Jennifer Christensen 1 Wiccalive.com




.............................................................................................................................................................

The Foundation of the Sacred Stream is pleased to announce our Membership Program open to all those interested in the ongoing work of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream.

There are three membership categories with the Foundation of the Sacred Stream — Personal, Journey and Professional. As a member of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, you become part of a spiritual community that can provide you with support in charting your own individual pathway to wholeness.

We appreciate your support and look forward to the opportunity to offer you ongoing assistance along your journey of self-discovery and professional development.

There are three levels of membership available. Benefits of each membership are listed below:

Personal Membership
Upon signing up for any class or training program with the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, $10.00 of your tuition will go toward granting you Personal Membership in the Foundation of the Sacred Stream’s community. As a member in this membership category, you will receive a quarterly newsletter and news and updates of community events.

Journey Membership
Upon completion of the Depth Hypnosis Foundation Course, you will receive Hypnotherapy Certification, with a special emphasis in the Spiritual Counseling Practice of Depth Hypnosis. This certification grants you Journey Membership in the Foundation of the Sacred Stream’s community. As a member in this membership category, you will receive a quarterly newsletter, news and updates of community events, and the opportunity to participate in a reduced tuition program for other classes.

Professional Journey Membership
Upon completion of the Depth Hypnosis Practitioner Program, you will receive certification as a Depth Hypnosis Spiritual Counseling Practitioner. This certification grants you Professional Journey Membership in the Foundation of the Sacred Stream’s community. As a member in this membership category, you will receive a quarterly newsletter, news and updates of community events, receive an invitation to a yearly member’s retreat, and receive client referrals from the Foundation.

Depth Hypnosis is a highly effective therapeutic model that combines Buddhism, shamanism, transpersonal psychology, energy medicine, and hypnotherapy.

Applied Shamanism
The Applied Shamanism Training Program is a powerful, in-depth course of study in Applied Shamanism. It teaches core shamanic principles and techniques that will help you gain a better understanding of the nature of reality, and effect positive changes in your life and the world around you.

Integrated Energy Medicine
The Integrated Energy Medicine Training Program is for anyone interested in gaining greater knowledge of the energetic systems that underlie physical, mental, and emotional health.

Buddhist Psychology Studies
The Buddhist Psychology Studies program is for those who would like to understand the deeper workings of the mind and heart from a non-western perspective.

Ordinary reality." These realms can also be referred to as the "seen" and "unseen" worlds. To the Shaman, there is no difference between the factual and experiential reality of these two worlds.

Today, shamanic practitioners are in a unique position to effect change on many levels. They are informed by modern medicine and psychological thought, and grounded in the wisdom of the ancients, addressing maladies with assurance and understanding. Unlike western medical thought, shamans recognize that even the slightest trauma has potentially negative long-term effects, and they will often perform soul retrievals for surgeries, births, and the loss of loved ones. The study of shamanism offers a fresh perspective on the nature of healing and provides effective methods for maintaining health on a mental, emotional, and physical level.


Integrated Energy Medicine is a delicate balance of the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual states. Whenever one of these states is out of balance with the others, a person's overall system becomes imbalanced. This can result in severe emotional and psychological states such as depression, eating disorders, and addiction, as well as physical illnesses ranging from cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic fatigue, to name just a few. Energetic imbalance can also manifest subtly in the form of mood fluctuations, headaches, and other less serious issues.

For thousands of years, many cultures, tribes, and societies have recognized that there are complex energy systems within the body. When maintained properly, these energetic systems contribute to the overall health and well-being of an individual. Also common to these cultures is the idea that there is a subtle energy body or animating force in each of us. This animating force is called chi in Chinese medicine, prana in India, ki in Japan, mana in the Huna tradition of Hawaii, and the soul in many spiritual traditions of western civilization.

Interestingly, science is now closer than ever to lending support to these ancient claims. Einstein's Theory of Relativity showed that matter is made up of energy packets called quanta. He essentially proved that energy underlies everything in the universe and he set into motion a serious study of energy, which continues to evolve today.

What energy is and where it comes from is still a mystery. However, the study of energy in physics for the past century has helped usher into our society a new understanding of energy and how it operates in the universe. This has paved the way for the combining of intuitive and scientific methods of healing and the merging of eastern healing techniques, and western medicine. These new combinations are creating innovative and highly effective ways of healing the body and mind.

The Four Noble Truths, the Eight Fold Path, Boddhichita, the dharma, the sangha, meditation (Vipassana, Samatha), taking refuge and reincarnation are just some of what will be explored in the Buddhist Psychology Studies Program.


Although Buddhism is primarily viewed as a religion, at its heart it is a very sophisticated system for understanding the deeper workings of the self. Different schools of Buddhist thought focus on different aspects of practice. This program is non-dogmatic, and takes a “pan-Buddhist” approach as it draws from wisdom that has been developed in several different schools of Buddhism.

No previous knowledge of Buddhism is necessary. Those who do have experience with Buddhist practice will find fresh understanding in the application of Buddhist perspectives to western therapeutic paradigms.

The Buddhist Psychology Studies Program is divided into several parts: BPS 1, BPS 2, BPS 3 and a Continuing Studies Program. There is also a Buddhist Ethics class designed for professionals. (CEUs are available for all of our Buddhist Psychology courses.)


Dreams
The information we receive in dreams can serve as a vehicle for deepening our relationship to our deeper self. The tremendous amount of guidance we receive every night usually escapes us – either because we do not recognize its significance or because we do not know how to translate the information held in dream images and states.

In this class, you will learn how to explore the meanings held in dreams from several different vantage points. An innovative method for tracking energetic patterns held in dreams will be presented here. You will learn how to use these energetic patterns as a blueprint for understanding normally hard-to-access information held deep within the self.

The shamanic journey is one of the oldest technologies for understanding the world of spirit and energy. It has been the foundation of spiritual and healing practices of vast numbers of cultures for thousands of years. Today, the shamanic journey still offers a dependable method for exploring the psyche and accessing inner wisdom.
In this class you will learn to sustain a journeying practice that will help you:
    •     heal parts of yourself you have had difficulty accessing
    •     problem solve for yourself and others
    •     serve others effectively and efficiently
    •     understand the nature of different levels of consciousness

Applied Shamanism Level I
 
 Much of the work performed by Shamans takes place within the Middle World. In the Applied Shamanism Foundation Course, Level I, you'll learn how to safely navigate the Middle World, while minimizing fear and deepening your trust in yourself. You will learn about the nature of the Middle World and the healing that occurs within it. Some of the core shamanic methods of healing taught in Level I include Power Retrieval, Divination, and Distance Healing.

Applied Shamanism Level II

 In the Applied Shamanism Foundation Course, Level II, you will learn to work safely and effectively with two core methods of shamanic healing: Soul Retrieval and Psychopomp. Soul Retrieval is a powerful shamanic healing technique that yields profound change. Psychopomp refers to "the guiding of souls", and provides a deeper understanding of the nature of death.

 In my Depth Hypnosis practice, I work with many survivors of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Most survivors have developed defenses around the abuse and the memory of it, and although this may be helpful at the time, it prevents the survivor from fully integrating the emotions of the experience. The key to healing abuse involves remembering the experience, and integrating the emotions that are associated with the abuse—emotions such as fear, pain, or betrayal, for example. Depth Hypnosis offers a variety of useful techniques for helping survivors move past the defenses they have developed around their memories of the abuse.

 Because most defenses are formulated unconsciously, they are most easily accessed through the unconscious. Often the survivor is not aware that they are defended, or that they are being affected by the experience they are defending against. By helping the client become aware of their defenses and by exploring their nature, it is possible to transform them.

 The establishment of safety is essential to this process. The survivor needs to know that the transformation of defenses will not leave him or her helpless and out of control. By bringing the survivor into contact with the essential self through guided imagery and meditation, we establish both a base to work from and a goal to work toward. In effect, we create a container of safety in which to hold all of the emotions, and protect the survivor while they explore their issue and the nature of their defenses.

 When I work with abuse survivors, I am less interested in laying down historical fact than in understanding the nature of the person's subjective experience. This idea of staying close to the person's subjective experience regardless of actual external events becomes particularly important when hypnosis has been used as part of the abuse. How hypnosis is used in an abusive situation is broad in scope, but it can be understood simply as suggestions that nothing happened, they are making it up, or threats to the victim that if they say anything they will be hurt. These kinds of suggestions to the victim are powerful and they contribute to the victim's denial about the abuse, not remembering it, or reconstructing the events. This is done to remain safe and, in the case of children especially, to survive into adulthood.

 I have found that there is always some level of cognitive dissonance to the hypnotic suggestions laid down during or after abuse. That is to say, there is some feeling on the part of the survivor that something is not quite right around the issues that have been the subject of hypnotic suggestion. The sensation that something is not quite right may manifest as uneasiness, strongly defended irrational ideas, or a complete unwillingness to look at the idea that something is not quite right.

 I believe this dissonance arises from the fact that the hypnotic suggestions given during or after abuse do not jive with the person's authentic experience and sense of self. The mind during the abuse is so open to manipulation, that the suggestions take seat in the person's psyche. But because they are paired with the abuse and generally are contrary to authentic experience, the suggestions register as an uneasy feeling.

 One survivor, I will refer to as Jim, was hypnotized as part of his abuse. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience for abuse victims. In this case, Jim shares many things in common with other survivors I’ve worked with, survivers who have all been hypnotized as part of their abuse. When Jim first came to me, he was unaware that he was a survivor of severe parental abuse. In fact, he vehemently stated again and again that his mother loved him very much. The vehemence in these statements was a red flag for me, and I filed this information away without realizing where it would take us. We then continued the process of working on Jim’s physician-diagnosed attention deficit disorder (ADD). Jim had been on medication for ADD for over a year, but was it was having no effect.

 As the abuse memories began to surface when we explored the roots of the ADD, Jim was often aware of a very bright light in the middle of the surfacing images. When I asked him to focus on the light, Jim began to repeat the same phrases again and again. One such session revealed the following set of phrases:

Your mommy loves you, no matter what anyone else says. You just fell down. Your knee is only a little scraped. Those bruises happened when you fell. Poor Jim, mommy helped you fix your knee and made it better. No matter what anyone else says, you know this is true. Your mommy loves you every day, more and more. And when you look at your knee remember your mommy loves you. Your mommy loves you more and more each day."

 It took me a moment to realize that he had been told to look at a bright light while classically-formulated hypnotic suggestions were told to him after he experienced abuse. Because of this, I realized that it would be necessary to uncover all of the hypnotic suggestions that had been given to him during or after abuse.

 After a great deal of work, we discovered many different abusive situations where hypnotic suggestion had been used to distort Jim’s memory. The presence of the light became a helpful sign in knowing when we were dealing with these suggestions during our Depth Hypnosis sessions. In subsequent sessions, whenever the light appeared, I would ask him to look into the light and just allow his lips to move. Each time revealed a new hypnotic suggestion and a new memory of abuse.

 In order to rid Jim's psyche of the cognitive dissonance causing his ADD, we had to remove the effect of the original suggestions by his mother. To do this, I asked Jim to write out a series of suggestions that would replace those of his perpetrator. While Jim was in a light trance, I would repeat his suggestions to him. Having Jim write his own hypnotic suggestions was important to the healing process. He was taking control of his own process and his own psyche, therefore empowering himself against the intrusion of his mother—an intrusion that had existed in his psyche for forty years.

 The new suggestions would not have been able to take hold, had Jim not dealt with his rage and sadness over the abuse. We spent many sessions addressing his emotions and integrating the retrieved memories of abuse into his consciousness. It took a great deal of courage for him to be able to see the physical abuse and to understand how it distorted his ability to concentrate. It was even more difficult to integrate the emotions of betrayal by his mother and how it had cost him not only his memory and ability to focus, but his ability to trust himself at the root of the ADD.

 Depth Hypnosis provided a series of techniques to uncover the abuse, as well as the hypnotic suggestions that were hiding it. Today, Jim is still coming to terms with many aspects of being identified as an abuse survivor, but his attention problems have been greatly reduced. He is now able to focus and tap into his will to live in ways that were impossible for him before he began this process. Now he is regaining the ability to trust his own experience and make decisions based on it.

 Using Depth Hypnosis Techniques to Treat PTSD

 By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is a surprisingly pervasive disorder suffered by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone. Formerly referred to as shell shock in WWI and WWII soldiers and later named Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans coming home from the war, it is now recognized by the American Psychological Association (APA) as a legitimate psychological disorder, affecting many people, military and otherwise. The causes of PTSD vary, but the common factor is usually a traumatizing event. Any long or short-term event, such as an accident or physical abuse, can permanently affect a person and cause PTSD.

 Modern psychology has been helpful in describing and categorizing the ways in which PTSD presents itself in the form of panic, dissociation, hallucinations and other phenomena. However, the attempts of the APA and others to understand the disorder have yet to provide any substantial long-term alleviation of it. In most cases, medications are prescribed to address the symptoms of panic and lack of sleep, but they do not offer definitive ways of resolving the underlying causes.

 Depth Hypnosis is a therapeutic model that does offer an effective method for working with PTSD type symptoms. The alleviation of these symptoms depends upon identifying the traumatizing event and then integrating the emotions that were not processed at the time of the event. Depth Hypnosis provides the practitioner with techniques for identifying these symptoms related to PTSD, and for integrating the event and its severe effects within the client's psyche. In order for this to happen, the practitioner must create a safe space that enables the client to enter the time and place where the trauma occurred, allow abreaction to the extent that the client feels safe to do so, help the client transform their relationship to the trauma, and integrate the experience into the client’s being.

 I have worked with numerous clients suffering from PTSD type symptoms and Depth Hypnosis has been effective in improving or entirely alleviating symptoms in most of them. One of my clients described her experience with physical childhood abuse as "beaten dog syndrome". She explained how, as an adult, she still involuntarily flinches when someone yells or moves towards her too quickly, much like an abused dog will flinch when you raise a hand to it. The more debilitating affects of this abuse manifest in my client's lack of confidence, fear of confrontation, depression, Attention Deficit Disorder, and suicidal thoughts.

 When my client first started seeing me for counseling, it was to address a problem she had with confrontation and depression. Whenever she experienced confrontation, she shut down and was sometimes debilitated for days. I began by questioning her about her childhood and using a Depth Hypnosis technique called Insight Inquiry, I discovered that she had been abused by both parents as a child. During this process, it took some time for my client to see and acknowledge the abuse. She had been under the impression that her childhood had been good and that the punishments she endured, including beatings with belts and being locked alone in a room for hours at a time, were normal and that she deserved the punishment.

 It took many months to reach the core traumatizing event, a severe beating with a belt by her father, which took place when my client was four years old. This was not a new memory for my client, although her recollection of the event had always been void of emotion. After doing light trance work for several sessions however, my client was able to get in touch with the full emotion of the event and gain even more of the memories surrounding it. In the trance she recalled the shock of betrayal as her father, a person she loved so much, turned on her. She was bewildered because she felt responsible and did not understand what she had done to cause this event to happen. She also realized that a memory that she thought was unrelated, was actually part of the same event.

 It is interesting to note that my client was so overwhelmed by the fear and pain caused by this particular beating that her mind actually compartmentalized the memory, breaking it down into manageable segments. When my client was finally able to go back and relive the event in a hypnotic state and see more clearly what had happened, she was able to integrate the separate parts back into one whole memory of the traumatizing event. The following are the words of my client, reprinted by permission:

"What I remember is my father dragging me down the hall. I was crying "No Daddy. Please Daddy.' I had done something wrong, though I don't know what and he was pissed. He made me pull down my pants and lay face down on the bed. I think I checked out then, because I can't remember the physical pain or how long it lasted. It seemed like a pretty long time. My next memory is of me sitting on my bed looking out the window and thinking that the whole world was over. I can only describe it as something in me had left. It had died. I then recall sitting in front of my dresser with my baby clothes trying to put them on. I think I must have been left alone in my room for a pretty long time because during the beating it was light outside and when I was trying on the clothes it was dark."

 Using Depth Hypnosis techniques, I worked with this client to transform her relationship to the traumatic event and dismantle the defenses she has built-up in reaction to it. As a result, she is now better able to handle confrontation and she reports that her depression has lessened and her suicidal thoughts have dissipated. We also spent many more sessions integrating her memory of the traumatizing event by going deeply into her anger and fear while she was in a safe space. She also did the important work of connecting with the part of her that she described as “having died” at the time of the event, and we integrated the powerful emotional content contained there. It is important to note that Depth Hypnosis techniques do not involve simple suggestion hypnosis or rescripting of the traumatic event. Instead, it provides an in-depth exploration into the psyche, and the places where the psyche stores memory and trauma. It is a process in which the client always actively participates.

 While Depth Hypnosis is not the only means of alleviating symptoms of PTSD and other psychological disorders, it does seem to help clients on a long-term basis. There is a great deal that we do not understand about the psyche and trauma related disorders, but through work of this kind, we can learn more about PTSD and ourselves in general. In the end, it is the courage and hard work of the clients who make healing possible.

 Opening the Doors to the Self - Pain as a Guidepost (Part 1)


By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 As we have seen, one of the most valuable tools in this journey to the encounter of the self at a soul level is the ability to create an atmosphere where it is safe. We must feel safe in order to remain present with pain long enough to be able to understand its origins. Within the framework of hypnosis, the path through pain or imbalance can reveal itself safely. It can lead us across the field of the pain through the psyche to the encounter with the self at a soul level. To begin this journey, it is important to examine the kinds of relationships we have with pain.

 We all have different adaptations to pain. One of the most common is a habit which may be ultimately self-destructive, but which eases the pain in the moment. The remarkable thing about habits is that they often have the quality of masking even the origin of the pain they were developed to accommodate. In a way, they are the perfect anti-inflammatory - however temporarily effective and ultimately ineffective their anti-inflammatory properties may be. Not only do habits cool the pain, but they make the conscious mind forget what the pain originally was and where it originated. Of course, the certainty that we will have to deal with the pain eventually one way or the other is also masked.

 Because of this dynamic in habit formation, unraveling the nature of self-destructive behavior can be a circuitous task. One of the reasons traditional psychotherapy may get lost in these loops is because it begins at the outside of the matrix and tries to work its way in to the root of the problem. This approach can provide a faulty road map. It can be faulty, because everyone has a different, unique source of pain, which can manifest in similar types of external behavior. We can describe external behaviors, but this does not always help trace each individual path back to the internal motivation behind the behavior. No generalized system can do this.

 The only way to truly unravel the matrix of self-destructive or compulsive behavior is to start at the pain which lies beneath the habitual behavior. This means getting the conscious mind and the various constructs which evolved to deal with the pain, to step aside, even for a moment. This is exactly what hypnotherapy provides: a well deserved rest for the conscious mind. This allows the contents of the unconscious mind to be expressed, usually in images. The message it conveys are the keys to the pattern which underlies the external imbalanced behavior.

 The process of unraveling and decoding these messages from the unconscious can be very threatening to the personality and its constructs. These are, in large part, developed precisely to mask the pain at the root of habitual behavior. When the personality and its defenses to understanding the true nature of pain are left to their own devices they preserve themselves. They do this by evading the encoded messages the unconscious mind uses to convey its contents. We receive these messages on a regular basis through dreams, deja vu experiences, past-life recalls or other-life bleed-throughs, and other anomalous (anomalous to the world dominated by the conscious mind) phenomena. We will look at how hypnotherapy provides a key to the process of decoding these images later in the book. For now, we are just looking at how our honest encounter with the pain at the root of imbalance can be understood as a path to the experience of the self at a soul level.

 Sometimes the messages about the pain our habits are trying to medicate have been altered. This can happen through active intervention on the part of those who would rather not have us remember events clearly. My experience in helping survivors of abuse come to terms with the effects of abuse has shown me that hypnosis can help break down defenses to abuse memories. These defenses may have been useful when they were developed, but many survivors find that these same defenses become an obstacle. This is especially true when survivors decide to integrate the information contained in the abuse memories as they begin the process of self-exploration.

 Because most defenses are formulated unconsciously, they can most easily be contacted through the unconscious. Often, the survivor will not even consciously know about the existence of the defenses, much less what thoughts or decisions they are constructed to block. By exploring the nature of these defenses, usually through contact with the issues they were constructed to cope with, the defenses can be slowly and carefully transformed. This can happen in hypnosis once the survivor begins to feel it is safe to do so.

 The establishment of safety is essential to this process. The survivor needs to know that the transformation of defenses will not leave him helpless and out of control. By bringing the survivor into contact with the essential self through guided imagery and meditation, we establish both a base to work from and goal to work toward. In effect, we create a container which can hold all of the emotions safely. This keeps the survivor protected while the exploration of the nature of the defenses and the issues they relate to begins.

 When I work with abuse survivors, I am less interested in laying down historical fact than understanding the nature of the person's subjective experience. This idea of staying close to the person's subjective experience regardless of actual external events becomes particularly important when hypnosis has been used as part of the abuse.

 I have found that there is always some level of cognitive dissonance to hypnotic suggestions which are laid down in the psyche and are a bit aligned with the individual's experience of reality or desired experience of reality. This is especially true of hypnotic suggestions used all too frequently during or after abuse, especially ritual abuse. That is to say, there is some feeling on the part of the survivor that 'something is not quite right' around the issues that have been the subject of hypnotic suggestion. The sensation that something is not quite right can manifest as uneasiness, strongly defended irrational ideas, or a complete unwillingness to look at the idea that 'something is not quite right' about a particular sensation or feeling.

