with the work of Jung and Freud, but the tarot is proof that the idea has been around in one form or another for centuries, even millennia. The vocabulary used to describe the relationship between the conscious and unconscious is all that has changed. The ancient Egyptians had their "sleep temples" and the ancient Greeks performed initiatory rites known as "mysteries." Even Christian church ritual is meant to encourage us to enter a trance state.
Jung's debt to the tarot is well documented, while Freud himself worked as a hypnotist for several years before deciding to abandon it and create what became known as "psychoanalysis." Freud was not particularly skilled as a hypnotist and did not enjoy its formal aspect, but he borrowed many hypnotic techniques and concepts to create his own system.
In a tarot reading we focus on the cards, but how does hypnosis work?
It works because our unconscious is constantly registering and recording vast quantities of information than we are not consciously aware of. This information determines our behaviour more powerfully than we realise. Our conscious mind, or ego, or human will, likes to think it is running the show, but this is not true. For example, we do not consciously regulate every heartbeat or tell our body how to generate new cells. These are unconscious processes. The body is as much a part of our unconscious as the heart and our higher spiritual centres. In fact the contribution of the conscious mind to our total being is quite puny and insignificant compared to that of the unconscious.
A hypnotist knows how to bypass the conscious mind and talk directly to the unconscious so as to deliberately implant specific information. This short clip showing the stage hypnotist Derren Brown, working with the English actor and comedian Simon Pegg, familiar from the Star Trek and Mission Impossible movie franchises, provides an example of what I mean. At the end of the clip Brown reveals how the trick was done.
We are being constantly bombarded by millions of sensations and the conscious mind is a kind of filter that reduces those sensations to a manageable level and organises them into familiar patterns. The conscious mind, which I always associate with the Emperor (IV) card, is our protector. We would drown in a torrent of phenomena without it. But the Emperor, especially as we get older, tends to do his job too well. The patterns of our life gradually become more manageable, more familiar, more fixed. We get "set in our ways." In hypnotherapy this is known as someone's "conscious set." At this point we need to find a way to trick our way past the Emperor if we are ever to make positive changes to our life.
The clip with Derren Brown seems to have very little to do with making positive changes to someone's life.
And that is why, as much as I enjoy and admire, even envy, the skills of someone like Derren Brown, officially I have to say that I disapprove of stage hypnotists. They propagate the notion that hypnosis is something to be feared, something that can be used to control and humiliate us against our will. Persuading the client's conscious mind to relax its iron grip on our consciousness is already difficult enough.
Exploiting hypnosis for the purposes of entertainment also trivialises something that has the power to do tremendous good and enrich our spiritual life. A knife can be used to stab someone or it can be used to cut up an orange and share it. Hypnosis is a remarkably versatile and valuable tool and it is up to us to decide how best to use it.
The dirty secret to stage hypnosis is that, for whatever reason, about 10% of the population are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion and can almost instantly go into very deep trance. The trick is to learn how to recognise and invite up on stage only people from the audience who belong to that 10%. Actors are usually among the most susceptible because they are already performers and like to play along. Their sense of self is more fluid than most of us. The trick to onstage mind-reading, and much of card magic, is that ideas have already been surreptitiously implanted into the unconscious of the subject for the mind-reader to "discover." This is what happens in the Derren Brown clip.
What is the difference between stage hypnosis and hypnotherapy?
A hypnotherapist of course does not have the choice of limiting his clients to the 10% who are highly suggestible. The great clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist Milton Erickson claimed that everyone is capable of being hypnotised, but I found that about 10% are extremely difficult to put into trance. Perhaps surprisingly these people tend to have a lower than average IQ. People at the low end of the scale have difficulty concentrating their attention for more than a few seconds. The rest of us, myself included, fit somewhere in the 80% range in the middle. Different personalities require different techniques to get them into trance. Some are born with a greater talent for trance than others. Clients used to be asked to fill out detailed questionnaires to help the hypnotherapist decide which techniques to use, but I found palmistry to be a more accurate and reliable indicator.
