On Secret Society of List Addicts, check out vacations I’d send myself on if I weren’t so broke I actively have to choose between food and laundry. (Hint: I always choose food.)
NTKOG #207: The kind of modern-age guru who – when casting around the darkest corners of her psyche – realizes, hey, there’s an app for that. (And at $1.99, spiritual well-being comes cheap!)
I am: wary of New-Age jiggerypokery, including but not limited to: hypnosis, “self-esteem” and quinoa.
I am not: trying to get competitive, but I might be the most unenlighted person I know. Hey, how many first kisses have you had in Wal-Mart parking lots?!
The Scene: A late evening bus from New York up to Boston, obsessively cataloguing my neurotic thoughts while hungover college students dozed in the seats around me. In a last-ditch effort for serenity, tried to meditate my twitching, vibrating self into an uneasy physical rest.
Suddenly, a (recyclable, eco-friendly) lightbulb! Hypnosis! Signed into the App Store to check out the free trial contenders: a half-hour program for improved self-esteem (um, no) and another for restful sleep. Jackpot!
Once I downloaded it, wriggled into a comfortable position and plugged in my earbuds as deep as they could go. The closer to your soul the better, right?
After some bird chirping and gong ringing, a disembodied man’s nasal voice started speaking to me from deep within my ear canal. “Close your eyes and relax,” he told me. “Picture yourself outside in your perfect place on a beautiful day.”
All y'all desert rats know what I'm talking about.
As I sunk lower in the bus seat, he directed me to shine an imaginary sun on each of my muscles in turn as they melted into utter relaxation. “The sun warms your face” – slack-jawed, I drooled on myself – “and now it shines on your chest and stomach” – I slowly dripped another six inches lower in the seat – “and now it warms the toes on your left foot. Really feel each little toe relax!
Wait, what?! You mean – you mean the left foot that’s currently crunched at a 160-degree angle to avoid the risk of accidentally making contact with some other dude’s bare foot? You mean that one? Oh, man, Relaxo Towne Express! Choo choo!
I pulled myself up haughtily in the seat and it took fifteen more minutes of deep-ear blathering (something about candles? a sunset might have also been involved?) for him to liquefy me back to a Capri-Sun-commercial-esque puddle of relaxation.
Just as I started to enter the velvety blackness of welcome unconsciousness, Disembodied Voice dropped to a whisper: “You are now completely relaxed. You will leave your unconscious mind open only to my voice. You will absorb every bit of the very important information I am about to tell you.”
On the count of three, you will chant your Visa card number...
Wait. What. The. FUCK?!
My whole body jerked upwards like a marionette, wild-eyed and desperate to protect myself against Disembodied B’s attempted brain-rape.
Disappointingly, he just wanted to tell me lots of stuff about how I’m a good person for trying to take control of my unconsciousness, and how restful sleep is this big noble gift I’m giving myself and how I’m basically a Chivalrous Knight of Olde for vanquishing my fear of unconsciousness with this free trial iPhone app.
I’d already sunk halfway under the chair in front of me, murmuring incoherent agreement (“Yes I am great!”) and was three milliseconds from sleep when, damn it all, the Disembodied Bastard trotted out the old healing sun motif yet and – curses upon you, you nasal bastard! – directed my personal consciousness-sun to wake me up, muscle group by muscle group, and face the day alert and alive.
Dude. Psyche-blocked.
The Verdict: A two-pronged upshot to today’s tale, loves. First: I obviously found some aspects of hypnosis at least somewhat relaxing, and so am interested in re-trying it in a more appropriate physical context. Despite the fact that this experience suggests I won’t be able to turn my conscious mind off for long enough to experience much joy. (What else is new.)
Second: When I started the hypnosis, I felt especially well-dressed for the part, because I was wearing a long, floaty hippie skirt – one of those loose, elastic-waisted numbers. NOT THE CASE. Between all the relaxation puddling and jerking abruptly upward in my seat, after the half-hour course I realized that, without noticing, I’d managed to roll my skirt entirely off my hips. Yes. I was sitting bare-ass on a bus seat.
