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WHAT have you been today?  Is this a question of perplexion or one that sparks excitement? All of our senses seem to answer at once! “I’ve been so busy, kinda tired, hungry to no end, overwhelmed, hot, cold, dreamy, annoyed, super tense, excited about what I just saw or maybe “I am the one who brought the main dish, the one that got stuck cleaning the oven, grateful I am almost there, halfway through, ready to give up, still fighting the fight…. ” Inumerable answers want to jump in and report their whatabouts!  While some of these are temporary, some feel so permanent they are part of our identity and instead of speaking only of today, they speak of something permanent about us: “Always everybody’s go-to, the winner of the game, a truly loyal friend, Dad, the one that invented the recipe, the Principal of this school, Super Grandma, or someone who always looks great in blue!” 

We live in a natural world so just as light refracts in response to speed and shape by changing its waves as it moves from one medium to another, all-the-while developing into optical illusions…. so do we, as natural and responsive human beings who react to stimuli such as emotions and beliefs, refract ourselves into WHAT we must be to keep those visions we have of ourselves alive inside of our ideas.

Considering William Cowper’s observation with regard to changing fashions: “Variety is the spice of life,”  it was never really the clothes themselves that were regenerating but, rather, the minds of the designers, the wearers and the society that was co-creating by taking on a style!  The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus’, very similar statement reached far wider in his conclusion that “Change is the only constant in life.”  While spotlights will be attracted by glittery dresses and colorful hats, deep thoughts, pen-in-hand, will pull us into enlightenment.  It will be everyday life and which attention we choose to give to WHAT part of it that will also illuminate not only the presence of fluctuation and alteration in our lives but equally so the sustenance that they absolutely are to our being able to actually live them!

We end our day in darkness, in the click of a lamp to a closed eye only to awaken to a beam in that eye, now open, from a brightly lit day. While we have learned to predict whether the new day will be a warm one, a cold one or a windy or wet one, we have not yet learned how to force it to be either one and so begins our instant adaptation with a pair of sandals and shorts or a warm jacket and an umbrella because, of course, the change will be the constancy, the ironically most reliable factor, and so our day goes on until it, again, changes into night with modifications in just about every moment of that time span whether the old tree we drive by is dropping old leaves or growing new ones, the teacher that assigned us yesterday’s homework is replaced by a substitute today, the grocery store is out of our favorite cereal or stocking this new season’s fruit instead of the one we had grown accustomed to, or the pants we put on last week that zipped beautifully now won’t close around us at all.

Silently but surely, continual transitions maintain us!  If this is not fully evident, it can be easily tested: Simply try breathing out all day without converting to breathing in!  Try running your meeting at work today with your two-year old voice and vocabulary. How long can you go without a haircut and still keep your reputed appearance? Will what we made for dinner on Monday still serve up fresh and tasty this Friday?  It sounds exhausting and just the imagining of being in constant alteration is enough to start the yawns that make us yearn for protective sleep.  Great instinct and yet….when those eyes close again tonight, transformation will continue to take over in order to assure we are at our utmost wellbeing as our blood pressure will automatically drop so that we can rest and allow our bodies to repair muscle tissue, our glands will secrete the hormones we require for growth and metabolism, amongst other processes and, especially interestingly, our brain will increase our blood flow to limit our bodily movement to protect us during REM sleep where we will hallucinate what we must process in our minds only from where it is safe to do so, instead of when we are awake which could prove too difficult or dangerous. There is a reason we only allow ourselves to dream of falling off cliffs instead of attempting to do so! Interesting, too, that we can all imagine and fear the feeling of it.

WHAT an ally we have in change! WHAT a remarkable support system! WHAT an enhancement to being alive! It can only prompt us to wonder: “WHAT are we today that we had yet to be yesterday and can look forward to becoming tomorrow?”  Well Darwin would smile in approval at the fitness of our minds in proposing that question, knowing full well from his well-studied deductions, that by this question alone we are definitely survivors.

