This covers day 25 of 30 for the Hypnotherapy Project, which I'm collaborating on with Los Angeles-based hypnotherapist Greg Beckett. You can read more about this experiment, what motivated it and what we hope to accomplish here; you can read all of the entries in chronological order here.

There's always an extra burst of joy on Mondays when I see Greg in person after a couple of days "off" (remember, "off" days I'm still doing hypno, just not in person).

In part, I just like the chatting. There are so many ideas and new things manifesting in my life since we stirred the pot with this project, it's a relief to be able to share them with the person who's actually collaborating on it with me.

But it's also great to have the personal attention of a new CD or just a personalized "trip" after listening to the canned version for two days. On Monday, Greg created a new recording that's all about helping to build up one of my weaker personalities, self-esteem.

I'm starting to see how a lot of hypnotherapy works through imagery. As in, imagine yourself...

on a beach
in a quiet, safe room
going down a tunnel
at the lectern/helm/steering wheel/etc.

...and then (amazing/wonderful/different thing here) happens.

It makes sense that people who already have pretty well-developed imaginations would do better with hypnotherapy than those who are extremely literal-minded. There's a lot of visualizing and leaps of faith involved when you're creating something from nothing.

This recording had a series of doors, each with labels like "today" and "tomorrow" and, because it's a particularly gnarly day with lots of commitments for me (at least through the end of this calendar year) "Thursday." Greg walked me through them and something or other happened there, I guess I'll find out when I listen to the CD some more, since I went somewhere else during the recording.

And that somewhere else? The curb I was parked at on this, a street cleaning day. My inner clock was battling it out with my inner artist, and since my inner financier hates getting parking tickets, the scales were tipped on the side of let's wrap this up.

For those of you who still think there's some sort of woo-woo lala-land you float off to under hypnosis, that should serve as some reinforcement of this central fact: you can't walk through the doorway when you're worried about being parked in the driveway.

xxx c

Image by rknickme via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.