Will you hypnotise me?

It’s a line I often get to hear when I talk to people about the wonders and the life changing miracles of hypnotherapy.

I don’t blame them. Till two years back, I had not the faintest clue about hypnotherapy. I thought hypnotherapy was nothing but a whole load of mumbo jumbo.

While I was much intrigued by the highly dramatised demonstrations of Past Life Regressions in ‘Raaz Pichhle Janam Ka’, I was also highly skeptical. 
 My interest was definitely piqued when I read Dr. Brian Weiss’ account of a client’s journey into her many lifetimes in the book ‘Many Masters, Many Lives’.

But that is where it stopped for me. It was great fiction. But, nay, not for me.

I had never heard of Hypnotherapy. I never bothered to find out if PLR and Hypnotherapy were indeed inter related.

But then Claustrophobia happened to me.

A persistent issue that suddenly descended upon me when I was entering a crowded cinema hall. And then year after year, it began to invade my life. 
 Brick by brick erecting itself into this huge impenetrable wall that was beginning to close in on me from all sides.

Now while the dictionary defines Claustrophobia as an extreme or irrational fear of confined places, mine had a surprise element in it. Through multiple bad experiences over the years I figured it was really a fear of being in closed spaces with a whole lot of people.

In a cinema hall, if there were too many people I would keep my eye on the the exit. In malls, I would first determine the closest exit to escape from. Inside a plane was the worst. It mostly struck when the flight would land. I have yet to understand why people stand up and crowd the darned exit when the flight gates have not even opened.

A voice in me would constantly say, “Stay calm! You can always shout and push your way to the door”.

But no matter how much I tried to talk myself out of it, the panic and the anxiety would strike without warning and just take over. And all that fighting and struggling to stay calm like ‘normal’ people would drain me.
 If you are a claustrophobic or an anything-phobic you might just know what I am talking about.

I remember waking up in the middle of the flight once and seeing the food trolley blocking the alley next to my seat. I struggled for breath and told them to move. But when I started to walk out, I almost fainted out of panic. My colleague woke up to find me being treated to lemonade on the front seatas the head stewardess enquired if there is a doctor on flight.

I remember crying myself through a couple of flights in which there was panic due to turbulence. Turbulence was not the issue. Sitting on the middle seat, far, far from the exit, was.

My whole life was designed to work around this one god-damn-phobia. I would book my seat in advance. Talk to airport staff, cabin crew, expecting them to understand my predicament.

Judge them harshly if they did not.

Five star hotel rooms were another pain point. Just couldn’t understand the concept of having windows that would not open. I would wake up in the middle of the night and pace around, unable to breathe. Then have this whole debate in my head if I should rush down the stairs to the lobby ‘right now’ in my PJs and bathroom slippers. Every time I resisted and talked myself to sleep I felt a bit victorious.

Phew!

And then… I found out about Hypnotherapy. Now while I was being initiated into Reiki Level Two, my Reiki Master, who was also a Psychotherapist among many other things, decided to show us how Reiki could be used creatively to heal issues beyond the physical body.

She asked each of us if we had an issue.

Hell, yeah! I did.

I had spoken to her in detail about this issue. But strangely in that moment I chose stage fear over claustrophobia.

Yep. That too!

She asked us to close our eyes. Said some very calming words, and then when we were completely relaxed, she told us to go back to the first time we experienced the issue. She made us relive that part of our lives using the sense of seeing, touching, smelling, hearing. And there I was, a 6 year old, looking at my dusty shoes, on stage, during a school assembly.

I was excited to recite a poem I had memorised diligently a night before. 
 But in that moment as everyone looked at me expectantly, I froze. Some sniggered, some laughed at me, a teacher or two looked like they were judging me. I was embarrassed. Palms sweaty. Heart hammering against the ribs. Gulping rapidly every millisecond, out of sheer nervousness. Feeling alone and helpless.

It was a feeling I was all too familiar with in conference rooms.

