TrueLife - From Organic Fields to Hypnotic Dreams: Joshua’s Story

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Joshua is a Hypnotist, NLPPractitioner, and Coach with a mission to unlock your highest human potential. He helps business owners, entrepreneurs, and other professionals eliminate self-sabotage and create confidence and clarity using his unique and modern style of hypnotic coaching.Before founding X-Factor Hypnosis, Joshua helped transform the food industry, working for 14 years with the world's largest farmer-owned organic food company.When he's not working you'll find Joshua hiking, reading, or enjoying time with his family.integratedhypnosis.comTwinCitiesHypnotist.com One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearers through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Friday. It looks like we made it. We made it, everybody. It's Friday. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day.

I hope you have something lined up for this afternoon, this morning, this evening. maybe this weekend. I got an incredible show for you today with an incredible individual. The one and only Joshua Peters. He's a hypnotist, NLP practitioner, and coach with a mission to unlock your highest human potential. He helps businesses, owners, entrepreneurs, and other professionals eliminate self-sabotage and create confidence and clarity using his unique and modern style of hypnotic coaching. Before founding X-Factor hypnosis, Joshua helped transform the food industry.

working for 14 years with the world's largest farmer-owned organic food company. While he's not working, you'll find Joshua hiking, reading, or enjoying time with his family. And for those listeners on my podcast, you know I have an affinity for higher and altered states of consciousness, for seeing the world in a way that is nonlinear and trying to create the best relationships in your life with yourself, your family, your friends, and the environment. One thing that I'm really excited to talk to Joshua today is figuring out this relationship between, behavior, linguistics, suggestibility, and the way we perceive the world. So Joshua Peters, I'm so thankful for you. You're here today.

How are you? I'm awesome, George. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, it's my pleasure. As we were speaking briefly in the introduction, I think that you may be one of the most uniquely qualified people to have a conversation about this idea between the behavior of linguistics, imagery, and altered states of consciousness, and higher states of consciousness, and just the relationship we have with ourselves in the environment.

Before we get into that, though, I was hopeful you could maybe give us a little bit of background on what it was that drew you to this, this world in which you live. Yeah, for sure. Well, I spent a lot of time really, really stuck. And so kind of my story starts around age of 35 where I found myself in a, I call it the house of broken dreams. In a house I never wanted to live in, in a place. I never wanted to live in. And I was there. I have five kids.

I've in a marriage that's just not working. I'm in a job that's not working. Everything was kind of down for me. And the reason that that happened was because I lived life by not making choices, which is a choice itself. And so life kind of happened to me. I really had a kind of a victim idea of what life was like. and that was a wake-up call for me.

I realized I get to make choices. Like, this is my life, so I don't have to just let things be what they are. I can decide what I want things to be. And I started to make choices. So I got divorced. I found a job, the job at Organic Valley that you mentioned on the intro there, found a job that was in line with my value. to make a difference in the world.

And it was close to my home so I could be there with my kids now because it was more important that I was there. Family is very important to me. And then I started making other changes. I quit smoking. I started focusing on my health. I kept just kind of making these little choices one after the next. And I didn't have hypnosis.

So for me, it was just brute force. Just like, okay, going to make this work and then figure out how to do it and then just do it. So a lot of persistence and a lot of mistakes. And after about 10 years, I had kind of shifted my life around to a place where I was ready to move from the small town where I was living in, which is actually the place I grew up in. And like I said, the place I never wanted to spend my life at, but I spent 20 years there. I chose to move from southwest Wisconsin up here to the Twin Cities where I'm at now. And my kids didn't want to come with me. So I still had a couple kids in high school.

In fact, one was just going into high school. And like I said, family was important to me. And it was hard. It was a hard decision to make. And so I found a hypnotist. they helped me work through the fears that I had. And it worked really well. I made the move.

I still was, you know, I was going back and forth. I was there for my kids pretty powerfully as best as I could be. And I started then looking for, okay, what is the next thing? What am I going to actually do with my life now? And if I, when I thought about it, I realized, if I could learn hypnosis, I could help people make changes in their lives in a faster, quicker way than I did. And I could get paid for that.

Well, what was a more empowering way I could think of to live? So I found a hypnotist that was local who could mentor me and I mentored with him for about a year. I started seeing clients on evenings and weekends. And after about a year after that, I was able to go full time, which coincided with my youngest child graduating. So kind of everything kind of worked together. And then I've been doing it full time since then. So that was 2018.

I love it. I love the hero's journey and the, but I think what I love most is having the courage to take the steps to make your life conscious and necessary. That's hard. It's difficult to come to terms, especially for me, I'm almost, I'm almost 50. And I've come to a similar spot in my life where I realized life, I was letting life kind of just take me by the hand and move me in those same directions.

And it's, I think it speaks to your identity, especially maybe it happens to all of us later in life or different times. However, maybe you could speak to the idea of coming to the point where I can make the decisions. Hey, it's possible I could wake up and do what I want to do. For some people, that's a fantasy. Like, what do you mean you could do what you want to do and make money? You're out of your mind.

You can't do that. Yeah, that was a hard lesson. And I've been really interested in personal development my whole life, not even just at that point, but what was interesting to me as I kind of look back at it all through my 20s and early 30s when that first part of the story was happening. I was doing all this work to make changes in my life, and I was blocking those changes from happening. So, and the reason was because I had low, very low self-esteem. I didn't think I was valuable.

I didn't think anything that I wanted matter. Like all this, there's all these, like, limiting beliefs that I had about myself that wouldn't matter how much development I was doing. I kind of refused to let anything happen. And once I pulled, once I like pulled that out of the way, that's when things started happening. But for me, it was going at a landmark education seminar, which I don't know if you ever heard of that, but that's a kind of a weekend seminar that is all about shaking you out of

the comfort zone. And that was the ultimate message that I got from that was. there's no meaning to life except the meaning that you give to it and you get to choose what that that meaning is. And when, and that hit me so hard that's like, okay, if that's true, which yeah, I can agree with that, then what do I want my life to mean? And that was, that was what started to get me there. I find a lot of people have to hit that low point.

They have to be almost desperate to be ready to step into making changes. And I think that's because it's just comfortable. It's comfortable to kind of let life, like you said, let life kind of lead you along. There's not a lot. It's not hard. You just kind of let life happen. And then you deal with it until you just can't deal with it anymore. Yeah, on some level it speaks to the idea of good is the opposite of great,

but on another level it speaks to the ideas that Victor Frankel taught us in man's search for meaning. Isn't it, do you think it's kind of dangerous to like, is it true that the only meaning in life is the meaning you give it? Like, I guess on some level, you can't control what happens to you, but you can control the meaning of it. It's such a giant thing to think about. How did you get your arms around?

Like, you know, you go to that, you go to the landmark thing, you start hearing these ideas, you start playing with your life a little bit. Was there, like, maybe you could speak to that, like, that moment at click. Well, I mean, that was, like, when I heard them say that, that was just a, it's a, it's a thing that I had heard before. Okay. It's a, it's an Eastern idea. And, and I knew it at a conscious level.

I think because of the whole process that they went through, like they kind of control when you're eating and when you get to take bathroom breaks like they do a lot to put you in this state an altered state where they can hit you with these truisms or i mean it's not even a truism it's just a it's a a way of looking at the world i guess you could call it and and it hit me so deeply that i started to look at my life and to realize actually this is true like all these all these so I like to make rules about life I still do it like I don't even I don't mean to but somebody tells me something this happens with my wife and I lot she will tell me something and I'm like okay this is how it is this is the rule it's not a rule it's like the one she just told me this one

time but in my mind I like set it up as the rule and that's what I had been doing all through life where something would happen I would make something up about what that meant, then I would live like that's true. And we all do that in a lot of different ways. Like that's the unconscious mind giving us a program that didn't, and then it starts to run. We don't think about it. It's just like automatic. Is that like the foundation for hypnosis? Like being able to program your patterns of thought. Like how would you define hypnosis? Like what is it? hypnosis is a state of often, so this isn't always true, but it's often a state of relaxation, but it's really about focused concentration.

Most of the time when you're in a relaxed state, but we don't have to be in a relaxed state to go into a hypnotic state. And maybe a way to think about this that is a little easier is instead of calling it hypnosis, call it a trance. I think that's a better way to look at. at it. Because hypnosis has, you know, all kinds of baggage to it, which has its pluses and minuses because everybody knows something about it.

