Stranger in an Unstrange Land: Moving to Toronto

This morning I woke up from a dream where I sat down in a college classroom for my new semester, and looked up to realize I was surrounded by friends: without me planning it, this class turned out to follow on from one where we all become good friends immediately, and had so much fun all semester - think the tv show Community, but with the whole room. Everyone was smiling at me, greeting me, so happy that we were going to get to spend this time together.

This dream isn’t hard to interpret. A month ago I was in Boston, where I had longtime friends who would get together in a group, and my unconscious is just catching up with the fact that I don’t have that anymore. A part of me thinks I could be on an extended vacation, I’ve got that umbilical cord of chat messages and social media, but it’s getting harder to deny that Toronto is where I live now - a city where, though I’m Canadian and lived in Ontario for over a decade, we didn’t know a single person when we decided to leave. It could be a lonely life if I don’t get out there.

But Toronto is already showing itself to be a spectacular place in the summer - so much going on and so free feeling. It’s not only lifting the weight of dread that caused us to leave the United States in such haste - khatsha and I landing in Canada only 12 weeks after deciding to go, for reasons you can probably guess gestures at the USA - but also the weight of prudishness and repression of the laws in Boston. We’ve already been to the pool-based sex club in Toronto, twice! It’s on Google Maps! (did you know Massachusetts does not have a single sex club, education center or dungeon?) And Toronto Pride was an explosion of happiness, diversity and self-expression on a scale I’ve never seen before. Breathing just feels easier here, and though it runs on money, like all big cities, the abundant charms of things to do, drink and eat seem to include all kinds of people, not just the rich. At least until Ontario winter hits, the city could be a wondrous toy, just made for an NB and boy.

Got to keep moving, surfing the excitement and unbelievable hassle of an international move (as of this writing there is a truck with all our belongings on it, somewhere between Boston and Toronto), so the grief doesn’t catch up. My birthday early this year was a two day hypno play party called the Bubble Party, where we had dozens of balloons, bubble guns, a popcorn bar, mandatory screenings of Rainbow War and Pop Goes the World, and lots more. The idea was to make a bubble from all the sadness in the news and life, and together we more or less succeeded. As khatsha said, I’m glad we didn’t know at the time it was the last one. Some will visit, and surely at least one of our vulnerable friends we are trying to help get out and make it to Toronto will - others won’t be able to, and we’ll try to help from a distance. Someday we’ll feel able to at least cross back for a visit ourselves. But that time is gone.

At the same time so grateful for the passport and financial privilege that gave us a (relatively) easy exit, and for how the maple leaf logos and worn brick houses of Ontario are homey to me. It is no longer subversive if I blast the Weakerthans or Metric, eat All-Dressed chips or say “Grade 6” instead of “6th grade”. I’m a stranger, but it doesn’t feel so strange.

As a side note, I wish I wrote more consistently, because it would be easier to shape my feelings into words with more practice, and also because I wish this blog was a better record of what my life is like. But of course most of the most interesting stuff has to stay private - which means some of the most eventful periods are the least documented. And anyway, I’ve come to consider it a red flag when people have too consistent, well-rounded-seeming of a social media persona.

I’ll always have those 11 years in Boston, that contain my entire hypnokink life to date, and especially the crazy-vivid last 8 years since khatsha arrived. So much to savour, and so much to wrestle with - even if nothing else memorable happened in the whole rest of my life (which, I hope is not the case!) I’d have plenty to chew on. After all those extreme highs and lows, that could make a box set of novels, part of me is so nervous about how draining and heartbreaking community can be sometimes, not to mention the vulnerability it takes to play with new people. It can really kick your ass. But I’m so grateful for those memories and lessons, and the people who made them, and at least right now hopefulness is winning.

Luckily, and mostly thanks to khatsha’s hard work, we’ve already started meeting cool people, especially some nifty Toronto artsy kinksters and hypnokinksters. I didn’t count on already having that fun in Toronto of riffing on suggestions, bitching about Erickson, making pie in the sky plans for events etc that hypnosis people do when they get together, but it’s a great feeling! We’ve been to two munches, and have some great get-togethers coming up.

