Data Management

(This blog was originally posted on February 24, 2014)

Photo by Rick Hustead

No matter what you do, even if you don’t try, you learn something new every day. The question is: What will you do with this new information that you have just learned? 

For example, imagine that your car’s gas gauge is almost on empty, so you pull into a gas station to fill up your tank. You notice that the cost of unleaded gas is up four cents from last week’s listed price, which triggers a familiar (known) emotional response of anger/frustration and even anxiety about the cost of fuel. What you do about or with this information will depend on how badly you need the fuel right now and whether it is/will be available when you are ready to make the purchase. Your actions will also be influenced on how you have handled similar situations in the past: Just fill up the tank and resolve this inconvenience, buy just enough gasoline to keep you on the road for a few more days, or drive around to look for a better price at a different station.

Your subconscious mind likely knew exactly what you would do before you made the conscious decision to just fill up the tank. Even though your first instinct would normally be to look around for a better (cheaper) price, you decide to just buy the gas right now. A big storm is coming, and you don’t want to risk getting stuck on the road in bad weather. Also, if a lot of other nervous drivers have the same idea, you might have to drive around forever looking for a station that has a better price, but it could already be sold out of gas before you get there. Even though you are still annoyed that you had to spend so much more money to buy the fuel than if you had shopped around a bit more, you are relieved that the tank is full, and you no longer have to worry about getting stuck in bad weather.

Remember: Every sensation you perceive provides a catalog of information about your environment and how/where/why you fit into that situation. The conscious mind identifies this data (stimuli) as a “known” or “unknown” message unit; the subconscious mind is more likely to accept or reject the information/behavior if it is already in your repertoire of knowns—and you will act accordingly. Furthermore, no matter what you do, you will be creating a new and/or reinforcing a previous known behavior in your repertoire.

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

Lost...and Found

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/.

© 2016

Just Go With It



Photo by Sara Fogan

Charlotte Dujardin rode a clinic participant's horse during the seminar.

 

 

                As we get older, it becomes easier to appreciate an experience and to reap the benefit of doing something we don’t really want to do, than when we are children. Even though adults have most of the same subconscious motivations, desires and “knowns” that we had when they were little kids, we also have the benefit of experience. We know that we will learn something from this experience if we just open up our minds and are willing to take in this new information. We know that nothing really does last forever—whether it is a six-hour riding demonstration or that time we get to spend just hanging out with a beloved parent or child. So we just go with it and try something new.

          As adults, we can appreciate that the logic, reasoning, will-power and decision-making faculties we possess in our conscious mind were actually the catalysts for organizing this family time in the first place. I love horses; I train in dressage. My dad says he is afraid of horses, and he doesn’t really know anything about the discipline I ride. But the opportunity to spend “family time” together was the subconscious “known” in our minds that clinched the deal.

                Earlier this year, my dad accompanied me to the second day of Charlotte Dujardin’s dressage symposium at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. This was a big deal for me: I have been a big fan of Ms. Dujardin since I “discovered” her during the 2012 Summer Olympics; the opportunity to watch her teach and ride (in person, not on TV) was an opportunity of a lifetime. More important, I got to spend the day with my father, which hardly ever happens because of our very different schedules and my predilection to spend most of my free time around horses. But, my dad was a good sport. He didn’t tell me that he was bored even one time; I even caught him leaning forward in his seat once or twice to get a better look at what was going on in the arena. He just went with the flow of the afternoon: demonstrations, lunch, more demonstrations and then a question-and-answer session with Ms. Dujardin and her former trainer, Judy Harvey. He even made some very good, informed observations about what he was watching. He wanted to know if my horse could do some of the things he saw being done in the arena; and he seemed proud when I told him that Galahad is working on a lot of those movements (albeit at a much lower level).

At the end of the afternoon, he told me he had enjoyed himself. He said liked spending time with me and that he had a very good day.

So did I.

                               

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/.

© 2014

Animal Hypnosis, Part 2

Photo courtesy of Sara Fogan

Me and Lydia Hiby in 2012

 

People seek out my hypnotherapy services because the logic/will-power/decision-making and reasoning faculties of their conscious mind want to change a behavior that no longer works for them. They are willing participants who become active partners in the therapy process. In addition to hypnosis and guided imagery, I teach my clients behavior-modification techniques that they can use to gently replace the unwanted or “problem” habit with a behavior that is more conducive to their desired lifestyle. But dogs, cats, horses and the multitude of other domestic animals people share their lives with do not make the decision to change a behavior. Their owners do.

