#23: Master Hypnotist Mike Mandel (50 Years) on Ego States, Parts Work, and the Architecture of Mind.

Mike Mandel is a world-leading hypnotist with over 50 years of professional experience. He's performed nearly 5,000 stage shows, trained over 10,000 students at his Toronto hypnosis academy, and co-hosts the Brain Software podcast.

Our conversation bridges hypnosis, Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, pain management, and meaning-making—showing how different healing traditions can discover the same truths about how minds heal.

Whether you're a therapist curious about hypnosis, an IFS practitioner, or simply fascinated by how minds work and heal, this conversation will expand your understanding.

You'll hear:

• The "bungalow model" of ego states and stunning parallels with IFS therapy
• How hypnosis stopped a severe burn from forming (tiny firemen with liquid nitrogen!)
• The history of hypnosis from ancient Egypt to Milton Erickson
• Why you need at least three models of reality (not just one)
• How Mike reframed chronic pain from suffering into a reminder he's alive
• Kitchen surgery stories that will blow your mind
• Rapid-fire questions about meaning, legacy, and what matters most

⚠️ WARNING: Mike starts with a brief hypnotic demonstration. Pay attention—the more you focus, the more you'll experience it. We unpack how he did it at the end.

"Everything is an ego state issue without exception." — Mike Mandel

Key Timestamps

• 05:50 - The Forgetting Demonstration
• 07:28 - Ego States & The Bungalow Model
• 15:23 - IFS & Hypnosis: Stunning Parallels
• 21:50 - The Frozen Baby: A Profound Healing Story
• 35:25 - Pain vs. Suffering
• 40:52 - The Burn Treatment Story
• 45:55 - What IS Trance?
• 56:26 - History of Hypnosis: Mesmer to Erickson
• 1:07:44 - How the Forgetting Demo Worked
• 1:18:18 - Rapid-Fire Meaning Questions

Resources

• MikeMandelHypnosis.com
• Brain Software Podcast

Developing Meaning is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS and is NOT INTENDED AS MEDICAL ADVICE.

Theme Music by The Thrashing Skumz.

Produced by Dirk Winter and Caroline Hinton

Brought to you by Consilient Mind LLC.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Why Hypnosis Matters
• 5:27 Party Trick Amnesia Demo
• 8:00 Models Of Mind And Parts
• 12:08 Bungalow And Stage Ego State Models
• 21:05 Highest Wisdom And Healing Stories
• 28:24 Addiction, OCD, And Parts As Protectors
• 33:56 Hypnosis, Safety, And Dark History
• 40:12 Tools: Cards, Intention, And The Mandel Triangle
• 48:20 Meaning, Pain Vs Suffering, And Reframes
• 55:45 Self-Hypnosis For Anesthesia And Burns
• 1:05:42 Trance Explained And Language Patterns
• 1:14:30 History Of Hypnosis In Fast Forward
• 1:25:10 Erickson, Indirect Methods, And Neo-Ericksonian
• 1:31:50 Unpacking The Amnesia Language Pattern

