(This blog was originally posted on September 22, 2016)
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| Photo by Rick Hustead |
There is a platitude about never really losing something that truly
belongs to you. If it is truly yours and you are meant to have it, eventually,
that object or person or pet will return to you. In the past 36 hours or so,
three things I truly believed were gone for good returned to me in the most
unexpected ways.
The first was a quote: “You don’t do that to people, you don’t do that
to people, you don’t do that to people!” The line just popped into my head one night
earlier this week and I had no idea why or where it was from, but the quote was
so familiar. I tossed and turned for about an hour, wondering who said it,
where had I heard or read it? Maybe it was from one of my favorite movies, Truly,
Madly, Deeply? No. I have seen that film and many times and read the
screenplay; I know the dialog for all the key grief scenes practically by
heart, and that line wasn’t in any of those scenes. Finally, I did an Internet
search and found a scene from Grey’s
Anatomy that had a similar line. Similar, but not the same…. So I put the
line out of my mind and went about my day. When I woke up the following
morning, the answer to my quote puzzle was solved: the line was from a scene in
Circle of Two, a 1980 film starring Tatum O’Neal as a sixteen-year-old girl who
falls in love with an artist portrayed by Richard Burton. (FYI: The scene in
which O’Neal says this line is at 1 hour 28 minutes into the movie.)
The second item I found was a notebook that contained notes I took during
Charlotte Dujardin’s dressage
symposium at the Los Angeles
Equestrian Center in March 2014. Earlier this year, I reorganized my room
and packed away a lot of magazines and other items to store in our loft. The notebook
“disappeared” around then. From time to time I considered climbing up to the
loft to go through those boxes and look for the notebook; but as the months
passed and the weather got hotter I just put it off. I knew it had to be
somewhere in the house. Sure enough, when I was sorting through some notebooks
for inspiration for a new blog I happened to glance at the corner of my bedroom
and saw the notebook. It was on the floor next to a bookcase and probably had
been there all along, I just never noticed it before. I quickly picked it up
and placed it next to my computer; I referenced some of the notes in yesterday’s
blog about the Olympic gold medalist’s tips for training a young horse for
dressage.
I found the third item this evening. Actually, there were two items, but
I didn’t know I was looking for the second one—which I found first—until I
discovered it. When I started to become involved in advocating against cetacean
captivity, I wanted to work on a counted cross-stitch pattern of orcas (killer
whales). It was strange to me that even with the popularity of Blackfish and growing awareness about the plight
of these animals at marine parks, there were no embroidery kits or even
patterns of the mammals. I looked on-line and inquired about these kits at
every craft shop I could find on San Juan Island, Washington, where I attended
the Superpod 5 event in July. As it turned
out, I actually had a pattern in a collection of embroidery designs of wild
animals tucked away in a box in my closet. I’m sure I purchased the book for
the patterns of grizzly bears and grey wolves, and it probably had been
languishing in that box, never opened, for at least ten years.
The amazing thing to me was that I only found the patterns because I was
desperately searching for something else. Last weekend, I noticed that a small
plastic horse I displayed on top of my dresser was missing. My mother gave me the
horse to celebrate when I bought my first real
horse, Geeves, in 2004. Both my mom and my horse have since passed away, and the
sudden disappearance of that little horse really upset me. So this evening I
started pulling boxes out from beneath and beside the dresser in case the horse
fell behind or even into the items I was storing. (This was when and where I
found the orca pattern.) What if I
knocked it into one of the dresser drawers? I wondered. Ta-da! When I
opened the one in which I store my t-shirts, I could see four tiny plastic
hooves sticking up.
My hypnotherapy training really helped me find these items because it
allowed me to relax and allow the
inspiration and items to come to me rather than slip into a frantic search
mentality. I was able to engage the logic/will-power/reasoning/decision-making
faculties of my conscious mind to strategize about where I should start looking:
Where was the last place I saw the item/heard that line? But I also knew that
when the item didn’t appear after a reasonable time of searching, the best
thing to do was stop the active search and allow my subconscious mind to do the
heavy-lifting part of this work. The conscious mind can only store a limited
amount of information at any one time, but the SCM holds millions of message
units just waiting to be re-discovered. I just needed to be patient, relax,
wait and let the treasures return to me.
Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based
in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in
2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an
appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.
© 2017