But learning to go into trance is a skill that can be learned by almost anyone and improves with practise. As clients get more familiar with trance and learn to better trust the hypnotist, they allow themselves to go deeper each time. After several sessions a client will often begin to go into trance almost as soon as they enter the office. They start to remember what it feels like. Talking someone down into trance is known as the hypnotic induction. These are most effective when they appear to be casual and spontaneous, so that the conscious mind lets down its guard. But the inductions are often carefully scripted and rehearsed by the hypnotherapist to perfect crucial subtle shifts in emphasis and intonation. The unconscious of the client is hyper-sensitive to these details even though their conscious mind is completely unaware that anything out of the ordinary is happening.
Many people take pride in the fact that they consider themselves too "strong-willed" to be hypnotised. But in those cases the small individual human will is fighting against the much stronger mechanisms that govern human consciousness. Simply commanding such clients to deliberately resist commands puts their conscious mind in an impossible double-bind. The only way to disobey a direct order from the hypnotist to become more awake and not to relax for a second is to go into trance. This is the origin of the term "reverse psychology." But there are hundreds of techniques for dissolving conscious and unconscious resistance to hypnosis. Resistant clients are like people who only agree to take swimming lessons on the condition that they are allowed to keep their arms and legs tied together. Reading tarot cards for someone who thinks the whole thing is nonsense can also be an uphill struggle.
So the conscious mind needs to be tricked into becoming quiet?
Anyone who has experimented with meditation, or performed any task that requires intense concentration, will attest to the fact that the conscious mind is full of distracting rubbish. That is one reason why the suit of Swords is the darkest suit in the tarot. More thoughts, less peace. As Sri Chinmoy says: "Consciousness is a table, and thoughts are the flies on the table."
Meditation proper cannot really begin until this restless chattering slows down or stops altogether. This is what in Zen practise is called "emptiness" or "nothingness", and with the help of a good hypnotist it is a lot easier to reach than you would expect. At this point the whole quality, or flavour, of our consciousness changes and we enter into what I am calling a deep "trance" state.
We are not absent. We are still participating in the experience. We remain highly alert inwardly, in fact more alert, not dopey at all. We can be in deep trance with our eyes open, which was how I was taught to meditate. Try it, just allow your eyes to go out of focus and turn your attention inward. The Hanged Man in some Tarot de Marseille decks, like the Dodal, has his eyes crossed and I often wonder if this is what is being referred to. Actually we are all already very familiar with trance states of different types, so this whole hypnosis thing is not as weird as people would have you believe.
A hypnotist is someone with experience of trance who can teach us quickly and easily how to enter deep trance states. It's like going to a piano teacher to get lessons to speed up our progress. There is no substitute for private meditation, just as there is no substitute for developing our own way of playing piano, or making art generally, but some initial guidance can save a lot of time.
What is the value of being in a trance state?
From the point of view of a student of meditation, it allows the heart and soul to come forward. From the point of view of a hypnotherapist, it means that the client becomes highly suggestible. When our conscious mind is quiet we absorb ideas like a sponge. Those ideas then become part of who we are at a deep unconscious level. Hypnosis works within the domain of feelings and convictions. The conscious mind will always argue with new ideas presented to it, but the unconscious is uncritically receptive.
That sounds as though it could be dangerous.
It is. And indeed that is why many are suspicious or fearful of hypnosis. But what people do not realise is that they have already been hypnotised many hundreds of thousands of times throughout their lives without their knowledge or consent. Parents, friends, schools, religions, the media, advertisers, politicians, and society at large have all been pumping us full of ideas about who we are, what we want, and what we are able to accomplish. Most of those ideas are downright harmful, or at best severely limiting. When we gain access to the unconscious we soon realise that our true capacities are infinitely greater. This is the real subject of the movie "The Matrix".
In trance we have the ability to re-write our conditioning, to modify habitual thought patterns and behaviours and to change who we are. The conscious mind, or ego, has a very limited appreciation of our true capacities, but considers itself to be the centre of our consciousness. However, our true identity, or soul, is infinitely larger and more beautiful than the ego.
Hypnotherapy is not something foisted on you without your knowledge, but is 100% a collaborative experience between the hypnotist and client that limits itself to achieving specific goals agreed on beforehand by both. In a sense, hypnotherapy is a means of de-hypnotising ourselves.