But really, we go in and out of trans states all the time. Like we're in and out of, we're driving trans. Here is the most common trans state that people go. That's the most common trance that we have in our modern world. So we go into that state. But so hypnosis is another trans state that gives you access to your imagination in a deeper way, to these other parts of us that we don't always even know are there. It opens us up to be able to hear messages, something that kind of like what happened to me in that situation. I was in a trans state so that when this statement that I had heard before and was up here, now it hit me down here.

like right at the heart kind of level. That's how you use hypnosis. And there's really, really a lot of techniques and ways to do hypnotic trance. So NLP is a, is a, is a, you know,

neurolinguistic programming is just another form of hypnotic trance. It's just done in a more awake sort of way. There's, there's lots of tech, there, even in, there's the EMDR,

where you're using eye movements, There's different kinds of modalities that use tapping. All of these are taking you into a different state of consciousness so that you can put in the beliefs that you want or sometimes clear up the ones that are in the way or do some inner child healing or there's like a lot of things you can do there. And they resonate at a deeper level when you're in these types of trans states. Is it too far to say that a trans state can be considered an alternate form? a reality? I don't know if I would call it. I mean, so what is reality, George? How do you? Because you could say being awake is an altered reality. Sure. Yeah, it's, I love language. And the older I get, the more I realize that the words I use describe who I am,

my environment and my relationships. And when you become aware of that, you begin to understand that you can model reality, whatever that is, the state in which you're moving around, however you want to. It's really powerful. And it's,

I guess that kind of leads me to my first, one of my first questions is that, in your opinion, how does the language used during hypnotic inductions influence the depth and nature of altered states of consciousness? And what implications does this have for understanding suggestibility? Well, so a typical kind of hypnotic induction is going to start to use inflections in your voice

to help. So it's about the inflections in the voice. It's about the words that you say. It's also about the way that you say them. All of them are about, in many ways, getting present, getting present with where you are, right now and then to dropping even deeper. So one of my favorite ways to help to do that is to use words that are a little vague. And when you use kind of vague words like that, you're my client or you or whoever you're

talking to, even if you're talking to yourself, we start to create meaning, right? we start to build what's right for us. Some of the most powerful ways of using hypnotic language is to do it in the way that lets the client create their own suggestions. Like, what is that? It's better for me to not say the thing, but to open up the possibility for them to build it themselves. Does that make sense to you?

You want it to be their idea. And so it's the difference in, let me see if I can come up with an example. Well, a lot of times I will have somebody have a hypnotic experience and I will tell them, allow that to happen in the way that's right for you and give me a nod when that feels complete. Okay? So I'm not telling them what is supposed to happen. I'm not telling them when it's done. I let them do it in their own mind in the way that's right for them.

And then when they feel it's done, they let me know. Is that answer your question? Yeah. On some way, it seems to me you're allowing them to get leverage on themselves, allowing them to give themselves permission to move forward. That's a, so that what you just said right there is almost everything I do. And sometimes it takes a while to get through that and takes a lot of kind of exercises and practices for them to get to that point.

Much of what I do, one of my mentors shared with me that sometimes all people really need is a cheerleader, somebody to be on their side. And when they have that, they can take on the world. But most of the time, we don't have that. Or we don't think we do. In fact, our own minds are often opposite of that, telling us all the things we do wrong and kind of beating ourselves up where we go into a hypnotic state and I just remind you that you are enough, that you're loved, that you're creative enough and smart enough and worthy

of everything that you want in your life. And I mean, sometimes hearing that can bring tears to people's eyes because they've never heard that before, whether from anybody else or even from themselves. Yeah. It makes me think about the relationship to patterns. When, using myself as an example, I can notice the way I think, but you really need someone there to notice you noticing what you think, right? Yeah.

What? If you bring it to language, kind of what we started with here. It's similar because we will use language to describe certain things. So I'll give a good example. I see a lot of people that are dealing with anxiety at different levels. And in fact, most people are dealing with that at different levels. Many of them, they call it my anxiety. And they are owning, they make it part of who they are.

So sometimes it's enough to help them just, separate. Let's let's change how we talk about this. So from now on, if you're feeling anxious, you can feel the anxiety or the anxiety that you feel. You don't get to call it your anxiety anymore because it's not yours. It never was yours. It was something that you experienced, but let's start to separate from it. That's an example of how somebody uses language to hold on to the problem. And people don't just do that with anxiety. They do it with that.

Well, everything. So my anxiety, my OCD, my fear of flying, you know, whatever it happened, whatever their particular thing is, my self-sabotage. Yeah, that's, it's interesting. I never thought about it from that angle, but you are, you're making it your identity. It's like some part of you wants it there. Like, this is mine. Yeah.

You can't have it. It's mine. I got this. This is my anxiety. It feels cozy and safe, even though it feels uncomfortable. It's familiar. Have you found that when people use the word my for something that they have that they're holding on to, that that is usually something that was developed and been a defense mechanism for a long period of time? Well, most of the time, easy answer is yes. And to elaborate on that a little bit, we create these kinds of patterns. So we're talking about patterns again.

We create these things usually through a few different ways. And typically when we're pretty young, we see people in authority acting a certain way. So like a parent or a teacher or a relative or a friend even. And we store it in the back of our mind. So like kid sees parents arguing in the back of their mind like, well, marriages go like this. Relationships are like this. Got it. Store it.

Now you become an adult. You're in a relationship. You start to unconsciously create that pattern that you saw played out when you were a kid because that's what adults do. we're not consciously thinking any of that stuff, but there's a part of us that saw that, that stored it in the back of our mind, that created, though so in the brain,

literally created a pathway of neurons connected to neurons. So when you see something happening, your brain is starting to build those same pathways that's called mirror neurons. We watch somebody doing something. We learn how to do it by watching. That happens in this kind of instance as well. sometimes through a highly emotional experience is going to create a pattern.

So like I don't like to call them traumatic events. I like to call them past experiences because it's actually more real. But a highly emotional experience, either positive or negative. So it could be a really good experience can create a belief of ourselves or a pattern that we start to live into or negative one. that can again that can happen right away or it can get stored later in life something happens that triggers it and boom you start to act it out so that's why something that you see early on may not happen right away but it can happen later on in life and then another another way to do this is just through repetition so just kind of doing the same thing over and over like

that's how we think of building a habit right you just do the same thing over and over again but that can also be around belief, around behaviors, what we think about ourselves as well. It's interesting how the patterns we're talking about now correlate to parts of the brain, like the default mode network. Of course you're going to default to that. Like, that's what you were, those are the mirror. That's what you were taught.

And then it speaks to the idea of some of these altered states, whether sometimes psychedelics allow you to bypass that default mode network. make new connections and understand or see things in a different type of way, which brings me to this next idea about languages. Isn't it interesting how sometimes when we talk about past traumas, we say, oh, I can see it differently now, right? I have a different perspective. How do you, why do you think we use the sense of sight to explain how we think?

Well, so this is something that is often used. in our imagination. So this is, we imagine using our senses. Right. So sight is one of them, but also they might also say, oh yeah, I hear you. It's true. I feel what you're laying down, right? There's different ways that we, and everybody's a little different.

So some people are very audio focused. Some people are visual focused. Some people are kinesthetically focused. Even smells and taste can be. in there as well. Like one of the most easy ways to go to a memory is through like a song, right? You hear a song from a certain time in your childhood, boom, it's going to take you there. There's songs that I hear that take me to riding a bus, riding the bus to school,

because we heard those songs riding the bus to school. Sledgehammer from Peter Gabriel is one of those songs, right? I just, and see, this is what happens. You talk about these things. Those neurons start to fire off. Boom, I'm back like nine years. old, ride in the bus. And I didn't even have to hear the song.

I just talked about it. And it took me there. So these are different ways that we experience the world. So that's why we use those kinds of terms. And in the imagination, we're going to use all of, you know, in hypnosis, we use a lot of these different ways to access those parts of our brain because we need to use what works best for the particular client. I'm a big fan of symbols too.

One of my one of my favorite symbols is like the yin and yang sign. It's like those two paisleys with like the spot of chaos and order and the spot of order and chaos and the colors. And it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to imagine it spinning around. You know, you can look at your life when you're just like, oh, God, why is this happening? You think, oh, I'm just the spot of chaos right now. But there's just so much an image or a symbol can do for thinking sometimes. What is your take on Do you think that maybe symbols

are more powerful than words? Are they a part of language? When you start thinking about symbols, what do you think about? Well, I mean, words are symbols. Words are audible symbols that we've created to represent ideas. Just like letters, right?

Yeah. So yeah, symbols are powerful. Metaphor, another way to communicate to the unconscious mind. Some of the most powerful ways that I work with people is letting their own metaphors come up. So, you know, they tell me,

if somebody tells me, oh, I want to do this, but I feel like there's this block in the way. Oh, well, what's the block like? Oh, it's like a, it's like a brick wall. Oh, tell me more about the brick wall. Yeah, it's like, it's eight feet tall and it goes on as far as I can see to either side. Oh, what else do you notice?

Oh, it's, it's only one layer brick thick. Huh. Well, what happens if you push on the brick wall? Oh, it falls over. It wasn't really very strong. Well, push it over. Okay. Now what happens? The block's not there anymore. So, you know, people will create their own metaphor for their problem. And then if you just ask them some questions on how to what's happening next, they'll give you the solution. I can't help like, it's so funny you say that because I'm just currently reading this book, metaphors in mind. James Lolly. I was literally just reading about that. It's a huge. Metaphors are phenomenal.

And it's interesting. Another book that's awesome for people that want to read about metaphors is called Metaphors in the Mind by Radman right here. His name is difficult to pronounce. But it's called Metaphors of the Mind. And this one, they start talking about the way in which the only way we can get to new information is by referencing old information.

