Saturday, January 24, 2009

Focused Relaxation Leads to Mind Travel

From my earliest memories, I have had an inner fascination with how things work, which was very likely the underlying draw that eventually lead me into a career with computers--the ultimate mechanical device. But the creative (right) side of my brain eventually caught up with the logical (left) side as experiences during my teenage years progressively turned my thoughts to the inner workings of the mind itself—the ultimate biological device.

And then one day, as more times than not seems to be the unintentional way progression in such things just happens in my life, I stumbled onto a stage performance that would literally change my life and tie it all together in one remarkable epiphany. There on a high school stage was a world-renowned hypnotist who seemed to be able to control the minds and therefore the unrehearsed antics of my closest friends in ways that they couldn't begin to explain nor even remember. I was completely taken by the whole experience, which turned into a unquenchable thirst to understand every aspect of what this man knew that allowed him to have inconceivable power over others' minds.

I immediately located an acredited school and subsequently became certified as a hypnotherapist and began working with anyone and everyone that I thought might be able to take advantage of my new-found skills, even if they couldn't pay me for my time; what did I care, I was hooked. And then, as before, without the slightest intention, the next giant step in my evolution of grasping the mind just happened.

My soon-to-be sister-in-law that I had worked with several times longingly expressed a home sickness that I couldn't ignore. So, once in the relaxed state of mind, I simply suggested that she focus her attention on her mother's face and attributes, which she readily did. Then, without a second thought, I suggested that she allow the mind find her.

In a moment, she matter-of-factly began describing the features of the room where her mother was sitting reading a book. Having worked with hundreds of people by this time in my career, it wasn't difficult to recognize the innate ability of the human mind to bring back very vivid details of even the most supressed memories, so nothing was much out of the ordinary to this point; she was home, where she wanted to be, and her anxieties were under control. But then a fleeting thought popped into my head, which I innocently pursued, that changed the entire atmosphere of the session; I asked her to look at the book that her mother was reading and tell me the title.

Before I knew it, she responded with the Life of Karl Marx (we learned only later that she was reading it in preparation for a university class she had the next day). Just then I had the thought to ask her to go around to the back of her mother's chair and tell me what page she was on and read the first line of the page, which she did without hesitation. I can't even begin to describe the high we all experienced when we called later that night and discovered that what she had seen "in her mind" was indeed all true, down to the words on the page that she was reading.

Now some 20 years and literally hundreds of what I refer to as Mind Travels later, all the details of the methods and techniques used to relax the mind and actual transcripts of some of our most unusual Mind Travels have been captured in this book called Through the Eyes of a Traveler. You can Mind Travel, too; in fact, you can learn how to project your mind to any point in time and space, past, present, and future. Imagine it! For those who wish to learn the techniques in a class situation, we also offer workshops (seminars) to provide one-on-one instruction.