What I'm up to

I haven't been posting much here for a while. All my blogging effort has been going into Living Skillfully: Change Your Life, my personal development blog, and guest posting on other related blogs to build more traffic and subscribers. But it's time for a roundup of what's been going on.

I'm about to bring out another online course, Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding (there's a $20 discount offer if you sign up before 22 November 2010).

I also want to put together a small stop-smoking product before the end of the year, since cigarette tax goes up here on New Year's Day and that will stimulate a few more people to look around for effective ways to stop smoking. I'm approaching quitting smoking in terms of a personal development challenge rather than from a strict medical model.

I haven't just been writing about personal development, though. I'm doing some too. I've started getting up earlier to exercise, which is going well (I'm progressing through the Hundred Pushups challenge). Conveniently, this builds the same muscles that I use to paddle my new kayak, which is a lot of fun.

Starting in February, I'm doing a 10-week improv class. My day job may also pay for me to go to a public-speaking course run by Toastmasters.

Very slowly, I'm working on a Young Adult novel called The Y People, which is a bit of a hat-tip to the X-Men while being almost completely unlike it.

I've moved all my creative stuff over to C-Side Media at last, and I'm thinking about starting a new blog there (because I don't have enough blogs). This one will be about the process of self-publishing, basically how you can publish your book for free. It's a topic I have useful knowledge on and it would benefit other people, plus if I get people subscribing to it there'll be some splashover to my other projects. I'll announce it here as and when. (You can subscribe to get all C-Side Media updates on any of the several C-Side Media blogs.)

I'm also planning a podcast in the New Year on personal development, in which I'll interview other personal development bloggers. Steven Aitchison has agreed to be my first guest. It'll probably be monthly.

So there's plenty happening in my life in 2011. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to know more about any of it.

Publicity Officer

Well, I'm now the Publicity Officer for the NZ Association of Professional Hypnotherapists.

I've been thinking about offering to do that for a while, so I approached the secretary at the NZ Hypnotherapy Federation conference this weekend just gone. (Good conference, by the way.)

I said, "Would the NZAPH like a publicity officer?"

She shook my hand and said, "Welcome, publicity officer."

She then took me to the president, who literally embraced me. Apparently it's been difficult to get anyone to do anything lately, so he was delighted to get a volunteer.

My colleague just down the road, who has been the newsletter editor, also took the opportunity to offload that job onto me, which is fine.

I really want to improve the positive profile of hypnotherapy in public consciousness, so here's my opportunity.

Life Leverage: my new nonfiction project

Over at Hypno NZ I've just announced Life Leverage: Simple techniques to improve your health and wellbeing.

The project is a book-and-CD combo, with the hypnotherapy tracks on the CD supporting the changes that the book talks about making.

I've created a mailing list where you can sign up for updates on this and my other hypnotherapy-related projects, such as audio recordings and videos. The idea is to assess demand so that I can decide what kind of a print-and-distribution model to adopt.

If health is a topic that interests you, please take a look. I try to stay on the scientific end of the health advice spectrum and make sure that my recommendations are well supported, but at the same time treat human beings as human beings and not squishy machines.

Occasional update

Hello, Faithful Readers. (By switching my RSS feed to Feedburner I've managed to discover how many of you there are, and it's more than I thought. Though still not many. No, I'm not telling you.)

As you may well have realized, the reason I've not been blogging much over here is largely because I've been blogging a lot over at Living Skillfully and podcasting at City of Masks. The latter will be coming to an end in the next couple of months, all going well, and I'll be moving on to a new fiction project. If you want to be involved in the next-project-deciding process, hop over to City of Masks and leave a comment.

It's interesting how writing contributes to personal shifts. In the course of blogging about various topics and finding which ones attract me, I've discovered that what really interests me in hypnotherapy is actually the stuff that I thought I would find boring, bread-and-butter: smoking cessation and weight loss (or rather, positive eating, which isn't by any means just about weight loss). In fact, health promotion and helping people to engage in healthy behaviours has become quite fascinating.