 I believe this dissonance arises from the fact that the hypnotic suggestions given during or after abuse do not jibe with the person's authentic experience and sense of self. The mind during the abuse is so open to manipulation that the suggestions do take seat in the person's psyche. But because they are paired with the abuse and generally are contrary to authentic experience, the seat they take is uncomfortable.

 My experience with a survivor we will call Jim has many themes consistent with other survivors I have worked with who have been hypnotized as part of the abuse process. When Jim first came to me, he was unaware that he was a survivor of severe parental abuse. In fact, he vehemently stated again and again that his mother loved him very much. The vehemence in these statements was a red flag for me, and I filed this information away, not realizing where it would take us. We began the process of hypnosis to help him with a physician-diagnosed attention deficit disorder which was not responding to medication.

 There is much to tell about the long process in Jim's evolution in understanding himself and his inability to focus. It took him some time to come to terms with the idea that he was an abuse survivor. But I will focus here on how it became evident that hypnotic suggestion had been used to screen from him what had actually happened to him.

 As the abuse memories began to surface in exploring the roots of the attention deficit disorder, Jim was often aware of a very bright light in the middle of the images that were surfacing. When I asked him to focus on the light, he began to repeat the same phrases again and again. One such session revealed the following set of phrases,

 "Your mommy loves you. No matter what anyone else says. You just fell down today. See, your knee is just a little scraped. Those bruises happened when you fell. Poor Jim, mommy helped you fix your knee and made it better. No matter what anyone else says, you know this is true, you know that your mommy loves you every day, more and more and when you look at your knee you will remember that your mommy loves you, your mommy loves you more and more each day."

 It took me a moment to put it together that he had been told to look at a bright light while classically-formulated hypnotic suggestions were repeated to him after having been abused. As the truth dawned on me, I realized that we would have to focus on uncovering all of the hypnotic patter that had been given to him during or after abuse.

 We discovered that there were many, many different situations where hypnotic suggestion had been used to distort memory. In subsequent sessions, whenever the light would appear, I asked him to look into the light and just allow his lips to move. Each session revealed a new patter to screen a new memory of abuse. After each session where this patter would emerge, I would present the recorded patter to Jim. I would ask him how he wanted to erase the patter which was still stored in his memory.

 I never provided him with hypnotic suggestions that he did not write out himself. In each one of the "re-writes" I would include the suggestion that this new hypnotic suggestion would take permanent and total precedence over any hypnotic suggestions he may have been exposed to in his childhood. This worked as a kind of seal to keep the other hypnotic patter from intruding on his sense of self and perception of reality in the way that it had for forty years.

 A big part of this work went beyond simply providing a new hypnotic "tape". The new tape would never had been able to take hold had he not been able to deal with the rage and sadness he felt about having been betrayed in this way. It took a great deal of courage for him to be able to see the physical abuse and the way it distorted his ability to concentrate. But the emotional betrayal of the use of hypnosis to cripple his memory, and thus his sense of self, was in many ways a more brutal process to work through for Jim.

 Because the damage had been created at a subconscious level, it needed to be undone on an subconscious level. This was accomplished by contacting the methods by which Jim had been conditioned through hypnosis. I am not aware of any process which can provide this repair other than hypnosis. By using hypnosis to explore the nature of his defenses in seeing his mother as anything but a perfect, loving creature, he was able to see how his defenses were keeping him from contacting his ability to concentrate and focus.

 Jim is still coming to terms with many of the aspects of being identified as an abuse survivor, but his attention problems are greatly reduced. He is able to focus his attention in ways which were impossible for him before he began the rewriting of these tapes. He is regaining the ability to trust his own experience and make decisions based on it. I am sure if we had not discovered the unethical way in which hypnosis had been used to rob him of these abilities most of us take for granted, he would not have made the progress he has in reclaiming himself.

 When we learn that there really is some type of pain at the root of our imbalance we can begin to allow ourselves to understand the nature and origin of it. This is the beginning of the process of shifting our relationship to pain. As this happens, the constructs the personality has created to avoid dealing with the pain become irrelevant. If the truth of the existence of this pain is irrefutable, then it is inevitable that the personality's constructs, developed to mask that pain, begin to lose their foothold within the personality. This can be terrifying to the part of the self which operates solely on the personality level. And it can be threatening to the structures in which the personality operates such as the family and religious, social, economic and political communities the individual operates in. These structures have made adaptations to "manage" the pain the loss of contact with ourselves at a soul level creates; they may even, in some cases, be designed to mask this loss. In some cases they are the cause of this soul loss.

 If the pain of this soul loss is resolved, if we can be whole, those structures become less important to us. And we may decide to withdraw our support from them. If enough people do this, the society's institutions must change. It can be extremely threatening to the entire matrix of the agreed-upon, cultural conscious-mind reality to have even one individual throw in his cards and pull out of agreement with the cultural realities. We have only to look at the dynamics of dictatorships and autocracies to see how true this is. If we discover a way to transform our relationship to our behavior by uncovering the origins or nature of our pain, we no longer need the habits or the constructs which the conscious-mind reality's personality has created. These constructs are developed not only to support the habit, but they become part of the mask we use to interact with the larger cultural reality we exist in. When the mask realizes the inevitability of its destruction due to the possibilities inherent in this transformation, fear arises. At the point where the source and nature of the pain is discovered, the personality's mask may generate defenses in the form fear, denial, and doubt. This is natural. One of the main functions of the personality is to keep whatever is perceived as unacceptable unseen. When the need not to feel the pain is greater than the need to know the truth, these defenses are necessary. But as those needs change places, everything changes.

 It is understandable that the fear which may arise at this point can create disequilibrium. Fear occurs not only in ourselves as we experience the shift, but also in the larger cultural matrix we exist in. Fear is generated within the cultural institutions which deny or manage pain as their supporters realize the institution's role must change. An institution which is designed to manage or deny pain must crumble if its members decide they no longer need it to maintain distance between themselves and their pain. This type of transformation can be far-reaching. At each level, constructs which have been created to manage this pain of separation must give way to new forms which are based in our honest dialogue with the sources of that separation. For the individual, the personality constructs must shift. For the institutions, their function must shift away from the management or denial of pain as a raison d'être. Ultimately, the culture at large must reorganize itself entirely to remove the veils it maintains between the experience of the self at a soul level and that part of the self which interacts with the culture.

 Because the truths about pain and the way we try to disguise it can be revealed through hypnotherapy, some view it with consternation. Hypnosis has been labeled suspect by many institutions within the larger cultural context. As we have seen, the legal establishment has labeled it unreliable and some mainstream religious communities have called it the work of the devil. Perpetrators of abuse who have managed to enter agreements of secrecy with those they abuse view hypnosis as a mortal threat to those agreements. I have had many clients who did not understand their parents fear when they told them they were beginning hypnotherapy come to understand it as the abuse is revealed. I have even had clients who have told me their psychotherapists had told them that hypnosis was dangerous. Dangerous to whom? Truth is only dangerous to those who are invested in a lie. When hypnotherapy is used ethically and consciously, there is nothing to fear.

 The tragedy of the failure to embark on the journey toward truth is illustrated by one of my clients who came to me for help with his habit of compulsive overeating. He wanted to try hypnosis because he thought I could give him some suggestions which would curb his appetite. I prefer to try to understand the source of the pain and help begin the healing process from the inside out, rather than just putting a bandaid on the pain in the form of positive suggestion. So I asked him a few questions. At that point he revealed to me that he was receiving disability payments for a diagnosis by a government psychiatrist of schizophrenia. He also described in some detail the highlights of his emotional history. He also provided me with a write-up of the government psychiatrist's diagnosis and solution to his problem. From what I could tell, the psychiatrist's reaction to this patient's pain was to discount, ridicule and minimize it. A paraphrasing of the report is something like this:

 "Patient believes he was raped and sexually molested by his parents. Parents deny this. He believes he is being abducted by aliens regularly. Paranoid. He thinks all people on the street are after him. Psychotic. Loses track of time. Has recurring episodes where he has visions of parents molesting him. He also dreams same. Diagnosis: schizophrenia. Recommend medication and disability payments."

 I could find nothing in the report or in the treatment records where anyone had ever taken the patients' reports about his reality seriously. It seemed like the main goal of the government psychiatrists' interaction with this patient was to neatly compartmentalize the problem. At no point that I could see was anyone willing to actually be present for the pain this patient was experiencing. No one believed that this pain was real, much less that it had a real source somewhere within the patient's psyche.

 Under hypnosis, the first image this patient had was the image of a tall gray alien. The second image was of himself as a baby in a crib, with his father standing next to him smoking a cigarette molesting him sexually. The hypnosis session went through other images related to a sense of shame which emerged from these two primary images. Most of these were centered on self-destructive external behavior - including overeating, compulsive sexuality and episodes where he had experienced a loss of time. I took the information provided by his unconscious mind seriously. My approach was not, "Oh, you're seeing aliens, you must be nuts," but "So here is an alien, what does an alien mean to you?"

 This type of dysfunction does not exist in a vacuum. It takes the complicity of many actors within the patient's environment to keep this level of dysfunction in place. What would it mean if this patient's father really did rape him? What would it mean if his parents did molest him? Would it possibly mean that his whole complex of overeating was an effort to reconcile what he knew to be his own irrefutable inner reality with the lies which his parents, his doctors, and his benefit administrator reinforced with every action ? What would it mean if he discovered and integrated the source of his pain?

 The main effect of accepting the patient's experience of reality as truth would be that everyone involved, including the patient himself, would have to take responsibility for their part in perpetuating his pain. This is a huge undertaking. But it is clearly the work this person has to do if he is ever to be reconciled with himself at a soul level. If everyone faced the fact that he had been molested by his parents - either emotionally, physically or sexually - he would have to reevaluate his relationship with his parents. This might mean losing their support (for whatever benefit it was). He would probably lose his disability benefits if was able to arrive at a state of integration with this level of pain. There would have to be a tremendous shift in the external cultural constructs around him if he asked the actors within them to take responsibility not only for his pain, but for their own. For them to be able to be present in a honest way for his level of dysfunction, they would have to look at the pain at the source of their own dysfunction. The initial dislocation on every level would be disorienting at first, but the reorganization around truth would ultimately benefit everyone involved. It would provide a tremendous relief from having to maintain a web of so many lies.

 He was so used to believing all the ways in which those around him tried to minimize his authentic experience, that he was shocked when I suggested the possibility that the information he was receiving in hypnosis might be a basis for his internal reality. This reality included the possibility that the nightmares and the psychotic breaks might actually be a reflection of his authentic experience of abuse. The truth of his authentic internal experience (regardless of the actual events in the external reality) was overwhelming to him. It was hard enough to believe that these horrible events could have really happened. But more overwhelming was the task of facing the pain which was being managed by his parents' duplicity and the complicity of the government psychiatrist in an honest way. When I asked him what it would mean if he validated his own authentic experience rather than believing everyone who ridiculed his experience as delusion, he was clearly overwhelmed by the possibilities contained in this shift of perspective.

 At that moment, he had to decide if he could manage the confrontation of his pain at its source or if he preferred to remain in the chaos which the denial of that pain had created in his life. He had to decide if he could go through the transformation and the rebirth of himself the integration of this information would generate within his sense of self. I could only promise him that the effort would not be in vain, that he would find new energy and regeneration. And it would be on the other side of the process that this transformation of his relationship to this pain would engender. I could not tell him it would be easy, I could not tell him that I had a little pill that would make it all go away. I could not deny that the dismantling of the undeniably complex matrix he had created to deal with his pain would be difficult. But I could promise that he would experience a diminishment in the gulf that was separating him from an authentic encounter with himself at a soul level.

 This process can be understandably terrifying and many people would rather forgo the intimacy with pain it requires. Often, only those whose situations are so intolerable or those who can dimly perceive the light of regeneration at the end of the tunnel choose this path. This patient could not take that path. In making this decision, he could not see that the access to new resources of personal power the integration of the pain would provide him was worth the effort he would have to go through to obtain it. There was nothing I could do but support him in his decision to postpone the process of personal transformation. And truly, this was only a postponement. The journey home to the encounter with ourselves at a soul level is not an option. We can choose how and when we take the journey to a certain extent, but we cannot defer this encounter indefinitely.

 While we must respect the individual's limits in his ability to cope with the truth of his inner reality, we must not deny the value of pain. Sometimes, we learn to value pain only when it has become undeniable. This lesson is well illustrated in the case of another client of mine who decided to take the path to the transformation of her relationship with pain.

 She came to me hoping to find pain relief through hypnotic suggestions for excruciating pain in her right arm. An army of osteopaths, orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists and internists had judged that it had no origin. Again, because I do not feel comfortable simply applying bandaids of external hypnotic suggestion to deep-seated problems, I asked a few questions about the development of the pain. These questions led back over her life; I was struck by her ability to manifest emotionally painful situations again and again. However, the manifestation of the pain in her arm was the first time the pain had manifested physically. It was clear to me that, contrary to what the physicians had said, that there was a source of this pain. And it could well lie within the emotional aspect of her being. It also seemed possible that the source of the emotional pain and the physical pain were one and the same.

 We did several sessions together, including a prenatal regression and a past life regression, to try to understand the reasons why she needed the pain in her life. Each time, the only suggestion I gave when she was in hypnosis was, " We are going back to a time and place or situation which will shed light and understanding on the origins of the pain you are experiencing in your right arm." Each time, I was asking the subconscious mind for the message it was trying to convey through the manifestation of the pain in the right arm. As is customary, the message was conveyed in the language of images.

 During a past life regression she regressed to a time where she had been a monk in a place where there were high mountains. She found herself hiding in a place where there was a stone wall and a dirt floor. Through further questioning, it became clear that she was in a monastery. Politicians and soldiers had come into the monastery and were slaughtering all of her fellow monastics. The pain she felt in not being able to control the situation and save them from this fate was acute. Finally, the soldiers found her and took her out into a stone courtyard, yanking her arms behind her back and tying them tightly together. As the soldiers cut off her head, I asked her what the last thought in her mind was as she died:

 Opening the Doors to the Self - Pain as a Guidepost (Part 2)

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 Client: " My last thought is: I have to remember this."

 Hypnotherapist: "What is the value in remembering this?"

 Client: "So I can remember my religious teacher and his teachings about the nature of the soul."

 She had used the emotional pain of anger at herself for failing to save her fellow monastics and her physical pain of being tortured and beheaded to try to remember the teachings of her spiritual source. It is a convoluted way to remember such teachings, but who can account for the decisions we make under such extreme duress. By arriving at one point of the origin of this pain, the pain in her arm began to shift a little.

 During a prenatal regression, one of extreme panic and a sense of loss of control (the same emotions which were attached to the images in the past life regression) she realized that the only connection she had to her mother was pain and panic. As an adopted child, this was all she had to remind herself of her birth mother, her physical source.

 In both of these instances, it was pain which she chose to keep herself connected to the source of sustenance of her soul. If she had kept running away from the pain rather than facing it, she would never have been able to resolve the pain in her arm. By embracing the pain rather than fighting it, by listening to it rather than ignoring it, she was able to touch her soul again. By seeing her pain as her friend and not her enemy, she was able not only to free herself of the physical pain but to transform the way she manifested all types of pain in her life.

 She saw how she had manifested the physical pain. It was impossible to deny it in the same way she had been able to deny the emotional pain she had created in her life. Both were only attempts to return to herself at a soul level. By embracing the physical pain, she was able to take steps to resolve the emotional pain. She realized that she could find and maintain a connection to her physical and emotional source of wisdom and power through other means. She also realized that the conscious-mind personality constructs she had created to maintain that connection through pain had to be transformed. She saw the choices clearly and she chose the path of transformation. It was a courageous choice.

 This required considerable effort. She had to dismantle the personality constructs she had created to deal with the pain, a process which, in itself, was very painful. But she did come out the other side of it with a new connection to the source of herself at a soul level. This connection did not require pain to keep the lessons and needs of her soul active in her conscious life. The immense power and renewal she was able to manifest in her life through the process of the transformation of her relationship to pain could never have happened had she not decided to embrace the pain rather than ignore it.

 This approach to imbalance is decidedly more involved than simply labeling the dysfunction and assigning a pill to it based on the label. But it is, ultimately, a much faster and surer route to the resolution of pain. The reason that many practitioners who rely on the compartmentalization of pain may fail is because their method of compartmentalization does allow the patient - and the practitioner - to ignore the pain. The focus of attention becomes centered on the label. The curative procedures may only apply to the label rather than to the patient. A client of mine described an encounter with compartmentalization of this type with a well-respected head of psychiatry at a major hospital:

 "Her mind was laid wide open before me as she asked me utterly irrelevant questions about my problem. I could see little compartments with little labels on them, and she was trying to figure out in which compartment I belonged. The questions she was asking had more to do with the labels than with me and I realized I could not trust her or her process at all."

 While this approach does not serve the client in helping him to return to a soul-level sense of himself, it is safe for the practitioner. This is because the practitioner does not have to be present with the pain once it is compartmentalized. And the client may even think this is a safe course of action for him as well because he thinks the compartmentalization lets him off the hook for taking responsibility for resolving the pain. This is a path most people would understandably choose if they could. But the possibility of true self-transformation and self-understanding through the pain is lost. The client is cut off not only from the pain at the source of the problem but from the possibility of tracing the path to the self at a soul level that the pain provides.

 In this process of trying to circumvent pain, the typical therapeutic approach mirrors the adaptation to pain which the larger conscious-mind dominated reality has adapted. The therapist may not be able to step outside culturally-accepted ways of looking at pain, so it is difficult for true healing to take place. As illustrated above, a person who truly transforms himself in relation to his pain may no longer be a willing participant in the culture's agreements which are designed to mask pain. In lieu of transformation, therapeutic approaches may just become descriptions of the problem.

 Without the soul and its still point to return to, every description of every psychic, organic, or psychological imbalance is just that - a description rooted nowhere and going nowhere. The big problem with this concept is that imbalance does not arrive and function in a vacuum. It has a very real and active reality within the individual psyche. The psyche has, as its center, the still point of the experience of the self at a soul level. Just because a particular school of thought does not recognize the existence of the self at soul level does not mean that it does not exist. The evidence that it does is clear when it is understood that all imbalance yields to the power contained within this still point when confronted honestly.

 The goal of therapy should be to find the individual wherever the dysfunction has led him within the matrix of the psyche. Exploration of all of the facets of our psyche, not just those involved with the conscious-mind reality must be permitted. This process is often best accomplished with as few externally-generated labels as possible. External descriptions and lectures about the dysfunction can have little therapeutic effect on the resolution of the dysfunction. This is especially true when these descriptions only refer to a small sliver of the greater reality of the self. The individual must come to the realization of the true nature of the dysfunction himself in order to see that the realization leads home to the soul. If we do not take the opportunity the path which leads through the source of imbalance provides, we lose a chance to experience ourselves at a soul level.

 Unfortunately, this process is impossible when the defenses and constructs of the conscious mind are still engaged and even supported by the interventions of society. Hypnosis allows us to see beyond these barriers and imagine an external reality which reflects ourselves at a soul level. This new understanding of reality may or may not have the furtherance of the current cultural paradigm as its goal.

 Freud ran into this problem when he began using hypnosis to treat what he referred to as female hysteria; he reports on his efforts in one of his early papers, "On Female Hysteria." The truth the women, mostly from the upper class, revealed under hypnosis had the potential of dismantling the whole web of lies the members of their class depended on to maintain male domination. This truth was that they were being sexually abused by male members of their family; the strain of hiding this truth was the root of their dysfunction. And this truth was laid bare when the veil of the conscious mind's constructs to safekeep the actuality of the abuse were lifted through hypnosis. Had Freud persisted in the unveiling of this awful truth, the members of upper class Viennese society would have perceived him as a danger to their ability to maintain their status quo. They would have denounced him, called him a liar or hounded him out of their midst; in any case, his budding medical career would have been seriously sidetracked.

 He could not face such ostracization, so he fabricated a twisted model of female hysteria. This postulated that the phenomena women were reporting in hypnosis were really the basis of a deep-seated wish that they would be sexually abused by their male family members. This horrendous fabrication, this abject failure on the part of Freud to be honest with himself, his patients and his surrounding society dominated psychotherapeutic models for half a century. Rather than face the truth, Freud abandoned hypnosis. He realized the bombshell effect the truth of the widespread nature of incest in late nineteenth century Vienna would have. Forcing everyone involved to take responsibility for the truth was too daunting a task. To demand this would have jeopardized not only on his own professional survival but the survival of all of the male-dominated institutions of that time and place.

 Hypnosis, in the hands of a hypnotherapist who is willing to face the psyche with total honesty, allows the constructs of the conscious mind to rest. It helps the client remove himself for a moment from the confines of the conscious-mind dominated society. This allows the true mechanisms of the psyche and soul to emerge. When the subconscious mind is allowed to express itself, it readily pinpoints the source of dysfunction and allows the individual to discern the path toward the integration of the dysfunction with the larger self. The information and understanding which can set the individual on a course toward the understanding of the workings of his soul easily and readily emerges in hypnosis. The only task is to listen.