So, knowing this, tomorrow we will all be up bright and early, or maybe not ‘til past noon, setting higher goals, giving up the midnight snacks and the pounds they bring with them, changing from entry-level positions to CEO salaries, acquiring degrees and new languages to study for them in and running that extra mile at every corner right?  Well there’s a hitch if one can pardon a pun.  Like horses in front of an ol’west saloon, we all have that interruption from the rope tethered to the post right as we are ready to gallop past the hills on yonder….and that is the other constant in our lives we still need to address as it lives also in our bodies, in our hearts and in our minds: It is Our Dear and ever so clingy Friend, the one that always grabs and pulls us lovingly toward it crying “Stay with me.  Stay right here.” Ah yes, Hello Ego, right as my mind was giving in to the dizzy delight of the high atmosphere where all imaginative thought balloons rise, here you are again to remind me that if I dare to forget WHAT I am without all those frightening ideas of change, which you have continuously described to me as effectively disastrous, I may just question that WHAT that I am and grow into WHAT I could become and evolve to instead! Hey…..I just might end up experiencing and evaluating, enlivening and expanding on that road they call IntraYou again.  Thanks so much for that pull on my string “old pal?”

WHERE have YOU been today?

Our responses to that question are usually physical:  “at work,  at home,  at school,  inside, outside.”   We immediately track down our bodily experiences to answer.   What about our minds?  Where were they?  Were they in the same place as our bodies at every minute?  Did our thoughts stick with us or did they wander elsewhere?   Surely you experienced memories of the past or dreams of the future today.   Perhaps thoughts of a place that you have only imagined garnered your focus at times or you were captured by someone else’s story on the news,  the plot of a television show,  a video circling the internet or simple hearsay from a conversation that grasped your attention and carried you away for a portion of your day.   Certainly you slept the night before, letting your mind go into dreams for the night and  then reconnecting with it to awaken into this morning.   If you have recognized yourself in any of these settings then your answer to the question of “Where have you been today?”  can also be  “I was in hypnosis.”

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be hypnotized?  Well…mystery over!  You already have been, time and time again!

Hypnosis is simply a very relaxed state of mind that we will yield to when  we are overloaded with message units to the brain.  Those message units can be positive, negative or neutral  and yet,  when numerous, they  will disorganize our inhibitory, critical mind and allow access to the subconscious mind, thereby putting us into a very suggestible state.   In other words…we are open.

Imagine you are at home watching a profoundly sad movie with a plot you can really relate to.  As you focus deeper and deeper into the storyline, the messages that are entering your mind are growing not only in number but also in personal meaning and intensity.  Before you know it they become more than the conscious part of your mind can carry. The conscious part of your mind is the part that is aware of the physical you, of where you are and what you are doing at this moment.  When overwhelmed,  it basically lets go, much like you would let go of an armful of something  that became too heavy.  In doing so, that conscious, aware and, most important, critically-thinking part of you , just moves aside…. falling into relaxation, leaving the door open for those overwhelming thoughts to expand deeper, entering into the rest of  your brain, the subconscious, where you operate more automatically, out of accepted belief,  with less questionning or critical delibaration.   Even though you are completely relaxed and open while in this state of mind, you are still fully in control.  If the phone were to ring now or if anything else were to interrupt the movie, you would be perfectly able to quickly jump out of that state, re-enter your conscious state  and focus on answering the phone or attending to the interruption simply by choosing to do so.  Nevertheless,  should you remain  in the  hypnotic state you will be experiencing the movie at a highy attentive level with all of your senses, emotions and thoughts attached to it, as close as possible to actually being in it.  You may begin to experience what the character is feeling, cry with him, feel his fear and maybe even exhibit physical  responses such as your own heart racing due to his experience!  You may forget you are at home for a second and even speak out to the movie.  Have you ever yelled at a movie character?  “Run! Get out of there! What are you doing? Look behind you! ”  Have you ever felt it difficult to hold  back your tears as the character freely released his or have you automatically put your hand on your stomach and yelled out “Oh!” as a reaction to the character taking a punch?  You were in hypnosis.

Now suppose that this movie had been playing at a friend’s or a co-worker’s home instead of your own and the environment had been a room full of people you were not entirely comfortable with.  Do you think you would have delved into it as deeply and allowed yourself to get so lost you would have been yelling out or crying?  Not likely.  The understanding of where you were and how you felt about letting go or getting overly “into the movie”  in front of everyone would have made you choose to remain in a conscious state by ignoring the message units from the movie, not allowing yourself to let go into hypnosis.  That is because you are always in control.  It is YOU and only YOU that allows the thoroughfare  from your conscious to your subconscious to be traveled.  This thoroughfare is not only a passage, it is also a right, your right,  to pass to and from the different areas of your mind as you,  and only you, accept to do.   So, contrary to popular belief, ideas presented in the media or even cartoons, you cannot be hypnotized and made to quack like a duck or rob a bank (unless you want to)!  Talk about movies hypnotizing us to believe things!