Transcript

Dirk: 0:17

Hello, welcome back, meeting seekers. Today I am very excited to introduce you to world-renowned hypnotist and hypnosis teacher Mike Mandel. If you heard our last episode with trauma expert Joanne Tuomley, you heard us talk about the power of hypnosis. Hypnosis is ancient, thousands of years old, and it shows up everywhere that ideas take root. Hypnotic principles are at work. That's in therapy, in politics, in advertising, in everyday conversation. Mike Van Beltel has been hypnotizing people for over 50 years. He has performed on stage hundreds of times. He's worked with police and first responders, and he's built an amazing hypnosis academy in Toronto and trained over 10,000 students, including me. In this episode, we explore what hypnosis is, how trance works, how hypnotic language shapes experience. At the beginning, Mike starts with a brief party trick hypnosis forgetting experience. So pay attention. The more you pay attention, the more this will work on you. And then at the end of the episode, we unpack how he did it. And then during the episode, we explore so many different interesting aspects of hypnosis. We explore ego states and draw really interesting parallels between ego state work in hypnosis and parts work in IFS. We are going to hear a concise history of hypnosis and the evolution of two different sides of the hypnosis spectrum, one being direct sleep now, the powerful hypnotist model, and the other indirect, using hypnotic language to induce trance and to create hypnotic effects in a much more subtle way. We're also going to hear about how hypnosis can be used to treat pain. Mike has some amazing examples, how it can treat inflammation and stop bleeding at times. And then we're going to talk about how all of this applies to meaning and how having various different models of the mind is extremely helpful for having a flexible and effective approach to life. I am so excited to share this conversation with you. Without further ado, here is my conversation with master hypnotist Mike Mandel. I am so excited to have you here. Just to put our conversation into context a little bit, I did your online hypnosis training. I did your in-person training. It really hit me at an important point in my life where you really helped in terms of sort of to get off screens, follow your curiosity, just learn, learn, learn. You are amazingly inspirational. And so I'm really excited about our conversation today. And let me just start with welcome. Just to sort of let people know who you are, I will read a little blurb from ChatGPT. And part of why I'm doing this is because I want to talk to you about models of the mind, meaning, hypnosis. And for me, AI has helped me sort of come up new ways of thinking about our mind and how we create meaning. So here's what ChatGPT has to say about you. So Mike Mandel is one of the world's leading hypnotists with over 50 years of experience in hypnosis, NLP, and personal development. He's widely regarded as a master of neo-Ericksonian hypnosis, a modern, flexible approach to creating change through language and suggestion. Mike has taught thousands of students worldwide, blending his deep expertise with humor and storytelling to make hypnosis accessible and transformative. As a gifted teacher, author, and co-host of the Brain Software podcast, Mike is renowned for his ability to simplify complex ideas and inspire personal growth. So today we will explore his groundbreaking work and how hypnosis can help us uncover meaning and reshape our lives.

Mike: 4:50

Wow. That's amazing. Thank you, ChatGPT. You get your 20 bucks.

Dirk: 4:54

Oh yeah, you're you're a member, you're you're a paying member. I'm still a free, free GPT user.

Mike: 5:00

I'll tell you, Dr. Dirk, it's fantastic. I I have a paid membership and I built a GPT, I call it Doctor Science, and it has PhD level, understand, in it's a doctor of medicine and a veterinarian and a chiropractor and an osteopath. And it has PhD levels in gemology, meteorology, astral, you know, solar, solar radiation. I mean, everything you can conceivably think of that I thought of. And the ability to get a scientific answer really, really quickly is just a wonderful thing.

Dirk: 5:28

It's mind-blowing, right? And um so yeah, so let's get into that. But to start us off, I would love it if you do a little demo. And there's this sort of party trick, parlor trick for getting. And I would love it if you could do that demo, and then we can unpack it at the end. Okay, sure. Give you a bit of hypnotic energy here.

Mike: 5:49

And first of all, I have to I have to show you. This is my brick from Milton Ericsson's house when it was when it was knocked down to build a parking lot, as in the Joni Mitchell song. It literally was. And it's signed by Elizabeth Erickson. One of my students got me that. I thought it was a joke, and I saw a box in it and said, Oh, it's from Ericsson, so huh? I nearly threw it out. I got home and I saw it was from the Ericsson Foundation in Phoenix. So I went, whoa, hang on. And then realized there was a plaque on it I hadn't seen. It was on the obverse side.

Dirk: 6:15

I've said little chills. I uh yes, some people won't know yet who Milton Erickson is. By the end of our conversation, they will know. But yeah, that's a big deal.