 Opening the Doors to the Self - Relationships (Part 1)

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 Recently I heard an interview on National Public Radio's program, Fresh Air, with the Dalai Lama's official translator. The interviewer, Terry Gross, asked him if there were ever western concepts he had trouble translating into Tibetan. The translator said the hardest concept he had ever tried to convey emerged from a conference on Buddhism and psychology held in the United States. He had enormous difficulty trying to translate the words which described the concept of self-loathing. It took him almost half an hour to find the words to help the Dalai Lama understand this concept. The Dalai Lama was unable to believe that anyone could be so separated from the self that he could loathe it. In his mind, this was utterly unthinkable. In his vast exploration of the human psyche through the context of Tibetan Buddhism, this was a concept utterly unknown and foreign to him.

 This is the most common element I find at the root of dysfunction that people come to my practice for help with. This self-loathing, so foreign to a Tibetan living on the planet at the same time as we do, is utterly pandemic in the United States. It is also almost universally unacknowledged in most bastions of mainstream culture, including many psychotherapeutic models. Indeed, I was shocked to hear a well-known, Harvard-trained psychiatrist mention that he had been in practice for twenty-five years before he realized that the lack of love could make someone crazy.

 The dynamics of this lack of self-love, this self-loathing most of us struggle with, can be most readily explored in the relationships we have with other people. Often, our dislocation from ourselves is mirrored in the dislocations we find in relationship with others. We can most easily learn about the phenomena which separate us from ourselves at a soul level by examining our relationships with others through hypnosis. It is true that many types of dysfunction can be ameliorated without the in-depth examination of this phenomena. But for the realization of the true alchemy of the self for which hypnosis is such a potent tool, this aspect of our relationship with ourselves cannot be overlooked.

 Understanding the messages contained within our relationships with others helps us understand the core issues within ourselves we must address. Often, it is only through the difficulties we experience in our relationship with others that we discover what we need to integrate within ourselves to become more whole. By using the issues we find in our relationship with others, we can shine a light onto the issues which keep us separate from ourselves at a soul level. As we begin to perceive the dynamics of these issues, we begin to understand the damage they can cause.

 Sometimes it is hard to tell whether the dynamics of the external relationship create disharmony in our relationship with ourselves at a soul level or if it is the other way around. My clinical experience leads me to believe that we all have certain issues which keep us separate from ourselves at a soul level. We bring these issues with us as we incarnate and these issues dictate what relationships we choose. The dance of two individuals finding each other with complimentary issues which will trigger awareness in both is repeated thousands of times each day. It is stunning to see how accurately people attract others who will act as a depth charge to bring to the surface those issues they need to examine in order to integrate more fully. Generally, this depth charge is experienced as pain.

 Through compassion and understanding, we can allow ourselves to see and accept the dynamics this dance creates. We can allow ourselves to admit how we have hurt others and to see how we perpetuate and internalize the damage and hurt others have caused us. It is important to remember that all this hurting is a way of teaching ourselves and each other about the issues we need to look at to integrate into a larger understanding of the self.

 The dynamics of the internalization of the issues contained in external relationships applies to more positive aspects as well. While it is equally important to embrace the learning we gain through our positive relationship with others and ourselves, it is generally not this aspect of the process which brings people into hypnotherapy. Often, it is how we have been unable to embrace these positive aspects which bring us to a search for ourselves at a soul level.

 Both Jung and Freud, among others, have addressed the issue of projection of one's inner conflicts onto others in order to be able to see and grapple with them. The trick is to learn to perceive the patterns where we tend to repeat and replicate conflicts within different relationships. This allows us to get a better handle on what is happening within the relationship we have with ourselves. Many people have presented theories which are supposed to address this issue. But I have found that many theorists tend to stay only at the transactional level of relationship. They describe its dynamics without actually taking whatever understanding can be gleaned at this level to the deeper issue of our relationship with our selves.

 Part of the problem in many conceptual models is, again, that many theorists do not have a paradigm for the soul or a concept of the self at a soul level. They tend to focus on surface transactions. This may be because they do not believe there is a soul level of the self to relate external phenomena to.

 I do not have a complete understanding of all of Freud's work or all of Jung's work. But I think Freud's inability to see this larger context in which the personality operates is one of the reasons why Jung felt it necessary to split with Freud. Jung has gone farther than most theorists in fleshing out the context in which we find our waking consciousness. The maps he provides are invaluable in exploring our relationships to both our inner world and with others in the outer world.

 The Buddhist paradigm of the evolution of the self is also very helpful in fleshing out this other perception of reality: that we are more than our conscious mind tells us we are. This paradigm has been variously articulated by different schools of Buddhism; I will attempt to summarize it here in what is, hopefully, its essential form.

 The idea is that we enter into the field of material existence to learn more about ourselves. We are here to learn how we are related to that state of understanding which is beyond words or concepts, but which is ultimately our essential self, or, our experience of ourselves at a soul level. Through understanding this experience, we can even come to glimpse that which lies beyond our experience of self at a soul level. Some schools of Buddhism provide elaborate images to help convey these concepts. These images, when meditated upon or entered into in a state very similar to hypnosis, reveal teachings about the various paths which lead to that state where the essential self is revealed. In this process, it is important to keep in mind the nature of our experience in the external world. This reveals the road blocks we maintain from lifetime to lifetime in the ultimate realization of the nature of our essential self. Relationships with others are generally the tableau on which these roadblocks are most clearly revealed if we can remain attentive to the information they provide.

 By entering into the images of self or other or by entering into the emotions generated in relationship in an hypnotic state or a dream state, much the same information can be learned. The wrathful deities described in some schools of Buddhist thought may also be seen as the emotional states we must pass through in order to experience the self. These are the emotional states which arise in relationship to others and are more easily objectively understood in a hypnotic state without the defenses of the conscious mind. Once they are allowed full expression, the emotions generated in our relationship with others can help articulate our relationship to ourselves.

 If we find ourselves embroiled again and again within the same emotional state from relationship to relationship, it is a safe guess that we are grappling with that particular aspect in our relationship with ourselves. Or, if we refuse to enter into relationships with others, we can learn about our relationship to our selves by exploring the nature of the block preventing us from creating relationships. By fully integrating and understanding these repeated patterns or blocks, first in our relationship with others, and then in our relationship with ourselves, we are able to continue our evolutionary path toward wholeness.

 This evolution can be understood in many ways. Bill Baldwin, Brian Weiss and other researchers in the past-life regression therapy field believe, like most Buddhist schools, that this particular incarnation in this body is just part of the road we travel to wholeness. The issues we are dealing with in this plane of material existence are those which we did not deal with effectively in that past or other life. Stanislav Grof states that all our issues with ourselves and with others are imprinted at birth. By returning back to our birth through hypnotic regression or holotropic breath work, we receive a map of the issues we need to understand. This understanding allows us to break the cycle of repeated negative patterns in relationship with others and ourselves.

 I think everyone mentioned here is right. There are many frameworks which provide deeper understanding of the patterns lying behind or beneath the seeming chaos of relationships we find ourselves in. One way to understand these patterns is to lay the context of this lifetime within the framework of multiple lifetimes. Whatever issues we generate in our relationships with others in this incarnation are simply issues which were relegated to the unconscious in previous incarnations. These issues may get triggered, highlighted or imprinted again by the nature of our birth so we are, in a sense, reminded of the work we have to do. Or, the issues we have to resolve in our relationship with ourselves may simply be highlighted again in our relationships - or lack thereof - with our birth family.

 Insight and understanding about our relationship with ourselves as it is reflected in our relationship with others can be gained from looking anywhere along this continuum. Most often, that understanding comes from the emotions generated along the continuum. The goal of the work we do in hypnosis is to gently lead ourselves back to the river of feeling which is generated in our relationship with others. We can then allow ourselves to drink again the full emotional experience of whatever we have relegated to the unconscious. We generally refuse to remain conscious to that which we believe causes or could cause us pain. There are many situations, especially as children, when it truly may have been unsafe to feel the full impact of the betrayal or neglect of another. As children, and even as adults, we may lack resources or alternatives; often our only recourse is to ignore or forget what is unacceptable. But that which we choose to ignore or forget does not go away, it simply takes up residence in the unconscious. When we allow ourselves to revisit what we were unable to fully feel or what we found unacceptable in relationship with another, we take another step toward understanding what it is within ourselves that we find unacceptable. By revisiting the emotions generated in relationship in a safe and protected situation like a hypnotherapy session, we can safely examine what it is we find unacceptable in ourselves. By allowing ourselves to cross the boundaries we have created in order to experience the unacceptable in ourselves, we often find compassion and understanding for ourselves. This same compassion and understanding may not have been available or evident to us in the external relationship in which the feelings were generated.

 Emotions which are judged to be intolerable can be relegated to the unconscious at any point in our evolution. Generally, this happens if we find ourselves in situations where we believe that fully feeling the impact of the interaction contained within a relationship would destroy us. It is important to point out that many decisions to block the full emotional impact of a relationship are often made judiciously. They may be made by children who are utterly vulnerable to the damage that can be perpetrated by the members of their birth family or other adults in their environment. Equally judicious is the decision made not to fully experience a particular situation in extreme circumstances such as war experiences, torture or starvation in a present or past life experience. It seems utterly logical to think or feel that we can be destroyed by exposing ourselves to devastating suffering. Although our world views or conceptions of ourselves may be destroyed through experiencing intense emotions, we are not. Part of the learning in opening to feeling is to understand what is affected and changed by strong emotion and what is not. The essence of being at a soul level is only informed by emotion; it is never destroyed.

 One of the little tricks the self at the personality level plays is: don't experience the impact of this relationship fully, because I am all there is and if I experience this fully I will be destroyed, then you, the larger self, will be destroyed. This perception by the personality that it or its defenses to full integration with the greater self can be destroyed through fully feeling is actually true. What is destroyed is the personality at a surface level. By allowing ourselves to fully enter into the experience of relationship, vulnerable to any and all emotions it contains, we always find the path home to the self at a soul level and to wholeness. This is the part of the self that cannot be destroyed. When this part of the self is in contact with experience, the personality is no longer needed as an exclusive arbiter of reality.

 Unfortunately, the core fear of self-immolation in feeling fully which most westerners carry is the driving force behind almost all relationship interactions. What the personality didn't tell us is that the unfelt feelings don't go away, they just hide in the subconscious. These unseen or unfelt feelings drive all of our relationship interactions as they push to become seen and felt once more.

 If we decide anger is an unacceptable emotion, we may go to some lengths to suppress a reaction of anger. We may cloak it in sarcasm (as an external reaction) or numbness (as an internal reaction). In this way, we can pretend that we are not angry. But anger remains behind the reaction used to veiled it and it seeks to be unveiled in order to rejoin the rest of the personality. Therefore, the hidden, unconscious anger will drive the person to become involved in situations where anger can be invoked and felt consciously. If the suppression continues through each attempt the anger makes to be felt, the "ante" gets raised with each interaction. Finally, there is a situation which is charged enough to reach beyond the veil to flush out the anger. The stronger our defenses to feeling are, the more 'disruptive' these situations become in order to shatter the defenses. It can even get to the point where the hidden or suppressed emotion can only be flushed out through highly-charged and even potentially life-changing or life-shattering experience.

 This is particularly true if our defenses to expressing the emotion at an emotional level are completely fortified. In this case, the emotion has few recourses. The most common recourse to expression is physical disease. This suppression of emotion, is, in my mind, one of the genesis of disease. Even the western medical establishment is becoming dimly aware of this progression of disease. In the San Francisco Chronicle of December 30, 1998, there was a report that the AMA had found a strong correlation between chronically depressed patients and heart disease. Chronically depressed people are generally suppressing a whole panoply of emotions. The only way they can become aware of them is to feel them physically because they have refused to feel them emotionally. This correlation is no surprise to anyone but materially-based empiricists.

 In spite of the stakes involved in repressing emotion, this push to blot out entire portions of our experience is common place. I recently received an e-mail from someone who asked me if I could hypnotize him to forget he had ever been with other women so he could marry his girl friend with a "clean slate." I could only guess what emotions he was seeking to obliterate from his consciousness, rather than deal with them and gain the learning they had to offer. By trying to forgo this learning, he would lose the understanding these former relationships with other women contained to teach him about himself.

 The emotional response relationships with others generate is almost always the issue which needs to be dealt with internally in our relationship to ourselves. If fear comes up in approaching intimacy with another, then I must consider what it is I fear about entering into that state of wholeness with myself. If anger comes up again and again in my relationships with others, it is likely I need to look at what I am angry at myself about.

 The task of identifying emotions and entering into them fully is not straight forward. Our relationships with one another and with ourselves are extremely intricate. They weave one set of emotions in one person through another set of emotions in the other. The resulting, observable interactions of the relationship often masquerade as something quite different than the core emotional issues. These core emotional issues are those each person has entered into the relationship to resolve. We find ourselves tangled in a web of skirmishes over territory, control, fear of intimacy or any number of other surface presentations without ever understanding how we got there.

 How can we begin to untangle this web unless we allow ourselves to feel what the relationship is presenting? It is possible the last time we got close to the emotion coming up again for understanding in our current relationship was in the context of a truly dangerous situation. We very well could have been in such a position, especially in that open, vulnerable child state where we had few tools for understanding what was happening in any objective way.

 The child's vulnerability to all types of emotion intensifies the power behind the mental decisions we make about reality as a result of an encounter or a denied encounter with strong emotion. These decisions, often made with little objective understanding, stay with us throughout life. They drive our interactions with others as we try to come to terms with the context in which these decisions were made. The emotional intensity behind the decision informs the defenses we create to deal with what, at the moment of experience, seems intolerable to experience.

 Similarly, objective consideration of our emotional state is utterly impossible for most of us when exposed to life-threatening trauma as adults in this life or other life experience. These are situations where the best course of action is to leave the physical body and abandon the emotion wherever we can. It is understandable we would shut down feeling where we, however mistakenly, perceive we can be destroyed by fully feeling.

 The degree of trauma generating these emotions and the level of repetition of this trauma define the distance we believe we must create between ourselves and our experience. This distance is usually filled in with different types of mechanisms which provide further defense to experiencing the emotions generated by the trauma. We have the capacity to create an enormous variety of psychic structures. They must all be negotiated in the healing process to bring the original experience back to integration with the self.

 Unfortunately, all we generally run into in this attempt to return to the original traumatic experience is the defenses that we created to keep ourselves from feeling it. So we keep trying to return the original experience in relationship after relationship, and wind up only hitting the defenses we carefully constructed to keep us from getting at the original experience. Therefore, our main interaction with others is from the level of these psychic defense structures. And this is hardly satisfying or rewarding because we are interacting with the other only at the level of each person's defenses, not at a soul level.

 It is remarkable how we manage to find others with mirror images of our own psychic defenses to help us break through the barriers we have created for ourselves. Unfortunately, because few people realize this is the basis of their relationship with others, they continually create more pain and more defenses. This is especially true when the mirror images begin to reveal anything about the real pain at the base of the interaction.

 Whenever this happens, relationships generally break down. This is because we do not realize that the authentic experience of the pain the relationship generates in us is actually the path back to the original context in which that pain was generated. If we can reach that original context, we can straightforwardly and honestly grapple with and resolve the emotions held within it to reveal ourselves at a soul level. This is an experience which is always available to us if we allow ourselves to journey to the other side of the web of unresolved emotion we have woven for ourselves.

 This encounter with ourselves at a soul level is precisely what we are all longing for, whether we articulate it in these terms or not. Most of us can only dimly imagine what it would be like to be able to interact not only with ourselves at this level, but to know and understand others at this level through our relationships with them. What a different definition of relationship!

 But before we can arrive at this level of relationship, we must begin to dismantle the roadblocks to that experience. Different schools of psychology base their entire existence on the description and prescription for one or two of the ways different structures or defenses are created. All too often, the conceptualizations of these mechanisms turn out to be imperfect, mechanical descriptions. They may be imperfectly understood without the context of the self at a soul level. And, in my opinion, they are almost always imperfectly treated with medication or external behavior modification methods.

 My experience has taught me that all of these mechanisms, whether they be labeled "Obsessive, Compulsive" or "Attention Deficit Disorder" or "Multiple Personality Disorder" by the psychiatric establishment are the same thing. They are all different degrees of elaboration of that distance we have taken from the experience of fully feeling. What is not needed is an iron-clad diagnosis. What is not needed is a further distancing from the emotional experience through medication. What is not needed is an imperfect adaptation to the distance through behavior modification. What is needed is a full and complete re-entry into the relationships or situations where we first and subsequently took the distance from allowing ourselves to feel.

 We need to re-enter these situations, times, or circumstance in such a way that allows us to completely re-experience the relationship and the emotions it engenders. Hypnosis and age regression, combined with the tools of inner child work and soul retrieval are excellent ways to accomplish this task. It is only by sailing fully into the storm of the relationship where the emotional experience was abandoned that we can reclaim that experience. We can then bring it home to the self at a soul level for greater self-understanding.

 We must compassionately define and understand the defensive mechanisms with which we have littered the distance between feeling and ourselves. This task must be accomplished before we can fully re-enter the relationship and the emotions it contains. This is an important part of the process, because the defenses must be assured that it is safe to dissolve. We must be sure that it is only the defenses that are dissolving and not our essential being, no matter what our fears and lack of trust tell us.

 It is important to fully participate in the dissolving of these barriers to the experience of emotion in our relationship with others. This process is often a mirror image of the barriers we maintain in relationship to ourselves at a soul level. By understanding this process of dissolution in relation to others, we can be more confident when it comes to the more threatening process of dissolving the mirror image of these barriers within ourselves. Much is to be learned here and applied at the next stage of integration with the essential self at a soul level. Once we have negotiated these barriers and once the fully-felt experience of the relationship with the other has been reclaimed, we can begin to understand what this dynamic has to show us about our relationship with ourselves.

 Let me relate an example of this process. A woman I will call Karen came to me for help with a series of physical symptoms which caused her great turmoil. They had been found to have no organic cause through exhaustive tests by physicians. Psychiatrists had given her a label and some pills, which were of no help in alleviating her distress. As we began to explore the various physical symptoms, a pattern of unexperienced emotions to what she unconsciously considered intolerable situations emerged.

 This information, the nature of the emotion she could not tolerate in the experience of her relationships with others, was an affront to her all-competent, "in control" conscious behavior. Hypnosis was definitely in order to breach these conscious adaptations to this behavior. First, we negotiated the terrain of her defenses. The main defense she had developed was the mask of confidence and control. This maintained the distance between herself and her unfelt experience. It is important to restate again that these defenses were placed there for a very good reason. In this case they afforded protection from what she could only perceive to be a very hostile environment in the abuse of her childhood.

 Once we arrived at her unfelt experience, she was able to go through a series of regressions. She re-entered the primary relationships where she had made the decision not to feel. And she breached those decisions to embrace the feelings that lay embedded in the relationships. We unwound a long-standing, repeating pattern of abandonment and the pain it generated in relationship after relationship. We followed this trail through her psyche to all the different situations and relationships where she had attempted to resolve the emotions behind the abandonment. And she was able to see how she had never allowed herself to fully experience these same emotions in the attempt to contact them by repeating the abandonment. She saw how she had, unfortunately, in each situation, only added more mortar and brick to her "competent, unfeeling and in control" mask. This happened as each relationship gouged the intolerability of experienced emotion deeper within her psyche. Finally, because she was unable to resolve these issues by feeling them on an emotional level, her higher self forced the issue by making the pain manifest on a physical level. She was forced to deal with the emotional pain in a physical way because she had managed to evade experiencing the pain on an emotional level. Her magnificently-wrought control defenses precluded any hope of this. When she could no longer move parts of her body, she realized she had to confront what was keeping her immobile: the unfelt emotions.

 We will explore the process of these types of regression - age regression, past-life regression, and birth regression - and the emotions they lay bare in other places in this book. Here, I want to focus on what the tangled, unfelt emotions in relationships with others told her about her relationship with herself. We traveled through layer after layer of anger, sorrow, despair and anguish. These emotions arose from the experience of having been abandoned at birth by her mother, living in several foster homes as an infant, and finally being put up for permanent adoption. And she was adopted into a family where she never felt that she was permitted to show any negative emotion about anything at all, much less about any of the events which brought her to that family.

 But the ultimate issue was abandonment. It was not until she had explored all the ways in which she had been abandoned by others in her relationships with them and felt all the emotions she had tied up in the physical symptoms that the physical symptoms began to disappear. But, in my mind, the most important learning she experienced was all the ways she had abandoned herself by not allowing herself to feel and experience. And this central theme, the abandonment of the self, emerged as the core issue she brought into this life. Her lesson was to see the nature and dynamic of this abandonment and to allow herself to re-unite with the self fully and integrally. The dawning of this insight and the profound nature of the learning she had chosen in this life could never have been experienced or understood had she not allowed herself to return to all of her unfelt emotion frozen in sometimes ancient relationships. If she had accepted the pain killers and labels her physicians and psychiatrists had handed her to deal with her problems, she never would have had the profound, spiritual unfoldment and understanding which lay on the other side of her pain.