Community is a basic need. khatsha and I can have a lot of fun together, and keep busy in different ways, especially in these early days when there’s everything to do, but it’s not enough. I had it in Boston, I had it in Italy, and I had it last time I was in Ontario: regularly seeing people in a group, in person, who are happy to see me, who like me, who get me. And being involved in their lives and particularities, in all their triumphs, worries, obsessions, and sorrows, and what’s created when we get together. Can’t hardly wait.

Hypnosis Made Me Spiritual

 

For sleepingirl's PSYCHOSPIRITUAL Hypnokink/Spirituality Essay Jam

I probably walked past the shop in Central Square with CRYSTALS AND BOOKS in the window a hundred times, but this time I went in. Even though I was only looking for shiny objects for hypnotic fixations, I could already feel a divergence in my path, possibilities opening, a relief of not being that teen who proudly bought an issue of The Skeptical Inquirer with paper route money. 

After looking at a few crystals and prisms, I had a thought and asked the owner, “Do you have any books on trance?” He immediately said, “Right over here!” 

There were a lot of titles, and now ones that my eyes might have glazed right past, like Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, were super interesting to me. Something changed.

Thanks to my experiences with hypnosis, both hypnotizing and being hypnotized, I think that there is something inside everyone that can be labelled the spirit, and that it can be communicated with—just not with facts and logic. Hypnotists know how, but so do religions and new age practitioners.

It’s not very effective to tell someone just, “calm down”. But to help someone settle their breathing, guide their attention to a peaceful or fascinating sensory image, or let them give themselves over to a guiding force for awhile, that can touch the spirit profoundly. It’s hard to admit that, like everyone, my mind is a restless animal that must be approached the right way, and what I have called “rationality” is often just hypervigilance, neither representing who I “really” am nor the highest possible thing to aspire to. But hypnosis and BDSM have taught me that surrender and transcending the self are just as valid, and usually more powerful.

I think we’re most conscious of the spirit when something is out of whack, a set of deeply human concerns. How we feel about the future. How much the past weighs on us. Whether we feel aligned with our surroundings, including the community of people around us. How in control of our lives and minds we feel. Whether we feel a sense of growth and progression. How we deal with anger and various types of frustration. Whether we feel that we are a good person, and putting our energy into the right place. How we feel about the way the world is going. How much of the time we are free of distress. These are all what I would call spiritual matters.

Once I missed my flight at the Montreal airport and shared a meal at the airport hotel with two other stranded passengers, a middle aged native craftsman and an elderly catholic priest. They began discussing their respective spiritual practices,  the native guy talking about how ritual work had helped him overcome addiction, and the priest discussing how he uses a brief ritual with daubing annointed oil on people at the hospital and rehab clinics he works at in Brockton. Another time I was contacted out of the blue on Fetlife by someone involved in shamanism in Boston, and we had a fascinating coffee talking about the differences and similarities between hypnosis and shamanic ritual. I can now easily see a function for every part of a rietual, starting from the in-depth work that the recipient does with the shaman to craft it. 

For myself, until the age of 12 I went to a church in a lukewarm branch of christianity called Anglicanism. I left it behind without little to no hesitation, but in recent years, as khatsha and I have started attending Unitarian services at the church on the Boston commons once or twice a year, I notice how standing and sitting, speaking and singing together, and being aligned with other people in a beautiful solemn space can have a calming and regulating effect on the animal of my mind. 

There’s so much to be learned, in both directions: from spirituality to hypnosis, and from hypnosis to spirituality.

I don’t seek to do therapy or healing with hypnosis—I’m really in it for the sexy times—but sometimes it happens anyway, and as the hypnotist I’ve seen profoundly spiritual experiences close up. They’re too private to share, but two experiences are so vivid in my memory, one in a cemetery and one in an art gallery, both of which led to my trance partner bursting into tears and feeling as if something had powerfully shifted. I’m also reminded of Enscenic and Ellie Copter’s Musical Hypnotic Journeys, guided by a playlist and group suggestions, where everyone I’ve talked to who did it has described going through revelations and emotional breakthroughs.