And that's where the metaphor comes. in, it's like, oh, well, this particular concept is sort of like the sliced bread, you know, or, but they go in really in depth and talking about how we discover new language. And one of the things he says is that he does this exercise where they say, try to think of a new animal. And most people will be like, okay, because I want to challenge you to think of an animal that's never been alive. And a lot of people be like, okay, it's a, it's got four legs and five arms, but, you know, and a horn on it. and it has glass, but they're not really coming up with anything new. They're just putting together things in order that have never been put in order before. And when you start thinking about that in your own mind, you're like, oh, is there really any new knowledge?

Or are we just slapping things together in different ways? And you start looking at discoveries that people made about electricity or, you know, rocketry or science. And you go realize, hey, they're just following this pattern. It's not something coming up with something novel and new. It's just they're putting things in an order that they've never been put before. That's a pretty powerful way, similar to what you're doing with helping people think about things different. Is that fair to say?

It's very similar. Yeah. I like to hold the frame that you have the answers. You have the resources you need. You have everything that you need. And I'm there to help you find it in yourself. Like I consider myself a guide. I'm not fixing your problem.

I'm a guide to help you get to the place where you can fix your problem. Can you say that again? I think that that should be something that people realize. A lot of times people think that they become the healer when in fact the medicine is already in them. Maybe you can just repeat that again for people. Yeah. I am a guide to help you find your own internal resources, your own internal X factor, like I like to call it, so that you can live the life that you deserve to live.

I love it. I love it. It's really well said in them. In heightened states of consciousness induced by hypnosis, how might linguistic patterns shape the perception of time? And how is this reflected in subsequent behavior? I guess what comes to my mind as you ask me that is because you're in a deeper state,

that's a very much more imaginative state, we can go back in time. We can alter experiences in the past. We can go forward in time to create, really creating that mental pathway, right? So we go forward in time to practice a situation. And all of it kind of blends together. Often people in a hypnotic experience, kind of either lose track of time. So they often will come out of it thinking that no time, little time has passed or a lot of time has passed.

and they're usually wrong about both of them. Oftentimes it's like it goes by very quickly. So time gets a little bit flexible in a hypnotic state or really in a trance state. So it's not necessarily about a hypnotic state, any kind of trans state. Like imagine a time where you've been in a flow and just kind of time can just go by and you're just in that state just doing. Watching a great movie or something that you're really. burst in, right? You lose track of time. So this is not a, this is a trance thing, not a hypnotic

thing. I feel like maybe it's just me, but I feel like our relationship as a culture. I feel like our relationship with time is changing. And you can do, I wouldn't recommend this experiment, but you can do it. So let me just put that out there as a primer. If you want to, if you want to speed time up or slow time down, if you go to a red light and you just wait, sometimes it goes pretty slow. But if you go to a red light and pick up your phone, time flies like that. You know, you can change time if you want to. You know, but you, it's a really great way for you to understand that you've been conditioned to experience time in a certain way.

I think our culture puts these time restraints on us. You know, here's another one if people want to start thinking about how weird time is. When you think of an octagon, you think of eight sides. So why is October the 10th month? Deca. You know, why is Deca the 12th month? He started thinking like, hmm, that's kind of strange. You start digging into this idea of, well, maybe it's for taxes. But, you know, there's all these things just waiting to grab your attention if you start thinking about time. Another one that I really like is there's a fascinating individual that he's far gone now, but his name is Mercea Iliad.

And he talks about like the time in which you find yourself in contemplative prayer, or an ecstatic states. And he talks about sacred time. And an example of that is like, I've been married and you've been married. And that moment where we're standing at the altar or standing wherever it is in this time, we shared that time.

That's sacred time. Even though we weren't together, I can tell you about the time we got married and you can picture what that time is like. It's like this thing we get to share far away from each other. It doesn't matter if it's you and me on the East Coast and West Coast or if it's me and my great, great grandfather. Like you can experience the same time as someone else.

That's kind of profound, right? Yeah, that is. That's a beautiful thought experiment. Yeah. As far as October or December, you know, it's because they added a couple of months. So it did used to be the eighth and the tenth month. And then we had to add some months earlier and screwed it all up. Yeah.

And then you realize, like, that is a pattern. Like, we do that a lot. That just happens to be one that everybody can see if you're looking. You start looking back on history and you're like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Whose history? Yeah, well, look at the days of the week are like that too. These are all named after Germanic gods, right?

We got Thor and Odin and Freya and then we got Saturn in there and the moon and the sun, right? named after the planets really yeah but we know for sure that jesus was born on the 25th of december right absolutely a whole celebration about that coming up that's right so can hypnosis serve as a unique linguistic tool to access and influence subconscious processes and if so how does this influence behavioral responses that may not be readily accessible in ordinary waking state So hypnosis helps to take you into this kind of focused, relaxed state, where you're more open to ideas, to suggestions. Then when you hear these words, when you're in that state, it's kind of like that moment where I was at that conference and I heard those, I heard those words. You're in the state where those they click, they sit, they make a difference.

So hypnosis is a trans state that allows you then to, whether you have a hypnotist do this or whether you're even doing it yourself, you know, saying words to yourself, reading to yourself, it starts to build those suggestions to make them more real to you. a lot of things that I will use with a client. So say they have a fear flying. That's a good example of. It's kind of a simple one that is easy to think about. I will actually give them a whole list.

So I'll take them into a nice deep state. So a hypnotic experience usually starts with an induction. That's kind of what you think of counting down. down from 10, and then you take them a little bit deeper, you help them relax more. You start to get them in their mind, imagining things. It helps them get more and more real in their mind as they imagine some small things. Then you take them deeper. So I usually wait until we're kind of in a, and deeper is a subjective term, right? So we take them into this altered state. And when they're at the depth or the height of the altered state,

however you want to think about this, I will then give them a series of positive suggestions that are saying things like, as you drive to the airport, you feel calm and confident and excited about your experience. While you're standing in line at the security checkpoint, you feel safe and in control. As you wait for your plane, you find yourself so completely distracted by what you're doing that you're

let go of the challenges of the past and you focus on the confidence that you have now. And as you're riding in your plane, you feel more and more confident that you can do not only those things that you have to do, but you can do whatever you ought to be able to do and to do that easily. So we just kind of use those kinds of terms. So it starts to build, again, it's actually. actually really simple in a neuroscience-based way where we bring up the neurons that the problem is there. So that's talking about the problem, right? Like before when I was talking about the Peter Gabriel song, and boom, those neurons fire it off.

So we talk about the problem, fires off the pattern. Then we use all these imaginative exercises to send those neurons, those words that I just said, down a new pathway. So we're talking about the fear of flying, but now you're focused, you're calm, you're in control, you're confident, all these things. It's rewiring the brain. Like that is what's happening at the core level, whether you're using hypnosis or any other kind of modality. That's what they're all doing, is they're firing off the problem, adding in the solution, doing that again and again until. you know, neuroplasticity kicks in and this new pathway is stronger than the old one. Yeah, that's interesting.

It's, it seems very prevalent today. And a lot of people I talk to that are working with like PTSD or any kind of trauma. And I mean, that seems like what you would do is you want to first off get people to be comfortable enough to think about that thing that has been blocked and then rearrange and change the shape of it in some way. Have you? And to your example right there, like you just gave a great example, right? Because you don't actually have to go into the moment. But if that moment that is PTSD memory for you, if that had a shape, what would it be? Oh, it's a square.

If it had a color, what would it be? It's a red square and it's like vibrating and solid and kind of angry. Okay. Well, when you're calm, tell me about that. well that's a blue circle that's got waves and okay so come back to that red square where do you notice it in your body what happens if you turn it into a blue red feeling what happens when you turn it into a circle what happens if you take that vibration and you make it into waves oh that that feeling's gone oh really isn't that interesting like you can literally do what you describe change the shape of the feeling

of the experience into something different, which we don't, I think one of the biggest challenges is people think that they feel something and then they have to like go into that. Like that's just, that's just what they have to do. It's not necessarily a bad thing to feel your feelings, but also sometimes maybe we don't want to just suck into the negative feeling. And we would rather, for maybe there's no reason.

for that. That's like a trigger moment, right? Some stupid thing happens that has nothing to do with getting angry, but you still get angry. Well, there's ways that you can shift that. So now when you're in that trigger moment, you get to decide how you feel. This brings up, I've had this idea on my mind that's kind of been knocking on the door, if that makes sense. And it's like this idea of the texture of language. On some level, I think we're beginning to move past this idea of, you know, of maybe it seems to be language is evolving. And I think it has a texture to it. You know, a lot of the times we, the shape of words,

be it the vibration of the sound that comes from us. But I think that if we really paid attention and began to decipher the texture of language, I think we can really communicate more effectively. Maybe that's why poetry is such a wonderful way in which people can respond to it. Sometimes when you read poetry or hear a song, you can get goosebumps or your face gets flush.

But what do you think about language having a texture to it? Well, we're talking about how language makes you feel, right? Texture is about feeling. So language definitely, again, because it's a symbolic representation of an idea, it is a way of community. It's one of the, I think Stephen King said that the best form of telepathy is writing. because it's the only way you can literally get into somebody's mind to understand exactly what they're thinking.