 Opening the Doors to the Self - Relationships (Part 2)

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 Another example of how experienced emotion can lead us back to the self can be observed in the case of a man I'll call Rick. He came to me after having seen a succession of psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians and other hypnotherapists over a period of 10 years to help him reduce a problem which had been labeled sexual compulsive/obsessive disorder. He had seen a behaviorist who taught him to imagine he was indulging in his compulsions just when a policeman or other authority figure entered the picture. This did help in reducing some of his behavior for a short time, but he was still left agitated and seeking some outlet for his agitation. A psychiatrist had prescribed a drug for him which helped him somewhat by reducing his desire to act out his compulsions, but the drug was very expensive and left him feeling very tired. Another hypnotherapist gave him suggestions to help him enter a trance to divert his attention to a pleasant scene whenever he felt his compulsions getting out of control. This helped some of the time.

 After our initial interview, it seemed pretty clear to me that all of this behavior was a compensation for a sense of powerlessness. I gently questioned him around this subject and, although the idea he ever felt powerless first seemed utterly impossible to him, he eventually confessed to having felt powerless in his early relationships. Again, we negotiated the defenses to the experience of powerlessness through hypnosis and entered into these early relationships. He entered many different situations and relationships and allowed himself to feel the anguish and shame at the debasing abuse by his early family members. By doing this, he was able to transform his relationship to his sense of powerlessness through fully feeling. He was able to find some peace from his compulsions.

 But the most important learning from this process of re-entering into relationship to experience unfelt emotion was, again, the understanding he gained about his relationship to the authentic power of the self. It was not until he allowed himself the full range of emotion he felt in feeling powerless at the hands of others that he was able to see the ways in which he disempowered himself. He did this by separating himself from the experience of his power even as he separated himself from what he perceived to be intolerable emotions. As he was able to restructure his sense of self based on this understanding, he was able to experience the authentic power and courage he had not allowed himself to touch. For he had separated from his power even as he had separated from the intolerable emotions. When he was able to allow himself to bridge this separation by going through the pain of powerlessness, he was able to touch his power again. And his compulsions diminished permanently.

 One last example of the way we seek to flush out the feelings we have either refused or been unable to experience in prior relationships can be found in the dance of fear and hope between two people I will call Peter and Jane. They came to me seeking help in understanding the fiery dynamics of their relationship through past-life regression. Through one lifetime after another of incompletely experienced emotion, an interesting dynamic emerged. Based on each person's pool of unexperienced emotion, each had a different, yet utterly complimentary set of emotions he or she was seeking to flush out and experience in relationship with the other. The striking complimentarity of their issues brought them together and had kept them together, locked in dance of strife and turmoil they could not find their way out of.

 By identifying the underlying patterns from their subconscious through hypnosis, the conscious manifestation of those patterns began to take on a more coherent form. This pointed to the issues each of them had with their own, separate issues of individuation in this incarnation. Jane's relationship lesson with herself involved learning to trust her connection to herself at a soul level. Peter's relationship lesson with himself involved learning to have more compassion and less judgment of his anger in order to resolve his deep-seated anger with himself at a soul level. Both were looking for triggers to the experience of the emotions around these core issues in life after life and in relationship after relationship with one another. These triggers could be found in the quotidian tasks of the day, such as shopping, where a simple decision over what to make for dinner took on cosmic weight. The basic pattern underpinning all these day-to-day interactions is as follows:

 Jane fears (but unconsciously seeks) connection

 Peter seeks (but unconsciously fears) connection

 Peter establishes a connection.

 Jane begins to trust the connection, but feels she has to be in control of the connection in order to continue to trust. She begins to make more and more impossible-to-meet demands to test the connection.

 Peter resists the control she is exerting by failing to meet simple promises. This gives him a reason to not only try to re-exert control, but to prove he is right to be angry with himself for having failed to keep his obligation.

 This gives Jane a reason not to trust him and an excuse to break the connection.

 This gives Peter a reason to vent his anger.

 This proves to Jane that connection is dangerous.

 This proves to Peter that his anger is unacceptable and so he is unacceptable.

 They are both sent back to their opposite corners.

 Jane fears (but unconsciously seeks) connection

 Peter seeks (but unconsciously fears) connection

 until the next dance begins.

 Allowing ourselves to feel is actually a very simple method of resolving many manifestations of imbalance. Sometimes, I think my whole practice is just helping people feel again. The amount of fear we carry with us from relationship to relationship is staggering. Our society has become a massive exodus from this fear: buy this car, wear these clothes, marry this rich guy, and you will be never have to feel anything but happy again. But this diminished acceptance of feeling just compounds the cruelty and abuse we tolerate in our relationships. Because we are blinded to our feeling of distress by following the dictates of material culture, we cannot imagine the level of distress we inflict on others. And so the cycle begins again. We reel from relationship to relationship, hoping and yet fearing that the dynamics of the relationship will finally touch all the feelings we have banished to the subconscious. If we can just learn to allow ourselves to be in the authentic experience of emotion, we can allow the understanding which emerges from it to lead us home to the self.

 Our relationship difficulties often spring from seemingly innocuous triggers. These triggers make conscious the material we have purposely made unconscious. This decision was usually made at some point when we determined we could not safely experience the emotions involved in interacting with reality. Yet we know we must eventually bring the fully felt experience back to the self at a soul level in order to glean what can be learned from the process. Relationships serve as exquisite triggers to this information. This is because we must return to any experience again and again until it is understood and integrated. Relationships with others allow us to do this.

 It is already difficult enough to really perceive what our emotional entanglements with others in present time are trying to reveal to us about ourselves. But the process of really entering into the territory of our past relationships and the way they reflect our relationship with ourselves is even more complex. First, it is important to realize that we are not just one aspect of our being. There are many parts of us which are, in fact, at different levels of maturity and understanding. We have all seen the stereotype of the brilliant college professor who perceives and understands theoretical and intellectual complexity with ease but who functions at the level of an embarrassed thirteen year old in social situations.

 Although most of us can conceive of two spaces simultaneously, we find it hard to imagine two times existing simultaneously. Jung realized that "There are worlds within my mind which cross the boundaries of time and personality." These are the worlds which we must open to in order to understand our past decisions to feel or not to feel fully. These worlds are contained within the context of relationship. They haunt our current relationships with others and reflect our fundamental relationship with our selves.

 But how can we create a path to illuminate these three relationships: our relationship with others in the present as a reflection of the emotional issues with others in the past, which are both reflections of our relationship with ourselves throughout time? I have found that using the paradigm provided by inner child work addresses the way various emotions present themselves in each of these relationships simultaneously.

 It is unfortunate that the idea of discovering our inner child has been the butt of so many late-night talk show comedians' jokes. This is an extremely powerful tool for addressing emotional realities experientially rather than intellectually. There is an enormous difference between understanding an emotion such as anger intellectually, and actually allowing the anger to course through our veins and learn what it has to teach us on emotional and spiritual levels. Inner child work allows this latter understanding to emerge fully. Some schools of Buddhist thought recommend the entry into the images of the wrathful deities through meditation in order to understand deeply the nature of emotions. In hypnotherapy, we must allow ourselves to enter deeply into the relationships where our emotions are frozen. We do this in order to understand what led us there and what can lead us out.

 The following is a recreation from notes taken during a regression where the tool of inner child discovery was used to help a 50 year old man. He had come to me because he kept experiencing numbness on his left side which had no organic cause according the many tests he had undergone at a local hospital. He was also experiencing the break up of a marriage which had left him completely confused. The most remarkable thing we discovered in exploring the numbness in his body was that he had literally no capacity to feel anything at all in any of his relationships. The idea of experiencing joy meant as little to him as the idea of experiencing fury. It was as if he was missing a whole set of colors in his relationship to the world. There was black and white - awake and sleeping - but nothing else which colored his emotional world. I knew we had to find the way back to feeling through the numbness. After several sessions of pure hypnotic suggestion that it was safe to feel, we had the following session.

 At the beginning of the session, he reported that he had not been able to get a particular tune out of his head, but that he could not remember when he had ever heard it. After hypnotic induction, I asked him to keep humming the tune until he received information about it. This information could come either in the form of an image, or sound, or word, or set of words, or just a feeling, or intuition.

 C: I see a little boy lying in front of one of those old radio sets.

 T: What is he doing?

 C: He is listening to music.

 T: What is the music like?

 C: He is listening to this song in my head.

 T: How is he feeling as he listening to the song?

 C: It is a sad song.

 T: How is he feeling as he listening?

 C: Sad, I guess.

 T: Where is he feeling this sadness in his body?

 C: In his left shoulder.

 T: What is that feeling in his left shoulder like? Is it hot or cold? Or tense or loose?

 C: It's tense. It's hard.

 T: How is your shoulder feeling now?

 C: Tense and hard.

 T: Can you take some breaths into that place in your shoulder, and as you exhale, just allow any sounds or words or images to rise and come out with your breath.

 After about 5 minutes of this breathing, a tear appeared on his cheek.

 T: What are you experiencing?

 C: The little boy is so sad.

 T: What is he sad about?

 C: He hasn't eaten in 2 days. He's cold. His mother hits him when he complains.

 T: What decision does he make about these feelings?

 C: Don't feel. It is just cold. That's all.

 T: I'd like you to go there now to that room where the radio set is. I'd like you to go in as an adult, bringing with you all of the knowledge and experience you have gained in your life and see that little boy lying down in front of the radio. How do you feel when you see him?

 C: I feel sad.

 T: How do you feel about this little boy?

 C: I feel really sorry for him.

 T: What would you like to do?

 C: I want to keep him warm.

 T: What would be the best way to do that?

 C: Hug him.

 T: So just allowing yourself to put your arms around him and draw him to you. How does he feel as you do this?

 There is crying for about 5 minutes.

 T: What do you want to say to him?

 C: That it's okay.

 T: What's okay?

 C: It's okay to feel the sadness.

 T: What do you want to tell him about his mother hitting him when he complains?

 C: That it's not okay. That it is not his fault that he is hungry.

 T: How does he feel when he hears that?

 There is crying for another little while.

 C: He feels better.

 T: What do you want to tell his mother about hitting him?

 C: I can't talk back to her.

 T: Just allow yourself to speak to her now as an adult with all of the knowledge and understanding you have gained from your life. And allow yourself to know that her higher self is present as well as the part of her you already know. What do you want to say to her?

 C: It's not okay.

 T: What's not okay?

 C: It's not okay that she is hitting the boy.

 T: How does it make you feel that she is hitting him?

 C: Mad.

 T: Where are you feeling this sense of being mad in your body?

 C: My left arm.

 T: If that anger in your left arm could speak, what would it say right now?

 C: I hate you.

 T: Can you say that again?

 C: I hate you.

 T: Can you say that again, a little louder?

 C: I hate you.

 T: What else do you want to tell her about this little boy?

 C: You hurt him. I hate you for hurting him.

 T: How does your mother react when she hears this?

 C: She is shocked that I am talking back to her. She is angry.

 T: How does she feel when she sees how badly hurt this little boy is.

 C: She feels bad.

 T: What does she say?

 C: I'm sorry.

 T: How does that make the little boy feel?

 C: Better.

 T: What can you see about your mother from this perspective that you could not see as a little boy?

 C: She is scared.

 T: Scared about what?

 C: She is scared that there is no food.

 T: How does that affect your understanding of what happened here?

 C: It wasn't her fault. It wasn't the little boy's fault.

 T: What isn't her fault?

 C: It isn't her fault that there is no food.

 T: What isn't his fault?

 C: That he complained.

 T: What do you want to tell this little boy about expressing his feelings?

 C: That it is okay to express them. He isn't bad if he expresses his feelings

 T: How does that make him feel?

 C: Better.

 The session went on for a bit longer in this vein. This is the learning he drew from this session :

 It was okay to allow himself to feel. He was not "bad" for having feelings. This realization was central in helping him approach himself in later sessions. Once the fear of his "badness" was resolved in later sessions, he was able to see how this fear of feeling his badness kept him from feeling anything. We were also able, in later sessions, to explore how this fear of feeling anything would make him "bad" and how this perception was preventing him from feeling the love he had for his wife. By allowing himself to feel the love and caring he had for this little boy, he was able, in later sessions, to break through to experiencing love for his wife in a way he had not encountered before. * He could allow himself to feel more than just the cold, or numbness. It was safe to express those feelings by allowing his side to "thaw." Many more feelings came tumbling out of the numbness in later sessions and the numbness began gradually to subside. * That he was not alone. He was able to call this child home to the self at a soul level. He was able to allow him to feel the full support that he had to offer the child by coming from another time and space than where the child had been frozen. This allowed him to be there for himself as an adult in his relationship with others in a way which did not require him to "freeze" other people out of his conceptual understanding of the world.

 None of these realizations which touched so many aspects of his being could have been made on so many levels at once without the use of the inner child paradigm. The changes he was able to make in his life from the snippet of a tune that this child had heard could never have been affected so quickly or so profoundly without the application of this set of tools.

 The importance of understanding ourselves through the lens of relationship becomes even clearer when we consider that these relationships are not limited to the time and space contained within conscious-mind reality. As we expand our knowledge and understanding of other parts of our being, we open ourselves to the information they have to offer us about the nature of the self at a soul level.

 What is Depth Hypnosis?

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 Depth Hypnosis is a synthesis of Transpersonal Psychology, Shamanism and Hypnotherapy, and Buddhism. The following description is especially helpful for those who might be considering entering the advanced training course in Depth Hypnosis.

 The philosophy underlying transpersonal psychology - that true healing can only take place when one recognizes one's place within a much larger context of the shared experience of the soul - is the underpinning of my practice. The techniques of shamanism and hypnotherapy provide the catalysts for healing within that context. The differences between the disciplines of shamanism and hypnotherapy are much fewer than the similarities. Both seek to relieve dis-ease arising from the mental, emotional or spiritual body and affecting the physical body. Both see physical disease as an outgrowth of an imbalance in any one of the other bodies. Both seek to relieve this dis-ease by interacting, in an altered state, directly with the mental, emotional or spiritual bodies, often using the physical body as an entrance into the more subtle bodies.

 Although many schools of hypnotherapy seek to place the hypnotherapist in a position where the patient's will is surrendered to the hypnotherapist, this is not the way I work, nor the way I believe a hypnotherapist with integrity should work. In schools of shamanism, which are not involved in the "black arts" such as casting curses or affliction, the idea of aligning with the one's own and the patient's helping spirits is a given. In the type of hypnotherapy I practice, and in the type of shamanic work I do, I seek to align my will with the higher self (in the parlance of hypnotherapy) and/or with the helping spirits (in the parlance of shamanism) of the patient.

 Both schools of healing recognize that the patient has access to the answers behind his malady, but may not have keys to that access. In traditional shamanism, it is the shaman who seeks to find the key to the illness and unlock the healing potential. In hypnotherapy, a good hypnotherapist leads the patient to these keys through careful questioning and helps the patient insert the keys into the lock, which will release healing. In my opinion, this is the principal difference between traditional shamanism and hypnotherapy. But even this difference is bridged in my practice because I see myself as a teacher whether I am working as a hypnotherapist or shamanic practitioner. In either case, I as I see myself as a teacher, learning about the patient as I work, and using what I learn to help the patient know himself. To be effective in this work, I have to be sensitive enough to know when and where my patient is ready to pick up the keys (and have me function as hypnotherapist) and when and where I need to hold him until he is ready (and so have me function as a shaman).

 The main tools of shamanism which I personally use to enhance my skills as hypnotherapist are the shamanic journey and the merging with and/or channeling of helping spirits. Through the journey I gain access to higher wisdom and fountains of life energy which enliven me and help me continue clearing my own issues. This helps me constantly expand the amount of power I can bring to any hypnotherapy session. In a way, the spirits work with me directly in the same way I work my hypnotherapy clients. At the same time, it could be said that I am a translator for my patients who have not yet learned to work directly with spirits. I let spirit work through me so they can have a solid, material-world interface with the knowledge coming through spirit. As they get more and more comfortable with the honesty this communication affords, I can pull back more and more and help them create their own connections to spirit. It could be said I am like a transformer which steps down the energy of spirit into words, while at the same time helping my patient to become open enough to step up to receiving the information from spirit directly. If I do my job right, I become only a step on the journey the patient takes on the journey to the self.

 My job involves helping them clear blocks to the core self by pointing out to them what the spirits are pointing out to me about them. By merging with helping spirits while the client is an altered state I hear questions I pose my clients while they are in an altered state. Thus, we are both in an altered state when we are working. The altered state provides a field of access to information that is normally blocked in conscious state. At the beginning of my work with any patient, I enter into that state through the shamanic techniques of merging and I help my clients enter into it through hypnotic induction.

 Nonetheless, it is always my goal to help my patients take as much ownership as possible of the negotiation of communication pathways to spirit. This is not a skill that is taught to people through any of the traditional educational means of our society. It takes some people longer than others to own this process. I will often start a person out using hypnotic techniques exclusively in order to clear some of the more persistent or developed blocks to the core energy centers. People who are lost in viscous circles or stuck in destructive patterns (which, ironically, were almost always developed to keep them 'safe') do not have the ability to sustain a clear pathway to spirit. As they clear these blocks through hypnosis and dream work (another fountain of information arising from altered states), they begin to get a clearer idea of the nature of their core energy. This helps them sustain the focus needed to begin to establish and deepen their own links to the higher self and helping spirits. Once I see they are able to maintain focus, I will teach them to journey and to meditate.

 I will help them learn what I call the "language of the soul" by teaching them to unlock the images through which the higher self and helping spirits communicate. My knowledge of this language comes directly from my own merging with spirit and through journeying. It is my goal to help everyone become a shamanic practitioner for their own healing. But I have to start with hypnotherapeutic techniques because they are almost like a bridge between the flat, linear world of the conscious mind and the full-blown, multi-dimensional world of spirit in which shamans dwell a good deal of the time. More and more, I turn over the process to them, so that they continue their healing without me and so that they can have the great and humbling experience of working directly with spirit.

 Journeying is the very best technology I know for returning personal power to the core self. This loss of power, is in my opinion, at the heart of every imbalance I work with: depression, addiction, compulsive behavior, "bipolar" or "multiple personality" states, phobias and physical imbalances. Through hypnotherapeutic techniques, I can help a person create a platform through which they can begin to commit to taking responsibility for the care and maintenance of their core energy. The journey then becomes the vehicle through which they can refine and deepen that commitment through the gathering of power and the submission to the initiations the spirits expose them to. Not everyone is able to sustain this commitment on his or her own, so I often wind up acting as an anchor for this practice.

 To be truthful, I always ask to work with people who not only are willing to take this journey for themselves, but who are interested in dedicating their healing to the service of others. Not everyone is able to take the journey to the core self all the way to the point where they can become conduits of healing energy for others. In this case, I work with them only hypnotherapeutically; they generally clear the imbalance they came to work on, and then move on with their lives. It is always a privilege for me to work with someone willing to try and sustain the path to spirit on his or her own. It is always a privilege for me to bring someone to the doorway where they take the step into communion with the higher self or helping spirits who will then guide them in the healing of others.

 The path to that doorway is through hypnotherapy, dream work drawn from transpersonal psychology, and the teaching of the shamanic journey. I act as a guide along that path until my patients are ready to trust enough in their helping spirits and higher self to become their own light on that path. And ideally, until they are ready to become a light for others on that path, serving in whatever way their gifts allow. In a way, I see myself as a servant of spirit who helps others prepare to become servants of spirit themselves. I do this by using the tools of hypnotherapy to clear the unconscious blocks to the core self. I do this by teaching my patients the language of dreams so they can begin to identify the information they are being given regarding their own evolution. And I do this finally, by teaching my patients how to journey.

 I see hypnotherapeutic techniques, dream work drawn from transpersonal psychology and shamanic techniques as lying along a spectrum of healing which is entered into through the altered state. The way I work with this spectrum in helping others heal themselves is guided and informed by the information I get through my own dreams, my own journeys, my own merging and channeling of spirit. I would be unable to sustain the focus I need to use these powers the way that I do if I had not undergone (and continue to undergo) the clearing provided by hypnotherapy. I see the use of hypnotherapy and shamanic techniques as a vital partnership with transpersonal psychology techniques and Buddhism in the healing of deep wounds that remain untouched by traditional forms of therapy.

(The Opportunity for the Reconciliation of the Shadow in Dying and Bereavement)

 When a loved one is dying or has died, our defenses to all of the complicated aspects of our relationship with that person are often shaken. If we are lucky, we are less able to keep in place all the unconscious agreements with that person and we are afforded a time to explore those agreements and how they affect our ability to be honest with ourselves. To deepen this process, it is often helpful to use hypnosis and its ability to further weaken the conscious defenses we have to death in order to more fully understand ourselves.

 This part of the grieving process, this deeper exploration of the meaning of how death highlights these hidden places in our relationships, is often masked by the homilies of organized religion, the need to save face in front of family members, and the urging by well-meaning friends to just get on with our lives. Even if we find we are able to explore these places, we rarely have the luxury of doing so with the person who is dying.

 The pain of exposing these issues can be too overwhelming to someone who has already entered into the struggle between the inevitability of dying and desire to live. However, if the person can perceive the enormous benefit of exploring these unconscious agreements with someone who is willing to help and with the help of tools such as hypnosis, the dying process can become much less of a struggle. This is because the desire to live can often serve as a mask for the desire to resolve and understand the issues we have avoided before dying.