How do positive or negative thought patterns become embedded in our unconscious?
Mostly by repetition. This creates neural pathways through the brain, like paths through a forest that get more defined the more we use them. It is easier to follow old paths, no matter how bad they are, than to search for newer better ways through the forest. This is the source of "bad habits" that are difficult to break.
But this mechanism is also responsible for many of our greatest accomplishments. The unconscious might be thought of as the hard-drive of a computer, while the conscious mind is the computer screen. We store highly complex programs on the hard-drive that need to be opened one at a time because they are much too big to all be permanently available on the screen. Learning to walk as a child is a remarkably complex "program" that is learned gradually by painful trial and error. Eventually the learned skill gets stored in our unconscious, where it sits quietly until we need to walk somewhere. After opening the program we no longer need to consciously think about what we are doing. Walking, that extraordinary balancing act, seems to happen by itself.
Learning to read is another example. In adulthood we no longer need to consciously sound out every letter to form words and sentences. Our unconscious takes care of the whole thing at astonishing speed. Driving a car is another familiar example of self-hypnosis. After several weeks or months of conscious repetition the skill becomes automatic, so to speak, to the extent that we often forget how we arrived at our destination. In fact most of our life consists of downloading these programs from our unconscious and allowing them to operate without conscious interference.
In hypnotherapy the learning process is speeded up, but several sessions are sometime necessary to over-write old programs and establish new neural pathways. Complex behavioural issues may take many sessions to correct. There are no miracles involved. The greatest 20th century hypnotist Milton Erickson once said: "You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favourable climate in which to learn."
So, what exactly is hypnosis?
Many hypnotists believe that hypnosis is a "special state", a unique area of consciousness that we can visit. Others, myself included, prefer to think of all consciousness as a patchwork quilt of trance states of varying intensity. Balancing on a tightrope is a trance state, boredom is a trance state, watching a movie is a trance state, sex is a trance state. Sleep is arguably the deepest trance state. We take these experiences for granted because they are so familiar to us, but if you think about it, there is something wonderful about these shifts in the quality of our consciousness. An ordinary sex trance involves distortion of our time sense, heightened tactile sensitivity, and reduced awareness of our physical surroundings - all symptoms of the kind of trance states normally associated with hypnotism.
Essentially we enter a trance of one sort or another whenever we narrow our attention to concentrate on something. Pulling someone into the present moment by getting them fascinated in an object or image or bodily sensation is the quickest way to put someone in trance. This limits the distractions caused by the continual aimless chattering of the conscious mind, and allows the unconscious to come forward and play a bigger role in our total experience, as we saw above in the three RWS cards.
What distinguishes a hypnotic trance from ordinary everyday trances?
Depth. My explanation is going to be a gross simplification but should give a rough idea of how it works. The conscious mind is like the surface of the ocean but the unconscious is in the silence and depth below the surface. If you wired yourself up to a machine that measured brain waves, the way you spend most of your waking life - probably the way you are right now - would show a predominance of "beta" waves. These would appear on a graph as spiky peaks close together. A light trance, such as when you are daydreaming or deeply immersed in a novel or movie or crossword puzzle, would show a predominance of "alpha" waves, whose peaks would be smoother and more widely spaced. In hypnosis we generally work at the next level down, which is characterised by slow rhythmical "theta" waves. These are the brain wave patterns associated with states like meditation or the creation of art. The next level down is distinguished by "delta" waves, which are linked to very deep meditative states and with sleep.
Interestingly a human baby exhibits mostly "delta" waves before the age of about 2. So they are technically asleep even while they are crawling around and screaming and crying and doing whatever else babies do. This is a very open receptive state, highly conducive to learning. Consequently, many of the most valuable but also some of the most debilitating and tenacious unconscious programs are established during these early years. The very mood of the house in which we grow up is quietly hypnotising us into believing that this is how life as a whole is, and this sets limits on much of what follows.