And so that's what comes up for me as you're talking about this is there's an unlimited texture to language because it has the capability to bring up feelings and images and even sounds

in your mind, you know, emotions, all the different things can come up. Memories just by using language. I mean, but art can do the same thing, but it's a little less precise where language can be very precise in how it does that. And it can be more intentional in doing it again and again, like being similar for people where art, I think, is a little bit more, open to interpretation than language. I mean, language is still open to interpretation, but maybe a little less so than art.

Like the structure of language is something that's fascinating to me. And I was speaking with a friend of mine a while back, and somehow we got on the concept of zero. And when zero was introduced to the world of numbers, like it changed the way accounting can be done. It changed the way we model reality. If we were just to do a hypothetical fun exercise here, do you think it might be possible? What if we could introduce a new symbol to the English alphabet that would denote like integrity or something like that?

Do you think it's possible that we could enter a new symbol, like an in or a symbol or like a suffix or a prefix into the English language that would help people model reality differently? I mean, it happens all the time. When something new is there, like computer. Computer is a word that was recently introduced that gives you a model. Right. Yeah, I think that happens all the time. Yeah. We pull ideas from other languages, but we create, we create words to represent what we consider reality in different ways when there's something that's not there, right?

Like, Rocket is another one that comes to mind, different things that are newer than have been around than the ideas that have been around for thousands of years. there's this there's a pattern that I've been noticing and it seems that over the last maybe decade or so we've been verbing nouns like hey go instead of google like we're googling that now yeah and it seems to me that that echoes like if you just start doing that with nouns like you know like george as a noun as a person placed or thing but what about george is a process what about joshua as a process what joshua as a verb i think if you start looking at your way like that, you can, it really helps to speed up the progress of what it is you're trying to accomplish. Like you are, you are a process. And if you start looking at the

world around you like a process, whether it's Googling, whether it's Georging or maybe you're Joshoing. Yeah. You know, like I think that you can really, it gives you that perspective, the same way maybe alter states of conscience give you another perspective. Using language in your life and verbing nouns kind of gives us that idea of a process. What do you think about that? I kind of like that. It's like how is, if I'm Joshuaing something, it's how am I, how does it, how do I do it? Right. Yeah.

How does Joshua do this? Yeah. And it's different than Georging the same process. Totally. The way that I Joshua, a podcast is different than the way that you George is a podcast. That's so awesome. Yeah. That kind of stuff makes me excited for the future.

We like, my daughter and I play out kinds of cool word games where one, time we'll when we're brushing our teeth you know we'll play this game where you got to think of an animal you got to think of something it could be an animal it could be an idea and then my idea my animal has to beat it we'll start out like she'll say an aunt and then i'll say a lizard and she'll say a cat you know and then all of a sudden you know we're at plagues or a comet coming down you know but yeah it's super fun there's a people to imagine and play games like that there's a um a story in uh in the Sandman. So I got it from.

Yeah. Okay. So you've read that. Yeah. Yeah. But that's an ancient story. The riddling game. It's kind of like,

uh, don't they call it the oldest? I think so. The oldest game in there, I believe. Yeah. It's a, yeah, it's a fascinating wizard battle, right? Yeah.

How to, how one wizard battles another by turning into the next beast. Yeah. I like that series, but he hates God. so much that like it's kind of hard for me to read i don't know why like i'm not super like i i must read something into it that bothers me about it but like it just seems like he just he just on some level he his his his his animosity towards religion as that character is like it's too much

for me i don't know why but let me see so considering the power of suggestion in hypnosis how do linguistic nuances contribute to the formation of positive or negative behavioral changes? And what role does the choice of words play in reinforcing or altering existing patterns? So I guess the way that I would respond to that one, and we've talked a little bit about this already, right? Let's say from, so like a hypnotist

is somebody who is really working hard to give you a positive suggestion. Because everything, if I'm going to give you a suggestion, I'm going to give you one that is in line with your values, in line with what you want, you know, because we've already talked. I know what you want. We've figured it out. And I'm not going to say something that is out of line with what you do want.

Plus, I usually will give you suggestions that are open enough so that you create the meaning of them. Again, you create your own meeting. Where this actually seems more relevant is the suggestions that we give to ourselves. And like the word, again, if we're kind of come back to words that we use, I think of, there's a handful of words out there that I think of as disempowering words. And these are words that we use all the time to essentially let us off the hook. So this is what Master Yoda talks about. Do or do not, there is no try, right? So when somebody tells me that, well, I tried to do that.

what they're really telling me is they didn't do it. When they tell me, well, I should do this, well, we know they're shooting on themselves. We know we don't want to do that. Or they have to do this. Well, have to and need to. That's what your dad told you. And we know what happens when your dad tells you to do stuff, right? So there's these words like try, should, have to, need to, want to is even in there.

What it comes down to for what I have found is it just comes down to. a choice. Like, you're ultimately choosing how you show up in life. You might not want to hear this. So if you don't want to hear this, close your ears right now. Everything that is happening in your life is you're choosing for it to happen. You're choosing if you're procrastinating. It's not because you got the procrastination gene. It's because you're choosing to procrastinate. And now, granted, there might be lots of unconscious stuff happening there. but if you don't deal with that, well,

you're choosing to allow the unconscious stuff to take control. And like we always have a choice. We always have something we can do. Yeah. Yeah, it's sometimes when I find myself or my family saying, I have to do this. I say, no, you get to.

You get to do it. Exactly. He said to see my daughter go like, oh. No, you get to. You get to clean. your room. Isn't that exciting? In exploring the intersection of hypnosis and language, how might the hypnotic experience

challenge or reshape traditional concepts of free will? I guess we kind of hit on that just now, but are there ethical implications of influencing behavior through linguistic suggestion? Well, yeah, there are ways that you can use language to, I mean, politicians do it all the time. Yes. Right? There's ways that language is used. in a non-ethical way. And I don't think most hypnotists, and the hypnotists I know don't do that. The people that are doing that are not hypnotists.

There are other people that are using the same techniques, but they're doing it outside of the healing modality. They're doing it in, you know, like I said, a lot of politicians will do this. cult leaders do this. Even corporate leaders will do it.

Think of Steve Jobs in the reality bubble that he would create around him, right? It doesn't have to be a negative thing. But it can be used in a negative way. So words are powerful. I think of one of

my favorite books to go back and read from time to time is Edward Bernay's propaganda. In that book, they speak about the world in which you live is shaped by men with whom you'll never meet. You know, and you start thinking about these ideas of like, what is my thoughts? You know, and we see it in culture all the time. And it's fascinating. On some level, when we look at hypnotism or suggestion or propaganda on a level. Like we, you know,

we understand that we want there to be shared goals and shared sacrifice. And so you want to give people a shared vision. But that can go a ride really fast, especially when you're dealing

with a big group of people, right? Is there, it's hard because there's no, a lot of times the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But yeah,

what do you think about using techniques on a mass scale like that? I, I don't like the, I don't like it when that happens. I don't agree with manipulating people for your nefarious uses.

And I would be happier if people weren't doing that. And they're going to be doing that. So you need to know when that's happening. And it's hard to know when that's happening, especially when you're being told something that you want to believe is true. Yeah. In some ways, critical thinking is like a martial art. And one should go hard and try to figure out as much of the techniques that you use to find your way around the world and the way influences is brought around the world so you can protect yourself from that kind of stuff.

You know what's interesting when we talk about on a mass scale, you know, Cass Sunstein and I think he was the advisor for Obama. and Robert Caldini was for Hillary Clinton. And when you start looking at the way in which, you know, PR firms craft narratives, like it is mesmerizing to see the level of thinking that goes on to project these images and the minds of people. In some ways, you can't help but be enamored by it. Yeah, yeah.

I watch for, what's the term, for adjectives, because adjectives often are the thing that go from fact to manipulation, right? So think of it like a news headline that says, I don't know, somebody, I'm trying to think of a way to say this,

ex-company lost money. Okay, so that's one headline. I'm just trying to think of a way. If you add an adjective here, So company ruthlessly lost money, right? Or something, depending on the way they want you to look at this, you're going to change that word. That's the, that's the flamy word. That's the word that brings in the emotion.

And I noticed those, you know, depending on what side of the aisle you're watching the news from or meeting, it's going to be different. it can be the same exact article with two completely different spins where it's really my favorite kind of news just kind of here's the facts that's how it's supposed to be here's the facts

you make up your own decision on how you feel about that I'm not supposed to be told what to feel about the news yeah yeah it's interesting I used to I used to enjoy watching

like Ari Fleischer or the Raging Cajun like the press secretary A really good press secretary is someone who's really interesting to watch. Not because what they're doing is wonderful, but because they're so quick and they're so fast, and they have the ability to, like, you know, show you this vision or just drag this red herring right across this thing.

You won't even see it. It's pretty fascinating. Right. Right. Is that something you studied too? Focus on what it is that they want you to stay focused on. It's so good. They're like, they're not going to get me.

They're not going to get me. Oh, they got me. It's so good. It's fascinating. Is that something that you've studied too is like all the different logical fallacies, like the way in which people use non sequiturs to control the way they see the world? To a degree. I wouldn't say that I've studied that in depth.

