So, what did I learn about Erotic Hypnosis this year?
It doesn’t matter what I learned for myself, in that that’s just what a catalogue of things that are distinctly unique to me, to my emotions and my growth as a person. What matters is what I learned how to talk about this year.
Let’s start with the fun stuff.
I had a very meaningful and very important long term romantic relationship end at the end of/ beginning of this year (2015), and like my last meaningful relationship that ended, the one that led me to embrace my fetish and explore this part of mu life in the first place, it served as a pivot point for how I saw myself and what I wanted.
I’m bringing this up first because this is the most important thing that I have to share.
I went silent for a few months, when after all the emotions started to settle a little more I looked at who I was and who I wanted to be.
I didn’t go silent because I was too sad, or too heartbroken, etc. I stepped back and sized things up because, how do you explain to the next person you’re with, the next relationship, the next person you start to share your life with, that your ex was also someone what was an actual professional at your particular and somewhat peculiar kink?
How do you look at yourself and see yourself as a whole and complete person when you’re focused on one particular part of your life, in part because you fear that deep down inside this is what defines you?
After all, we’re just people, and people can tend to let their word’s become small, and our most precious or sensitive secrets can have a habit of carrying so much weight you feel buried under them.
The shame that you will be rejected for your kinks, the fear that you’ll never really be happy with someone in a vanilla relationship and so on.
These secrets, depending on who you are, can be crippling emotionally, and all fears have the chance to become paralyzing and draining, leaving us only with shame, and it is a shame of the hypothetical, it is a shame that we create for ourselves when we see only a part of ourselves.
Then, I quit my job.
I’d been writing hypnosis scripts pretty regularly since early 2011, and even thought I was only really working for one person at the time I left my terrible job, it was barely enough to get by.
So, I paid a few months forward with rent, had some me time, then I started working on my site.
I’d gotten the perspective I needed and decided to double down on something that I am uniquely qualified and capable of doing, especially since it has allowed me to do a few other things.
(Live comfortably not being one of them, as much work as I do, it’ll be a bit before I can afford the life I want for myself. But at the same time, these sacrifices have also let me work on my non-porn writing and I’m almost done with a full blown rough draft of a novel.)
I have a few great people that I love to work with, my ex has become one of my best friends, and since starting my site, I’ve had the chance to meet and get to know some wonderful people that have helped me understand more of this fetish, more of myself and my own needs, and more of what other people want to.
So, what can I tell you about my journey and what’s come my way?
Hypnosis is Like Juggling
Here’s a little peek into my past romantic life:
We didn’t have nearly the amount of hypnosis play you’d think we would have.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, and if you’ve ever been in a serious long term relationship, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand why.
We might have had more, we might have done more, if not for the fact that I was a terrible subject.
A lot of people will tell you there’s no such thing as a terrible subject, that it’s about finding the right person, and in many ways all of this is very true and very useful. Since all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, thinking positively is hugely important, and framing yourself for success is necessary.
I’ve talked a lot about this before so I’ll keep it short, but what if you simply don’t know what you’re doing, not with any kind of real grounding?
What if you feel like you’re not doing as well as you should have done?
What if nothing seems to work?
What if your points of reference for success are fleeting and limited, and are far outnumbered by instances of not-success and/or failure?
Further, what if you’ve just got shit going on in your head and your heart that keeps you from lowering your guard, or letting go, or enjoying the process etc.?
Well, there’s a lot of bad habits to pick up there, and a lot of self doubt. You can accumulate as well.
I realized, after over a decade of struggling (with going into trance, accepting that this is what I enjoy, and all sorts of other stuff) that what I need was to ground myself in the fundamentals of experiencing trance.
Or in other words, you can’t juggle if you can’t catch.
So, I started teaching myself the hypnosis equivalent of throwing one ball into the air and catching it.
Because, from my perspective, I realized that what a lot of files ask you to do is a lot more psychologically complex and engaging than simply going into trance, and if I was struggling with reaching any kind of basic level of trance there was no fucking way any suggestions would really work.
Step one was find content I could watch/listen to that had a tangible set of concepts and actions that would provide proof of success.
So, I found a couple of YouTube channels that were all vanilla, and the women that ran them were talented and educated about the subject.