There's a discipline of psychology called Health Psychology which deals with this, and there are several courses on it at Massey at masters' level, so providing my interest endures (always a question with me), a health psychologist is what I'm aiming to become. I've been thinking for a while that "hypnotherapy" is not an ideal label from a marketing perspective - not only because of the perception issues it has, but also because it is marketing a feature - hypnosis - rather than a benefit - such as getting healthier or gaining confidence.

So until I can legitimately call myself a health psychologist, I'm contemplating using the term "health coach" - also still mentioning that I do hypnotherapy, but emphasizing what I use it for.

In other news, thanks to Andrew and the new Monastics group (the Desert Mothers), I've had a small breakthrough in my understanding of the "spirituality of everyday life" thing. There's no magic to it. There's no technique. You just have to do it - be aware of what you're doing, be present, pay attention.

It's simple and hard.

Soon, I hope to post more garden photos, since it's a year since my big planting and everything is growing well. Until then, keep paying attention in everyday life.

What I've been reading

I haven't posted for a while, so here's an update on what I've been reading.

I have about three more letters from Meditations on the Tarot to blog about, but they take a little while, so I'm waiting until I'm finished my online shop for hypno.co.nz. (That's what I've been working on in my spare time lately.)

While we were in LA I bought several books at Brand Books, an excellent little second-hand bookshop in Glenfield. One of them was New Techniques in Behavior Therapy and Hypnosis: Including Advanced Techniques in Sex Therapy by Arreed F. Barabasz, written while he was lecturing at Canterbury University (30 years ago, so the "new" isn't applicable any more). There's some good stuff on migraine which I'll make use of (basically you teach people to warm their hands, since that shifts blood flow away from the head, and too much blood flow in the head is part of the problem). There are also some useful ideas on systematic desensitization for phobias. The sex therapy material is mostly either things I already knew or things that would require me to be a doctor to put into practice, but there's also a section on sleep disorders with one or two useful points.

I'm partway through John Crowley's LITTLE, BIG; I've kind of got bogged down in the tragic story of Auberon and Sylvie. It's one of those books that's really well written but I don't necessarily enjoy all of. I've read it before; I don't remember whether I finished it then or not. Possibly not, since all I can recall is the very early scene where Smoky and Daily Alice go off on their honeymoon walking trip. I'd forgotten how much sex it has in it, and forgotten that there were drugs in it at all (no rock-and-roll, though). I've been stalled on it for a while, reading other things, but I do intend to finish.

A book that does include rock-and-roll is Russ Haines' Digital Audio: Record | Rip | Edit | Mix | Master | Burn | Stream, which although it was published in 2001 is still a very valuable resource, because unlike so many technical books it gives underlying principles, not specifics of using rapidly outdated tools. In fact, he emphasizes that the (software) tools you use don't particularly matter; there are several of them, find one you like and learn to use it well, they're much of a muchness as far as the basics are concerned. I want to summarize this one fully from the perspective of voice recording and post the results to my hypnotherapy site (since this is why I got it from the library: to learn how to make better recordings that I can sell in my new online shop). I'm waiting for a device he recommends, an analog-to-digital converter, to reach me from Australia, and it's taking forever. (Australia Post were slow when I lived there 17 years ago, and apparently are still slow. You'd think that for $9 they'd be able to move a small package 1200km in less than two weeks.) Once I have that I'll go through the book again.

On the spiritual side, two things. I've finally got round to Sister Mary Margaret Funk's A Mind at Peace, which I must have had in the "to-read" queue for over a year. It summarizes the teaching of John Cassian, who collected a lot of sayings from the Desert Fathers in the 5th century, on meditation and dealing with the "eight thoughts": food, sex, things, anger, dejection, acedia (spiritual weariness), vainglory and pride. Andrew has been using it in his Centering Prayer workshops for a while now. The writing itself is not tremendously well organized and is quite poorly edited, but the ideas are useful. I just finished the Sex chapter this morning, and already the book is making a difference. The basic principle, as with Centering Prayer, is to be aware of the eight thoughts (thus making them mindful rather than mindless), and then "renounce" them, or as Centering Prayer more helpfully says, let them go, so that they don't carry you where you don't want to go. It has a handy appendix with a number of different practices listed and briefly explained.