Finally, in my forties, I’m open and curious about all forms of spirituality, and though I’ve started reading—and greatly look forward to the results of sleepingirl’s hypnosis and spirituality jam—I’m aware that I’m barely a beginner. But the older I get the more important I think it is to be able to talk to the spirit: spiritual health is directly tied to every kind of health. I know that when I'm lonely, or hopeless, or freaking out about something, all my other problems seem worse, and may actually get worse. When I feel cared for, hopeful, calm, and connected to something bigger than me, it's the opposite.

What I Would Brag about If I Bragged About Hypnotic Sex to Vanilla People

I'm not really interested in promoting hypnosis to vanilla people, and in fact it's mostly other fetishists that I want to talk to about it. It's also not beseeming to gloat. But gloating is so appealing! So here's my little space to talk about some magic things that I know are possible combining sex and hypnosis - with enthusiastically consenting partners - because I've experienced them or seen them with my own eyes. And I bet a lot of people would love to experience them in bed, even if they've never had a single power exchange fantasy:

• Have simultaneous orgasms
• Feel incredibly confident and seductive for a session
• Make tongue/fingers/cock magically vibrating
• Make touch feel magical in general
• Drop every distraction from the day, relax, and focus on your partner
• Make a strap-on have full sensitivity, and even experience ejaculation
• Get in the mood for sex more or less instantly
• Make someone want to give oral sex so bad they beg for it, and whimper with satisfaction when they get to
• Make cum taste great
• Feel as if you're having sex with a stranger, but one who knows your body, and who you somehow know is safe
• Orgasm just from giving pleasure to someone else
• Have a clear memory and afterglow of a good long fuck in about 10 seconds
• Commit to a roleplay scenario in a completely immersed and unselfconscious way

Just scraping the surface, but a lot of these are someone's holy grail, not impossible without hypnosis but very unlikely, and even one of them might make the most memorable night of sex someone ever had in their lives. 

 And yet we in the erotic hypnosis community almost don't even think about them - we typically dive into deeper, weirder fantasies of control and alteration. But it's cool!

On Being, or Not Being, A Wizard

Everyone should read @h-sleepingirl's excellent essay You Are A Wizard, So Pour Over The Tomes. In it, they argue that hypnosis is magic, and respecting the discipline means studying the historical texts of hypnosis like books of magic. Not uncritically, but looking to integrate historical knowledge and use it to inform your practice.

I really like this, and I think it speaks very well to my own path. I like to read.  

Pictured: Me pondering my tomes

I think I, and especially @khatsha, have read more than average, especially when it comes to books. I'm going to be first in line for @h-sleepingirl's analyzing Erickson class.

I think this describes one road to developing as a hypnotist, one skill tree. It's the scholarly road, and there are many riches to be obtained there. I don't think it's the only road though, and it might not resonate with everyone. I think of hypnosis as an artform, far more than a science, in that it is rooted in expression of your inner life and tastes and relationships as much as hard skills and knowledge, but all artists can potentially benefit from diligent study and analysis of what came before. 

But I think of telling someone learning to play rock guitar: you ought to master music theory, and classic Blues, and flamenco guitar, if you really want to be a virtuoso. Or a painter, you should study the dutch masters, and spend a couple years on colour theory, and at least a year on anatomy. No doubt all those things could help, to broaden and deepen someone's practice, and open new doors, but they might not be a particular person's path. For example, maybe what they need is to spend 1000 hours bashing on that guitar or that sketchbook in a basement somewhere, until they break through to what they really mean to say.

I have met "hedge wizards", who have developed amazing, and, importantly, very original hypnosis technique via almost pure intuition and feedback, or alternately, person-to-person observation and teaching. The space of hypnosis is laughably underexplored, especially in what's been published, and creativity can come from anywhere. I feel the next big breakthrough is just as likely to come from a 20 year old My Little Pony transformation fetishist, who primarily reads AO3.

I'm also reminded of the witches and wizards in Discworld, both with their own powerful, vastly different ways of accumulating knowledge.

 

The wizards with their vast library, with their pride in deep study, building cathedrals of theory and dispute over many years and generations of painstaking work.