This was in the fall of 2014, and I’ve talked about this before.
What was helpful for me was that as they were videos, there was a fair amount of eye opening and closing, and the suggestions given had a physical component to them, which was helpful for me because I’m a tactile learner, I have to do something to really learn it and internalize it.
From there, and I’ve mentioned this before as well, I started watching Alexandra Snow’s hypnosis videos.
She’d made trance-themed role play content before, but hit a point where she started to create videos with actual hypnosis inductions and theory etc.
For me this was helpful because she was new to it, and I was new to being able to consistently reach any degree of trance state.
It felt like we were both still throwing and catching one ball as the metaphor goes. Or it was me projecting, either way, it doesn’t matter.
And just to be clear, that is not a shot at her.
I am a huge fan of her work, her work ethic, her creativity and her charisma. I cannot say enough good about how much I enjoy and love her videos.
My limited interactions with her have been super positive, and she continues to impress me with what she does.
What I realized as I progressed watching her videos was that though I could enter trance, I was not yet able to respond to suggestions.
Even suggestions that I wanted, ones I was enthusiastic about, were beyond my capacity to embrace.
I had not taught myself how to disengage in the process to the point where I was being open. My conscious mind’s critical filter was still active.
Specifically it was watching her Trance Conditioning series which I believe was the first stuff she heralded as, “this isn’t just fantasy content”. Part 1 and part 2 were really helpful, and by part 3 I hit a limit of what I was capable of.
I then ran into this with countless other videos and MP3s etc. and I realized that my next step was to better develop my ability to disengage and let go.
Now some of you might be thinking, “Wait, isn’t that something that’s just supposed to happen?”
It’s About You, or at Least it can be All About You
Well, for some people yes it does just happen.
Not so much for me.
Not because I’m special or strong willed, or a beautiful snowflake, but because everyone carries their own psychological issues and struggles, and mine happens to be the fact that for me to mentally decompress I usually have to be playing a video game and watching a movie at the same time, or reading and listening to music.
What I understand is this, the causes of your behavior are not excuses if you embrace them and work with them.
If you blame them and hide behind them, or are afraid to face them, they are excuses and justifications.
“I am bad at this because of that, so I am doing this to improve that.”
Is not the same as:
“I am bad at this because of that, so that won’t work on me or doesn’t work on me,” or even “hasn’t worked on me”.
One thing I know is that when I talk to people and say, “I’m historically not a good subject” sometimes they’ll say “you aren’t if you think you are” or stuff along those lines, and while they’re not wrong, they’re not specifically right.
They can’t be, because they’re not me. They’re also not you, so you have to do the work to improve what you want to improve.
When you have a tangible psychological or conceptual hurdle standing in the way, it isn’t positive thinking that’s stopping you, it’s not having the tools you need to work with your situation.
Oh course people will say that those barriers are ones you have constructed, and they are. But there’s also the fact most barriers in your minds cannot simply be smashed to pieces in one fell swoop, we have to chisel away at them, work them down, or work up from the most basic of places.
So anyway, after this realization I stumbled across Charlotte Gray.
I’d remembered some of her earlier stuff, it seemed nice but I pretty much ignored her when she was Arkadia, and then when she came back as Charlotte.
Of course, this was also during a period of time when I was only listening to my ex’s files because well, we were in a relationship and anything else felt like it would be cheating.
But, low and behold, when I listened to her file with the Latin Science sounding name, I was hooked.
I downloaded all of her free stuff that was up my ally, then bought some of her stuff that wasn’t free yet, and there were days when I found myself listening to like 4 of her files in a day.
This was also when I realized I preferred shorter files, as it was less time for me to start to come out of trance.
It wasn’t just going down, it was staying down that was an issue, in part because I didn’t have a solid point of reference.
I mean, of course I’d had some amazing experiences with my ex in real time (I mean, duh) an some really great experiences with her work, but once thing I would run into would be that I’d start to blink out as the induction and the deepener came to an end, then I’d come to and feel like since I wasn’t still in that totally gone state that I was coming out of trance and I’d lose the moment.
This experience was happening less and less as I listened to more and more of Charlotte.