Cue two full hours of TKOG attempting to subtly stand up enough to readjust the skirt without a) flashing the couple behind her, or b) waking the girl next to her. Both of which I ultimately did. No fewer than four times.
Yeah, maybe I should have bought that self-esteem hypnosis course after all.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Neat one!
I remember one “guided meditation” I followed some years ago, I was enrolled in a local yoga course.
The teacher was saying stuff, we had to imagine, then at one point she said “Now count back fron 123 to 1″.
The last thing I remember was around 75, and then suddenly she was saying “Now turn around from that warm light you are visualizing”
Yeah, I fell asleep! Luckily I didn’t snore!
Sadly, the meditation/hypnosis tapes (yes, tapes; this was years ago) I’ve tried all made me giggle immaturely because I just could not take those thick, drippy voices seriously. Awesome that it worked for you
When I was doing anxiety counselling a few years ago, meditation was suggested to me. Long story short, very much not my thing. Laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing only made me more painfully aware of all the shit I was anxious about, including weird muscle twitches and cramps which seem to appear when you lay still and focus on every inch of your body. In addition to that, the meditation track was full of ridiculous imagery. No, dude, I don’t want to imagine a giant tree ‘outside time’, but inside ‘the circle of life’, you’re delving way too far into the metaphysical for me and my anxiety to cope.
I’ve briefly paused my Shirley Maclain self help eight track to type this this; Exactly, I don’t want to miss a word. I loved the drool line. The app must of helped because you made no mention of the germophobe thoughts after being butt naked on a BUS SEAT!
LMAO!
hilarious, hilarious, hilarious.
exactly my reaction to this yoga DVD forced upon me after an injury. i believe my exact expression in the beginning was ‘Pffft’ until i found myself stretching like a pretzel to the sounds of a very bendy asian man whose hair was longer than mine.
my cynical self was baited and hooked.
thx for the post.
So… I have just spent the past couple of weeks reading all of you posts. You have such a super blog. I am now kinda upset that I have to wait for a daily post, instead of wading through the archives. Thanks for such an awesome blog!
Aww, you’re so sweet! Thank you!
I can’t believe you managed to flash people on the bus during meditation.
Only me, right? There are three constants in life: death, taxes, and if you get TKOG on any private means of transportation she will flash people.
True story. Public transportation too.
DETAILS NEEDED PLEASE!
Nothing that juicy, sadly. I’m pretty sure he was just referring to the time he and I went pantsless on the T. Although if you’re thinking of something more risque, The Ex, feel free to enlighten us all…
I once actually listened to one of those relaxation tapes, and like fell into the whole relax-thing. But when the tape was over and it was time to get up and do stuff, I was completely destroyed. Took me til the next day to feel untired enough to do -anything-.
I don’t like those tapes. Bastards.
I can’t agree with you more about the power of flat desert-scapes, scorching sun, and dusty ground (or, more realistically, unreasonably hot sidewalks and strip mall parking lots) to infiltrate the soul. When I hit the road from Arizona to the midwest three years ago I thought I was leaving for good and welcomed a life with seasons and green. Now, every year, I grow a little less enchanted with trees that aren’t palms or mesquites and miss the southwest a whole lot more. Especially during the monsoon months.
Dear, Dr. Hypno looks so familiar. He is My Kind Of Guy. Do you see any family resemblance? Perhaps it’s the black clothing or the pocket watch. He just looks like someone we should know. Thinking.
I know! As I ran a google image search of “bad hypnotist,” I wondered how many of the people I saw that you and BC Dad know. And how many of them could potentially be my real father!
Dear, BC Dad says, “With a good hypnotist your ‘dad’ could be anyone. I think he was joking.
If you ever decide to get waxed again, you should hire a hypnotherapist to see if they can make it a pain-free process for you (some people with allergies to anesthesia do this for surgery)
Oh, and yes to the Alex Mack reference in your tags!