Cluck, cluck. I’m a chicken.
I got hypnotized today. At least, I think I did. I met my hypnotherapist this morning and we started with another nice long chat about my fears and goals for the process. My biggest worry, I told her, was that she’d be doing her thing and I’d be sitting there thinking, “It’s not working; it’s not working.” And she was like, “Oh, you may well be. But that’s cool. It’ll still work.” So that was nice to know. After our chat, I leaned back in my leather easy chair, closed my eyes, and kicked up the leg rest. She dimmed the lights and basically started going through our usual end-of-yoga-class routine – “Relax your feet, relax your legs, relax your arms, etc.” Then she counted backwards from ten and with each number I was supposed to somehow “go deeper” and relax further. I felt pretty damn relaxed, but to be honest I didn’t feel like I was in any sort of trance state. I felt like I could open my eyes and sit up at any moment… but I didn’t want to. She’d mentioned before that she was going to try to “talk to” my subconscious, but didn’t realize that meant she was going to address it directly. I remember her thanking it for helping me with my successes, but that it was being overprotective now and needed to channel its efforts into helping me. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot beyond that. It’s weird; at the time I remember thinking that I was still totally “awake” and noting everything so I could blog it later… but now there are only bits and pieces. Every now and then she’d stop and do the counting down from ten thing again, and I’d again puzzle over how to “go deeper”… and then on the third time, as we got down to one, suddenly I really did go deeper. It was like I could feel my head go “click,” like when you suddenly realize how to see those Magic Eye pictures and then you can do it at will. I was still totally conscious; I was like, “Wow, so THIS is the place I’m supposed to be in!” It was like I’d finally shucked off my body and crawled up into my own head. Very relaxing and nice. And I could drift out of it and back into it without much effort. Meanwhile she was still going on about my goals, and how I wasn’t going to have the fear and worries anymore. Towards the end she asked me to imagine myself at my goal weight, and then to imagine myself in that body. As I told her later, I randomly welled up like I was going to cry at that point. (“Happy cry or sad cry?” she asked. “Mostly overwhelmed cry, I think.” “It’s okay. Everybody cries in here.”) I also remember right at the very end there was something about the colour blue, and how every time I saw it my subconscious was going to remember the things she’d said. And then she started counting up from one to five, and I was supposed to feel the energy going back into my limbs… and I kinda did. And then I sat up and we talked about it. She gave me some homework – the counting down relaxation exercise – and I’m supposed to call her in a week with my progress.
As I re-read that, it all sounds very cosmic and hippie and weird… which is surprising to me. It honestly didn’t feel like that at the time. For most of it, I was just sitting in a chair thinking how boring a blog entry this was going to be. I mean, I was just sitting in a chair listening to some woman talk soothingly at me. It was only when I called the Snook up afterwards that I realized I was having trouble remembering the things she’d said. I can tell you in great detail what we talked about before and after the hypnosis bit, but the middle is all kinda vague. In terms of actual results, I haven’t noticed any real effects yet. I was as hungry as ever, and though I certainly noticed blue things, I wasn’t sure if that was just me consciously doing it. *shrug* We’ll see.
Happy birthday, Anthony!