But, you know, I do like language. I do like writing. And I'm very interested in how language works. So I pay attention to those sorts of things. It's interesting. in today's world where we're doing a podcast, we have all this cool new technology. You know, I'm often, I have a younger daughter who,

during COVID, she did some Zoom classes and stuff like that. And there has been in the lexicon and in the society, this idea of, I wonder how this particular mode of communication is changing the way we interpret the world. Sometimes I feel as if we're losing the felt presence of the other. You know, you don't have the ability to maybe catch some of those pheromones. or you don't have the ability to slap you on the back or look you dead in the eye and stuff like that. But what do you think is happening right now in this interesting time of shifting communication

modalities? Well, I mean, it is really interesting because, I mean, I work with people all around the world and I work with people locally. I like people in my office. It is a little bit more charge to that, there's a little bit more energy there. But having said that, I have the same success with people online. And we still build a relationship. We still build rapport.

There's still an energetic back and forth. Even though it's like, this isn't really you there. You're just like these ones and zeros on my screen. But we're building a connection. We're still having a conversation. There's still this kind of back and forth that's going. So I don't know how that works. But to me, there is still.

energy that happens. I think that there is a craving for the in-person. I mean, especially after COVID happened, most people, if they're local, they want to just come into my office and they don't want to do, they don't want to do another Zoom call. At the same time, people have gotten really used to the to the convenience of of zoom and video giving us access to this wider world now so that it's just another option i did a i did a class just recently with a teacher from england right so you get to do you can do classes from wherever you want to it's i go through different ideas of what may be happening and that's half the fun of it is exploring what may be happening. In the beginning, I thought to myself, well, maybe what's happening is this atrifying

of the ability to pick up small nuances from people. But then the more I thought about it, and the more communities I have online than I go out in public, maybe the opposite's happening. Maybe we're struggling really hard to become aware of the nuances through the video feed that when you actually sit with somebody, it's like hyper-influenced. Yeah, it's easier. Yeah. I, you know what, and it's, it's interesting to talk about this with people, because as I'm talking about it, it's like, I'm beginning to see it more. Like, maybe that is why now when you're in communication with people, you'd be like, I think this person's bullshitting or I think this person's really saying this, you know, because you're struggling so hard across the Zoom to really be focused.

And maybe this idea of being in this moment and having that hyper focus is, is allowing different patterns to be developing. I don't know, that's pretty cool to think about, though, right? Yeah, yeah, we're always building new patterns, building new pathways, figuring out new ways to think and do things. Yeah. How do, in your opinion, how to altered states of consciousness induced by hypnosis impact the linguistic processing areas in the brain? And how does that relate to the observed changes in language, perception, and production? I think it slows things down. So, and it opens up your.

Again, this is just what it, this is my opinion here. It seems to open you up to be able to accept things, words, ideas, images that were, that the conscious mind might say, I don't believe that. Like, I could, I could look somebody in the eye and just say, you are enough. And they'll just like, blow that off. Like, what's that weirdo talking about? Take him into hypnosis. And I tell them that. And it hits them and they cry because they've.

never had that happen before and and they feel it. So that's kind of the difference. It seems to make it easier to accept, to feel to like internalize what you're hearing, whether it's, you know, from me or really from yourself and allow it to be, I guess, real for you. Okay. So this speaks to something that's fascinating. Do you feel that when you're able to do that with someone and you could feel it,

Isn't that kind of intoxicating sometimes? You know, when you can do that for somebody, that feeling that resonates back to you from you helping them, that's an intoxicating feeling sometimes, right? It's, I don't know if it's intoxicating. I wouldn't necessarily use that term, but it is, I mean, it is a positive, powerful feeling. And to me, it's about when that happens and somebody's having that kind of emotional reaction, it makes, first of all, I could feel it. Like, I do feel that myself, but it also makes me aware of the responsibility that I have to hold this safe space, right?

I think that one of the things that I'm good at is holding that space so that, you know, whether you're a mother who's coming in for whatever challenges that you have or the the biker dude who's coming in, both of them feel safe to be able to express whatever. they need to express. And I have had very manly men in tears in my office where they would never be like that anywhere else. This is the only place where they can be, where they feel safe enough to be able to do that because I can hold that space for them. And it's important to keep that space there for them, whether it's online or whether it's in person, you can still hold the space either way. See, maybe that's the difference

between someone who's been trained and who hasn't been trained is that like I use the word intoxicating. That's kind of dangerous that I would use that word. Like you're like, I'm going to hold space. I'm like,

I think it's intoxicating. If you actually get some training over here. Like, take it easy, George. Well, well, we all know who's not to go to for some of thematic techniques here. I'm going to make you guys feel awesome. Watch.

Word choices, though, right? Like if you, and hey, at least I can notice the pattern. That's going to tell for something. So can hypnotic language be considered a form of augmented communication that unlocks latent cognitive abilities? And how does this relate to the potential for enhancing learning, memory, or creativity? So what it does, it does seem to be able to unlock abilities that we maybe have kind of locked off. Right.

So a lot of people will get more creative. They allow themselves to come up with ideas or they're getting it from this other version of them. That's just kind of much of what I do is take you to a place where you start to get your own messages, your own suggestions. I'm not saying anything. Or I might be say, say, you know, say things in a vague enough way. Again, like we said earlier, that lets those messages come through.

So it does it does seem to unlock some creativity. It seems to open up, open people up to ideas that they maybe hadn't been aware of and allow experiences that they sometimes don't want. I don't want to say don't want to allow, but kind of didn't have the capacity to allow. As I say that, I think of like going into your mind, going through an experience where in the past, it used to be this big problem, but going through it now with no problem. What's that like? What are you feeling as you're doing that? What are the sounds around you? What's the perspective?

Like getting all that stuff real in your mind creates that pathway. Now the pathway's there. Now when you're in the situation, it happens. This is what athletes will do. Michael Jordan. He would shoot basketball. in his mind, then he would go out on the court and shoot baskets. Arnold Schwarzenegger do the same thing before he'd go lift weights when he was doing,

you know, being the Mr. universe. He would imagine himself lifting these incredible weights. Then he'd go out and do it. So this is not an uncommon thing. This is used by very successful people. It's often used by people without even realizing that they're doing it. So a lot of people are doing this even without, you know, the term hypnosis on it.

Because like I said, let's take hypnosis away and just say trance. And trans can be daydreaming. That's a trans state. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to get in there, whether it's breathwork or dancing sometimes. Yeah, for sure. Meditating. Yeah.

You know, I've been, I've had a really fascinating relationship with psychedelics for a large part of my life. And I've used that as a method to get into some of the thoughts that have been buried. And sometimes it's really helped me get through tragedies and even understand or give me a new perspective on tragedies. Like on some level, for me, it's allowed me to walk up to those particular memories without any judgment. You know, that really helped me go, oh, look, it's not you. this is life and it's unfolding in a way to help you. That's a, that's an interesting place to get because I think that's where the medicine is.

And what do you think about that? I am a, I mean, don't do anything illegal. Yeah. And I'm an advocate. So as long as it's legal within your place, then go for it. I have found a lot of value in psychedelics. So psychedelics, what they do is they unlock, along with other kind of things. Like they unlock neuroplasticity.

So they make all these different connections. They also, for me, help you get present. So that's kind of what you're talking about. Yeah. Just really present. So now you're present just where you are so you can look at these older, these other situations from a different point of view. And as you do that and your neurons are connected in different ways,

you're building new pathways because that's exactly what they're supposed to do. Right. And sometimes they allow those. that neuroplasticity to expand for weeks even after you take the medicine. So very, very powerful. If you're considering this, work with somebody who knows what they're doing. Consider someone to help you integrate. Be smart about it.

Yeah, absolutely. Find the purse. Do your own research, you know, and don't go to South America or some foreign place because of a flashy flyer. Like, do your research. Find the people that speak to you and then get some referrals and talk to people that have been there. I think that's the best way for people to read some books.

I mean, the best way to prepare for a psychedelic experience is in the library, I think. You know, when you can start figuring stuff out, mechanism of action and why things work and some psychology, maybe some Carl Young is a good piece to jump off. There's the Netflix series, How to Change Your Mind is a really, really good starting point, too, for somebody that's curious and interested.

Yeah. Or it's a book as well, how to change your mind. Yeah, the pollinator. That's what we call them, right? It's interesting to think about it. I'm hopeful. Like sometimes when we speak of patterns, it seems to me that in the world of psychedelics

from what I've been reading and some of the people I've been speaking to, it seems to have echoes of the late 50s and 60s where there was all this research done and there was this medical container for psychedelics. People were doing this cool research. research, then some things happened and it got put away. What do you think about when you look back on the previous wave of psychedelics and what we see

today? I'm, I'm really excited that things are opening back up again and grateful for those people that did that original research. And there's, there's a very small handful of people that continued doing the research, just couldn't do it, you know, above board. It's really unfortunate that, that this happened the way it. it did and you know there's we could have a whole podcast episode about yeah why that happened the way it did but i'm glad that things are opening up and there's a new reality like these are powerful

medicines yeah that are here for us to heal and uh and recreate our lives in the way that is going to actually make a powerful difference. I speak to a lot of people that, you know, there's a company called Moksha Journeys in Oregon, and they are really helping people with addiction and they're using psilocybin to do it. And they have so many amazing people on their staff, like Premah and Sienna and all these really cool individuals.