So, when people ask me to hypnotize their dog so it won’t bark so much or to persuade the cat to stay off of the dining table, I must politely defer to a professional animal trainer’s expertise to resolve those behavior issues. However, as a certified hypnotherapist, I have many tools and techniques that can help the human partner change specific responses to the pet that can reinforce any new behaviors that the companion animal is learning. The first thing I want to know is what the client think is going on with the animal. What might make it easier for the pet, or help the pet, to change its unwanted behavior? Imagery is a great place to start this exercise.

When Lydia Hiby teaches animal-communication clinics, she encourages and supports each of her students to develop our intuitive skills so we can also do what she does. This skill is also very important for a client who wants to improve his or her communication and relationship with a companion animal by correcting an annoying habit. When the client is in hypnosis, I guide the client through a visualization exercise in which he or she is listening and paying attention to every detail in their pet’s environment. What does the animal see? Hear? Smell? Touch? Perceive? How do these stimuli affect it, in terms of why and how often it repeats the undesired behavior? There is no right or wrong answer in this exercise; the important thing is for the client to give him or herself permission to experience the world from your pet’s point of view.

Next, I would guide the client in another visualization journey in which the person gets to practice using the behavior-modification techniques that the trainer recommended to correct the unwanted behavior. How is the pet responding to the training cues? The imagery includes noticing physical details about the animal—how it looks, smells, feels, how energetically it responds to the person’s commands—and how the client feels and responds to the pet’s efforts to do the right thing. The individual gets to practice each of the techniques with confidence, control and patience with the animal and him- or herself. Since the person will already be relaxed, comfortable and calm during these hypnosis and visualization exercises, he or she will also be replacing the previous negative response (frustration) to the behavior with this new emotional reaction (calm). At the end of the hypnotherapy session, I will teach the person how to anchor these sensations of calm and relaxation with the confidence and skills he or she has acquired in order to apply the training techniques and easily achieve the desired change of behavior.

               

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/.

For more information about Lydia Hiby and her work as an animal communicator, visit her web-site at www.lydiahiby.com.

© 2014

Just Go With It

 

                As we get older, it becomes easier to appreciate an experience and to reap the benefit of doing something we don’t really want to do, than when we are children. Even though adults have most of the same subconscious motivations, desires and “knowns” that we had when they were little kids, we also have the benefit of experience. We know that we will learn something from this experience if we just open up our minds and are willing to take in this new information. We know that nothing really does last forever—whether it is a six-hour riding demonstration or that time we get to spend just hanging out with a beloved parent or child. So we just go with it and try something new.

          As adults, we can appreciate that the logic, reasoning, will-power and decision-making faculties we possess in our conscious mind were actually the catalysts for organizing this family time in the first place. I love horses; I train in dressage. My dad says he is afraid of horses, and he doesn’t really know anything about the discipline I ride. But the opportunity to spend “family time” together was the subconscious “known” in our minds that clinched the deal.

                So, a couple days ago my dad accompanied me to the second day of Charlotte Dujardin’s dressage symposium at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. This was a big deal for me: I have been a big fan of Ms. Dujardin since I “discovered” her during the 2012 Summer Olympics; the opportunity to watch her teach and ride (in person, not on TV) was an opportunity of a lifetime. More important, I got to spend the day with my father, which hardly ever happens because of our very different schedules and my predilection to spend most of my free time around horses. But, my dad was a good sport. He didn’t tell me that he was bored even one time; I even caught him leaning forward in his seat once or twice to get a better look at what was going on in the arena. He just went with the flow of the afternoon: demonstrations, lunch, more demonstrations and then a question-and-answer session with Ms. Dujardin and her former trainer, Judy Harvey. He even made some very good, informed observations about what he was watching. He wanted to know if my horse could do some of the things he saw being done in the arena; and he seemed proud when I told him that Galahad is working on a lot of those movements (albeit at a much lower level).

At the end of the afternoon, he told me he had enjoyed himself. He said liked spending time with me and that he had a very good day.

So did I.

                              

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/.

© 2014