 If one of the reasons we decide to incarnate is to make explicit as much of the self as possible, it is hard to die a "good death" when the process of revealing all we have tried to avoid has not been addressed as fully as possible. During life, especially one lived within the confines of the extremely material culture of the west, we tend to indulge in every activity possible to keep us from our task. This task is to fully explore all the aspects of the self we have set out to explore in this particular incarnation.

 One of the reasons we avoid doing this is the fear of the contents of what Carl Jung calls "the shadow." All of our activities and the nature of our lives, is of course, intimately connected with this part of ourselves which we would prefer to believe is not there at all. We can choose to undertake the process of flushing out the contents of this shadow side through the use of hypnosis without some pressing external event such as death acting as the trigger. But most people do not want to be drawn into this task because we don't realize how important it is or that it is even a task to be undertaken at all. We may only sense how insecure we feel when we allow ourselves to pause in the construction of the edifice of the external personality. The fear of actually feeling the devastation of the disconnection with the self through the denial of the contents of the shadow is usually avoided until something like death asserts and unequivocally defines the extent of the disconnection.

 So death has a way of showing us the futility of our efforts to create a self which is divorced from whatever we have relegated to the shadow - be it a sense of unworthiness, of unacceptability, or whatever. Death has the effect of bringing all of our justifications and "drivenness" to create a life free of the contents of the shadow to a halt. When the machinery of the creation of the false self which is created to indulge in this pursuit can no longer continue in the face of the truth and honesty of death, it is a perfect time to begin exploration of why we felt we needed to relegate parts of ourselves from open and direct interaction with life.

 If, with the encouragement of the presence of death, people who are intimate with one another allow themselves to find they are living double lives with each other, they can integrate the two paths into a fully explicit relationship which releases both parties - to death or to life. In the face of the honesty of death we often find that one life of the relationship is based on the direct interaction of the contents of the shadow and one life of the relationship is based on the interaction of the external, fabricated personalities. The latter is, as we have seen, predicated on the contents of the shadow anyway.

 This exploration, in a way, just highlights the way in which the contents of the shadow have been bent, almost as light through a prism, to manifest in the forms of the external personality. By integrating the images created by avoiding the contents of the shadow with the actual contents of shadow on all levels - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, tremendous growth and understanding occurs. Usually, this type of exploration needs to be done in hypnosis because even in the compelling presence of death, fear and the defenses it tends to engender can still be active.

 The understandings which arise from this process can come from not only the exploration of the relationship, but from the ways in which the relationship highlights the relationship we have with ourselves. This latter relationship is, in fact, the most important one, because this is the relationship which does, in fact, survive death.

 This is why it is possible to undertake the exploration of the shadow within ourselves and the relationship with another even if only one party of the relationship is ready or able to do this exploration. This is because all external relationships are really only the externalization of the relationship we have with ourselves.

 If it is true that we take with us from one life to the next all the unresolved issues around our relationship with ourselves, it is important to understand the dynamics in which we reject ourselves. It is also important to understand exactly what it is about ourselves that we are rejecting. This information can be most readily highlighted in our external relationships with others and the unconscious agreements they are predicated upon.

 Ideally, the task of rediscovering this information can be undertaken directly with the person or persons involved, but it is rare that everyone who is party to a relationship is willing or able to explore the relationship at this level at the same time. This is especially true when all the fears we have of death are insistently present due to its impending approach.

 As we have seen, if we are lucky, our defenses to this level of exploration are shaken with the imminence of death. But it is equally likely that we may decide to start reconstruction of our defenses in an effort to keep death and all that it reveals at bay. If someone chooses this latter course, there is nothing to do but wait until they are ready or until they feel safe enough to undertake the task. Unless we feel safe in undertaking this task it is not possible to explore honestly the contents of the relationship which have been held "underground" but which, as we have said before, are the actual basis of the relationship.

 So even if the person who is dying is unable to undertake this task, or if the person we have a relationship with has already died, we can still explore this territory either alone, or, more likely, with the help of a skilled counselor. Naturally, I have found that hypnosis is an excellent vehicle to use in the exploration of this inner terrain. And I have found that people who use this tool at the moment of bereavement or impending death are able to move quickly and effectively to understand and embrace the parts of themselves that death has forced them to review.

 Sometimes, just watching the struggle that a loved one goes through in trying to maintain the false mask of the personality designed to hide the contents of the shadow in the face of death is all the encouragement we need to do this work before the time of our own death. Even if we allow the mechanisms of our false self to prevent us from having peace in life, we are generally willing to enter into an exploration of that which is driving the mechanism of the false self in order to at least attempt a peaceful death. The alternative is just too painful.

 If we can meet the honesty of death with the honesty of the self, we may find that the struggle to let our loved one die is the same as our struggle to allow our false self die. This involves embracing all the aspects of ourselves, including the shadow's contents. The self longs to know itself in all its aspects - even those aspects which we feel we have to reject in ourselves.

 We all have different reasons and circumstances which bring us to the decision to relegate certain aspects of the self to the shadow. And every person relegates different qualities of the self to the shadow. Generally speaking, however, these decisions are based on the assumption of "unacceptableness" of those qualities - whether these qualities were initially unaccepted by the parent, schoolmates, personalities in other parts of the psyche such as in past lives or dreams - we ourselves inevitably become the main arbiter of self-rejection.

 By coming to terms with the nature of how we have rejected ourselves, we can become more open to the aspects of our relationship with our dying or dead loved one. In doing this inner work we can open ourselves to the integration of the unconscious aspects of our relationship to the other.

 The struggle of the individual to die or our struggle to let that person die, can be alleviated as the dissonance between the two levels of reality within the relationship is resolved. So even if the person who is dying is unable to fully participate in this process, we can bring the help of our own realizations gained from our own inner exploration to their dying process. This is also true in relation to someone who has already died; by undertaking this path of inner understanding, we can release our loved one to death fully and honestly. The reconciliation of the contents of the shadow both within ourselves and within our relationships with our dying or dead loved ones through the understanding of the nature of that which we have kept hidden is a gift we can give ourselves and each other.

 But even when we are unable or unwilling to explore ourselves and our relationships at this deep level in order to die as consciously as possible, the grace of death and its utter acceptance of who we are wherever we are in our self-understanding is a constant learning. My work with the dying through the Zen Hospice Project has helped me see how the dynamics I have described above either play out or remain unaddressed in many different situations. It has also given me a glimpse of the possibilities contained within death and the importance of being able to meet them as fully and consciously as possible.

 It was a surprise to me to realize that most of the people who are at the hospice - both those who were dying and those who are close to them - have little or no interest in doing the work described above which would help death be as peaceful as possible. Most of the patients spend a lot of time smoking. One patient spent his entire monthly allowance on 3 cartons of cigarettes although it was clear to everyone - and must have been clear to him - that he would not live long enough to smoke all of them. He did try, though, and he spent his last days coughing and smoking, his skin turning gray and his eyes sinking ever more deeply into their sockets. Others spend a lot of time watching TV, but not really paying attention to it. Few of them read. Most just sit and stare into space.

 Many of the patients are in a lot of pain and receive morphine which kills the pain, but does not allow them many of the options pain-free people have in choosing how they spend their time. So even if they were to choose to undertake resolution in their relationship and with others, the drugs often preclude such choices. Some who are not on heavy pain medication are agitated, but are reluctant to look into the root causes of their agitation.

 I have spent some time at the bedside of actively dying patients who have spent their last days smoking or watching TV. The grace of death is still extended to them even without the work on understanding themselves and their relationships. As I sit in the room and watch their chests heave and their eyes roll, I feel very privileged to be there with them because of the utter acceptance death has of every person.

 The grace of death lies partially in the fact that people are their most authentic selves as they are dying - with all of their pain and worry and fear. Often at the very end, all of the masquerade of the false self is stripped away and there is just the breath and the spirit in the room. The presence of spirit and energy which makes itself so well known to me at these times tells me that although the work of understanding and accepting the self at the deepest levels may not be done by many, the utter acceptance of the entire individual, shadow and all, is death's greatest gift. Often, even though the person has not come to peace with his life, death offers a clear and honest peace, accepting the person at whatever place he has arrived at through his living.

 I remember Michael, who was brought in agitated and terrified from a tenement hotel room. He had not eaten, bathed, or moved for weeks before he was found. Because he could no longer speak, I had no way to communicate with him through words. I imagine he had not been able to do a lot of clear-minded self-exploration in those last weeks, and as a junkie, it is unlikely that he had spent much time in understanding his inner world before that. He was so close to death that there were no veils between himself and his addiction and that which lay beyond it. At the very end, even the terror and agitation faded away as death extended its unequivocal acceptance of him. It occurred to me as I sat with his body afterwards that his death had accepted all of the parts of himself that he had tried to reject through addiction and neglect in his life. I wonder how his experience of his death would have been different had he had the opportunity to do the work in order to consciously understand the significance of this fact.

 I also remember John, whose body and face was horribly twisted as a result of a stroke. He spoke with difficulty and was always full of stories of how he was going to sue the guy who had "done this to me." His bitterness was almost illustrated in the contortions of his body. As he died, his limbs became limber and straight and long and smooth, as his rejection of his life faded into the death's acceptance of him. Again, death had accepted someone and all the ways he had twisted away from his true nature. It would have been wonderful if he had been present enough with his authentic self to fully comprehend and accept the magnitude of this grace of acceptance.

 I also remember Juan , who had been sure he would cure himself of his cancer and was furious when he realized he had been deluding himself. He died a painful, self-involved death, agonizing with every breath because of the anger he had at God for not saving him. When he was still well enough to step out of the delusions of rescue, he had not taken the opportunity to see what it was within himself he felt he needed to be rescued from. I wonder if he had been able to stop distracting himself from peering into the shadow by putting his energy into an impossible rescue if his death could have been easier. He rejected death as strongly as he rejected himself yet death was, again, all-accepting.

 For those who are left behind, the possibility of resolving at least some of the issues of their relationship with the person who has died as well as how this relationship reflects on their relationship with themselves opens and closes without many of them taking the opportunity to embark on the deeper exploration contained within the presence of death.

 Even if we are willing to explore the contents of that which we have disconnected from, we often do not know how to begin. There is little in western culture which would support and guide us should we choose this path. Without the help of hypnosis or some other powerful path to the self, we wind up putting the exploration of the shadow on hold until some cataclysmic event like the death of a loved one or the realization of the imminence of our own death makes a dent in the mirage of our life.

 Life is so short. We must enter into every experience completely - including the experience of our pain in confronting that which we have relegated to the shadow. There is no hiding from it, and if we cannot face it in life with our faculties more available to us, our deaths can become nightmares. Or worse, our deaths can become a moment of grace we are unable to accept and embrace because we have not been able to accept ourselves. If death truly is a passage from one level of consciousness to another - just as birth is a passage into this level of consciousness - we must use our life to prepare as best we can for each transition.

 The goal of this work is the goal of all of the self-transformative work we do in hypnosis: to make all the parts of the self explicit and fully expressed. The parts of ourselves which we do not allow to be expressed fully can often be found in the unconscious agreements we have with others, and ultimately, in the unconscious agreement with ourselves to keep parts of ourselves hidden. In the absence of any compelling force, such as death, to do otherwise, unconscious agreements take on a life of their own.

 The choices that people have to make when they are given a terminal diagnosis are wrenching. The loss of a loved one or the immanent loss of a loved one is the most difficult experience many of us pass through. And it is just in that moment of the raw experience of pain that we have the easiest access to that pain we carry within ourselves and the best opportunity to resolve and integrate that which we relegate to the shadow with the full experience of the self. If we can allow ourselves the kindness to explore our relationships with others and ourselves we may be able to accept ourselves with the same grace that death grants us.

 Widening our definitions of reality to include phenomena which are regularly perceived by the unconscious can help us find the path back to the self at a soul level. This is true even if these phenomena are discounted by the conscious mind. Dreams provide a valuable perspective on this journey and their messages are available to us on a regular basis. In order to decipher those messages, we must allow the defenses of the conscious mind to rest . This allows us to use its acuity to organize the information we are receiving in dreams. By using hypnosis to gain access to dream images generated during sleep, we can perceive that we are actually developing a relationship with profound and utterly personal guidance. Dream images become reports on our evolution toward understanding and reuniting with ourselves at a soul level. They point out areas where we are blocked in that journey and they mark breakthroughs in our efforts to know ourselves more completely.

 I use dreams as a door to the psyche when I am working with people who are fully involved in the process of transformation. I find them to be one of the most direct routes into core issues. They quickly highlight the anatomy of the separation from the self at a soul level. There are many approaches to deciphering the meaning of dreams. Some of the most effective begin with returning to that state just between waking and dreaming through hypnosis. Once one has arrived at this state, which Robert Bosnak very descriptively calls, 'the littoral zone' (like the shoreline, it is place between two very different modes of existence), the work can begin. In hypnosis, I ask the client to re-tell the dream he has just told me in a conscious state. Inevitably, more details emerge in the retelling, and new connections are made between the patterns in the dream.

 I will relate a dream here to refer to later in order to demonstrate the various methods one can use the images in the dream. These methods help bridge the gulf which separates us from our authentic experience of ourselves. I will refer to this dream at different points and use its elements as examples of ways to understand a dream at different levels. This dream was dreamt by someone who, during our initial lengthy interview, never mentioned her family of origin. She never mentioned the way her parents had interfered with her ability to contact herself at a soul level because she was completely unconscious to the way they contributed to her sense of dis-ease. She came to me because she just felt something was amiss and because she had vague feeling of fear. After the initial interview, I had few clues as to where to begin based on the information she had given me. This information mainly circled around, but never fully touched, this feeling of vague anxiety. Everything she related to me seemed relatively rosy. Even though I can usually intuit the message behind the words, I did not guess the degree of discomfort which lay behind her competent, sweet demeanor.

 The dream:

 She dreamed she was moving into a new house in a far away land with jungle all around it. The person who had her father's job before him had left the family the house. She found an arbor which she imagined planting beautiful vines on, but her mother told her that this was a very bad idea and that she had different plans for the place. She walked around the yard and beautiful women emerged from the jungle. One took a ceramic heart from under her petticoat and handed it to her. She noticed it was broken. Her father was furious that she had accepted the gift, saying, "You don't know what it is, it could be a work order to go work in a far away city which would be terrible." At that, she imagined going away and working in a far away city and it did not seem so bad. She fell asleep in the arbor that her mother had decorated her way and awoke to find a crocodile emerging from the jungle, ready to attack her. She ran inside and jumped on a table. Her mother jumped on a different table. She was reaching down to bring her beloved dog up on the table with her when the crocodile's jaw snapped shut. She awoke in a state of terrible fear.

 Sometimes, the information contained within the images or patterns will be very explicit and easy to see. In the dream above, the broken ceramic heart could not have been more obvious as a statement about her state. When I asked her how she felt about being handed this broken heart, she was able to deeply access the extent to which her own heart had been broken. I asked her to focus on the feeling in her own heart by asking her to enter into the ceramic heart. I asked her to "become" the ceramic heart. From this point of view, I asked her to describe the levels of sensation of being of that heart. As a result, we arrived at a scene of severe parental abuse in waking life. This had occurred at a very early age and she had completely blocked the experience from her memory. This was the beginning of the journey to discover why she had this vague feeling that "things were amiss."

 This idea of becoming an object or a person in the dream is borrowed from Gestalt therapy, but it takes this idea one step further. In that system, it is a powerful technique for gaining information about one's projections about one's identity onto objects or people in the environment. But all the information is still reflected back on the identity which ultimately needs to change in order for true growth to occur. No doubt, there is much useful information which can be gained from this type of exercise. However, if the object of this type of work is to grow as completely as possible into one's native sense of self without defenses, projections from the false self become meaningless. If the work is successful, there is no longer the identity of the false self to reflect back on. This is because, hopefully, our identity changes from moment to moment as we rearrange our sense of self to be in fuller alignment with ourselves at a soul level. There is really no point in augmenting perceptions of that identity which is only useful insofar as it highlights the degree of separation we are experiencing from ourselves at a soul level.

 But by actually transforming our identity into the object or person through hypnotic suggestion and guided imagery, we can have an actual experience of a new identity. This is because we leave our identity of the false self and its defenses behind. This must happen if we are to step outside the traps and walls we have created for ourselves - for whatever reason. This is because these walls tend to limit the breadth of the experience of the native self. This process is especially effective if the transformation of identity is that into the object or person or image which is a product of our own subconscious. There is no denying its reality, and there is no denying the information gained from this exercise.

 Sometimes the images are coded in such a way as to need some deciphering. It was clear to her that she would be sad that her dog had died. But by entering into the image of the dog through feeling, another level was revealed. This had a much more profound effect on her self-understanding. When I asked her how she felt about the dog, she said he was her constant companion and that she loved him more than anything else alive. She said that he was 'like a part of me.' By returning to the moment of losing him, and using the feeling this produced as an affect bridge, she was able to touch another situation where her mother was, by her deed and words, killing a part of her. She was able to experience this death in an undefended way. Therefore she was able to understand the origin of the pain of separation from herself which her mother had engendered. By allowing herself to explore the anatomy of this separation in dream images she was able to explore all of the places this pain of separation from herself affected. This allowed her to touch her own life force again. This level of self-understanding could not be reached simply by talking about the psychodynamics of her anxiety. This is because 1). the entire reality of this separation is unknowable at that level since the defenses of the conscious mind have necessarily been tightly kept in place and 2). even if this reality were hinted at through psychodynamic conversation and dialogue they would provide few mechanisms to shift away from the old paradigm.

 The technique of using an affect bridge - that is, connecting situations, times or places through the common emotion they share - is used by many hypnotherapists. This is usually used to travel from a conscious state to an unconscious state. It is a very effective way to access information which is hidden to the conscious mind. The conscious mind generally tends to categorize events chronologically or through "rational connection." For example, it might state: "that brown dog looks like the brown dog I had when I was six who was run over by a car." In that statement, rational or logical connection accomplishes what it often does: it leaves out emotional color as a protective device. An affect bridge might connect the following statement to a set of core issues around sadness. By translating "When I wear that brown sweater, I feel sad" to "The brown color of the sweater brings me back to the moment my dog was run over. It connects me to the pain I felt but would not let myself express because my father was there. My father never let me cry, and there is a well of sadness which has been unexpressed all these years." The only difference in the actual clinical situation would be that these latter statements would only emerge after the emotional release the contact with sadness engenders. Usually, this can only occur when the sadness is encountered without the defenses of the conscious mind. This emotional release would most likely connect to other emotions behind the sadness. And so the journey to self at a soul level reveals itself at deeper and deeper levels.

 This way of using an affect bridge, or emotional release, to travel from a non-conscious state to a conscious state is even more powerful than using it in the reverse direction, which is more common. This is because it circumvents even very tightly-held defenses; it allows us to come in the "back door" of conscious experience. I am quite sure that if this person had been working in conventional talk therapy, it would have taken months, if not years, to access the information we were able to touch in a few sessions. This is because her conscious defenses were necessarily, because of the deeply-held pain, so well polished. In a psychodynamic situation, the dialogue about the sweater could have easily stayed at the level of interaction we have when talking about the weather.

 Another technique similar to the affect bridge in connecting dream images to the experience of the larger self is the body sensation or reaction bridge. Here, the physical reactions present themselves spontaneously without the introductory aspect emotional response provides. Often, the physical reaction will lead back to the emotion, rather than vice versa as with the affect bridge. Many talk therapies overlook the wisdom which is held in the body, believing that the mind is the only place where information about emotional imbalance can be obtained. I have found that the body is, first and foremost, a field of integration of experience. By listening to physical symptoms, we can uncover experience we once thought lost to us. The conscious mind cannot erase that which the body experiences. It may try to ignore it, but information remains accessible simply by opening to physical reactions or sensations.

 Many times, dreams will allow us to enter into fully visceral experiences of often-negative emotions. We would never allow ourselves to experience these with our conscious defenses in place. In this dream, she woke up in terror. In waking life, she never allows herself to experience this level of fear. It would be too overwhelming to her self-reliant false self, which she needs because she has found no other way to deal with the terror she holds within her. The dream can produce emotions in us which we don't allow ourselves to acknowledge in a waking state. These unexpressed emotions are the building blocks of the walls we use to separate ourselves from experience at a soul level. The dream images manage to bring us back into connection at this level while the false self is literally sleeping. This allows us to explore and integrate them into a larger, more balanced sense of self.

 On the one hand, the types of coping mechanisms which are sleeping while the dreams weave their messages are absolutely imperative. They allow us to maintain sanity in an insane situation. For example, children who are subjected to constant abuse of any kind by their family dynamics cannot afford the luxury of being fully conscious of the pain the abuse is producing within them. However, once the "insane" situation is over, once the child has grown so he can begin to operate outside of the sphere of the family dynamic, it is important to allow a shift. This shift must occur in the coping mechanisms or defenses which were created to deal with the dynamic of the "insane" situation. This allows us to maintain a clear channel of information streaming in from the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. If there is no shift, we are unable to clearly understand new information. This is because we are constantly cataloguing our experience through our defense mechanisms to past situations rather than perceiving new information objectively. The defense mechanisms must also shift in order for us to maintain clear contact with the self we are trying to preserve by creating them in the first place.