The voice of my Reiki Master asked me to talk to that younger self. What would I want to say or do to that younger self?

I remember tears streaming down my cheeks, as I gave my younger self what she really needed in that moment.

A tight hug, and a reassurance that ‘it’s alright’.

I stood behind her and told her everything she would have liked to hear in that moment. And it felt so,so good.

The voice of my Reiki master told us to use Reiki symbols to heal that moment. A fragment of me. A moment that was locked in memory. Causing me to panic each time I was in a presentation.

And then just like that my mind showed me another event. I am in a classroom, 5 years of age. A teacher is asking me to stand up for an impromptu recitation test. I am unprepared, so I am thinking. A tight slap lands on my cheek. I am embarrassed. Alone. Helpless. Everyone is looking at me.

That was my subconscious mind showing me what really happened. 
 I spoke to my younger self. Hugging her, saying things to her that she needed to hear. Allowing her to let it all out. Consoling her. Healing her with Reiki symbols. Re-scripting the entire scene in my memory. (I even took the liberty to reprimand the teacher and told her to just lay off. If only someone had done that for me then.)

Integrating a happier, more confident me with my current self, I came out of the trance feeling lighter.

In my next presentation, and the many presentations after that, each time my name was mentioned for presenting the creative piece, I was pleasantly surprised to feel no panic, no mouth drying, no clamming up inside.

I was healed. For good. Adieu, stage fear!

My Reiki master had used a Hypnotherapy technique along with the healing Reiki symbols to help us heal our past.

But I had another monster to deal with. I started researching all the hypnotherapists in town. Till a friend told me about this one Hypnotherapist who taught hypnotherapy as well. One of the first and the best in the country.

Now when you build your life around fear, it’s hard to trust. So just to test the waters before I got into therapy with some stranger who could ‘hypnotise me’ and fill my head with nasty ideas, I enrolled for the course. Level One was all about the theory of the mind.

I was intrigued. It was no hocus pocus, this hypnotherapy. It was a well researched scientific approach to reprogram, recalibrate all those thoughts and memories that are buried deep within. Causing us to feel trapped in our thinking patterns, losing control of our emotions, affecting the auric field, eventually causing physical ailments and diseases.

I was smitten. Despite a job in advertising, I decided to study hypnotherapy in detail. I took my time. Finished the course over a span of a year, understanding, practicing on friends, family.

But, they say, to be a good therapist one must be a client first.

I underwent 7 sittings with my mentor, a skilled therapist. Each session was like unfolding a mystery. It was even more powerful than what I had experienced with my Reiki Master. A lot of emotional clutter. A lot of realisations, self discovery.

And there was no pendulum moving left to right and back, in front of my eyes. A bit of a chat, a reclining chair on which the therapist made me feel relaxed. Like being lulled into yoga-nidra.

While in therapy, the conscious mind is awake. So you can hear everything the therapist is saying. Only it is such a relaxed state that it feels like you are daydreaming. You see images, you feel a surge of intense emotions, sometimes even physical symptoms. It’s the subconscious mind’s way of showing you what ever needs to be dealt with.

Hypnotherapy is not the same as hypnosis. It is a focused therapy that uses hypnosis (I choose to call it an extremely relaxed state) to tap into subconscious memories from this lifetime and even previous lifetimes to find out the root cause of the issue and heal it at the source.

It healed me. Of claustrophobia, of all the baggage of emotions and fears I carried without even realising.

Now when I am in a five star hotel room, or in a flight filled with overanxious travellers clogging up the exit, or in a lift with 20 people, I wait and watch. I wait for my palms to feel clammy, I wait for the panic, I wait for that voice in my head that tells me to make a run for the exit. I wait. Then I smile. Because all that comes is a feeling of calm and free.

The wall is broken. The fear is gone. And there is so much room to breathe. Everyday.

I feel privileged and blessed that I can now do more than just talk about it. I can facilitate others to experience this very feeling. Session after session. Transforming a life. Just like someone changed mine.