And each one of the therapists has like this different modality in which they're able to help people through the journey. incident. Same thing with psychedelics today. They have a new program called the vital program. But it seems to me your background, like a background in hypnosis would be a great compliment to the other modalities that they have to help people go through these different traumas at their facing. Have you ever thought about working in that particular field with some of these different agencies? I have. I kind of prefer just being on my own right now. And I do, I do, I do some psychedelic integration with people,

so I don't take them on journeys or anything. What I have found, and this has been true for me too, is you can have a psychedelic experience. It could be life-changing, and it stays over here in psychedelic experience land, and life is over here, and they don't always connect, right? So through hypnosis, which is a great way to kind of re- go through a situation, whether it's a past experience or a psychedelic experience,

we can go back into those moments and we can pull out the lessons and apply them to life, to really integrate them in a more powerful way than can often be done outside of using a hypnotic technique to do that. So that's one of the ways that I have found works best that I'm really excited about. And other than that, I'm just, I enjoy, I don't necessarily want to tie myself to addiction because it's not necessarily where my sweet spot is. I think that I am better at empowerment and confidence, kind of, I love working with people that are already successful and more successful. I just enjoy that more. And not that I don't work with people that are dealing with different anxieties, but, you know, I like what I like.

And so I focus on that kind of a person, creatives, entrepreneurs. Those are my favorite kind of clients. Yeah, I love it. It's there's something to be said about optimization. You know, and I think that that, I'm hopeful that that is the next wave or the next container in which these different modalities go because it is, it's cool and it's helpful and it's necessary. And maybe the first phase should be trauma.

But I think the next phase, and we already see it with entrepreneurs or athletes or, you know, Even back when Kin Norton broke Muhammad Ali's jaw, you know, was it, I think it was Ken Norton. But he was hypnotized too. You know, it's amazing what can become of who you are if you're willing to free yourself of the limiting beliefs. And I think that hypnosis, maybe even paired with psychedelics, could be a critical one-two punch. Yeah, it absolutely could be. And then, you know, one of the way that I like to think about this, I had a person that I was talking with earlier today. And, you know, we talk about limiting beliefs and self-sabotage and all these things.

So the thing to remember is there is no part of us that's trying to mess up our life. That's so beautiful. We, every part, you know, every time that we have a limiting belief or a self-sabotage, there's something that is trying to give us a positive result. The method that it's using is just not very effective. And it's confused. So, you know, call that shadow work, call that integration work, whatever you want to call it. We're really, we're learning to accept all these different parts and to kind of get them in alignment so that we're all working together in a positive way.

Because it's not trying to stop us, it's just trying to keep us safe. And it's keeping us safe in the only way that it knows how. So sometimes that's through anxiety. That's through fear. That's through, you know, fear of flying or one of these phobias or maybe just being super shut down. Like there's lots of ways that we try to stay safe that keeps you safe because it doesn't let you do anything. Yeah. Yeah.

It brings up this idea. Like there's been times where I've been on a pretty deep journey and something comes up that I don't want to think about. And what I've learned is that the more that I try to pull. push it away, the more intense it gets. And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, it's really helped me discover how I discover things. First off, it's difficult just to hold one thought in your mind and not think about anything else.

Right. But once you... And less. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's going to stay right here. And if you try to push it, I'm just going to get bigger. So, like, that has taught me, like, okay, you've got to sit with it.

No matter how long it's going to sit, no matter what, you have. have to face, you have to sit with it. And pretty soon you come to the idea, okay, this two shall pass. But right now, this is something that it's not going away. I have to think about it. And that's helped me realize looking back on my life all the times that I distracted myself, so I didn't have to think about it. Yeah.

Like, you know, I am, I am horrible at this thing. Oh, no, I'm going to go clean my room or I'm going to wash my car. I'm going to go outside or I'll go for a run. Like, okay, no, you're not sitting with it. And I think that's one of the most powerful, one of the coolest things and most powerful things. One of the most frightening things that I've learned from those states of conscious is becoming aware of the thing, right? Maybe we can talk about awareness for a minute. That's a pretty powerful one.

Yeah. Well, and so this reminds me of, so let's talk a little bit about why I think that is. Okay, so I have to give a frame for this first. So my personal frame, I don't know if there's even a belief. It's just the frame that I use. Based on life experience is that you, me, we are little sparks of divinity. So let's say we're a spark. Let's just for the example, we'll just say that that's the truth.

We are sparks of divinity because what is divinity? Divinity is like everything, right? Everything in the universe, everything that is going to happen, everything that's ever happened. It's like this big cloud of just like love. And it's kind of boring. So to experience a little thing, something a little different, that's something a little interesting. It has to split itself off and kind of go into these different experiences.

So that's you living your life. That's me living my life. We are the universe experiencing itself go through life so that we can have experiences. We can go back to the universe again and then start over and do that again and again. But because, you know, the big blob of love is just kind of boring, it craves experiences. And those aren't necessarily just positive experiences. There's no judgment on what an experience is.

It's both good, bad, the sad, the happy, all of it is exquisite to that spark of divinity because it's experience. And the big blob of love is just everything already, so there's no differentiation. So that's the frame. So because of that, when you're going into these types of things

where you're stuck on that thought and that thought is also a feeling right that feeling part of you loves that feeling part of you just wants to feel that's the spark it wants to feel so if to your point you just allow yourself to feel that

and just be okay with it it doesn't mean that you're always going to feel that it just means that right now there's a part of you that loves this feeling and it's okay it's okay that it loves that feeling and if you allow it to just pass through you and you've and if you notice here's what here's the interesting thing if you if you start to pay attention to not the thoughts not the meanings but the feeling it might actually be kind of a good feeling so i've noticed when i do this the the feelings that you get they're kind of like energy in my body it's kind of it's exciting it's this

rush of energy where if I don't put any meaning to it, I can look at it. Oh, this is, yeah, this is a good feeling. This is like a rush of energy. It's this powerful feeling that I was putting all this other meaning on. Yeah. I'm not good enough or whatever it is. Like you're putting all this, it's not any of that. It's just what's the easiest way to get to this feeling that the spark wants to feel?

Well, maybe I'll just feel that instead. Let's just feel the feeling and let it have that. And usually it's done. Usually once you've done that, that's the integration. That's letting it be real. That's letting it become, it's not the resistance anymore. The resistance is the problem where if it's acceptance, except, yeah, okay, part of me wants to feel this. Okay, let's feel this.

We don't have to put meaning on it. We don't have to put thoughts on that. It doesn't have to mean anything about me. It's just a feeling. Let's let it be. I love that. I've never heard of put that way before. That really makes it accessible to me.

Thank you for that. I appreciate that. That's awesome. Yeah. I'm looking forward to having these things that I thought were negative feelings now. Right. So negative thought, negative meaning, but the feeling itself is probably just kind of, it's just a feeling. It's just another feeling.

Let's talk about that process. Is it your thoughts become your ideas, become your words, become your habits? Or is that the right order? I think it's thoughts lead to. feelings, feelings lead to actions or non-actions. Okay. So think thought is, oh, I did that stupid thing. Oh, you idiot.

Okay. Now I'm feeling shame. I'm feeling negativity and I'm feeling it in my body. And so I go away from the situation. I hide. I get angry and I smash something, right? Lots of different ways that that can happen. So you can either have an action or a non-action.

And that's, those are the three. ways that's essentially what I do with my work is I help you quiet your thoughts kind of getting control of the thoughts update those feelings that's the rewiring like the reprogramming so that you can take a new action and making that action part of who you are now like stepping into who you really are that spark that divinity yeah I think that that that on some level on this on the on like you know in the world of psychedelics there's this debate about what a bad trip is you know and we're back to language and meaning and stuff like that. But I was speaking with some very interesting people.

And there's also this debate in psychedelics about on some level, people are trying to take the negative aspects like the magic out of the magic mushrooms in some ways. Can you have the same sort of neuroplasticity and the results for the BDNF without having the psychedelic part of it? And some people say yes, some people say no. But it seems to me what's happening right there is that that negative manifestation of you freaking out is your brain being real being rewired in real time. Like that is the neuroplasticity. And this is the manifestation of like, I can't what is going on. I hate this thing.

Yeah. That's the resistance. That's what that is. Yes. So that's the challenge with that. That is the risk, right, of using psychedelics is, are you ready to face what's there? So people that haven't done a lot of inner work, it can be harder. And I can, you know, I'll share a little bit.

So I did a lot of psychedelics in my younger years. And then there was a long space where I didn't. And then I started exploring again. Yeah. And I have a whole different perspective. on how it shows up. Like the, it's,

it's much easier. It's more, but it's also deeper. Mm-hmm. Right? Because I'm open to allowing it to happen. I let, I let it flow through my body and I just let whatever's going to happen,

happen and accept it. And that is a, in the, in the past, there were times that I would resist what's coming up. And I didn't want to face it. And that makes, yeah,

that's like a bad trip. It's also, So, I mean, think of getting stuck in the loop, right? You don't have to be tripping to get stuck in a loop. It's the same kind of thing. Be with it. I'm here with you, right? Like if you're having a bad trip, hopefully there's somebody there that's just with you

that can talk you through it, let you know, you're doing great. Everything's going to be fine. I'm here right with you. Take a breath. All the same things that you might say to somebody who's having a freak out in any other kind of situation. It's just about feeling it's okay. You're okay where you are.