 Unfortunately, this dissolution of the coping mechanism does not always occur spontaneously when the situation it evolved in does. All too often, it tends to take on a life of its own. We find ourselves creating layer after layer of karmic involvement in our attempt to contact the emotions which the coping mechanism just as actively continues to keep us from experiencing. Unless these emotions are allowed their true and authentic experience, we are drawn further and further away from the possibility of a direct and authentic communication with ourselves at a soul level.

 In this case, by gently bringing the dreamer back into the full visceral experience of terror in hypnosis, she was able to unravel a whole series of events where this terror had crippled her ability to cope. By reliving the genesis of the crippling terror, she was able to begin to, figuratively, walk again. The dream allowed her the opportunity to heal which her conscious defenses could not understand or allow.

 There are at least two general categories of images or symbols which emerge in dreams which provide information at different levels of understanding. These two categories are archetypal images and personally-understood symbols. The term, archetype, was coined by Jung to describe the same images which he found recurring again and again in different patients' dream lives. These images often refer to realities which are present at the soul level which all people share, which he calls the collective unconscious. Jung points to archetypal images as containers of vast amounts of information. These images span the realm of the collective unconscious of which dreams are but one emergent phenomenon. Because they are shared, archetypal images can be read from person to person and dream to dream in the same way. Personally-understood images are only relevant in their relationship to the personal meaning of the symbol within the person's own psyche. Images regularly cross the boundaries of these two categories. Nonetheless it is important to keep this possible distinction in mind.

 The function of archetypal images contrasts with the function of more personally-understood images. I have found that when archetypal images emerge, they are indicative of a major shift in consciousness. The more personally-understood images can also function in this way, but generally, they deal with the understanding of ourselves at a more quotidian level. Personally-understood images can be compared in their function with the images of the minor arcana of Tarot cards. This is because they deal with our personal situation. Archetypal images can be compared with the images of the major arcana. This is because they are concerned with our interaction with forces greater than ourselves.

 In practice, it is useful to explore dream images from both standpoints. This is because, as mentioned, these images have a habit of shifting category. In this dream, the jungle - a wild and unconfined place, much like the subconscious - is a classic archetypal image. In this case, she did feel like the jungle was wild and unconfined, so the archetypal reading of it is valid here. However, she could have grown up in a jungle and found it to be a safe haven; in this case the classic archetypal meaning would have led us away from the path of understanding rather than toward it. This is why it is so important to check the nature of archetypal imagery against the language of each individual's subconscious.

 Beyond the information gained through the affect bridge, the body bridge, the use of archetypal and personally-understood symbols and the transformation of identity, dreams can provided more maps. These are maps to some of the issues which contribute to the way in which a person has been separated from his sense of self. These guides are especially valuable when someone has had to deeply sever connections to the self due to severe abuse. In this dream, I was given concrete information about the severity, genesis, and depth of this woman's dislocation from herself in a few sentences. However, although this information had been lost to the conscious mind, the unconscious mind had preserved it in a way which needs only a little understanding to decipher.


 Her issue was a karmic one, a generational thread handed down to her parents from their own parents. Because of her parents' inability to make the extent of the damage of their own acculturation conscious, they created the same damage in their child. (The person who had her father's job before him had left the family the house.)

 One source of her disconnection from her self was her mother's scorn and need to control her daughter's reality. (She found an arbor which she imagined planting beautiful vines on, but her mother told her that this was a very bad idea and that she had different plans for the place).

 One path to reconnection to herself is through connecting with her feminine nature and the power of nature. (She walked around the yard and beautiful women emerged from the jungle).

 The extent of her distress was hidden from her (One took a ceramic heart from under her petticoat and handed it to her.)

 She has a broken heart. (She noticed it was broken.)

 Another source of her disconnection from herself was her father's fear of her being independent and his inability to trust her. (Her father was furious that she had accepted the gift, saying "you don't know what it is, it could be a work order to go work in a far away city which would be terrible.")

 She is able to defend herself a bit better from her father's attempts at breaking her spirit. (At that, she imagined going away and working in a far away city and it did not seem so bad).

 But the only way she can deal with her mother's attempts at controlling her sense of self is to relegate her feelings about herself and her distress at her loss of self to the unconscious. (She fell asleep in the arbor that her mother had decorated her way).

 But on one level she realizes this is ultimately dangerous because she will leave herself open to ultimate destruction by her mother's machinations. (She awoke to find a crocodile emerging from the jungle, ready to attack her). (As she was reaching down to bring her beloved dog up on the table with her, the crocodile's jaw snapped shut).

 Again, her mother was a victim of the same type of destruction of her spirit, but she has used a different way to deal with it. (She ran inside and jumped on a table. Her mother jumped on a different table).

 All that she is consciously aware of in this disastrous internal passion play is that she is afraid. But having no conscious point of reference for the fear, the fear can only be expressed as a vague anxiety. (She awoke in a state of terrible fear).

 I could never have gained this information by asking her about her relationship to her birth family, because she was totally unconscious about this information herself. I wonder how long it would have taken us to get to the level of self-understanding she touched through this dream in one session through more conventional talk therapy.

 This dream amply demonstrates one of the most remarkable aspects of dreams: that one can understand them at constantly deepening levels. One dream is almost like a series of fireworks. At different levels and places in the dream, there are always new bursts of light one had not seen before. I have given up all hope of ever getting all of the information available in any one dream. This is because there are constantly new ones to delve into and because I am limited by own ability to see and understand.

 Dreams have a way of providing us with exactly the kind of information we need if we can just allow ourselves to open to them. The following is a description of just one dream, the only one John remembered in 2 years of working together. It appeared at a time when no other experience could have provided him with the inspiration to continue in the sometimes difficult work of confronting pain honestly.

 John came to me originally because he had been diagnosed with severe dyslexia and anxiety. He had been seeing a psychiatrist for several years and had been taking the drugs prescribed by him during that time. But his symptoms had not appreciably improved. He was hoping that hypnotic suggestions could help him with the symptoms involved with the label of dyslexia.

 John decided to try to confront whatever was at the source of his imbalance rather than settle for simple, external hypnotic suggestion. I asked John to go back, in hypnosis, to the time to when he was first aware of the problems he was experiencing. What followed was many months of twice-weekly meetings where he uncovered layer after layer of abuse - including physical, sexual and ritual abuse.

 On one level, he was relieved to know that there was a reason for his many maladjustments to reality which came into focus through the psychiatrist's diagnosis. But he had tremendous difficulty in accepting that these things had really happened to him. With the torrent of information which poured out of our sessions together, John's sense of self began to shift. I saw this a positive sign since his perception of himself had been so negative. Yet, in giving up this negative image of himself, he was left, as he put it, "with no buoy to hang on to." This loss of the already-tenuous mooring he had in reality was of increasing distress to him. It made it difficult for him to continue to have the courage to continue our work together. No amount of external support seemed to help shift this distress because he was so utterly unable to connect with any sense of support from within his psyche. As he put it, "It is almost impossible for me to allow myself to believe in myself."

 I had always asked him to try to remember his dreams to see if they could offer more information about the state of his internal dynamic. For months, he could report no dream recall whatsoever. Then, one day, after several sessions where he had been unable to continue what he called the "dredging" operations, he reported a dream. This dream marked the shift in his journey back to wholeness.

 At first, he was reluctant to recount the dream because he thought I would think he was being conceited. When he did recount the dream, I helped him to see how clearly it signaled a new sense of identity in formation. The dream was actually very simple, but it was packed with many symbols which were intimately relevant to John.

 The dream:

 Mario Andretti sees John driving and declares that John is Benito Andretti. John knows without a doubt that this is true.

 The following is a reconstruction from notes of the session:

 T:Who is Mario Andretti?

 C:He is greatest racing car driver in the world.

 T:What does being the greatest racing car driver mean to you?

 C:It means that you can do anything. I have always been drawn to racing of any kind.

 H:Why?

 C:Because it means winning, setting records. You are out in front, no one can touch you. You're the first or else you can get better and you can always improve. You are free. Free!

 T:Who is Benito Andretti?

 C:He was Mario's little brother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances at the age of 2, or maybe even younger.

 H:What would it mean if you were Benito, Mario's little brother?

 C:It would mean that I would be part of a big, loving Italian family. The family I always wanted. A family which is really alive and where people interact with each other in a real way. A family which sits down to dinner together.

 T:What else would it mean?

 C:It would mean that I would have someone to learn from. Someone who knows more than I do and who could give me the information I need.

 T:What was it like to know that, without a doubt, Mario's assessment of you was true: that you were Benito Andretti?

 C:I just knew it was true. I knew that I was a great race car driver, that I could drive any kind of car in any kind of race. I knew that I was related to Mario. It was undeniably true, unshakably true. There was no doubt in my mind that Mario was right.

 This simple dream was very significant to John's ability to go forward with the recovery of his sense of self. It filled many of the voids he had been feeling in himself.

 He knew, without a doubt that he could handle any car in any race (the symbolic connection to life's situations is more than graphic).

 He knew what it felt like to be part of a loving family (that he belonged to a greater, beneficent whole).

 He knew he would have Mario to learn from, to help him improve ( that it was possible to go forward with his journey to himself and that he would get the help he needed).

 It is significant that Benito disappeared under mysterious circumstances at a very young age - at about the same time John believes the abuse started. It is also significant that in the dream he has now reappeared. And his return has been validated and confirmed by someone who is admirable, respectable and believable.

 The most wonderful gift that the dream gave John was a sense of utter certainty which he was able to carry over into his waking life. This is something that he had been seeking desperately throughout his life. But this was especially true since he had begun to uncover the memories of abuse. This certainty of his ultimate success is what has brought him through the next level of his recovery. I am quite certain that he would have found it much more difficult to continue and his process would have taken much longer without the insight this dream provided.

 So far, we have looked only at how individual dreams can point to greater realities within our psyches. But there is much information which can be tracked from dream to dream. This tracking reveals ever-more deepening patterns which can bring understanding to the issues we struggle with in conscious-mind reality.

 Robert Bosnak has come up with a remarkable method of tracking this plethora of information from dream to dream. By using his methodology, we become aware of the parallel universes we live our lives in. We also become acutely aware of the patterns and connections between the worlds and the way in which they inform one another without our even realizing it.

 His method involves the juxtaposition of similar images across a series of dreams. This is an innovative technique which creates a map to travel through the psyche even beyond the realm of dreams. This method for individual dream mapping which I use in my practice traces the following steps. I use all of them in mapping my own dream life, but I may only use the information gained in one or two of the steps in any given hypnotherapy session. A basic outline of this method is as follows. For a more in-depth set of guidelines, I strongly recommend his book, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming.

 * Record a series of dreams in a journal.
 * Make a foldout of 20-50 dreams by taping them one next to other, numbering each one and noting their chronological order.
 * Create an infrastructure by making connections and marking similar images across all of the dreams with the same color of colored pencil or marker.
 * Identify clusters: look for themes and bring all the images in each cluster together. Create a separate document for each set of clusters.
 * Muse over the life of the cluster - indulge in free association with the images contained in each of the clusters.
 * Reminisce with some of the images and see what conscious memories the images evoke.
 * Write along with cluster's chronological format: Use one description paragraph for each element or image in the cluster, then rewrite it expanding the meaning of the image, drawing connections between conscious life as in the reminiscence.
 * Use the material generated in the previous steps to write in various genres, i.e. a poem, a story or a dialogue, depending on what suits the text. Weave things that the story reminds you of into the text. These are amplifications which will bring significance to the surface because the dream images will bounce off the surface of similarity. A contrasting story can also be woven into the text, dialogue or poem.
 * Let the work rest and come back to it about 10 days later and see what condensation of narratives and comparisons you can make. Switch clusters around and see if this provides new light on their images.

 A very brief illustration drawn from a series of 10 dreams I dreamed over a 6 day period illustrates this process. The mark "//" defines a separation between dreams.

 The following is an example of steps 1-4 is as follows. This is a cluster of images drawn from about 10 dreams along the same theme of: Foreign countries and languages, new places.

 I am in a new country. At one point, I am taken to a classroom where their writing is on slates - it looks like Russian. I wonder if I am in Russia - with all the secrecy and the high rise, it would make sense - but the script isn't Russian. Someone points to it and I suddenly can read it directly without translation. The words dissolve into English. I see the words: "utility, forge, strength, strong." I hear that language I heard before - kind of like Russian. // They are from all over the world. I hear lots of languages as I head toward the building. People are sitting in the sun - and all seem so depressed. They are speaking all different languages, Spanish, Chinese, they look Indian/Mexican. // The voice I hear is heavily accented with an accent I do not recognize. A Turkish man stops the taxi and tells me something about busses and time. He is fair.// I manage to turn the conversation to Lao Tzu . I am in a far off country. It seems like Europe. // She speaks a language I don't know. Somehow I realize she wants me to help her home to the Serbian quarter of the town. Suddenly, she is a little thin boy whom I lift onto the train and ask for a seat for him in German. There is a man who says he is a Spanish teacher. I say, "Que hablemos espanol" My German is really bad for some reason. I tell him I speak like a CentroAmericana because I don't say "grathias." He is offended, but remains nice. // 2 little fat German kids with rosy cheeks and blue eyes and blonde hair are hassling me by putting white cups on my shoulder with a little water in them. They pretend they did not do it. I turn around and address them with the "du" form. This pisses them off. I find my German and give them 'what for.'


 I do a lot of traveling in my dreams - as I have in real life. On the one hand, I like being an ambassador of sorts for these Russian type people, but on the other hand, I don't like them much. This seems to be true of the way I feel about people (including myself) in general, which I rarely let myself admit.

 These people from all over the world - the third world in particular - are so desperate. I wonder why I am so lucky not to be like them, but I am determined never to be like them - so powerless and helpless. Is this because I feel I really am powerless and helpless in spite of my first world pedigree?

 This Turkish (sometimes Persian) taxi or bus driver figure keeps popping up - sort of the guide who says he knows everything, but does not know a thing. I want to believe him, but know I am fooling myself if I do.

 It is interesting that a Turk would be concerned about time - which seems to be an abstract in that culture. Maybe that is another reason I wonder if he is Turkish - besides the blond hair and blue eyes.

 The people on the train are quite a mix. The Germans are so irritatingly superior to everyone, but the Spanish guy feels superior the Central Americans and does not like me poking fun at his "th" for "s." Everyone in Europe is always trying to feel like they are better than another nationality. I am with the Serb, who is at the bottom of the heap at this time, and yet I address the Germans with du. I have always enjoyed breaking the social rules in Europe - doing something totally shocking (but really very minor) to the mores and rules of the silly hierarchies the Europeans have created. They are comical in their self-importance. Am I ?

 I had no idea my dreams were so filled with far away places. My constant yearning to learn new languages, understand new cultures may be the way I express the need to know all the aspects of myself.

 The following is a bit of short cut to the writing suggested in point 8:

 Accents

 We try to speak

 one another's

 language

 Accents hide our

 misgivings.

 Sound travels

 across the sea

 on sailing ships

 And when it returns

 The ways

 the wind

 has changed

 it makes all of us

 uneasy.

 Words

 A new country.

 Words dissolve into

 incomprehension

 Empty eyes

 look back at me

 as I spiral

 higher and higher

 away

 From the desperation

 of language

 lost

 in lack of meaning.


 This particular set of images taught me a lot about my feelings which I often don't allow myself to act on. In particular, I try not to act out of the negative point of view I have about Germans or even admit that I do have a negative view of Germans. But these dreams do not let me hide from this part of myself. I used this information to look at what it is I find so distasteful about Germans (I had to face that I think all Germans are Nazis, which is a prejudice I would not consciously admit to myself). I had to find those places within myself which reflected the need for this type of outward-directed prejudice. It was like a pheasant hunt: flushing out the hidden hatreds I direct at Nazis and seeing how I direct the same type of knee-jerk, negative judgments at myself. And then, most painfully, I had to face the damage I do to myself in this process.

 This series also amplified my rebelliousness when caught in social hierarchies. This helped me look at the ways in which I am limited by my acculturation and find the ways in which this has crippled my relationship with my self at a soul level. Also, it let me see my deep fear of being powerless as those in the third world are; I realized I often mask this fear with "acts of kindness" toward people from those countries. Surely, there is compassion in those acts, but I was forced to really see that the fear that I am powerless like them drives me to these acts of kindness.

 This is all information that I would not willingly look at because all of it tarnishes the persona of goodness I want to project into the world. But only by embracing these issues can I be truly myself in an authentic way. I doubt I would have access to this information without dreaming because it never would have gotten my past my conscious defenses to these realities which do not allow me to pretend I am always good and kind.

 However, I also learned first-hand and experientially how to look into images and have the information emerge in a completely non-rational way. The experience with the Russian-like language taught me a lot about the process which provides information without using the loop of the rational mind. I definitely would not have had access to the mechanics or experience of this process through the tools available to my conscious mind. And this information is utterly invaluable in my line of work. This work relies so heavily on the dynamics in which information emerges through non-logical channels. This type of information is not available to the conscious mind because of its reliance on logic to organize phenomenon.

 By combining the techniques discussed in the first part of the paper with those developed by Robert Bosnak, we have access to an almost infinite amount of information. If we could spend our days understanding our nights, we would emerge infinitely stronger and wiser - if our conscious defenses could bear this challenge to their domain.

 Needless to say, much of the information available to us through dreams would be lost without the tool of hypnosis to aid in the retrieval of the information. It is almost as though the dream is the ore, hypnosis the smelting process and self-understanding at the conscious level is the ingot. By allowing the information contained within our subconscious to interact with that which is held in the conscious mind, we are made whole in ways we cannot imagine when we are lost in either the unconscious or the conscious mind. Hypnosis is the bridge between these worlds and the way it allows each to inform the other is an extraordinary path to self-knowledge.

 Hypnosis is a very helpful tool for understanding the nature of one's experience at a very deep level. My experience in helping survivors come to terms with the effects of abuse has shown me that hypnosis can help break down defenses to abuse memories. These defenses may have been useful when they were developed but many survivors find that these same defenses become an obstacle to the integration of the information contained in the abuse memories when the survivor begins the process of self-exploration.

 Because most defenses are formulated unconsciously, they can most easily be contacted through the unconscious. Often, the survivor will not even know the existence of the defenses, much less what thoughts or decisions they are constructed from. By exploring the nature of these defenses, usually through contact with the issues they were constructed to cope with, the defenses can be slowly and carefully transformed in a trance state once the survivor begins to feel it is safe to do so.

 The establishment of safety is essential to this process. The survivor needs to know that the transformation of defenses will not leave him or her helpless and out of control. By bringing the survivor into contact with the essential self through guided imagery and meditation, we establish both a base to work from and goal to work toward. In effect, we create a container which can hold all of the emotions safely and keep the survivor protected while the exploration of the nature of the defenses and the issues they relate to begins.

 When I work with abuse survivors, I am less interested in laying down historical fact than in understanding the nature of the person's subjective experience. This idea of staying close to the person's subjective experience regardless of actual external events becomes particularly important when hypnosis has been used in any way as part of the abuse.

 I have found that there is always some level of cognitive dissonance to the hypnotic suggestions laid down during or after abuse. That is to say, there is some feeling on the part of the survivor that 'something is not quite right' around the issues that have been the subject of hypnotic suggestion. The sensation that something is not quite right can manifest as uneasiness, strongly defended irrational ideas, or a complete unwillingness to look at the idea that 'something is not quite right' about a particular sensation or feeling.

 I believe this dissonance arises from the fact that the hypnotic suggestions given during or after abuse do not jive with the person's authentic experience and sense of self. The mind during the abuse is so open to manipulation that the suggestions do take seat in the person's psyche, but because they are paired with the abuse and generally are contrary to authentic experience, the seat they take is uncomfortable.

 My experience with a survivor we will call Jim has many themes consistent with other survivors I have worked with who have been hypnotized as part of the abuse process. When Jim first came to me, he was unaware that he was a survivor of severe parental abuse. In fact, he vehemently stated again and again that his mother loved him very much. The vehemence in these statements was a red flag for me, and I filed this information away, not realizing where it would take us as we began the process of hypnosis to help him with a physician-diagnosed attention deficit disorder which was not responding to medication.

 There is much to tell about the long process in Jim's evolution in understanding himself and his inability to focus and his coming to terms with the idea that he was an abuse survivor, but I will focus here on how it became evident that hypnotic suggestion had been used to screen from him what had actually happened to him.

 As the abuse memories began to surface in exploring the roots of the attention deficit disorder, Jim was often aware of a very bright light in the middle of the images that were surfacing. When I asked him to focus on the light, he began to repeat the same phrases again and again. One such session revealed the following set of phrases,

 "Your mommy loves you. No matter what anyone else says. You just fell down today. See, your knee is just a little scraped. Those bruises happened when you fell. Poor Jim, mommy helped you fix your knee and made it better. No matter what anyone else says, you know this is true, you know that your mommy loves you every day, more and more and when you look at your knee you will remember that your mommy loves you, your mommy loves you more and more each day."

 It took me a moment to put it together that he had been told to look at a bright light while classically-formulated hypnotic suggestions were told to him after having been abused. As the truth dawned on me, I realized that we would have to focus on uncovering all of the hypnotic patter that had been given to him during or after abuse.