And speaking of Centering Prayer, Andrew lent me his copy of Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls by Cynthia Bourgeault last week. I didn't quite finish it before I had to pass it on to Julianne, but it's interesting. We've been reading her books in reverse order, first Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, which borders on being orthodox (albeit in a slightly unusual mode), then The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, which is definitely esoteric, and now this, her first book, which is very unusual indeed. She believes (and may be correct in believing, I'm not in a position to say) that she still has a powerful, living connection with her late teacher, a hermit monk with whom she shared a (non-physical) love affair which surprised both of them. Together they formed a "second body" which, she claims, persisted and continues to develop after his death.

Finally, I'm currently reading, and very much enjoying, Charles Stross's Glasshouse. Damn, this thing is good. Future society, nanoassemblers, ability to upload yourself, change your body, and - this is important - change your mental "state vector", i.e. the contents and pattern of your mind. Someone infected all the assemblers with the Curious Yellow information virus, which censored everyone's memories of the past as they went through the assemblers (to change bodies, heal, de-age or whatever) and made them vectors of the virus to the next assembler. A major war was fought to destroy Curious Yellow and "clean" those affected. During this war, people did terrible things, some of which they then had memory surgery to forget about. One such is the protagonist, who along with others in a similar situation volunteers for a sociological experiment, a recreation of the long-gone society of the late 20th/early 21st century, as best it can be reconstructed from fragmentary records - which is kind of 1950s suburbia (with strongly defined gender roles) plus a mixture of technologies from various eras. All, though, is not as it seems...

For its handling of gender alone, this novel deserves an award (in fact, I just took a moment to nominate it for the James Tiptree, Jr Award, and I'll be surprised if I'm the first to do so). (EDIT: I wasn't.) But it's also incredibly well written and gripping, real mind-expanding "what if" science fiction. Stross is finally learning to keep his tremendous intellect and immense knowledge in the background, dialled down to a level where lesser beings can still understand - something like what Connie Willis and Neal Stephenson have learned to do - and it makes it even better than his earlier books, because for almost all of the time I know what the hell he's talking about. It has the disturbing presence and depth of Neil Gaiman, than which I have no higher praise to offer.

What I'm reading

It's not unusual for me to be reading two or three books at once. I usually have one "recreational" and sometimes one "serious" book by my bed, and a "serious" book in the lounge that I read over breakfast (that is, in short sections and at a time in the day when my head is clearer than last thing at night).

At the moment, though, for various reasons I'm reading five (six if you count Meditations on the Tarot, the reading of which has paused for now).

Until yesterday my breakfast book was Leslie LeCron's Experimental Hypnosis, a classic in its field (I like to own classics in the fields I'm interested in). I mainly bought it for Milton Erickson's chapter on time distortion, but there's some other good stuff in it too. Because it's so old (originally published 1948 - 60 years ago!) a lot of what's in it is just common knowledge in hypno circles now, but by no means all.

(Where are today's books like this, and like Altered States of Consciousness by Charles Tart - collections of leading-edge research, by scientists, but accessible to a wider audience?)

My current breakfast book is the next one for our occasional Cityside book group: Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman. It's an odd book, one secular-Jewish philosophy professor's very heartfelt search for the "lost Christianity" that he is sure must be out there somewhere - the one that "actually produces real change in human nature, real transformation". Sadly, I have to agree with him that that one has been lost - though also, more hopefully, that it's worth looking for.

Key quote:

I, as a professional philosopher, had long since been forced to accept that philosophical ideas by themselves change nothing in the life of an individual... through [intellectualism] modern man squanders his attention in the intellectual function while remaining cut off from the emotional and instinctual sides of his nature...

Yup.