Even more alarming is the fact that teenagers show a predominance of "alpha" waves until they are around 16 or 17 or even later. "Beta" waves are associated with rational adult consciousness, so it's actually pointless to expect teenagers to be reasonable - their "alpha" wave brain chemistry forbids it. It also means that teenagers are permanently in a receptive suggestible state, so all those cliches about being at an "impressionable age" are literally true. No wonder we are nervous about the friends our children make at this time, and that terrible experiences such as sexual abuse should generate such devastating long term damage. Altering such early negative conditioning can take years of therapy.
How would hypnotherapy approach such issues?
I personally have no medical training or any knowledge of clinical psychology, so I never felt confident in meddling in such matters. When they came up in a session I would always refer my clients to experienced professionals.
As a novice hypnotherapist, nearly half of my clients needed help to quit smoking or lose weight, but I also worked with those suffering from depression or insomnia or learning to tolerate chronic pain. I also helped people to overcome their fear of the dentist's chair, a chess player to improve his game, a javelin thrower to transcend his personal best, and a writer to overcome writer's block. Countless surgeries have been carried out on hypnotised patients when general anesthesia using drugs is not available or advisable. Their eyes may even be open watching the surgery, but they have been prepared to disassociate themselves from localised physical sensation or to imagine the pain is outside themselves, even located in a chair across the room.
Can you tell us about some other hypnotic techniques?
We use visualisation a lot when the client is in trance because, strange as it may seem, the unconscious does not make a solid distinction between fact and fiction - between what we know to be true and what we imagine to be true. The javelin thrower repeatedly imagines his throw going past the marker showing his personal best and this convinces his body, which is part of the unconscious, that it is already capable of achieving that feat. Sports psychologists use hypnotic techniques to improve confidence and performance.
Hypnotherapy frequently exploits the mind/body connection. The placebo effect in medicine is proof that such a thing exists. When the patient fully expects to get well, he will get well. How else do we explain the way a mother's loving embrace will stop a child from feeling pain? Our conscious mind tells us that this should be impossible, but in hypnosis the conscious mind is "put to sleep" so we are not limited by its conditioned expectations of what is possible.
What is the relationship between hypnosis and dreams?
The unconscious cannot express itself in words, but communicates with our conscious mind, often in dreams, using the language of images. I suppose in a tarot reading the cards ARE the dream. When we interpret the images in a way that accurately expresses the message being sent to us from the unconscious, we feel a sort of tingle of recognition. If we fail to recognise and respond to the promptings of dreams, eventually the unconscious is forced to communicate with us in the language of events, such as illnesses or accidents or falling in love.
During a hypnosis session the unconscious is often allowed to take the lead so that we are "dreaming awake", receiving messages in exactly the same way as when we are asleep and dreaming, watching scenarios unfold in vivid detail, complete with textures and smells, seemingly of their own accord. The unconscious is our friend and wants our whole being to prosper.
Words are the domain of the conscious mind, but words are an extremely limited and clumsy means of communication. Just think how impossible it would be to try to describe the taste of a strawberry to someone who had never eaten one. Feelings and emotions can be labelled too but their "taste" is elusive and at root not communicable in words. At best they trigger memories of past feelings. Plato called this "anamnesis", which contains our word "amnesia", and so translates literally as something like "non-forgetting" or "stopping forgetting." Achieving God-realisation, or "self actualisation" as Jung calls it, the union of the male and female aspects of consciousness, the experience featured on the World (XXI) card, is the ultimate act of anamnesis.
What else can hypnosis do?
Hypnosis has countless applications. I always thought it would be fun to train to work with the police to help witnesses recall details of a crime, such as the license plate number of the getaway vehicle. I have even heard of a subject in deep trance imagining himself rubbing the mud off an obscured license plate to read the number! He had been face down on the floor of the bank during the robbery! This could be apocryphal, but I have certainly witnessed some very strange things while working with hypnosis.
The unconscious seems to remember EVERYTHING that ever happened to us in astonishing detail. In deep trance it is relatively easy to take a client back to any moment in their life so that they may re-experience it. Much experimentation has been done with past life regressions, but it was not one of my specialisations.
Can you tell us any trade secrets about how to put someone into hypnosis?