Now let’s take a look at what happens after the movie  you are watching at home alone is all over.  What part of that mental experience will enter into your conscious thoughts and decisions, into your real daily life?  If the character made a decision with a negative outcome,  lived in a beautiful city,  sang a particularly catchy tune, drove a certain color of car, how does that affect you?  How do you feel when you hear that song now….a week or a year later?  What would you tell a friend who invited you on a vacation to that city?  Would you remember or maybe even choose  that color when deciding on a new car?  What if you had to make similar decisions in your life? How much would the movie character’s outcome influence you even if it was “only a movie?”  While in hypnosis, the relaxed and flexible, open state of the thoroughfare between your conscious and subconscious mind, made you highly suggestible.  In other words,  you were open to the ideas that were presented to you while in that state without the critical eye you usually employ when in your fully alert, more guarded state.  Once the movie was over and the state of hypnosis  was exchanged  for the more conscious,  decisive state of mind you needed to get up and move on, the gateway closed but the new suggestions you accepted remained internalized as new subconscious beliefs to live by in the present.  The way you now feel about these things are the changes you achieved while in hypnosis, ideas that you affirmed and now may even refer to as truths and consider  seriously to qualify your decisions with in the future.

What a creative, powerful  place this is, your subconscious!  Imagine what you are doing there each and every day! Every night for the last 30 seconds before we doze off we give in to the hypnotic state as it naturally precedes complete sleep.  What  last thoughts do you allow in there right before you fall asleep?  Every morning before becoming fully awake we pass through the hypnotic state as it precedes complete awareness.   What thoughts do you awaken to and accept first thing in the morning?  What have  you already sealed into your subconscious in your past and,  most of all, what are you able to do there at any time you choose in the present?  What if you were able to accept a better version of yourself, a more confident you, a you that no longer likes to overeat or smoke or procrastinate?  These are only four easy changes out of literally hundreds that people make every day by treading that thoroughfare from the conscious to the subconscious to create positive change while in hypnosis.  This is the true and rare “ work you can do it in your sleep!”

We cannot “BE”  more than that which we are able to “THINK” that we are.  Whether it is occurring consciously by a well thought-out choice or subconsciously by a habitual, automatic, and, unfortunately too often, mistaken, belief, everything we are and everything we are experiencing must be born out of a thought first.  In those 30 seconds before sleep and the thirty seconds before awakening we have one full minute in which we are traveling that thoroughfare and accepting suggestions daily.  Do you fall asleep worried or wake up anxious or are you peaceful and hopeful? Whatever you are choosing it is being accepted as a belief about yourself or your world.  Then, throughout the day we enter the state several times, most often when we are overwhelmed or pulled into any deluge of thoughts, stress being a major example,  or when we find ourselves in a pattern that no longer requires conscious thought such as repetitive tasks, passive entertainment or routine habits.  We are all experts at entering hypnosis,  just not always aware we are in it or of what to do with this wonderful  ability of our mind that has so much potential to either impede or improve our lives!  It is quite a road, this thoroughfare, and  surely a  successful trip down any road should be navigated by a capable, knowledgeable guide or driver!  That is where learning about and understanding hypnosis, practicing it and receiving hypnotherapy all come in beautifully.

As long as you have to focus and think about something you are utilizing your conscious mind.   Examples that call for the conscious mind would be figuring out how to play a piano or learn a new computer program,  deciding what to wear to work today and, of course, learning how to drive!  Think of it as being in “effort mode.”  Once you have accepted how something works  without further need to question, focus, learn or try,  it travels the thoroughfare to be allowed into the subconscious.  When something lives in the subconscious it no longer requires conscious awareness to access it.  You no longer have to think about each move in these activities or consider if these beliefs are accurate.   You no longer ask yourself which key gets played next on the piano as you play a whole song with ease. You work on the computer and check your email without going over “how.”  You accept the outfit you chose this morning and wear it comfortably with your mind now on other things and, yes, even as  you get into a car you naturally start the engine and put on your seatbelt without instruction or need for the checklist you adhered to in the beginning.   We can and often do even drive  subconsiously on “autopilot!”  All of your learning , accepted beliefs and unquestioned motives are stored in the subconscious and are now doing the driving.  They are also often directing your personal intentions, your goals and, most importanly, your outcomes!

