like,

whatever.

So it was definitely the threat of mortality.

And my children, I have three children, they were all little then.

They were like eight, six, and four.

And the thought of leaving them was horrendous for me.

So it was really just the white-hot fear of mortality that opened my mind to change.

That's exactly right.

so peter i want to get into number three because number three is the body because we have the three right the spirit the mind and the body so why do so many people go into reverse the body the mind and the spirit

Because the body is the tangible one.

And in our culture, we have what has been referred to as a five sense reality, meaning that if we cannot identify something with one of our five senses, that in essence, it's like it doesn't exist.

And I felt that way when I was a firefighter EMT.

And I felt that way as an EMT taking people to the hospital.

And I'm not giving anybody advice about what to do or what not to do.

But when I would take them to the hospital because they had a physical injury, so they had a broken leg or they had a laceration or in this one case, a man cut his fingers off with a snowblower, I knew I was bringing them to the right place because it's physical and the doctors could see it.

What made a hypnotherapy feel like the right new next chapter?

Okay.

It was.

It was.

I told you I had this security guard company when I was diagnosed, and I ended up selling that, and I was kind of freaked out by the idea of not having anything.

And so I bought this little shipping and packing store in Connecticut, and it – This one day, this woman walked in to ship a package, and it said Hypnotherapy Academy of America, Santa Fe, New Mexico on it.

And I got into this hour-long discussion with her about it because I just found that concept so fascinating.

And her sister had been one of the founders of this school, and her sister had married the other student.

Just briefly explain it if you don't mind.

So what are some of the kind of concepts that maybe have been helpful for you to make some kind of understanding of these kind of phenomenon?

That you're an eternal spirit.

You have always existed and you always will.

Like a driver of a car, you are not the car.

You're not the two-door coupe and you're not the minivan.

You're the driver inside of that body of that vehicle.

And it's the same now.

[laughs]

What do you think? What's the difference between hypnosis and meditation, for example?

I don't think there is a difference.

I think it's what you do with that state.

So I would define hypnosis as a focused state of concentration where selective thinking is employed.

And what this means, and anyone that's listening to this, if you've driven your car and you're thinking about a movie that you saw, you're thinking about a problem you had with an employee, you're thinking about something that's going on in your relationship, you pull into your driveway, you can't remember driving the last 20 minutes.

That's a hypnotic state.

And that focused state of concentration, whatever you were thinking about, is like looking through something the diameter of a straw.

you

So how do you help people uncover what's really underneath anxiety, people pleasing, relationship struggles, or even emotional eating?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And I first would like to just say how I think of root cause healing.

And I liken it to being an auto mechanic.

If you took your car into an auto mechanic because there was smoke coming out of the engine, because it was making a weird noise, because it was pulling to the right, you would not want to hear the mechanic say after they investigated, we really don't know what's causing this, but if you just turn up your radio, you're not going to hear the weird noise.

Or if you install a fan to blow away the smoke, at least you'll be able to see as you drive down the road.

No one would accept that.

Okay.

Oh my goodness.

And I was holding onto so much grief and so much anger about this.

I was...

I, I didn't even realize the, the depths of the, of the hatred and anger and grief that I was holding onto regarding this.

And that was something that came out in one of these sessions when I was deep in hypnosis, and I was sitting in a chair, and I was, I was raging, and I was, [chuckles] I was sobbing and, and, and it ultimately, the, the therapist guided me through to a forgiving the doctors for what they had done.

And there were multiple sessions like that regarding a variety of things from my own past, and that felt enormously cathartic, I guess is one of the words I would use, and the other word I would use is healing, because again, the mind and body are connected.

Could a machine ever have a soul injected into it?

I don't think so.

The

wildest night.

Just before we changed over to the new setup, we went a bit wild with acts.

We had a stripper.

A stripper? Oh yeah, the stripper was over there.

What do I say, Raffle?

Back in the

day.

The person who doesn't know they're coming from trauma, how do you start to bring that to awareness for somebody?

I teach my clients how to use an ideomotor tool.

So if you've ever heard or if your listeners have ever heard of something called kinesiology, there's a lot of chiropractors that use this.

Some naturopathic doctors will use it.

It's basically another phrase is muscle testing.

So your body is a feedback mechanism.

If I ask you, how are you doing today? And you give me an honest answer, your honest answer will come from what? How your body's feeling.

I'm a

Does that make any sense?

Yeah, it does.

I mean, the way I think about the same thing is that religion is a middleman.

And middleman just by itself is not either a good thing or a bad thing.

It depends on who the middleman is.

It may actually help you, depending on the middleman and your connection to the middleman, to find your divinity, to make connection with God.

It could be that it diverts you.

Um, but just have no idea where to start with as far as like any hypnosis and kind of getting help in that arena, I guess.

Um, we were able to kinda help them keep the lights on and, and just kind of throw the money around in a way that I'm sure the IRS would, would not appreciate, but, um, [chuckles] it, it, it was what worked.

Yeah, Scott and I met in the music scene, you know, probably in the first year I, I lived in Portland.

I'm, I'm a drummer and played in a lot of bands, done a lot of touring.

Like Scott, like, done all the sort of different roles in music that, that you can do.

Both of us have worked at several different venues in town.

I, I'd been, uh, working at Space Gallery, uh, more or less since I, I got to Portland.

Was a sound person there, and then, um, took over the, the booking, um, which I've done for over a decade now somehow.

I mean, it was really just like building a coalition very, very slowly, but, but very steadily that, um, I think ultimately won the day.

But walk me through what that means.

Okay, so you'd first need to understand or be aware of the distinction between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

And one of the metaphors that I like to use is imagine that you or I is riding on top of an elephant.

The rider, the human being, is like the conscious mind.

The elephant is the subconscious mind.

It's running almost everything about your life.

It's 95% of your brain's processing power.

[laughs] Talking about somebody who's, like, really understood the mind, right? Like, y- you're seeing people in real time probably have these experiences where they're like, "I didn't even know that it was possible for me to understand this or feel this way."