My "serious" bedside book currently is Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain - the title has an obvious relevance to my "Change Your Mind" course. It's about "neuroplasticity", the phenomenon whereby not just the content but the structure of brains is subject to change, and is based around one of the Dalai Lama's Word and Life Conferences on that topic. Begley has a slightly annoying habit of comparing an idealized Buddhism to a misconstrued Christianity, to the latter's detriment, and an also slightly annoying habit of using flashy similes in an attempt to communicate to a popular audience - though it's not anything like as annoying as the hearty stupid folksiness of a "For Dummies" book. But the research itself is fascinating, the experiments are well described and the implications carefully teased out. Basically, by concentrated attention we can change how our brains work, including making ourselves more compassionate and accepting towards others. This is definitely good news.

My two "recreational" books at the moment are George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones and Darby Conley's latest Get Fuzzy treasury, LoserPalooza. LoserPalooza is as funny as Get Fuzzy usually is, that is, very funny. I use it to relax and cheer myself up. I'm having trouble getting into A Game of Thrones; it's not really my kind of fantasy. As the Amazon review says, " There is much bloodshed, cruelty, and death", which I should have expected given that I picked it up (off a sale shelf in Vroman's Bookshop in Pasadena) based on a vague memory of it being mentioned a few times on Story-Games. I love the Story-Games folks, but they do tend to the bloodshed, cruelty and death end of things in their tastes a lot of the time. I may put it aside and come back to it later.

In a burst of confidence that anyone will read these meanderings, I've used my Amazon Associates ID to do the links and put one of Amazon's new widgets in my (now rather crowded) sidebar. I promise if I get any money for directing buyers to Amazon's site that I will spend it on books, which I will then review.

My milestones - let me show you them

This seems to be a time of significant events for me.

Two weeks ago I gave my first paid-for professional hypnotherapy session.

Last week I gave my "Change Your Mind" seminar for the first time. It went really well. It helped, of course, that I knew most of the people who came, but I felt (and apparently appeared) confident, I got great feedback, and even though I'd advertised it as a free course (because it was kind of a trial run), people gave me completely unsolicited money. Almost $175 of unsolicited money, in fact. At the end. Which is a pretty good indicator of perceived value.

Yesterday was the company I work for's last day in the offices that have been my workplace for over 10 years, since I first went there in September 1996 for a two-month contract (and never, up until now, left). We start at brand-new offices, specially fitted out for us, on Monday.

I have spent more than a quarter of my life so far working in that building. It's a crappy building and I don't adore my job (though I don't despise it), but that's still significant.

And that's the other thing: a quarter of my life. I turn 40 in less than two weeks. I'm now older than my mother was when I was born; I've had half my average life expectancy and a third of the currently conceivable maximum. I'm choosing to see this as a start rather than an ending: I am starting on the most productive, most satisfactory decades of my life (though the 30s were pretty good, especially since I got married at 32).

So in closing, I would just like to say:

BRING. IT. ON.

Grounded and centred

Just a quick observation about how I feel the day after giving a hypnotherapy session, even one that didn't necessarily go brilliantly in terms of the client walking away radiantly changed, or in terms of me feeling like I did the greatest job in the world.

I feel grounded, centred and at peace.

I think that's a good indication that I've finally got the whole career-choice thing right, after years of drifting into the next thing that came along.

Now to make it an actual career.

Two Hypnotherapy Seminars: Compared and Contrasted

Yesterday I went to a seminar with Andrew Newton, the well-known stage hypnotist, who trained Paul McKenna. It was interesting to compare and contrast it with the last seminar I went to, with Lawrence Follas.

Lawrence's seminar was somewhat dull and poorly organized, and I learned relatively little, whereas Andrew's was (as you would expect from someone who's been on the stage for almost 30 years) entertaining and professional, and I learned a lot more. Lawrence is an elderly and rather kindly man; Andrew is a dynamic man in his 50s (partly because of his accent, but also in his general appearance and manner, he reminds me of Tony Blair - a man he openly despises, so he wouldn't welcome the comparison). He has a persona (which I think is partly put on and partly real) of being cynical, sarcastic and uncaring. But there were also similarities between the two seminars.