Mike: 6:26

Well, let's just address what you what you asked me a minute ago because Ericsson was the foremost hypnotist I think who's ever lived. And although he started extremely directive in his hypnosis, do this, do that, you're feeling this, you're not feeling that, he began to use language as a means to cause people to ebb and flow into trance states. And it could be done so effortlessly that the unconscious mind of the person listening will draw from the language itself, connecting it to their own beliefs, their reality tunnels, and their structure of how they think the universe works, insofar as the unconscious is taking in the information at a level below conscious awareness and is able to process much larger amounts of information, which enables the person to drift into trance faster and easier than any recognition that they're even doing so. Now, the second important thing about it is this happens as soon as we start talking because language is in and of itself hypnotic. And the third important thing is, of course, I am doing it now. And you can forget the first important thing right now. That's right. And I say to your viewers, what else have you just forgotten?

Dirk: 7:28

I think it's important. The more you focus on the thing, the more you try to find it, you'll notice there's a lacuna in your mind, and it's growing as you try to find that. Just try to find that try. Well done, Doc. Well done. Somebody was clearly paying attention. Nice. Try paying attention in class. Yeah, no, you blew my mind on the on the online course kind of with that, and I re-watched that video a bunch of times. And so that's a fun thing, and and we'll unpack that in a bit. But turning to models of the mind, in this podcast series, I'm now coming out of a series on internal family systems therapy, which is basically a therapy that's that sort of exploded in popularity. Many of the originators were ego state hypnosis people. And it basically says, we don't have one mind, we have many minds that are working in parallel and interacting with each other. And this is, to me, this in retrospect, it's kind of obvious. It's sort of you, and and but if you think about AI, you can't build one computer that's gonna be the PhD of all those things that you're talking about. To have a powerful computing system, you have multiple different sort of conscious entities that are working in parallel and able to interact. And our mind, I think, is structured like that. So we have these multiple different, if there's an inner conflict, a part of me wants one thing, a part of me wants so there's multiple different minds or conscious entities, and then there's sort of a seat of awareness. And so certain schemas or parts of ourselves can sort of take agency, take over our conscious center. So what's your working model of the mind?