 We discovered that there were many, many different situations in where hypnotic suggestion had been used to distort memory. In subsequent sessions, whenever the light would appear, I would ask him to look into the light and just allow his lips to move; each session revealed a new patter to screen a new memory of abuse. After each session where this patter would emerge, I would present the recorded patter to Jim and ask him how he wanted to erase the patter which was still stored in his memory.

 I never provided him with hypnotic suggestions that he did not write out himself. In each one of the "re-writes" I would include the suggestion that this new hypnotic suggestion would take permanent and total precedence over any hypnotic suggestions he may have been exposed to in his childhood. This worked as a kind of seal to keep the other hypnotic patter from intruding on his sense of self and perception of reality in the way that it had for forty years.

 A big part of this work went beyond simply providing a new hypnotic "tape". The new tape would never had been able to take hold had he not been able to deal with the rage and sadness he felt about having been betrayed in this way. It took a great deal of courage for him to be able to see the physical abuse and the way it distorted his ability to concentrate, but the emotional betrayal of the use of hypnosis to cripple his memory, and thus his sense of self, was in many ways a more brutal process to work through for Jim.

 Because the damage had been created at a subconscious level, it needed to be undone on an subconscious level, by way of a method which was able to contact the way Jim had been conditioned through hypnosis. I am not aware of any process which can provide this repair other than hypnosis. By using hypnosis to explore the nature of his defenses in seeing his mother as anything but a perfect, loving creature, he was able to see how his defenses were keeping him from contacting his ability to concentrate and focus.

 Jim is still coming to terms with many of the aspects of being identified as an abuse survivor, but his attention problems are greatly reduced. He is able to focus his attention and tap into his will to act in ways which were impossible for him before he began the rewriting of these tapes. He is regaining the ability to trust his own experience and make decisions based on it. I am sure if we had not discovered the way in which hypnosis had been used to rob him of these abilities most of us take for granted, he would not have made the progress he has in reclaiming himself.

 Opening the Doors to the Self - Spirit Involvement

 As we have seen there are many paths to self-knowledge. Understanding the self is a complex process because the self is so complex. There are many facets to our being which our conscious-mind awareness generally blocks out. It must do this in order to deal with the very complicated external world we must negotiate in our daily life. The creation of a vehicle from which to explore the external world is one of the primary tasks we have to accomplish as part of our development. For many of us, this development is not as linear or logical as we would like to believe.

 Chaos is around every corner if we cannot find a "home base" in the conscious mind from which to experience the world. And many of us do find ourselves in chaos in pursuit of this center from which to understand the world. Generally speaking, this chaos is due to the amount of trauma we experience at any point in our development. One of the results of repeated exposure to trauma in the development of a sense of self is the appearance of what western psychotherapeutic community calls Multiple Personality Disorders (MPD) or Dissociative Disorders (DD).

 These manifestations of multiplicity or disassociation can be disconcerting to those around us as well as to ourselves. They interfere with our ability to develop a stable base to begin to understand ourselves at a soul level. In this chapter, we will look at different paradigms which can help us understand this multiplicity. We will see how we can actually use these manifestations to understand ourselves at soul level once integration of experience takes place.

 Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Disorder (DD) has only recently been re-recognized within the field of modern western psychology. When Freud's theories reigned supreme in this field, most cases of dissociative disorders were misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. In 1980, the American Psychological Association (APA) officially re-established the legitimacy of multiple personality disorders and defined a separate diagnostic category for dissociative disorders. Since that time, there has been increasing research and clarification of the major differences between schizophrenia and dissociative disorders, including multiple personality disorders. The association's diagnostic manual, DSM IV recognizes dissociative disorders as psychologically-originated mental disorders, originating from psychological reactions to trauma and the stressors of life. Schizophrenia is considered an organically originated mental disorder due to brain/nervous system/ chemical abnormalities.

 However, the phenomenon of vastly divergent "personalities" or behaviors contained within one physical body is not a new concept. It has been described and understood in different ways in healing communities throughout time and throughout different parts of the world. We have seen how multiplicity manifests in our different experiences of ourselves at different ages within one time frame.

 One of the ways multiplicity has been most commonly understood is by shamanic practitioners who view the phenomenon as a type of soul loss or spirit possession. One of the essential aspects of shamanic healing across all cultures is the shaman's journey in search of these lost soul parts. The shaman seeks help in getting the spirit or soul part to move to where it will best serve his patient. Michael Harner, in the Way of the Shaman, reports that it has been understood in almost all pre-industrial societies that a person's physical illness or erratic behavior often has its roots in loss of an essential part of oneself. The illness can sometimes be aggravated by the subsequent use of that lost life energy by non-corporal spirits. This loss can be compounded by the fact that trauma, which is often the triggering event for soul loss, can also allow the entry of spirits into a person's psychic space. This can then play havoc with the individual's mental and physical health. It is generally recognized that soul loss takes place due to some kind of mental, physical or spiritual trauma. It is the shaman's duty to find the lost soul parts and restore them to the individual. He then performs the specific type of healing, such as depossession or extraction, which will supplant the occupying spirits which might be present.

 This idea seems preposterous to the typical western mind. Some anthropologists reporting on the healing powers of shamans in pre-industrial societies have described the ceremonies associated with the restoration of soul and depossession of spirits as a child's game. Some of them describe these rituals in terms which gives the impression that the participants in such rituals take part in a silly mass delusion. In any case, these phenomenon have always been associated with things religious or spiritual from the western point of view. Until recently, they have found no place of observation from within the realm of science or medicine from which western schools of psychology and psychiatry have grown.

 Indeed, the manifestation of the miracles (e.g., a return to sanity or wholeness as a result of interaction with spirits) associated with this type of healing has been branded as quackery. Some members of the western scientific community have rejected it outright. This is true even though no lesser a personage than Jesus was a practitioner of this type of miracle healing. This has left a void in dealing with spirits which the church has tried to fill by charging priests with spirit exorcism or depossession work. By and large, they are ill equipped to understand the nature of the reality the shamans or traditional healers operate in. This is because their core belief systems do not include the maps of healing used by traditional healers.

 The divorce of healing from the realm of the spirit occurred with the supplantation of pagan and other spiritual practices by the advance of Christian missionaries. The services provided by the shaman or witch doctor in retrieving souls and convincing spirits to leave are barely addressed by western cultural structures. Over time, Christian exorcisms have degenerated into little more than the ordering of demons. The type of filibustering behavior displayed by those who do not understand the true nature of exorcisms is an unfortunate and ineffective form of communication. Any healing effect manifests almost accidentally. This is because pagan gods or spirits which might have assisted traditional healers in such practices as depossession are perceived as the work of the devil in many theologies. Indeed, the idea of spirits of all classes are sometimes viewed in this light by some religious authorities. This view precludes the assistance available from a shamanic perspective. The shamanic view understands spirits as denizens of a world which can be known and understood. Their powers are considered to have an effect on our own world. . Shamans, on the other hand, are comfortable working with the elements of the other worlds to effect lasting and permanent change for the better.

 It has been easy to discount the sometimes ineffectual interaction with the spirit world by those who did not understand what powers they are summoning. In this context, it has been easy for scientific westerners witnessing poorly-understood exorcisms to classify them by putting them the rubbish bin. The understanding of these rituals has been cast aside along with myths and stories whose powers are equally poorly understood by the western mind. William James, in his famous Lowell Lectures of 1896, spoke about the nature of possession and its perception by various cultures throughout the ages. He underlines the negative prejudice surrounding it in the scientific circles of his time, which persist to this day:

 "India, China, Egypt, Africa, Polynesia, Greece, Rome and all medieval Europe believed that certain nervous disorders were of supernatural origin. When the pagan gods became demons, all possession became diabolic and we have the medieval condition. The refusal of modern "enlightenment" to treat possession as a hypothesis to be spoken of as even possible, in spite of massive human tradition based on concrete experience in its favor has always seemed to me a curious example of the poor of fashion in things scientific. One has be to 'scientific' indeed to be blind and ignorant enough to suspect no such possibility."

 The refusal to include the idea of spirits in a scientific world view, is, as Michael Harner points out, highly unscientific. A scientist does not reject any possibility out of hand without careful observation and experimentation. Yet this is just what the western scientific community has done to the idea of spirits playing any role in mental health dysfunction. It is possible that the practitioners working in the field of MPD may never suspect that they are working with an entity or spirit possession. And if this were pointed out to them, they would probably ridicule the idea. Unfortunately, I suspect that this is why some people suffering from the symptoms of MPD, which so strongly resembles spirit possession, are not always helped in any lasting way.

 It is a pity that modern psychotherapeutic practices do not include the study of spirit involvement in its approach to MPD. The model of spirit involvement has been well defined and used to great effect in healing in shamanic communities for thousands of years. Along with the failure to recognize or attempt to understand the nature of spirits within western healing methodology is the failure to recognize the existence of the soul. Because this point of view does not recognize the soul, it has no map or possibility of being shown a map which includes the entire nature of the individual's experience. This map includes most of which is hidden to the conscious mind. It consists primarily of memories and experiences, some of which have been intentionally forgotten because they are too painful to remember.

 These memories may arise from one's own current life experience, including the experience of the womb. Or, they may arise from past life memories or even experiences between lives in other realities. In any case, most memories and experiences contained within the knowledge of the soul from other times or realities are re-kindled as an issue in this lifetime. However, the entry point into the process of resolving these issues may occur at any point in the soul's constellation of the issues.

 The entry point may even be found through a spirit which has become attached to any of the events within the constellation of the self. This attachment often occurs during the process of rendering these memories or experiences unconscious. Or, it can occur in the process of traumatization which leads to the blotting out of these memories. The entities or spirits known to shamans throughout time and well described in modern terms by William Baldwin can take hold and create the havoc they do within the individual psyche. It is often the effects of the trauma they are creating which brings a person to seek help. Access to the issues they are "medicating" can often occur through the gateway of the spirit itself, especially in cases of MPD.

 Shamanic healers and psychologists working in the field of MPD, whether they call it MPD or not, do agree on one important element. The imbalance which presents itself and is called DD or MPD or spirit possession has its roots in some type of trauma. Most western psychologists only look for these roots within the waking consciousness of the patient. The more successful actually use the tools of hypnosis to search for the roots of the traumatizing event beyond the reach of the conscious mind's defenses. The most effective healers within the western context are those who look for the roots in a context which is far larger than either of these contexts. They look for the trauma's roots in both the conscious and subconscious mind. If its source is not readily available in the surface areas of the either the subconscious of the conscious mind, they look further. They can trace the pathways provided by the subconscious mind through dreams or other non-ordinary states of consciousness. They track the trauma's roots to perinatal experiences, past life experiences, and encounters with different types of spirit entities.

 William Baldwin, whose work has centered around spirit depossession, defines three sets of entities in his work: human entities, dark force entities and extraterrestrial beings. Shamans practicing the core, trans-cultural shamanism which Michael Harner defines, outline three worlds: the upper world, the middle world and the lower world. These worlds are populated by an almost uncountable number of entities. Some are helpers and archetypal figures, for which Jung is the best translator in western psychology. According to this model, most of the spirits which are causing problems in a person's psyche inhabit only the middle world. These are the spirits defined by William Baldwin. The spirits of the upper or lower worlds are understood to be more helpful and powerful. The shamanic practitioner can call upon upper and lower world spirits with whom he established a relationship for help. They can help with the depossession of troubling spirits and help the client begin the process back to integration and wholeness.

 Western psychology has very few interventions which address the issue of spirit possession. It does have a set of exhaustive descriptions of the external phenomenon associated with MPD or DD type states, which, as we have seen, are very similar to those associated with spirit possession. And it does use some mind-altering drugs to some effect. Neither of these approaches allows access to the internal functioning of the client or his relationship to the spirit which is caught within his psyche.

 The American Psychiatric Association states: "the essential feature of the dissociative disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of the environment." The APA further defines DD as an adaptive response to acute trauma because it provides:

 * Containment of traumatic memories and affects (amnesia barriers)
 * Separation of normal conscious awareness (splitting off)
 * Escape from the constraints of reality
 * Alteration/detachment of self
 * Analgesia (numbness).

 Other schools of thought, including shamanism and past life therapies would agree with this assessment. These are all good reasons for the individual to opt for the alternate reality which can manifest in spirit possession, DD or MPD or other types of imbalances. The following symptoms of MPD, DD, and spirit possession (although not commonly defined as such in western psychological circles) are defined by the APA as:

 "Depression, low self esteem, crying spells flat affect, feelings of being overwhelmed or fatigued or mood-swings, difficulty in concentrating (fading out, detached, distanced), phobic, panic or anxiety symptoms, palpitations, sensations of choking or smothers, faintness, trembling, numbness, tingling, visual disturbances, headaches not relieved by standard analgesics, feelings of unreality, sleep disturbances of nightmare, misuse or abuse of sedatives, analgesic, alcohol, stimulants, gaps in memory, disappearance of objects, forgetfulness, periods of time loss, out of body experiences, sexual difficulties, fear of making mistakes, difficulty in making decision, extreme internal conflict between parts with different 'needs' or 'needs' v. shoulds.', self-mutilation, suicidal ideation, negative outlook on life, and suicide attempts."

 These definitions are helpful for as far as they go in, again, describing external manifestations of internal states. However, when helping a client resolve these symptoms, one almost has to forget the definitions. One must remain totally present with the presentation of the symptoms in order to enter the internal processes of the problem. True resolution can occur only from within the internal processes. Hypnosis is a very valuable tool in helping the client arrive at the moment these symptoms took root in his psyche. It can aid in finding an internal "beachhead" where resolution of the problem can take place. Only by staying with the symptoms and guiding the client on his own journey through the psyche can the hypnotherapist cross the boundaries of western psychology and traditional healing methods. When he can remain present with the client's experience, he can find the tools to assist in the retrieval of the lost soul parts or dissociated areas of the psyche.

 Practitioners with the most detailed maps of the psyche and with the least prejudice to the presenting symptoms are best prepared. They are the most able to help people come into an integrated sense of wholeness within themselves through this journey. The best way to use the maps defined by any school of thought is to put them aside or in the back of one's mind. The task is then to ask the client to guide the practitioner through the landscape of his mind. This is done through a process of non-leading questions, which incorporate the mental, spiritual and physical reporting on the part of the client while in an altered state.

 The background information I use in forming my own personal map to help clients with symptoms similar to those of MPD, spirit possession and DD is expanding all the time. But the questions I ask to help resolve the issue have remained surprisingly stable and sparse over time. After hypnotic induction, my goal is to find out: 1). What is the source of this particular presenting symptom? 2). What are the decisions or assumptions the client made about himself as a result of this situation? 3). How are those assumptions active in his present life? 4). What needs to be done for a shift to occur in his relationship to the source situation? 5). How will that internal shift affect his internal life? 6). Provide suggestions based on the client's own solutions to create the engine to effect those changes.

 We may have to repeat these questions and the processes they engender for many separate issues. This depends on the degree, severity and complexity of the imbalance. And we may have to delve into past lives, alternate realities of all types, including extra-terrestrial realities (as defined by the client). We may have to dialogue and converse with spirits to get the answers, but the answers and the resolution they bring with them do emerge.

 The tools I use in helping the client uncover the answers to these questions vary depending on the client's own needs. I don't really care if a person has been diagnosed with a DD by a psychiatrist or if a priest has referred someone to me for depossession work. The label is irrelevant. All that matters is the process and the process is defined by the client. Schools of thought which state the client is incapable of identifying the paths the journey should take denigrate the integrity of the client. Everyone knows what they need to become whole. They just need guidance and support to have the courage to take the path to wholeness. Granted, I do not work with severely so-called schizoid or psychotic clients, so I cannot make that statement in reference to them, but I would not rule this possibility out.

 When most people come to me it is because they have a habit which is the presenting dysfunction. Sometimes, the habit can even belong to an attached spirit. This usually becomes evident in following the course of symptoms as described above. All habit formation is really a development of a new coping mechanism for the base personality. Most people are dissociating from themselves in order to indulge their habits. Developing a habit can indeed facilitate the same type of "altered" behavior and fulfill the same need that developing a new personality does. Both cope with unacceptable external elements in the environment. Both serve the same purpose: the release from the unacceptable or the untenable. Within this framework, it could be argued that habit disorder and full-blown MPD or DD symptoms are just different points along the psyche's continuum in dealing with what the conscious mind perceives as unacceptable. And spirit intrusion can happen anywhere along this continuum.

 Indulging in a habit becomes the trigger for behavior to emerge which is unacceptable outside the realm of the habit. Alters, as defined by APA texts, function the same way. Alters are divergent personalities contained within one body. When an alter emerges, the person can indulge in all types of behavior which is unacceptable outside the realm of the usual personality. And my guess is that alters defined in this way may well be attached spirits.

 For instance, a normally mild-mannered person who allows himself the habit of drinking alcohol can use the alcohol as a trigger for the release of rage. An outside observer might remark, "He is just a different person when he drinks." Indeed, he may well be. This is especially true because parapsychologists have documented the usurpation of the body by bodiless spirits during drug induced stupors.

 The symptoms of spirit possession, MPD, and DD strongly resemble each other and have much in common in their presentation with other psychic phenomenon. For this reason it is important to remain open-minded when traveling through the client's psyche, seeking understanding and resolution. These similar symptoms can also present as subpersonalities developed in response to an imprint of negative parental messages such as "you are stupid." Or, they might present in strong, dogmatic belief systems about oneself based on decisions or statements received in moments of trauma, in an altered state or at the moment of death in a previous life. Similarly, identification or introjection of an abusive adult role model, usually a parent, can develop to the point where a true introject of the parent is present and actively using the client's life energy.

 All of these presenting symptoms can strongly resemble full-blown MPD symptoms depending, in large part, on the degree and repetition of trauma associated with such imprinting. They also depend on the age or place in time the imprinting occurred and the degree to which spirit involvement in present. The degree of trauma is the main determining influence on how much of the individual's energy gets subsumed by the dynamics of these types of dissociative processes. It is also the degree of trauma which often influences a person's susceptibility to possession by other entities. It also determines how much of the person's life energy becomes available to spirits to use for their own devices.

 One might well ask, what are the motivations of spirits or disembodied energies in taking up residence in a person's psychic or physical space. In my clinical experience, I have found that spirits have many different motivations for seeking access to a person's life energy. Many times, it is just the fix of life energy they are seeking. Sometimes they are lost or confused and simply find entry into a person's psychic space when that person is also lost or confused. Sometimes they have very good intentions; they are drawn to situations where people are so afraid that they have withdrawn their life energy from their body. The spirit or disembodied energy may fill the vacuum, trying to rescue or protect the person. Spirits which try to rescue inappropriately in this way may be operating under the same set of misunderstandings people in bodies do when they try to rescue or "fix" a loved one's problem by offering up parts of their life energy for that person's use. They enter into symbiotic agreements which cement the continuance of the relationship.

 Interestingly, I have rarely encountered the type of angry or demonic spirits which are so avidly depicted in Hollywood renditions of spirit depossessions. Almost always, if a spirit is operating out of revenge or intent to harm, they regret it and are anxiously seeking a way out of the negative place these emotions have put them in. If they do not regret it, it is only necessary to trace their intent for harm to the source of pain at the root of it, and help resolve their relationship to that pain. So, in a depossession, it is not uncommon to effect a healing for the occupying entity as well as a healing for the host. In many ways, this work is extremely gratifying because of the tremendous amount of healing which can take place on so many levels at once.

 Following are recreated excerpted transcripts of two cases of spirit depossession I helped effect. In the first case, the client was aware of a physical block in his abdomen which caused him considerable pain, and he had been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. He was also experiencing a block in his life as he was afraid to begin new ventures both personally and professionally. He reported becoming increasingly fearful and his partner expressed concern at what he called his "personality change." The second was aware that there was, as he said, 'something around' and suspected it might well be a spirit. He said he felt like a different person, and those around him reported behavioral changes, when he felt this 'something' present. In both cases, the host was in a hypnotic state, speaking for his own experience and allowing the spirit to speak through them to relay its experience and motivations for entering into the relationship. They reveal typical causes and nature of relationship between the host and spirit. C refers to the client, S refers to the spirit and H refers to the hypnotherapist. It should be noted in the first instance that I was at first unaware that a spirit was involved.

 A psychologist trained in the western psychotherapeutic paradigm might recognize the spirit as a manifestation of an alter or a fragment of a personality. It does not really matter what one calls this manifestation, but given the fact that the techniques used in depossession work so well in resolving the issues which present themselves in this context, it is useful to call this manifestation a spirit.

 H: As you breathe into the pain in your abdomen, just allow any words, images or sounds to emerge as you breathe out.

 S: Come and get me.

 H: Come and get who?

 S: Come and get me.

 H: Who is here.

 S: I am.

 H: Who are you?

 S: I am the Protector.

 H: Who do you protect?

 S: George (the client).

 H: What do you protect him from?

 S: Pain.

 H: How do you do that?

 S: I catch pain and make it into tiny balls.

 H: And how does that protect him from pain.

 S: It doesn't seem to be protecting him very well.

 H: What do you mean?

