Larkin Hypnotherapy

Song Wu Kong is the Chinese name for "the Monkey King", a famous ancient legend from that country. He is a powerful, albeit cheeky, monkey king indeed.

Long story short, the gods bring Song Wu Kong to Buddha because they are tired of dealing with him and they can't really control him.

Buddha holds Song Wu Kong in his hand and says, "If you can jump out of my hand, you may rule heaven." This appeals greatly to Song Wu Kong's ego and, as he is renowned for his jumping, leaps as high and as far as he can.

His leap takes him to the very edge of the universe where he sees the five pillars that hold up the sky. He takes out a can of spray paint and writes "Song Wu Kong was here" on one of them and pees on another. He leaps back home and stands before the Buddha.

"I have leapt to the very end of the universe. Hand me my crown, please."

The Buddha holds up his hand. On this index finger is written "Song Wu Kong was here" and his ring finger smells of wee.

Song Wu Kong is sentenced to be confined under a mountain for 400 years, at which time he is rescued by a monk and a pig-man. Song Wu Kong, in this part of the legend is a much humbler individual walking a path of service as his task is not to protect the monk on his Journey to the West (as the legend is called in China).

This story resonates with me greatly. I frequently think I've found a way to step outside and view EVERYTHING from without. It's a false perspective fueled by ego and, when you get right down to it, rarely helpful. You/we/I are always participants in the drama, never the spectators.

I stumbled upon an old journal of mine. The entry from September 11, 1991 is a quote from Joseph Campbell:

"...[E]very failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women wherever they may stand along the scale.... The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and then let it assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life."

Twenty years ago, this passage spoke to me enough for me to copy it down.

So much of the energy around us takes place on a subconscious level. What is holding us back? What fears of which we are completely unaware consciously block our path? Who and where are our ogres?

Hypnotherapy can lower the noise of daily conscious distractions, create a safe space by which light can be shone on those ogres. The key word here is "safe". In the safety of a hypnotic state, the subconscious can give us clues about what is really influencing our behavior and, it is very important to add here it can provide us tools to defeat it or to integrate it into our conscious lives.

I'm not sure I believe in it, but sometimes the evidence is compelling. It's a term coined by Carl Jung to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events". In other words, coincidences that are not coincidences.

Yesterday I purchased two used MP3 players. One of the players contained lots of inspirational podcasts about spirituality and manifestation.

I uploaded the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack onto it for my wife. The only song I really listened to was "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash.

This afternoon, I fired up iTunes (for the first time in months, it is important to add), and the third song to show up randomly is "I Can See Clearly Now". I have 8,410 and ten files in my iTunes library. The odds of this occurring are... well... I guess 3 in 8,410. Not astronomical, but worth a beard scratch.

It is also important to add that I am sitting in my kitchen staring out at the first rainfall in the San Francisco Bay Area in months -- a torrential downpour complete with severe storm advisories throughout the area. The rain, clearly, has not yet gone.

So what to make of it? It is not coincidence, but it might as well be for all the obscurity behind whatever the message is. I will reflect on it. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Because it's been quite some time since my last entry, I need "to eat some of my own dog food" as they say. I worked on this one to help myself get motivated and move forward.

Visit the mini meditation page to learn the steps to inducing a light state of relaxation.

When you are fully comfortable, repeat the following:

I stand
I feel healing energy flow through
every fiber of my being
I see my right foot lift
move forward
I hear the gravel crunch as my right foot
returns to earth.
I move forward.
Move forward.

Repeat it as often as you like. If you are relaxed enough, the suggestion to progress through whatever might be holding you back will stick.

Input from the outside world enters into our bodies via our sense organs. The input goes straight to the sensory thalamus in our brains, where all the receptors meet in order to superficially organize the input, and from there it splits.

The "wires" that run the input to the amygdala (where our emotions are activated) are shorter and faster than the wires that run the input to the hippocamus and cerebral cortex (the source of "higher-order" thinking).

What this means is that whenever we encounter any situation, we respond to it emotionally before we are aware of what is actually going on. So we will always become angry before we know what it is we are angry about.

This is one of many reasons why it is important to be mindful of what is going on around us. Nobody is suggesting here to stifle or suppress our emotions, but to pause a moment (or two — or ten) before acting on them. In some cases, this arrangement feeds addiction. The person experiencing the emotion grabs a palliative before the higher-order thinking kicks in to place the emotion in perspective.

Hypnosis can help with this. Through hypnosis, we can give ourselves a little breathing room. Tell ourselves to put the emotion in a safe place, until we have all the information we need to process the input/situation in healthy way.