 

And then there's the witches, whose magic is mostly from apprenticeship, experience and intuition, from being hands-on solving people's problems and from developing their own intensely individual, to the point of bloody-minded, personality. Interestingly, like some hypnotic techniques, the wizards are careful to credit the lineage ("Collatrap's Instant Pickling Stick", "Spold's Unstirring Divisor") whereas that might be inconceivable to witches - rarely categorizing and analyzing techniques, they might not even choose to see atomic divisions between them.

I'm sure most people will grow in both ways, and I firmly believe in the power of finding an idea in an old book that blows your socks off and changes the whole course of your practice (for me that would definitely be Erickson's Hypnotic Realities!) Curiosity about the roots of what you do is always a good thing.

But if you do hypnosis and you don't feel like a wizard: that's ok too.

 

---

sleepingirl wrote a really interesting reply, which I won't reproduce in full, but the last lines were:

I just think from my perspective as an author, as someone who tries to be on the pulse of what this community collectively knows or doesn’t know, that people overall need more encouragement to read rather than permission to NOT read. 

My reply: 

I think that I read your original post as being focused on reading almost exclusively, and one reason I absolutely loved your personal guitar story is that it shows that investing in being connected to the continuity of knowledge about the artform can take many different forms, in your case one on one teaching and observation. I was reading about how Jimi Hendrix learned guitar, and though he never had a lesson or opened a music book, and mainly learned by countless, compulsive hours of playing and experimenting - including developing his signature odd upside-down stringing of a right handed guitar for his left hand - he also spent enormous amounts of time listening to and imitating records, and later jamming with more experienced musicians. I see both sides in his story: the urgency of being curious and connected to the history of your artform, but also how there are many different paths to that, and prescribing one for someone that doesn't suit them too forcefully could even have a harmful effect on their enthusiasm and development of their own voice.

Where we might diverge the most is that I'm not sure I think there's anything special about reading per se in this space, where so many available books are incredibly shoddy and by low-knowledge grifting blowhards (and increasingly: ChatGPT) Hypnosis instruction manuals are literally some of the first magazine-based mail order scammy books, going back at least 125 years. I can imagine you saying, "I mean read the right books", but then I would say, is that any different to saying the right podcast, the right blog post, the right class, the right in-person demonstration? All can be a dense package of someone's valuable experience, learning and perspective. In this space of recreational hypnosis (as opposed to say, the study of the Zebra Mantis Shrimp) being in print for decades doesn't automatically signal to me that someone has a better grasp on theory or practice.

Someone pointed out though that I'm probably a bit blind to the fact that I'm swimming in a sea of people who know at least a bit (and often a lot) of hypnosis theory, and that there are plenty out there who are incurious about that and just want to get off. Like it's tempting for me to think most people in the space have at least passing knowledge of Mesmer, Erickson, Elman, and Bandler, but actually you don't know until you learn about it! So I believe in learning some history more than I thought. But I still fundamentally think it's such a wild, wide open space that although I'm incredibly grateful for the people diligently mapping out the body of literature, panning for gold, there's quickly diminishing returns after a handful of tomes, and my next revelation could as easily be found jamming with like-minded friends (or as we call it labbing) as in an older book. As you allude to, there's so many things one could be doing to develop that likely would help, but it's often a question of where to put your time.

I've even had a somewhat rocky relationship with the whole idea of always striving for greater mastery in my hypnosis practice, sometimes feeling like that can get in the way of connection and being in the moment, not to mention enjoying my sex life, but I sincerely agree with your sentiment about taking our fun seriously sometimes! I can see a shelf of tomes where I'm sitting, including some excellent ones by @h-sleepingirl, and very much looking forward to cracking a new one that just arrived today (Ormond McGill's New Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnosis!). In just a couple of weeks I'm looking forward to attending dozens of hours of classes by my peers (including one by @khatsha that is going to blow everyone's mind). I feel so lucky that this is my thing. It's an enormously rich intellectual history we have to draw on, and I really believe an even richer present and future.

sleepingirl reply to that (scroll all the way down)