You're safe. Here, wrap up in this blanket. Have a drink of water. Yeah. Eat a piece of chocolate. Now we're talking, right? Now we're talking. You're all right.

Things are beautiful. It's the end of the song. Isn't that nice? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes people talk about having like an audio hallucination. Like when you hear voices or something like that. What do you think is going on there?

Oh, we hear voices. the time. I do for sure. Exactly, right? So I don't know if it's an audio hallucination. It's just like a part of it. It's just a, yeah. So way back in the beginning, we talked about the different ways that we access our imagination.

Audio, visual, kinesthetic, those are the three main ways. There's others as well, but those are the main ways. So some people that are real audio based, they hear words in their mind. It's just their thoughts or like a part of them speaking. some people might just feel sensations in their body, feel emotions more. Some people might get real, like imagine things in their mind where it's just there's different ways that that happens. Now, that's not to say that somebody who's having a psychotic event is having the same

kind of thing. That's a little bit different of a thing and outside of my wheelhouse. So if that's the case, go see yourself, go find a therapist. Right. you know, it's interesting. In my exploration of psychedelics, I've found myself exploring different compounds. And for me, like I've, I've been a fan of LSD or some of the derivatives like ETHAD, but there seems to be a difference.

And this is just my opinion. I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. Like, for me, LSD and ETHAD, they do provide an incredible insight and a long, long form format for it. But for me, psilocybin mushrooms particularly, it seems embodied. Like, it seems like there's something there. Like, I feel like I'm talking to somebody or something or a different part. It's maybe more than myself. What do you think is going on when you feel the embodiment versus not having the embodiment?

Is that a different mechanism of action? Or is there someone there or does it matter? I call them the mushroom people. Nice. Well, if you think about it, there is something there. Like mushrooms are a lot. live. They are grown. There is a spirit to them. They're a spark of that divinity. Yeah. They are. Now, I guess you could, if you really want to boil it down, LSD, it's still that, it still has

that spark, but it is manmade. It's a chemical structure. Yeah. So this comes back to your other point around let's make a psychedelic that doesn't actually give you any psychedelic experience, right? This is, this is us trying to take control. of this process that, I mean, psychedelics have been around probably as long as humanity has been conscious. Yeah. And maybe even longer. Maybe responsible for it.

They may be responsible for it. Exactly. There's the stoned ape theory, right? So who knows how long these things have been around? They clearly, like, in the brain, there's receptors in the brain for these chemicals. So there's something going on there beyond just a plant that happens to have these effects. It's more than medical. And yeah, I don't like the idea of just giving somebody a pill to fix a problem.

And that's what I think might, that would be the danger. I don't know what's exactly happening, but that might be the danger of, removing the very pleasant and mind-blowing effects of a psychedelic experience and just figuring out how to make it neuroplasticity, which wouldn't be a bad thing. But I think you might lose, you lose the essence of the spirit of the plant, right? Yeah. If you're taking that out of there. So, I mean, that's the way I look at it.

I look at it as if there is, it does seem like there is a spirit, both. both though to LSD2 and to the plant, it's just different. It's very different. And I think it's because one's alive and one is a chemical. Yeah. It's like one's a robocall. I was talking to a machine. I thought that was a real person that time.

You know, it's, I find it to be an incredible linguistic bridge on some level because there's been so many times that I found myself in my backyard or, you know, on a low dose or even like on a higher dose. and just coming to this realization, like, wow, nature's totally talking to me right now. And an example is, I remember there's like this vine in my yard and it climbs up this tree. And like, I just remember sitting there like and think, just staring at it and thinking, wow, this particular plant knows to climb up this tree and produce a flower at a 47 degree angle on August 13th at 147.5.3 p.m. Like, how does it know that? And as I'm thinking that, I'm like, how did I know just to leave my?

my job, take a chance on this thing. And like, it's the same thing. And like, I just, I wanted to hug the plant. I'm like, thank you. You know, just thank you for sharing this with me. I mean, I love you. You know, and it's like, we can see ourselves in nature if we can just break some of the conditioning on some of it.

And I really think that's nature talking to us through us. And it's, they're almost like exogenous neurotransmitters, right? It is a way of connecting. Yeah. And, and there's, there's lots of ways. to communicate. We talk about linguistics, right? There's communicating through energy, there's communicating through words. Yeah, it's, I guess if we explore the connection between language and behavior in hypnotic context or heightened states of awareness context, how might

the linguistic framing influence the reinterpretation of past experience? I guess we kind of touched on a little bit, but, you know, maybe that's a great way. So, you know, I do that with people often. Okay. And kind of the simplest way is revisiting a younger version of you in a moment where you needed something that you didn't get, right? And giving them that, giving them the love that they needed, giving them the words of encouragement they need, whatever it is. And then in your mind, again, it's all doing this in the imagination, going to do that experience now with the things that you needed and how that can make such a difference for people. So just that that's using linguistics, my words, to help guide them to a place, right,

where they're in their mind creating a different experience. It removes the charge from those emotions or from those experiences that used to be highly emotional. Now all of a sudden the charge is gone. Like the experience, it still happened. Like we can't change the past. But we can remove the charge from that past experience so that it just becomes another, just another thing that happened.

And now you have this connection with this younger you that you can foster. So a lot of times I did this yesterday. We went through an experience that was around reconnecting with her younger self. And it can be really powerful for people to go back and give them what they need, have the conversation with them, let them know their love, like all that stuff. So often when we go through something like that that's been really powerful, I will, I'll ask my clients to find a photo of themselves or a toy from that time, put it in a place of honor in their home and talk to them or light a candle for them

or burn a stick of incense for them. Like give them some energy somehow. Well, how do you do that is practice yoga, work out for, I don't care what you do. Give them some energy. and can build that connection because that's, you know, I got here, I'll show you.

Yeah, please. I got my little picture right here. Yeah. My younger self that I go to in my place of honor, right over there. Yeah. So it's,

and you know, obviously this is stuff that I practice on myself too. Sure. I need it. Gosh darn it. Just like everybody is. Yep. Do you find,

do you run it in the opposite direction once you've run into the past? It seems to me once you go back and remove that charge, now you're able to run it in the other direction and model realities that might not have been possible before. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. One of the most important things that I feel I can help people with is to create the future. Create the future they want and give their unconscious mind now a target. so that because the unconscious mind will give you what it thinks you want.

The problem is it thinks you want what you've always had. And so you just go down the spiral until you give it a new target. So that's, you know, they call it future pacing, imagining yourself in the future, in a situation where in the past it used to be this way, but now you're doing what you want to do, the way you want to do it, you're thinking the way you want to think, feeling the way you want to feel like just fill in all those details and make that real in your mind and nod your head when that feels complete yeah that's speaking to the choir right you know i guess that's why growth is so you know constantly choosing the path of growth is scary because you are denying

the subconscious the ability to do what it's always done yeah yeah wow yeah yeah i've noticed like i Letting go is an interesting topic that people find themselves talking about a meditation or regression or something like that. But letting go often seems to create space for growth. Do you think that's accurate? Yeah, for sure. I think of it like a cluttered house. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's what letting go of.

It's getting rid of the clutter. The things that don't need to be there, those things that you keep kicking as you're trying to walk through your kitchen. And it's just in the way. So let's get it out of the way. is chuck it. You don't need it. Never needed it in the first place. It's interesting.

I was a UPS driver for like 26 years. And I remember, you know, on any route in any neighborhood, there's like a couple houses that are like hoarder houses, you know? And you're like, wow. You know, for someone who delivers, you really get to see what's going on. You know, I want to deliver this guy more stuff? Right. It's like put a little note on the package.

Maybe you should reconsider your life goals here, my friend. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and then for me, you know, I would, I would know the person and I would see the shame. Like they wouldn't come to the door because they didn't want me to see them. You know, and I was like, you start building this relationship, even though you don't really know them. Yeah. You realize like, oh, so that leads you to do research and you start figuring out, oh, all these things are tied to memory and they feel if they let them go, then they lose that memory. You know, and I started thinking about that in my life.

And, you know, I'm going through it, a part where I'm letting go and I'm getting rid of stuff. And so I'm letting, I love books, man. And I bought all these books. I'm always like, you got to get rid of some of these. Oh, yeah. You know, it's just like, why can't you get rid of this one? I'm like, that's a first edition. She's like, all these reasons, you know?

Yeah. And then like, I realized like, okay, this is ridiculous. Just give it to somebody that would enjoy it. And now you've already read it like three times. Who cares that? You have two first editions. Like, give it away. Give one of them away.

You know, and so that process begins opening up the room for growth. And as I start doing that, I realize everything in my house, well, maybe not tied to a memory, is tied to an idea. And that for me was very powerful. Like, oh, this bookcase is an idea that I like to read and it inspires. Okay. But once you become aware of the idea with which you've associated the thing, it allows you to let go of it. You know, it's kind of interesting to think about all the things in your life as potential things tied to ideas. That's kind of interesting, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Man, it blows my mind to go to the path. I love learning. And it just, it seems to me that we're always doing it. And if you get stuck in at some moment, think about what the idea that thing represents. And it might change your perspective on it.