A lot of what she did and made was stuff a bout being in trance, so there weren’t really a ton of suggestions that required any degree of openness, and what ones there were tended to be almost stage hypnosis styled tricks.
It was then that I settled on this sort of staging and point of reference for myself.
One: A little relaxed, a little locked in, feeling a little different than just being awake.
Two: A little more than One, more receptive and more focused, more fully engaged.
Three: Completely engaged and locked in, other thoughts come and go quickly, outside distractions are temporary if there at all.
Four: Blacking out for large stretches of the session, or browning out periodically.
I also committed to Charlotte’s TranceFormation series and did what I was instructed there. I started to practice habituating myself to the idea of being receptive, and training myself to respond to the sense of letting go and of critical disengagement..
This is as I finally had a base of more precise and consistent experiences I could draw from as a counter to what I had felt, or what I thought I was supposed to feel.
At this point is when I realized more clearly than ever that so much of what we say in reagrds to hypnosis and the hypnotists we like is noise and hyperbola that can actually be more damaging to other than we realize it.
We habitually create a world of false and exaggerated expectations around people and their work when we share our passions.
It isn’t done with malice, or with intention, it is just the side effect of talking about something we love, we over-hype it and over-hype in something as subjective as trance can often times be a dangerous and detrimental thing.
After that, and this was shortly before I decided to step back, I listened to Submission to Hypnosis by Marquesa once a day for a week, and this was after an early stage of having gotten back into her work pretty heavily around the new year, I think.
This go at it was to see how much progress I’d made, and it was encouraging, but I was still basically only throwing one ball in the air and catching it.
I was also, once again, thinking of doing a live session with her but for many reasons I did not.
Then, I stepped out of the scene. That was in April of this year.
While I was doing some soul searching and figuring out how to balance my life, I gave some therapeutic and vanilla recordings a listen, and here’s what I know about that:
Most of those files are creatively bankrupt and painfully uninteresting.
The amount of craft and creativity that the people in our scene put into their technique, and their structure is miles ahead of what you get from vanilla mp3s.
This is in part because it’s an arms race here, that you’ve got to come up with more and more cool stuff and innovations or get left behind, and also because this is really about entertainment, and entertainment breeds creativity.
Right around this time I also got horribly sick for two weeks, then my main client started to need some more work from me, and my tolerance for my day job was reaching an all time low in.
I also started talking with my ex again regularly, and we started to repair and establish our friendship.
Then I realized that while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life, if I could get just a little bit more business writing scripts etc. I wouldn’t starve or go homeless.
Also, the only people that will ever truly love you are the people that love you for all of who you are and accept you for all of yourself.
Shame is a poison to the self, and you are only both who you are and what you choose to make yourself.
The things we repress, the things we deny, these are our shames and they eat us alive.
(Unless you’ve got some really super fucked up mental disorder stuff going on, that’s way different. But seriously psychological bondage kinds etc. as long as it isn’t destroying your life like actually destroying it, it’s just something you like… more on this later).
So, with her help, I started to build my site and figure out what I was going to do. Then I got very luck with some more business pretty much right out of the gate and I’ve been going strong ever since.
Also, I made it up to two balls, and not the crisscross throwing either, but the just throwing them from hand to hand in a circle, think recycling label or the ocean to clouds to rain etc. picture.
I’m not selling myself short here, and part of getting to this point was listening to all of Nikki Fatale’s Because and Control Series as a primer for accepting and following more and more advanced suggestions.
But, there’s something else I want to talk about here before I move on to something pretty awesome.
Ellechemy.
At first, years ago when I heard her I thought she was pretty much impressionistic and experiential performance art.
Something that was sort of hypnosis adjacent.
Something that could work, but id didn’t really sound like anything I’d heard and it didn’t work on me.
Earlier this year I went through all of her syllabus, and I was really blown away.
I don’t know how her stuff works, I mean I can figure out some of what she does and I respect the hell out of her for the way she uses what are really unconventional techniques, but it works on me.
I know she’s a polarizing figure to some people because she has a higher price point on her stuff, and is also not afraid to lean into loving the life of findom, but for me, I just respect that.
I respect the fact she had so much free stuff to lure us in, and I respect her ability to capitalize on everything from her talent, to her allure, to her captivate audience.