 S: There is so much pain, and I can't make the balls tiny enough and they are all gathering up here in this place. I don't know what to do. (At this point the spirit is quite distressed)

 H: How long have you been helping George in this way.

 S: Since before he was born.

 H: How did you connect with him?

 S: I came with him into this life because I knew he was going to have a lot of pain and I wanted to protect him. But I can't do my job. There is too much pain. I can't make it small enough.

 H: How would it be if you could let George feel his pain and process it differently.

 S: That would hurt him.

 H: But this block in his stomach is also hurting him.

 S: (sadly) That is true. I have not done my job very well.

 H: Do you think it is possible that no one can do the job of protecting another person from pain?

 S: I thought I could.

 H: You may have thought you could, and certainly your intention seems very kind, but do you think it is possible that everyone has to do deal with their own pain?

 S: Well, I can't deal with George's pain, that is for sure. There are too many little balls.

 H: How would you like to go to a place where you can learn about how to deal with pain in a new way?

 S: That would be a good idea. I am not doing any good here dealing with it this way.

 H: Is there anything you would like to say to George before you go?

 S: I am sorry I failed. I was only trying to help

 H: Is there anything you would like to say to the protector before he goes, George?

 C: It's okay. Thank you for trying. I know I have to deal with my own pain, and maybe I didn't want to.

 H: George, you may feel a draining sensation for awhile. Just let me know when it stops. Now, Protector, please find your attention being drawn to the light that is here all around you. And notice if there is any particular energy pattern or entity which seems familiar to you.

 S: Yes, there is something familiar here.

 H: Just allow yourself to be drawn to that familiar pattern. Go now, without any fear or longing. Go, and continue your evolution.

 After about 5 minutes George reported a shift in the draining sensation and I sensed a definite shift in his energy pattern. After this shift, I spent some time helping George connect with his life energy in a new way, connecting on an energetic level with all the places the protector had been using. This is an important part of all depossession work. If the client is not filled with life energy after the spirit has left, he will sense a hollowness and may be susceptible to further intrusion as he seeks to fill the hollowness.

 After this session, George was able to begin to explore some deep emotional blocks through hypnosis. Within 6 months, they symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome had disappeared and he was working at a new job. He also reported that he felt more energized and alive than he had in years.

 In the second case, Michael had been a drug addict for many years. He had been "clean" for about 6 years. He said he did not really believe in spirits or the possibility of possession, but he said he always felt 'something around'.

 H: Is there anyone here with Michael?

 S: No. (there is strong twitching on the left side of Michael's body).

 H: Is there anyone here with Michael?

 S: No. (there is stronger twitching on the left side of Michael's body).

 H: What is your name?

 S: An...

 H: What is your name?

 S: Anthony?

 H: Anthony, what are you doing here?

 S: Where am I?

 H: You are here with Michael.

 S: Who is Michael?

 H: He is the person you are with.

 S: I am not with anyone. I am here. Where am I?

 H: You are in California.

 S: What is California?

 H: Look in this mirror. Is this you Anthony?

 S: This is not me. Who is this person?

 H: This is Michael.

 S: What am I doing here?

 H: That is what I want to know.

 S: What is happening?

 H: Anthony. You are dead.

 S: What? No!No!No!

 H: Anthony, you are dead. But you are among friends. Don't worry. Just relax. We can help you.

 S: What?

 H: Anthony, think back to the last time you were talking to someone like this.

 S: My head hurts.

 H: What is happening?

 S: It is very dark. My head hurts.

 H: Why does your head hurt?

 S: It hurts here. It is very dark. Something hit me.

 H: Is it possible that you left your body when you got hit?

 S: I don't know.

 H: Anthony, you are dead.

 S: No! Oh, my head.

 H: Anthony, do you notice the light here in the room?

 S: Yes.

 H: Do you recognize anyone here in the light.

 S: My father. Daddy!

 H: Would you like to go to your father?

 S: Yes! Daddy

 H: Michael, you may feel a draining sensation. Please let me know when you feel it has stopped.

 This session was quite a bit longer than this. We spent more time establishing the circumstances around Anthony's life, the way he died, and how he had become involved with Michael's energy. Clearly, this was a confused spirit who had been attracted to Michael's life energy - probably while Michael was not in full control of his life energy because of drug use. Interestingly, Michael reported that one of the reasons he had done drugs was to escape confusion. There was probably a "vibrational match" of confusion.

 And again, some time was spent connecting Michael to his life energy in the places where Anthony had been using it. In the weeks after the session, Michael reported that he no longer felt as if 'something was around.'

 Both of these manifestations of spirit possession could have been recognized and defined within the terms and paradigms used by psychologists or other social scientists.

 It is important to define the different ways in which the imbalance called spirit possession here and possibly called MPD by western psychologists can manifest. It is also important to develop a set of maps of the psyche in order to help the client. But it is just as important not to allow these paradigms to interfere in the clinical setting. It is easy to get lost in the definitions without progressing toward resolution for the client. It is too easy to try to place a structural paradigm on the client's symptoms just to ease the mind of the practitioner. This labeling is really a way the practitioner can believe he has a sense of knowing where he is and what he is doing.

 In fact, one can never really know exactly where one is or what set of imbalances one is ultimately helping to correct when one is surveying the landscape of the mind. As Victor Hugo once stated, "There is something which is larger than the sea, and that is the sky. There is something which is larger than the sky, and that is the psyche." To pretend that we understand all the manifestations of the mind is ridiculous.

 Indeed, it is foolhardy to ever think one knows exactly where the client is going because the client's experience is unknowable. It is unknowable because of all of the ways he has made the experience unknowable by rendering it unconscious. It cannot be known until it is revealed through questioning in an altered state such as hypnosis. It is important that the questioning take place while the client is in an altered state. This is because the trauma, spirit possession or other involvement almost always is processed in an altered state at its inception. Even if the practitioner thinks he understands the issues, the creation of connections between the issues which lead to resolution of the presenting symptoms are unique for every person. It would be arrogant, if not damaging, for a practitioner to make connections for the client between the trauma and the resulting behaviors. We have only to look at the damage perpetrated by adherents of Freud's flawed theory of female hysteria for such an example.

 The client must make the connections between the trauma and the presenting behavior himself. This allows the integration and resolution of the symptoms into the larger self to occur. It does no lasting good to tell someone who he is if he has no coat hook to hang that definition on within his psyche. It might make the person feel a bit more stable for the short term, but the stability is based on the perceptions of the practitioner, not upon the foundations of client's psyche. The client can only find himself in a different sort of trap when the practitioner attempts to resolve the presenting symptoms in such a way. And the practitioner is bound to fall into all the transference issues described western psychology texts by inserting himself inappropriately into the client's psyche in this way.

 It is important to remember that continuous manifestations of multiplicity within individuals has been recorded across all ethnic and culture lines since Paleolithic times. This phenomenon can be most easily observed by understanding shamanic approaches to healing. These methods have remained largely unchanged through time and these techniques are remarkably similar across cultural and geographic boundaries. One of the key concepts in shamanic healing is the idea of soul parts which get separated from one another. This creates illness or psychic dysfunction. The restoration of these soul parts creates healing. Soul parts have different functions and hold different experiences. They can be viewed as multiple manifestations of personality within a single individual.

 Even normative studies conducted by the APA indicate that we are "born with the potential for multiple personalities and over the course of normal development we more or less succeed in a consolidated an integrated sense of self." "With the occurrence of severe, sustained and repetitive trauma there is a disruption of the development tasks of consolidation of self due to loss of the acquisition of the control over modulation of states, which leads to DD." We must become comfortable with the possibilities contained within multiplicity in order to maintain an open mind long enough to locate the source of trauma and resolve it.

 Once the task of redeeming the self from the trauma has been accomplished, it is important to allow the individual to continue exploration of the realms of the self. The task is not only to help in the integration of this multiplicity into a stable platform from which to interact with the world, but to also help the individual expand his sense of self. This can happen once that stability is attained and it can include many types of experiences on many different levels. When we can maintain that sense of stability with as few defenses as possible to the marvelous multiplicity of life forms and expressions and experiences that we exist in, we can truly begin to understand ourselves. Naturally, we cannot appreciate the beauty of all the different expressions of life if we are trying to interact with them from a place where we have been crippled by trauma. Once we have allowed the practitioner to assist us in "cleaning psychic house" we are then free to explore the many facets of life without fear of the loss of sanity.

 Depth Hypnosis, Soul Retrieval, and Addiction

 By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

 There are many different understandings about the nature of addiction. In working with addiction through my practice of Depth Hypnosis, I have found that it is helpful to apply the diagnostic and restorative methods provided by shamanism to help resolve addictive issues permanently.

 Depth Hypnosis is an innovative model which combines Shamanism, hypnotherapy, transpersonal psychology and Buddhism to effect change in a wide variety of imbalances. Depth Hypnosis takes the wisdom of the most ancient psychologies on the planet, shamanism, and applies it to a modern therapeutic context.

 In shamanism, it is understood that imbalance is created by three possible conditions. These conditions are power loss, soul loss and energetic interference.

 Power loss and soul loss both occur in reaction to trauma. The types of trauma which create soul loss can also create power loss. Trauma ranging from a car accident to emotional, physical or sexual abuse to negative internal self talk can create a state of soul or power loss. Soul loss is characterized by a loss of energy on a physical level, a lack of interest in life on emotional or spiritual level and a lack of focus on a mental level. Power loss is often recognized by the struggle or a series of events which appear to bad luck which occur in a person’s life as he tries to overcome the exhaustion or depletion created by power loss.

 In Depth Hypnosis, addictions are viewed as a medication for the state of soul loss or power loss. In my work, I have seen that people either use the addiction to try and reproduce the state of soul loss in a controlled way or use the addiction to try and erase the state of soul loss.

 By taking an emotional biography of the person as well as a presenting biography of the addiction, it is surprising to see how predictable the onset of an addiction is in response to events which are viewed as producing soul loss or power loss. Divorce, death, abusive conditions in early childhood correlate with the roots of the addictive process. People will often say something like “Nothing was ever the same after that.” Or, they might say, “Everything has been hard since then.” These types of statements are tip offs that some major shift has occurred in a person’s internal world. That shift is what shamans refer to soul loss or power loss.

 In classic shamanic terms energetic interference is characterized by what is often called “possession.” That is, a person can become affected and even overcome by energy which is not his own. In shamanism, this can refer to as a possessing entity – or an energy which does not have a definable physical body. In Depth Hypnosis, energetic interference can refer to spirit possession, but it also refer to foreign energies such as introjects. Introjects are aspects of another person’s personality which a person can adopt or which a person can be overrun by. This occurs frequently in parent-child relationships.

 When speaking of addiction, one can easily recognize an addiction as something which has its own energy system and does not have a physical body. Addictions fulfill the main criteria of energetic interference in that they disrupt the flow of a person’s life energy. By engaging in addiction and trying to either recreate the energy patterns underlying traumatic events in a controlled way or erase those patterns, a person loses choice over how he uses his life energy.

 In shamanic terms, the remedy for the above situation is simple: remove the energetic interference and restore the part of the soul or power that was lost. But not necessarily in that order. Often a person must be restored to his power or his soul before he has the power or energy required to face down the depletion the energetic interfence is compounding.

 In traditional settings, the shaman does this work for the individual. By moving into an altered state, the shaman uses his relationships with what in shamanism are called ‘helping spirits’ to find the piece of soul or power which is frozen outside of time. This part of the self is usually caught in the trauma which created the soul loss – and it is as if the event is occurring in present time. By releasing the part of the self which is frozen outside of time by entering into the event and with the help of his helping spirits, the shaman retrieves and returns the soul part or power which has been lost.

 Depth Hypnosis adapts this technique to create an environment where the person suffering the power loss or soul loss is assisted in retrieving the lost part himself. This is done through a variety of techniques, most of which are accomplished in an altered state. The Depth Hypnosis practitioner guides the client into an altered state where the person is able to perceive more about himself than he would normally be able to in a waking state. By following the path of the trauma through the effect it has on the body, the client is guided into entering the situation or circumstance where the trauma occurred and retrieving the lost part himself. The advantages of engaging the client in the process are numerous – not the least of which is that the person becomes empowered as an agent for his own healing and is not dependent on an outside source, such as the shaman.

 Again, in traditional shamanic practice, it is the shaman, along with his helping spirits, who engages with the source of the energetic interference and moves it out of the person’s energetic sphere. And again, this practice is adapted in Depth Hypnosis to engage the client in understanding the source of the interference, its effect and the ways in which the individual is participating in creating and maintaining the energetic interference. And again, the advantages are the same.

 Case studies demonstrating the advantages of using Depth Hypnosis to address the issues underlying addiction are numerous. It is important to note that no two smokers or no two drinkers or no two heroin addicts have the same reasons for indulging in their habits. By using Depth Hypnosis methods such as insight inquiry, hypnotic regression and modified shamanic journeys the practitioner and the client embark into a process of discovery and healing.

 One client, a 35 year old woman came for help with an eating disorder – bulimia. By exploring the role the eating disorder played in her life and following the energy pattern it presented, she was able to see how the overeating to vomiting was mimicking the soul loss and resultant overwhelm she felt at being left in charge of 2 younger brothers at age 12 after her mother left her father for another man. The vomiting created a valve which released the overwhelm from the food. This relief had not been available to her as a teen coping with trying to parent her siblings. Through the eating disorder, she was recreating the conditions surrounding soul loss (using food to overwhelm her) and correcting those conditions with vomiting.

 By introducing her first to the power retrieval process wherein she encountered what in shamanism is called ‘ a helping spirit’ and what in Depth Hypnosis is called ‘the part of the self with your highest good as its soul intent’ she was able to receive internal stability she had not had before. With that stability, she was able to return to the part of herself which was frozen outside of time in the state of overwhelm through age regression. She was then able to effect a series of soul retrievals for herself. As her dominant internal state continued to shift from that of overwhelm to that of stability, her eating disorder subsided naturally. No behavior modification or suggestion hypnosis was necessary and the change in the eating disorder remains 9 years after treatment.

 Another case of an addiction being permanently altered through shamanic means adapted to Depth Hypnosis methodology is in the case of a 45 year old man with a 25 year addiction to chewing tobacco. Through his work with insight inquiry and age regression, he was able to follow the pattern of his addiction to grade school. He had been a naturally brilliant student, but found that he could not maintain friendships if the other students felt he was smarter than they were. So he came up with a method of dumbing himself down – doing poorly on tests on purpose to keep him from getting better grades than the other students. The habit of undercutting himself continued when he left school through the use of tobacco. The tobacco left him irritable and unable to focus, so his high energy was depleted and his performance at work remained mediocre. This was a less effective adaptation to the social constraints, and he had not been able to stop chewing.

 By effecting a power retrieval through the engagement with ‘the part of the self with your highest good as its soul intent’ he was able to revel in the joy of being fully in his power for the first time in 30 years. During an age regression, he was able to restore this power to the 10 year old who had disowned it in favor of social acceptance. As an adult, he was so exhilarated at the prospect being able to function at full capacity, that it was easy for him to quit chewing – especially when he realized that the habit was reinforcing and deepening the pattern of self-sabotage he had so poorly understood before his work with Depth Hypnosis.

 One last example is a 30 year old man who was addicted to several different types of ‘downers.’ The state that all these drugs produced was the same – one of suspended animation where he could feel very little and thereby ‘relax’. In exploring the roots of his experience through Depth Hypnosis methods, it became clear that was recreating the state where he had spent most of his childhood. This was a state of numbing which had been able to produce for himself in response to severe neglect by his parents. In a way, it could be said that he was actually visiting this part of himself that was caught in the trauma the numbing was medicating by doing the downers. By doing a series of power retrievals, soul retrievals and removing the energetic interference of the numbed state, he was able to kick the drug habit permanently.

 By adapting the ancient methods of shamanism into the modern therapeutic context, addiction can be overcome permanently and relatively painlessly. By challenging the client to participate in his own healing at the roots of the dysfunction, addiction can be successfully abated through Depth Hypnosis.

Name:
Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Location of Practice:
San Francisco, CA
Certification:
Depth Hypnosis Practitioner, Shamanic Practitioner
Specialization:
Relationship Counseling, Panic, Post Traumatic Stress Response, Auto-Immune Disease, Energetic Imbalances
Phone:
(415) 333-1434
Email:
isa@sacredstream.org
Website:
www.depthhypnosis.com
 
Isa Gucciardi holds degrees and certificates in Transpersonal Psychology, Comparative Religion and Cultural Anthropology, Hypnotherapy and Transformational Healing. She has studied with masters from many spiritual, therapeutic and shamanic traditions. She is Founding Director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, and developer of Depth Hypnosis.

 Other Resources
 
At Sacred Stream, our goal is to share our knowledge, information, and resources with as many people as we can. For this reason, we include resources on this page including alternative heath and therapy organizations and associations, bookstores and alternative retail stores, a recommended reading list, and more. Please check this page regularly for updates.

Alternative Health and Therapy Associations
    •     Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) www.energypsych.org
    •     International Board for Regression Therapy (IBRT) www.ibrt.org
    •     International Assoc. for Regression Research & Therapies Inc. www.aprt.org
    •     Professional Board of Hypnotherapy www.hypnosiscanada.com
    •     Society for Spiritual Regression www.spiritualregression.org
    •     Society for Shamanic Practitioners (SSP) www.shamansociety.org

SF Bay Area Alternative Healing Centers & Practitioners
    •     Integral Body www.integralbody.com
    •     Pacific Academy of Homeopathic Medicine www.homeopathy-academy.org
    •     Valencia Healing Arts Center (415) 647-6222

Other Alternative Healing Centers & Practitioners

    •     Nangten Menlang - Buddhist Medical Centre is an organization dedicated to the preservation and teaching of Tibetan medical science and Buddhist knowledge. www.nangtenmenlang.org
    •     All That Matters (Wakefield, Rhode Island) allthatmatters.com
    •     Panacea (Retreat Center, Costa Rica) www.panaceacr.com
    •     The Family of Light Healing Centre - An international mobile healing, channeling, yoga, eco tours and educational centre. www.thefamilyoflight.net

Bookstores & Alternative Products
    •     Shambhala Publications www.shambhala.com
    •     Wisdom Publications www.wisdompubs.org
    •     The Scarlet Sage Herb Co., 1173 Valencia St, SF, CA www.scarletsageherb.com
    •     Elephant Pharmacy www.elephantpharm.com
    •     Crystal Way, 2335 Market Street, San Francisco (415) 861-6511
    •     Planet Weavers,1573 Haight Street, San Francisco (415) 864-5526
    •     Open Secret Bookstore, 923 C. Street, San Rafael (415) 457-4191 www.opensecretbookstore.com
    •     Tibet Moon, 47 Broadway, Fairfax (415) 256-9414
    •     Bodywork Central, 5519 College Avenue, Berkeley (415) 226-8500
    •     Shambhala Booksellers, 2482 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley (510) 848-8443
    •     Angel Light Books and Gifts, 709 El Camino Real, Redwood City (650) 780-9900
    •     East West, 324 Castro, Mountain View (650) 988-9800 www.eastwest.com
    •     The Herb Wyfe, Wickford, RI (401) 295-1140 www.herbwyfe.com
    •     Psychic Eye Bookstore, 1128 El Camino Real, Mountain View (650) 964-2220
    •     San Jose Metaphysical Bookshop, 1231 Kentwood Avenue San Jose (408) 446-0590
    •     Planet Earth Rising, 625 Sutter Street, Folsom, CA (916) 355-8844
    •     Rigpa, www.rigpa.org and www.rigpabayarea.org
    •     San Francisco Buddhist Center www.sfbuddhistcenter.org
    •     San Francisco Zen Center www.sfzc.org
    •     Shambhala International www.shambhala.org
    •     Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies www.tsechenling.org
    •     Healing Crystals www.HealingCrystals.com

Meditation & Shamanic Resources
    •     Cedar Mountain Drums www.cedarmtndrums.com
    •     Centralia Fur and Hide www.furandhide.com
    •     Dharma Crafts www.dharmacrafts.com
    •     Grey Wolf Drums www.greywolfdrums.com
    •     Living Drums www.livingdrums.com
    •     Samadhi Cushions www.samadhicushions.com
    •     Shaman's Drum Magazine www.shamansdrum.org
    •     Shaman Drum Bookshop www.shamandrum.com
    •     Tachini Drums www.drumhoops.com
    •     Tara and Company www.taraco.com
    •     Yolanda's Drums www.yolandasdrums.com

Recommended Reading

    •     Anatomy of the Spirit by Carolyn Myss
    •     The Art of Happiness by H.H. Dalai Lama
    •     Commentaries on Living by Krishna Murti
    •     Esoteric Healing by Alice Bailey
    •     Fear No Evil by Eva Pierrakos
    •     Graceful Exits (How Great Beings Die) by Sushila Blackman
    •     The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
    •     The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
    •     The Myth of Freedom by Chogyam Trungpa
    •     The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts
    •     No Boundary by Ken Wilbur
    •     The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron
    •     The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
    •     Voices of the First Day by Robert Lawlor
    •     When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

Note: These resources are listed as a convenience to our visitors. If you use these resources, we take no responsibility and give no guarantees, warranties or representations, implied or otherwise, for the content or accuracy of these third-party sites or organizations.