I guess that in states of heightened suggestibility, is there a threshold beyond which linguistic suggestions become ineffective or counterproductive? And how does this inform our understanding of the limitation? and boundaries of hypnotic influence on behavior. So is there a point where the suggestions are ineffective? Is that the question? Or counterproductive, yeah. Counterproductive? I like to give a series of suggestions that maybe kind of hit at the same idea in a little

bit different ways. Right. But I haven't found, I don't think repeating them is any kind of a problem. So I don't think that I think the answer is no. I don't think it becomes counterproductive. The only way I would is maybe if it's too specific. Right. And kind of back to the idea that I said earlier that I like to give people the opportunity to help create their own suggestions.

So, you know, I might give you some. I'm going to give you some that are general, that are allowing you to do that. and then we're totally letting your unconscious mind just kind of kick up. And the last thing I'll do is I give people permission to just allow the unconscious mind to keep working. I'll always let them know if there's things still happening. So just allow it to happen. You don't have to do anything. Know that that's happening and watch for some messages.

So I'm usually pretty open around allowing the unconscious mind to keep doing the work because that's important, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It's really well said. I, every now and then in the world of psychedelics, you'll hear about, you know, maybe the point that where linguistic suggestions become counterproductive is when somebody is trying to interpret with a problem for you. And they're putting those suggestions in there. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's, that that was the other thing that came to my mind was like scripts, right? Like, yeah. In the hypnosis world, a lot of times people start by reading scripts that are specific to a,

tech for a problem. And the problem with that is that everybody's a little different. So, you know, the way that you are a smoker is different than the way that you are a smoker. And so there's some there's some generalities that are there. But if I, if I create a hypnotic session specifically for this person and then I try to give it to this person, it has the potential to not hit because things are not in alignment. So there's, There's little things, subtle things that you do that can help make that just soften those suggestions so that they're not, when this happens, you're going to do this. You know, that has to be a little more specific to the person. You had mentioned Stephen King earlier in our discussion.

And I'm curious your relationship with authors and genres and genres and maybe you could speak to that a little bit. Is there like a certain genre of books that you like? Are there certain authors that you admire? What's going on there? Well, I was a comic book fan growing up. I am a big Neil Gaiman fan. I like, I do, I'm Stephen King fans. I've read most Stephen King books.

And that's been a long. I think I read Cujo at age of nine. And I read it because my mom told me I couldn't read it. Imagine that. And then I was hooked. So ever since then, I like sci-fi a lot. and I like Scandinavian crime

I wasn't aware of that yeah yeah so I find that my favorite kind of stories and it's really it's kind of stupid but I really like the private eye who just never gives up

he gets beat up again and again and again and he just keeps going So something about that archetype really resonates with me. And I think it's the persistence thing, like just keeping on moving. It's also the, you know, I am a believer in like, you know, positive masculinity. And so there's a piece of that that's behind that kind of an archetype that I really resonate with as well. Yeah.

Yeah, it's, what can you? give an example of one of those books that you like a lot that's that that that is that detective that is yeah so so i i'll give you two uh yeah please one of the authors is joe nesbo and he he writes uh Norwegian uh basically modern noir about serial killers and uh is his hero is a police detective who's an alcoholic and like all the things that you know a typical a typical noir kind of a guy right great he's a great writer they're great stories a whole series of stories that he's written. That's one.

But then the other one is the, oh, what's his? Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer is a favorite of mine. And that's like the dirty little secret ones that I like to read. Yeah. Yeah.

I like those too. Well, I've found myself deep in some, in some like space dramas. There's a series called Red Rising. I can't think of the I guess I have right here it's Pierce Brown and he's wrote a series of books

that are they talk about this guy that's a he he drills for a certain type of ore on a on Mars and there's this you know other group of people that come down and they oppress them and then he becomes one of these people

and he takes over it's kind of he draws it all the way back to like and so he starts getting into like the philosophy of like the ancient Greek mythologies and he ties it all to together in like a space drama. It's really, it's really well done. Another, another good

one is Brandon Sanderson, who's mesmerizing like the, what is this one called? The words of radiance and the way of kings. Like I'm really into a lot of those. I love sci-fi too. What do you think's going on there? I hear like a lot of

interesting things. Like sometimes sci-fi might be a way of us remembering the place where we came from. There's all these weird things about like what it can be and the imagination. behind it. But what is one of your favorite things about sci-fi? Do you have a favorite sci-fi series? Oh, I mean, Dune is probably my

favorite sci-fi series. The other one I would say is the Gunslinger series by Stephen King, which is you know, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, like, it's all of them mixed together. But what I notice is the hero of that,

he's your typical noir detective who keeps going, no matter what, gets beat up, nothing stops him, he's persistent. Like, so again, something about that character really drives me. I think what I like about sci-fi is, and I'm not a fantasy fan, really at all. I don't read much of fantasy,

but sci-fi is just fantasy and space. And for some reason, I can connect with it so much more when it's a sci-fi series experience than it's fantasy. So what I like about Dune, for example, one of the things that's just fascinating about that is just the time span that it goes through. And the ideas that it talks about are, you know, we're talking about altered states. We're talking about seeing the future. We're talking about these grand societies that change over time, but never really change.

Yeah. And, you know, humanity as a space-faring species, with, you know, having millions of planets that they're on. Like, the scope of it is fascinating. And the, it's just the ideas that Frank Herbert is able to examine in that frame. I just fascinated me. So that's my favorite sci-fi series. Otherwise, I do mostly read, for right now,

Right now I read the noir stuff for fun, and then I read a lot of personal development type of books. It's always trying to increase my own knowledge and skills and get different ideas for things here and there. And, you know, I run a business. So I read a lot of business books, too, to level that up and try to keep leveling myself up and my clients. It seems like there's a genre that continues all three of those and it's like true crime. Like I'm a big fan of like these true crime novels and I recently read one called The Mastermind. Have you read that book? No.

I'll send you. I'll send you. I have an audio copy. I think I can send you. But it's this guy backdoors the pharmaceutical industry and ends up becoming like he builds an army. He just gets into everything. And like they, I don't want to spoil it for you at the end. but like the guy is a mastermind.

Like I read it and I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. You got like, you can't help, but on some level be like this guy just smarter than all of them. You know what I mean? But true crime to me seems to be this way in which a flawed character

finds a way to become the person that they've wanted to become. You can almost identify with that struggle. Like, that's pretty impressive the way that some people have done it. And then you're like, maybe it's all true crime. Like, I'm looking at this guy, I got the CEO, man.

That guy's no different than that guy, you know? Yeah. I don't know. It's really fun to get to part. I love reading because you can participate in someone else's story and see yourself in it. You know, it's wonderful. Right. Like I said, as Stephen King said, right, it's the one way to go directly into somebody's mind.

Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful. Joshua Peters, fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed this. This is really fun. I hope you'll come back and we can talk more about it. And I got a, my next phase for the podcast is getting really cool people together to have

fascinating discussions about whatever topic we're going to go with. Yeah. Love to. Yeah. I've been a great time. Thanks for having me here. Before I let you go, though, like what do you have coming up and where can people find you? What are you excited about?

Sure. So you can find me in a couple places, websites. I'll give you some websites first. So one, my main website for kind of client facing is called X Factor. Hypnosis.com. So that's where you can learn about how I, how I help people as far as with hypnosis. I do a podcast called Superstates,

and you can find that at superstatespodcast.com. It's really about using trans states of all the different types that we've talked about and more to facilitate personal or professional development. And so I have lots of experts on that have a frame around that. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. I think all of them are at Joshua Ray Peters, and that's REY. All of this is on the X Factor website.

You can find all those links there. And then as far as what's coming up, I am working on a series of webinars with some colleagues of mine that we're calling, what are we calling it? I think we're calling it the four doors. And it's ways of using altered states again to change different ways, different things in your life. We have a psychologist who's psychedelic focused talking about how to use psychedelics within your practice. We have another hypnotist who is really just talking about altered states, what they are, how you use them, how you can create them. We have myself doing, and I'm doing a process that I'm calling the resilience pyramid.

And it's not brand new. It's kind of based on a process that is an NLP process. And then I've added in some ideas from the Western esoteric tradition into it as well to kind of amplify it a little bit. And then we have some other guests as well. But that's going to be happening in January. I'll have, I don't even have, wait, I think it's called ritual. Yeah, ritual technology.com, I believe is the website for that. But that I'll be, that'll be on my web or on my, on my podcast coming up here soon.

In fact, I think I have it scheduled for next week. There's an interview with the three of us, the three main people, and there'll be all kinds of details for that next Tuesday. That's coming out. Nice. Fantastic. I recommend everyone go down to the website. Check it out. Check out the podcast. Josh was an incredible wealth of information and has a very unique perspective and very helpful, especially if you find yourself trying to push yourself to the next level of business or optimizing the way in which you want to run your life and relationships. Check him out. He's super awesome. He's fun to talk to and you can reach out to him and he'll get back to you and hang on briefly afterwards. That's all we got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have.

Have a wonderful weekend.