I love her stuff, she seems super fun, has always been cool with me, and I respect the hell out of her.
I also firmly believe that while I can do a pretty good job of capturing people’s voices and styles, I wouldn’t know where to start with trying to make something sound like her.
I’ll be honest, I can’t afford to buy her videos, but I also know she doesn’t make them for people in my tax bracket 🙂
As a customer, I have a decidedly low ceiling of value.
I’ll also be honest in saying sometimes I wonder if she fires off a lot of words and sounds, then lets us do the rest to ourselves, but real talk here, that’s totally real hypnosis too.
But, here’s the thing, critical disengagement isn’t a switch you turn off, it is the active choice not to follow a thought that blooms in your minds to, it is the choice not to engage and investigate ideas, but to leave them and return your focus to something else.
Hypnosis is not going to sleep, it is not a magic spell, it is not a million things we all sort of wish it was.
It is relaxation and it is focus.
Being bad at relaxing and being bad at focusing, I had to learn to do both to get to where I am now.
Where I am now, that two balls in a circle juggling, may be selling myself short because Sapphire Rain got me.
The Power of Hypnosis is Human Connection
To be clear, she didn’t put me in a trance and sweep me away into slavery or anything like that.
She just explained a technique to me, then even though she said it wasn’t going to work, and really it shouldn’t have, I fell hard into it.
What I feel into was her chuckling over Skye and telling me to wake up.
I’ve Skyped with her a lot, because we’re friends.
That’s the only time she’s done anything like that to me.
We talk about technique a lot.
We talk about the scene and the different cultures.
We talk about what’s great about hypnosis and what it can do.
She tells me stories about working with people, and what she has done.
We share pointers.
But mainly, and this is so very important, we get to have conversations with people that come from the same place we do.
You want to be a better subject, make some friends in the scene.
My friendship with her, my friendships with everyone I know in this scene only help me feel better about myself as a person, and that chips away at my reservations and my resistance in ways that everything else I’ve talked about simply cannot.
And I’m going to be a terrible friend now and tell you a secret about Sapphire.
She’s super fun.
If you want to get to know her, here’s what you need to do.
Know you place, and be respectful.
Don’t ask her for stuff, don’t expect anything, but if you want to get to know someone super cool that has always been willing to talk about hypnosis, she is great.
I might lose my friend privileges from this, but all I’m saying is if you see her in the Inraptured chat room, go say hello.
But, more on the topic of what this is all supposed to be about, one of the things she and I talk about is the difference between live and recorded.
Live sessions are ideal.
Listen to me now, recordings are a difficult and abstract approximation of what it means to be hypnotized.
Their fundamental one sided structure is not ideal for you to experience hypnosis in its most effective or enjoyable form.
I used to having this concept that a file couldn’t really hypnotize you/be a good file unless it was in the 18+ minute range.
I based that on industry standard and length as a means of gauging who was making a real file as opposed to who was an interloper making role-play-hypno-porn.
I shared this with Sapphire and she laughed.
What she told me, and I’m inclined to agree with her more and more (you’ll see why soon enough), is that going into trance can happen very quickly.
What we assume about a long induction taking us deeper really comes from the fact that an mp3 plays to the biggest most diverse audience, and that a longer induction has more chances to snag as many people as possible.
This is all function and form conversation really, and in the live setting the form in completely different.
Talking with her has helped me to understand some of the technique used by the people I work with and work for, and it has helped me to better understand ways to improve on the form and format of the mp3 as a vehicle for trance.
I’d tell you what those are, bit they’re trade secretes that help me pay my bills.
So, courtesy of my friendship with Sapphire and my horizons being broadened, when Lady Jessica came onto the scene I was far less skeptical than I would have been a few months earlier.
Also, as I’m really only living hand to mouth right now, it was nice to see someone new whose files I could afford 🙂
(Aside from me scraping and saving to buy Tessa Teaches Trance, because obviously that’s right up my self-development alley)
So, after listening to her free samples and finding myself responding rather well, I picked up her Beyond Progressive Relaxation file, really enjoyed it, sent her an email, and we’ve been buddies ever since.
I could paraphrase some of what we’ve talked about, or you could go read her blog. There’s a links list at the bottom of this article.
