Summer Roadtrips

This summer reminds me of 24 years ago, after I completed my training and work with Dr. Irene Hickman. In April 1993 Irene and I had gone to a conference in Edison, N.J., where I met Raymond Moody, M.D. and Dannion Brinkley, and then to Fort Lauderdale for the conference of the Association for Past-Life Therapies, where I had met Brian Weiss, M.D. Shortly after returning to Kirksville, Mo., it was time for my vagabonding life to resume, and I packed up and headed east.

For six months I traveled, trading hypnotherapy services for room-and-board. I stayed in a hotel only three nights, and that was at a conference in Detroit. I’d visit someone I had met during the previous months, conduct a few sessions for that person and friends, and then head on down the road. Stops included Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina.

I remember one woman who identified four-five issues she wanted to work on – big issues. Some therapists would have been licking their chops at the billable hours ahead. When she asked me how many sessions I thought it would take, my answer was, “Is it supposed to take more than one?”

It’s seldom that I see a client more than once. Occasionally, someone will want to set up weekly appointments. I discourage that. It would be great for me (financially), but it’s not the right thing for them. This kind of work (regression hypnotherapy) gets to the heart of the matter, quickly, and frequent sessions are not necessary.

I do recall one nurse who wanted additional sessions. In the first session, she was looking for the reason she was always cold. Her experience was in a past life, when she was about four years old and waiting at the entrance to the lane for her father to come back from town in a horse-drawn sleigh. She was wearing a light velvet coat and was very cold.

A month later she wanted to know more about that coat, because it hadn’t fit the environment. She regressed to Age 2, in another city, and with her mother, who was dying. Her mother had made the coat a little too large, so that the girl would have the coat and remember her later on. She was comforting her mother, telling her that everything would be all right. (In this lifetime, she had just started a grassroots hospice organization.)

A month after that, she wanted to know more about that family home, which she said was in England. She could describe the house and the interior, as if she were standing in the rooms right then. In her experience, she was! After she described the first floor, she went up the narrow staircase to the rooms on the second floor. After she had gone into the bedrooms, I said, “Go down the hall to the bathroom.”

She said, “There’s no bathroom! There’s a pot under each bed that Father has to empty.”

She taught me a lesson that day! One I’ve long remembered.