It is a fabulous system reserving the larger 88 percent of the space in our minds for accepted beliefs and ideas that drive us like confident passengers and allow the other 12 percent the freedom to focus, gather, ponder and even enjoy the scenery:

It all functions  perfectly, producing guaranteed results and a polished outcomes as long as the two sides of the brain are working together, like a passenger and a driver deciding their mutual destination.  Yet what if the two don’t agree?  What  if your subconscious accepted some time ago that French fries are a comfort you cannot do without but  your conscious noticed the extra pounds on the scale and logically wants you to diet today?  What part of your mind do you think takes over the wheel?  Where do you think this passenger is going to be driven to?  If you’ve guessed the nearest restaurant with good fries on the menu you are correct!  Twelve against eighty-eight is not a fair battle and yet, many a war has been won by the little guys when they commanded the right channels ….so….. YOU DO  have a “passage” way to the success your conscious side desires.

Mayo Clinic lists hypnotherapy in its Top Ten Recommended Alternative Therapies  of 2011 and Andrew Weil not only endorses but also offers training in hypnotherapy through his Integrative Medicine Clinic within the University of Arizona.  A trained, certified hypnotherapist in a professional setting is able to decipher your language and behavior and utilize it in your favor by communicating to your subconscious, suggesting the changes you desire to create.  All hypnosis is self-hypnosis because YOU are the one in control, entering the hypnosis at the pace in which you accept it and exiting the state, again, at will, retaining only the suggestions that you are willing to accept in the interim.  It is a wonderful  causeway!  Picture traveling to a sunny beach, a big city, a mountain side, where you enjoy complete relaxation and bring back only the souvenirs that you have chosen to in order to enhance the life you return to.  Hypnosis is a similarly relaxing trip to your subconscious and you will be returning home with the motivation, the confidence, the strength and belief to be the new you that you have until now only been able to wish or try to be through pure willpower.  The best part?  All travels allow learning.  It is  you that enters hypnosis and the more you learn from each session consciously, the more you are able to acquire the state on your own with less and less effort,  gifting yourself with the ability to choose wonderful changes and results for yourself in any area you desire each and every day!

As much as people, stories, stage and media love sensationalizing the subject of hypnosis,  it is really just a natural activity that your mind participates in daily in order to support,  store , organize and utilize your thoughts within your direction.  If you believe then you will absolutely achieve so you are already innately successful!  What you want to ask yourself then is “What do you believe?  What is driving you where?   The time spent in hypnosis or with a qualified  hypnotherapist will be like drivers’ training for the mind,  intended only to bring you to where you can take hold of the wheel and soar!  After all  it is both, YOUR thoroughfare and YOUR right to explore it since it only exists IntraYou!

WHO have you been today?

The natural and seemingly only answer would be “I’ve been “ME.”  The longer you think about it, the more obvious the response: “Today?  I’ve been ME, of course!   I’ve been ME all day today.  I was me yesterday and I will be tomorrow too! This is WHO I am!  What kind of a question is that?”  It is perhaps the most intriguing question we could ever ask ourselves and yet having spent all of our lives with ourselves, seeing only ourselves in the mirror and answering always to the name accepted by ourselves since birth, we naturally don’t often ask what presents itself to us as the obvious.

Take a moment and wonder, however:  WHO HAVE you been today?  Listen carefully to the responses that naturally meander in.  We might turn to visuals for our answers, to gender, to our professions, to our relationships with others or to our designations.  I am a woman or I am a man ….I am a teacher or a Mom….I am a human being or I am an individual.  All will perhaps feel befitting in the instance of the inquiry but what about within the movement of time?