Then, when we were chatting one day, just messaging back and forth, she text tranced me.
I probably wouldn’t have believed in text trance actually working if not for having had it explained to me by Sapphire a bit, then by Jessica, but I’d grown enough that my skepticism wasn’t a default for failure and I’ve learned how to disengage enough to stay in the moment.
I didn’t choose to engage in the thoughts that were blooming then fading, instead I followed what was happening, and it worked.
It should also be noted that I have a long and colorful history in my personal life of not doing well with authority.
But, there I was, hypnotized by a few text massages.
For my birthday, I had the wonderful opportunity to do a live session with Jessica.
This is the only time, outside of my ex-girlfriend, that I have been hypnotized in real time.
The hour that we were on together feels like maybe 15 minutes in retrospect, and from this experience this is what I know.
Experiencing what you want is generally both wonderful and demanding of reflection and self-exploration.
I would love to do more session with Jessica, and I would love to do session with more people, and I know this to be true, but I know something else.
My fetish, my kink, is not the key to my happiness.
One thing, one fantasy, one dream, on desire, one want, will not make me happy, and it will not make you happy too.
In early November I had a bit of a breakdown.
You can probably tell that this year has been an emotionally volatile year for me, lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of big changes etc. this is just how life goes sometimes.
But, this is what I learned.
Happiness, if you are chasing your happiness through your fantasies, will always elude you.
Happiness is not the thing, it is the relationship to the thing that will satisfy your desires.
The ability to have and experience the thing itself, the life that is rich with life and connections itself is what happiness is made of.
Lady Jessica dropped me down into trance quickly, and we had some fun play.
It was a fantasy, and it was fun.
But, my friendship with her, and my friendship with Sapphire have given me more emotionally than any trance play could.
And that’s of course, nothing compared to the joy of still having someone in my life that I shared so much with for so long, and not hating them now that that part of our lives is over.
I’m lucky because my friendships with these people exist outside of coming to them to share a fantasy, and I know not everyone has that, as my job has opened doors for me in certain social circles.
I know this, but I also know something else.
It’s weird and awkward to talk about the things close to you, especially your private kinks. Even when you’re in a place surrounded by people who like the same things, it is still a private thing.
It can be hard to know what to talk about, hard to talk about what you like and why, hard to articulate your wants and your needs, I myself didn’t know what I wanted once I was under and it was still awkward to say those things and ask for those things when I did articulate them, so I understand that too.
But, if I know one thing, my life is better for the connections I’ve made and the relationships I’ve maintained.
So, what do I know about Erotic Hypnosis?
I know it’s a great thing, it’s hot, and it’s fun, but it’s just something, it isn’t everything.
I also know you won’t know these feelings unless you feel them yourself, and I know they aren’t what everyone feels.
I also know I’m not particularly special or unique and that the kind of people that tend to love this stuff tend to have a lot in common with me.
Anyway, Happy New Year, here’s the links and shout outs:
LINKS (Alphabetical)
Alexandra Snow:
Here’s her clips 4 sale Mesmerize listing.
Here’s a link to Part 1 of the series I mentioned.
Charlotte Gray (retired): Here’s her awesome Blog.
Ellechemy: Here’s her site.
(She’s decided to charge for all her content now, which sucks for you if you didn’t get it free, but is still worth it to pay for)
Goddess Marquesa:
Here’s her site.
Here’s the file I mentioned, which is now called Wonderific Surrender.
Lady Jessica: Here’s her site.
Nikki Fatale (retired): Here’s her listening for all her files.
Sapphire Rain: Here’s her Inraptured profile.
(Must be logged in to view)
Tessa Fields:
Here’s her site.
Here’s a link to Tessa Teaches Trance.
What I didn’t Say Already:
I made a lot of new friends int he scene this year, listened to a lot of stuff I didn’t mention, and just wanted to say thank you to everyone for all the support!
Anyway, if you have questions or ideas for future articles, of if you just want to reach out and say hello, feel free to drop me a line.
Also, if you appreciated this article, I’ve created a $1.00 tip goody. I was thinking about selling the articles themselves like I do free stories, but this seems easier for everyone in the long and short run.
