This covers days 9 & 10 of 30 for the Hypnotherapy Project, which I'm collaborating on with Los Angeles-based ~~hypnotist~~ hypnotherapist Greg Beckett. You can read more about this experiment, what motivated it and what we hope to accomplish here.

One of the reasons Greg chose me to do this project with him is he knew I'd commit myself 100% to the conditions we agreed on. There was someone on deck before me, but he flaked early on. And all he had to do was show up at Greg's office every day to be supervised as he listened to his recording; at that point, the idea was more to see what progress one could make if one repeated the lesson for 30 days in a row.

The first five days were more intense than either one of us could have anticipated. We backed off a bit to give my poor brain time to digest, trying some "fun" experiments (making me forget, making me cluck like a chicken); as the weekend approached, we talked about and agreed to let me listen to my recording at home, checking in to assure Greg I'd done the work.

Both days, I chose to listen at night, before sleep. Typically, I have problems falling asleep unless I'm sick and/or exhausted, so it was immensely pleasurable to go O-U-T before the recording had finished, I woke up about 90 - 120 minutes after putting on the 20-minute recording, pushed away the headphones and nano, and went back to sleep.

Last night was a bitch, though. It had been a long weekend, The BF had freshly laundered sheets for the bed, and as I got ready to go night-night, I realized with horror that somehow, the last iPod sync had wiped the hypno file from the drive.

For the splittest of seconds I considered blowing it off...and then, at 10:55, I got in my car and drove the five miles back to my place so I could resync and do it right.

Everything about hypnosis, it turns out, is a choice: even whether you do it in the first place...

xxx c

Image by websteria via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license