Mike: 9:27

My working model of the mind, Dr. Dirk, is one of multiple layers. So I can reduce it to the simplicity of conscious versus unconscious, insofar as if we're looking at George Miller's work from the 60s, you know, the conscious awareness, some people say it's not true, but it seems to work, is basically magic number seven plus or minus two pieces of information kept in the mind at the time. Whereas the unconscious is maybe three to twenty million bits of information per second. And people who doubt the existence of the unconscious, uh, it was a question if they're running their heart valve synchronization consciously, you know, or 500 liver enzymes. And people realize this is happening flawlessly below the level of their awareness. But I do agree. I I've never really looked at the family model so much because my understanding, and I might be completely off here, is it seems to assign a uniform different role to different states. And my experience has been the opposite of that. It I do agree, going right back to Paul Faderin, who was a compatriot of Freud, and then Watkins and Watkins, husband and wife psychologists, and then probably the greatest expert on ego states alive today is Gordon Emerson, and an American psychologist living in Australia. I interviewed Emerson for an hour, and it was it was great because he's one of my heroes. And he comes at it just in such an interesting way, and he's the one who really got me thinking about these different sub-personalities that are digital, so that we only have one connected to our prefrontal cortex at any at any given time. The others are in the background, and they're either close to the surface and listening to everything we're saying, like ours are right now, or the the model of a bungalow works so well. And this this has served me well as my model of working with people. You have I'll give you two different models that are both brief and useful. The bungalow model says you have a bungalow with a basement, with a rec room down there, and the one the main floor has only one door to the outside world. Only one ego state, subpersonality, part, resource state, whatever you want to call it, is the one that becomes executive at any given moment. And that's the one that's holding the door open, interacting with the world through our own perceptions, observations, and so on, beliefs. But any of the ones on the main floor can come up to the door and they can take over and answer the door if they want to. They do it regularly. There's about five to fifteen of those. But down in the basement, we have other subparts, sub-personalities that have some of them haven't become executive for years, but there might be a hundred to a hundred and fifty down there. And they can generally come upstairs if they need to and take the executive. And of course, a stronger ego state can push a weaker one out of the executive. Like when someone suddenly is triggered by something that sets them off, then the stronger, angry ego state will push the nice one out and get into a raging argument with someone because that's what it does. But then off from the basement, we have what I love to love the description is a bomb shelter. And in the bomb shelter are the terrified, vaded ego states, as Emerson calls it, invaded by fear, anger, sadness, trauma. And they are in there because they need help and they're afraid to come out. And so, what so many problems are us connecting with vaded ego states and healing them, showing them that they're okay now, that they can get support, and getting ego states to talk to each other, to interact. Some haven't spoken to each other in years. So that's the one model. Here's the other one I'm liking almost as much now the idea of a stage with a podium, and the audience is the outside world. And one ego state, which everyone is standing at the podium speaking, that's the one dealing with the audience of the outside world at any given moment. But in the wings, hiding in the background, there's others behind the curtains, and they're ready to jump in and take over anytime. That corresponds to the upper floor of the bungalow. And then maybe further in the wings, out of sight, there's others that are sort of listening, maybe not listening that much. Some might even be in the audience listening. They have no intention of taking the podium. But then there's the dressing room, and in the dressing room are the ones that do I have to go on stage? Ah, I don't want to do that. That's the Vedu ones in the background. So this works nicely because the idea is, and this is going to tie into what you just asked me, uh, is rather circumlocar, but I think it'll work. The aspect of Emerson's work that I love is he sees the ego states, the subpersonalities, as resources, not as liabilities. And that is such a beautiful and powerful reframe. So we have states that are good at certain things. And when we run into problems is when they're vaded or when they're given a job they don't want to do and they're not good at it. Can you just say what um vated means? Yeah, vaded. Invaded as a short form. It's a coined term by Emerson, invaded by fear, anger, sadness, and trauma. Fast F-A-S-T. That pretty well covers everything. And when we heal them and help them process these emotions that are locked up almost like in a time capsule, you have a traumatized ego state that has PTSD. It's always feeling bad, but you don't know it's always feeling bad until it becomes executive. Then you feel the emotions. And here's what Emerson said. So here's the model that has freaked me out. I said to him, when I started studying this, NLP parts, first of all, in 1992, 93, I thought, it seems to me that a lot of things are parts issues, ego state issues. And then as I kept looking at it, it seemed that most things were ego state issues. And then when I was a therapist from 1993 to 2000, as well as doing the other things, I came to the conclusion that everything is an ego state issue without exception. And Emerson said yes. He said, You're absolutely right. Everything. And you can't think of one where it isn't. If you have an argument with your wife on an ongoing basis, you have an ego state that is doing that arguing and using the same strategy over and over and over. You know, what's the the line I I continued to apply the correct solution, which didn't work despite the correct solution. So humans do that. But here's what he said. That blew my mind, and I've never got my head around this since. And then I'll compare it with human given's theory. Dr. Emerson said, what if every ego state has its own unconscious mind? I just went, oh no. I'm intempering to simplify the model, it might be more complex.

Dirk: 15:22

Holy cow, this overlaps so much with IFS. And basically the idea is that there are two types of parts. There are involved in psychopathology. There might be some kind of a part that knows how to swim or knows how to ride a bike or you know, little programs that sort of are automatic and can help. But the idea is that there none of these parts are bad. Some of them are traumatized, and those he calls exiles. Those are things we want to lock up in the basement or push out of awareness. And then there are protective parts, and there are two types of protective parts. One type are before-the-fact protectors. These are called managers. So I'm going to be really prepared and study a lot and do all these proactive things to make sure my wounded parts don't get triggered. And then there are after-the-fact protectors, and uh those are called firefighters. So once my exile is is triggered and I'm feeling shame because I screwed up, then the you know, the drinking part will come in or the uh sex part or some some extreme, and the idea is that that part doesn't really care about consequences, but it just has to get doused. And so none of these parts are bad. They're all have some kind of a positive intention, even though in the world they might be creating all kinds of problems. And so the idea is instead of like killing off our firefighters, we want to make friends. And what happens when we do that, when we're kind to our parts, when we recognize that there's a positive intention, then this quality, this brain state emerges, which is not a part, which he calls, Richard Schwartz calls self, capital S self, which is this optimal quality of being compassionate, confident, creative, curious, having perspective, clear-minded. So there's this optimal brain state, which he sees as kind of a conductor. So we have these parts that are all have their roles and might be battling with each other, but there's there's kind of this clear-minded home sort of optimal state, and that has sort of this healing quality. If we can sort of connect the wounded ego state with the compassionate energy of sort of this big brain state, which which I think overlaps well with your model, it overlaps well with Dan Siegel's model of the mind, where he talks about sort of rigidity versus flexibility. There's sort of an optimal brain state of maximal integration and flexibility. Yeah, this is really fun to talk because there's there's so much uh overlap. And in a lot of the the Watkins and Watkins and all the you know, the ego state hypnosis people, though, those talk to the early IFS people. They're they're all trained in hypnosis. I don't think Richard Schwartz was, but he he had to know about that stuff too. Yeah. You think too, yeah.