If you are saying you are a woman now, could that still have been who you were if you had been asked right when you were born and were a baby or when you entered fourth grade and were a little girl?  It had to take years to become certified as a teacher and once in retirement does the title drop off or what if you decide to change careers?  Will you, in fact,  no longer be or still be a teacher?  Being a parent is, of course, forever and yet when sons and daughters grow up and become parents themselves what percentage of who was once Mom or a Dad becomes a Grandma or a Grandpa? These time-based classifications are not answering the query to completion.  They are describing who you think you are in the moment in which a response is being prompted.    Just as we saw when answering WHERE we have been, again it is the position of our thoughts in time that answer this question too because both, time and thoughts, are with us through life and, most importantly, drive our evolution through it.  If we render the response to WHO we are permanent, time will go on.  It is our evolution, however, that will not.

Why is that?  We will experience multiple changes in our lives, and if we take a moment or two to think about those changes, they will most often come about as reactions to our perceptions of our environment.  We may change the outfit we planned to wear to work tomorrow due to unexpected rain or lose the excitement we felt the first time we heard a song once we have heard it again and again.  WHO hasn’t seen a trendy haircut on someone and changed their physical appearance in the instant desire to match it or caught a glimpse of themselves in the mirror and changed their diet to drop a few pounds in pursuit of a more attractive look or better health?   What about the changes we make from growing through the simple physical stages of life as we grow out of running free in diapers to taking on debt on a credit card for a new suit that we just “know” will land us a coveted job?

There will also be changes to WHO we are that may not be visible because they will take place in our minds.  The obvious ones occur through learning.  When you look at the physicality of an actual human brain it has the appearance of being pliable and soft and full of ridges.  While it must always retain its basic shape through our lifetime in order to function as we need it to, of course, it is interesting that at the same time it symbolically does sort of appear,  not only malleable and easily molded, but also like  a landscape of endless pathways.  It is possible that that is a clue from nature hinting at us that we are capable of so many directions and that change is not only natural, but supported.

Think of a traveler on a soft mountain of roadways and tunnels.  Before setting forth he may look up at the mountain and react to its physical nature, thinking “I will have to go up and then down, around and through and it will be steep and perhaps at times deep.”  The reaction to those observations may lead to preparations such as the packing of a walking stick to poke into the unchartered ground for discovery or balance or to pull up and gain access to the steep areas.  Desire to find the best hiking boots to assure safe connection to the ground will gain higher importance.   A flashlight and extra batteries for those places where the ridges seem to turn, disappear and darken are now items of higher value than the dollars paid for them and nutrient-dense foods will now surpass preventive nutritional levels into survival nourishment levels as the question of “Just how long will it take me to get through this journey?”  gets louder.  This is WHO the traveler will be at the start of his walk:  Well-equipped man on a quest to the top.  WHO will he become on the way and be at the end of the quest?

Throughout the journey he will find places where the paths are shorter, the tunnels are lighter, where the ground is softer, the climate warmer and the turns are longer.  In the stages of his reactions he will change WHO he may have at one point intended to be to WHO he thinks it is best to become.  He will change from the man who carefully chose his boots and planned his snacks to the man who walks barefoot in the softer areas for better grip and saves his granola for later when he expects he will need more energy.  He will become person who uses his flashlight to identify noises behind him instead of lighting the path ahead as originally intended, out of response to the physical presentations of his interactive adventure.  In the world of his thoughts, however, he will turn to WHO he is far more often and change it even faster!  He will be man afraid of going hungry, man who is certain he heard a threatening sound behind him, climber, descender, quitter, persister and many others, depending on when it is we are asking “Who are you?”

This is an interesting progression in that it is ironically motivated by us trying to determine something permanent:  “Who AM I?” and yet is absolutely driven by change as we healthily adapt to who we need to turn into so as to reconcile with and succeed in our present environment.  This is significant indeed and we can begin to now see yet another component in the formation of what is known as the ego. Webster defines the ego as “ the self  – especially as contrasted with another self or the world.”  It is a reading of our “self” within the environment we are in and in contrast to all that is included in that environment whether that is a mountain, another self, a climate or any other observed part. It is a reading that asks What, Where, Why and How to help us determine Who we intend to be and, when effective, ignites the change to become it or, when immobile, prevents the change and impedes it.  It is a reading that begins like any other, with the turning of the first page and the first peek at what is inside….what is of course…..always IntraYOU, that’s WHO