They are not very secret. There are hundreds of books on the topic. But the best hypnotists are artists rather than technicians. Even if I tell you how to do it, to be effective requires talent and practise. Milton Erickson maintained that, "All you need to hypnotise someone is confidence in your own voice".
The most common technique is to hide therapeutic suggestions in repeated key words and phrases that make up the sentences you say to a client in trance. Derren Brown is brilliant at this. You may appear to the client to be relating a joke or an anecdote that has no apparent connection to the client's problems, but this is a trick to slip undetected past the protective wall of the conscious mind. The whole trick of hypnosis is to talk to the unconscious without awakening the suspicions of the conscious mind.
It may surprise you to learn that the unconscious hears sentences as a kind of "word salad", absorbing words and phrases as individual entities separate from the syntactical context in which they appear. For example, when I say something like, "I don't want you to go into hypnosis", if I make an infinitesimal shift of emphasis to the second half of the sentence, the unconscious will hear this as a direct command to "Go into hypnosis."
Shock is a common strategy used for triggering instantaneous trances. When something happens that the conscious mind cannot make sense of it becomes momentarily paralysed and silent, handing responsibility for survival over to instinct. This allows the open unconscious to come to the fore. At such moments the client is highly suggestible. A skilled hypnotist is able to step in at this exact moment and take control, quickly reinforcing and deepening the trance.
If you look at the beginning of the Derren Brown clip you will see the way he takes Simon Pegg's hand and turns it over on the table. This instantly establishes who is running the show but is also something that you would not ever expect a stranger to do at first meeting. Brown is inducing a momentary state of shock. The touching of Pegg's arm or shoulder at odd moments throughout the session may be emphasising certain important words, or it may simply be a way of deepening Pegg's sense of helplessness and convincing him that Brown is exercising a sophisticated form of control. It has been said that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis.
Confusion, paradox, illogical connections, non-sequiturs, grammatically incorrect sentences - these are some of the items in the hypnotist's toolbox, all designed to create an environment in which the conscious mind feels at a loss. Boring the conscious mind into inattention is another method. Conversely, making the conscious mind too busy, overloading it with tasks, such as holding 5 or 6 thoughts simultaneously, is a way of tiring the conscious mind so that it craves relaxation and surrenders its iron grip on our consciousness.
What about the "swinging watch" and "Look into my eyes"?
The swinging watch is a cliche but is still a wonderful way of hypnotising someone. Getting them to follow your fingertip or stare up at a stain on the ceiling works just as well. You are tiring the eyes of the client so that when the hypnotist says, "You are getting sleepy", the client thinks, "Jesus, this guy can read my mind" and so feels simultaneously outmatched and nurtured, like a child with a parent, and consequently more willing to accept suggestions.
"Look into my eyes" is another cliche of hypnosis that works wonderfully well. Unbroken eye contact is physically and psychologically tiring. But apart from that, one of the best ways of putting someone into trance is to be in trance oneself. Musicians understand this. In public hypnotherapists nowadays are reluctant to talk about such things because the profession has struggled long and hard to win the approval of the scientific and medical community, to make hypnosis respectable and take it out of the circus tent. But in private every hypnotherapist I have talked to admits to feeling a sort of telepathic link with their client in trance.
Subtly repeating key words and phrases, weaving them skillfully into an ordinary-seeming sentences can establish "neural pathways" in the brain with remarkable speed and effectiveness. "Post hypnotic" suggestions can be implanted that will be triggered at a much later date by linking them to something like squeezing one's thumb and forefinger together. This kind of thing can be used to overcome, say, a temporary craving for a cigarette long after the hypnosis session is completed.
You talked earlier about ways in which hypnosis can be abused. Does this have political implications?
You bet. Political slogans and propaganda work in exactly the same way as a hypnotist's repeated words and phrases. People gathered together in a group, especially those who are of a like mind and who are only at the rally because they already trust and admire the man on the stage, will unconsciously reinforce each other's trance. Advertising works in the same way. When we are relaxed in front of a TV we are already in a light trance and so quite vulnerable to suggestion. If this was not the case advertisers would not spends millions on ads. A single ad would not have any effect but when we have seen and heard the same thing 50 times we find ourselves reaching for that product on the supermarket shelf without quite knowing why. Ads make connections in our unconscious linking the product - corn plasters, say - to happy emotions like youth, sex, ease and wealth.