Firstly, the amount I paid for each was about what it was worth (obviously, the Follas one was a lot cheaper).

Secondly, both of them could have productively been a lot shorter.

And thirdly, both of them were as long as they were because the presenters went on about their personal beliefs to an annoying and unnecessary degree.

Now, Lawrence Follas is a New Ager who believes pretty much anything, while Andrew Newton is an atheist who believes almost nothing. But both of these positions annoy me for the same reason, which they have in common with fundamentalist and evangelical believers of all religions, and don't have in common with me. That is, they think they understand how the universe works - not necessarily in every detail, but overall.

I don't think they understand, and I don't think I understand, either. The detail level is the only level at which I think I understand anything, and that's only satisficing.

Although I have very little respect for the content of their beliefs or the way they support them, I do respect and even admire the fact that they are passionate in them, that these beliefs are important components of their lives. It shows they're considering the important issues. I think their conclusions about these issues are totally off base, but at least they are admitting them into their mental universe rather than leaving them unexamined.

But I did learn something from both seminars, apart from the hypnotherapy techniques which were what I was there for. That was: However important my beliefs are to me, when I'm speaking to an audience which doesn't share them about another topic, I should mention them only in passing, if at all.

Kickoff

I realized this week that I'd been stalling on launching seriously into starting my hypnotherapy practice. Now that I have my diploma I can start, even without waiting for my Association membership, which should come through in a couple of weeks. (The exam went well, I can't see them turning me down; they're not grim-faced guardians of the portals, they were very friendly, though professional.)

So during the week I designed a little flyer, and today I got it printed out 20 times (6 flyers to a page) and got a paper trimmer, cut them up, and went for a walk around the block distributing them.

I carefully avoided the letterboxes with "No Circulars" signs; I have one myself, and it infuriates me when people ignore it; I would never give business to someone who did so. REAL ESTATE AGENTS, I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

Ahem.

Anyway, I'm out there now, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Helen reckons that for her massage therapy business that's the most effective thing to do, walk round and put some flyers in letterboxes.

Officially a Hypnotherapist

Well, I passed the final stage of my hypnotherapy diploma last night. Talked to Roger, who trained me, over the phone and he said he was very happy with the material I'd submitted and didn't have much in the way of critique to offer. Evidently the videotape came out OK, which was my main worry.

So now I can start practicing. This feels like a really important step, especially since it's taken considerable effort and perseverance to achieve.

NZAPH exam is next, on the 22nd of April.

And then I have to decide - shall I use my powers for good... or for evil?

(I just had to pop that in, the post was far too serious.)

Yet another blog begins

So, another blog. Why?

I realised last night, talking to Andrew (my spiritual director), that my online presence is kind of scattered and that reflects a slight lack of integration in my life.

I have a blog over at the Cityside community which I only post to occasionally, because I only put things there that I think may hold some sort of interest for that community (and at that I'm probably wrong half the time).

I have an old website at Geocities which is kind of an archive of my old articles and such going back 20 years. Most of it doesn't reflect what I think any more, but it may be helpful to people who are still at that stage of faith (in fact, sometimes they write to me and say it is), so I keep it.

I have my creative website, C-Side Media. I could blog there but then I'd have to build a comments feature (most of the code is my own), and creativity isn't all I do. Much the same goes for my hypnotherapy website, Hypno NZ. That's set aside for what I hope will be my new profession; a lot of my interests don't really fit there (and again I have written most of the code and don't need the grief of writing a proper blogging app).

I post on several forums. Story-Games is the one where I have posted the most - it's a forum for people who design and play narrative-focussed roleplaying games - but that's led me to the quirkily titled I would knife-fight a man, where the discussion includes sex, God and roleplaying games. I mostly weigh in on the God discussions.

And some of my fiction is at Xenoglyph (you'll have to get a user account to see it).

So that pulls together my online presence. I'll probably copy some of the posts I've made at the other sites over here too.