I talked earlier about the hypnotist's use of shock. The left-wing political commentator Naomi Kline has written a brilliant book, The Shock Doctrine in which she catalogues examples from the last 40 years, the era of Globalisation, showing the way massive economic reforms advantageous to corporate power, but which are generally disastrous for the bulk of the population, are foisted on countries at the very moment they are suffering from the collective shock of war or natural disaster. Massive development projects that take place all at once rather than being carefully planned and spaced out sensibly over time create the same sense of overwhelming shock and passive helplessness in a community.
Some students of Milton Erickson studied the way he hypnotised clients and formalised his mannerisms into a complete system known as NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). The techniques can be effective even when they are learned and applied mechanically by idiots. I should imagine every trainee advertising executive takes courses in NLP. Milton Erickson would have hated it, but I suppose Einstein wasn't too happy either about his Theory of Relativity being used to make atomic bombs.
Do you have any final comments?
I would like to return to the subject of tarot for a moment. One technique for taking someone down into trance is known as the "yes-response". The hypnotist will make a series of random banal irrefutable observations or vapid truisms - about the weather, the colour of the shirt you are wearing, or about how "life can be hard sometimes", and such like. This sets up a "momentum of agreement", so that when the next statement is more debatable or contains a therapeutic suggestion rather than another banal fact, the client will tend to accept it uncritically. I see many TV ads using this technique nowadays - a list of such disconnected statements followed by the suggestion to "Drink Coke".
Pointing at visual details on the cards seems to me identical to the hypnotist's trick of making "banal irrefutable observations". In this way, while our client is in the mild trance induced by a reading, the reader's interpretations of the images on the cards can carry the same force as verbal therapeutic suggestions made during a hypnosis session. In fact, the cards are a more subtle and effective means of changing someone's habitual ways of thinking than a lecture. No one likes taking direct advice and will resist it, inwardly or outwardly arguing its merits, but an image is irrefutable.
Hypnosis would be a wonderful to learn in high school to improve learning skills and to promote mental and physical health, but I feel even these benefits may limit our appreciation of its true potential. Personally if I ever got back into hypnosis again I would use it primarily to teach people meditation and self-hypnosis to put them in better contact with their unconscious to enable them to enrich their spiritual life. I wish I had discovered it sooner.
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Biography
Dodalisque is 65, a Scorpio, married with 2 daughters, having emigrated to Canada from England when he was 22. He studied meditation with the Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy between 1983 - 2001, but is quick to add that he was his master's worst disciple in the world. A disgrace, really. Even though Sri Chinmoy died in 2007, he still considers himself a devoted follower, but life gradually redirected his spiritual energies toward the possibly less austere disciplines of tarot, palmistry, reiki, and hypnosis. He studied hypnotherapy with a qualified practitioner for two years, which included many hundreds of hours of practical experience of being in hypnotic trance and of hypnotising others. After passing his professional exams he became a member of the IMDHA (International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association), and is entitled to put the letters C.Ht. (Certified Hypnotherapist) after his name. He worked as a full-time hypnotherapist for just 3 years (2006-09), and cites poor financial management and a lifetime habit of laziness as contributing factors to his decision to retire and take up a candy-ass job as a clerk in an antiquarian bookstore.
Recommended reading:
Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: the story of hypnosis - the best general introduction to the history and development of hypnosis.
Sidney Rosen (ed.), My Voice Will Go with You: the teaching tales of Milton H. Erickson - a charming introduction to the great genius of 20th century hypnosis.
William O'Hanlon and Michael Martin, Solution-Oriented Hypnosis: an Ericksonian approach - in book form this is a series of transcriptions of recorded workshops providing straightforward advice to novices about how to hypnotise people and what to do with them when they are in hypnosis.
David L. Calof, The Couple Who Became Each Other: stories of healing and transformation from a leading hypnotherapist - remarkable case histories that illustrate some of the more startling applications of hypnosis. Gives an inkling of the unfathomable potential of human consciousness.