Mike: 18:24

That's interesting because there's a huge overlap here. Uh the some people talk about centrum and these other things. The way I look at it is this. And I agree with John Grinder, who said the test of any model is its usefulness. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not, does it work for you? And what I found really useful when I could not break down whatever barriers to healing were happening, working with someone with ego state work. Um, the idea that the superficial ones, the ones in the bungalow main floor, this may be 10 to 15, this one that tells you you're tired, one that tells you you're hungry, one that makes you drive carefully. I mean, this these different ones that come out every day. We can get to the ones in the basement sometimes without hypnosis, but hypnosis appears to be the express train to get to the wounded and the baited ones and some of the ones in the basement. Without hypnosis, without the trance, it's impossible to isolate them or very difficult. Emerson says, and I I love this, he's just such an interesting teacher. He said that ego states that, let me get this right. Um, he said, when you hypnotize someone, you get someone in a somnambulistic trance, whatever the heck that is, right? But if we let's presume the model is accurate, when we hypnotize someone, put them in a trance, the other ego states are asleep, which struck me as intriguing, that you're dealing with just the one in an uncontaminated way. So specifically, one would have to have a particularly robust trance in order to get this to work. Um, so in my case, the way I see the whole organization is the whole idea of highest wisdom, which we may be talking about the same thing. Highest wisdom has the best outcome for the person, ecology, not just staying alive, not just survival, but thriving. There is a nurturing aspect of highest wisdom to help the other states and to even extend then beyond to help other people. And when I've contacted highest wisdom working with people, it when I hit a deadlock, I've just said, there's a part of you that I call highest wisdom. Well, it's called that, and I'm not saying it, but it it has it is the only one that all of your parts, every one of your ego states respects and will listen to. And that's the one I'm summoning now because we want to fix this. And I have to honor everything. I'm never gonna bully ego states. I'm always building rapport and being non-judgmental and supportive. And then highest wisdom becomes executive. It typically takes about 45 to 60 seconds, but the voice I found has been nothing like the other person's voice. I dealt with a woman who was a therapist, a little woman, and she had some issues, and um, I couldn't crack it open. And I appealed to Highest Wisdom, and you would think the goddess Athena walked into the room to hear this thing speak. And that's how we sorted it out. She had a wounded ego state going back to six 18 months old in Germany that was put in a crib with the window open and no blanket by a negligent aunt and uncle, and she was freezing and terrified. And this would become executive, and she'd cry and scream without warning at times, even as she as she was a therapist. Highest wisdom assigned an ego state that would love to look after this baby. Not only will do it, but it has to want to do it. That's the power. And said it would look after her forever, so she'd never be cold and never be frightened again. Bingo, everything changed. And she described it to me was this large, powerful Scottish woman, all in tartan, came up, wrapped her in a blank, you're late. Last, I'll look after you. Nothing will get to you when I'm here. Hugged her and held her. And that was that was the healing. Is that remarkable?

Dirk: 21:50

Holy cow. I'm getting chills as you're talking. This is this is so similar to what happens in in IFS. And in this show, I'm really sort of traveling through different healing communities looking for conciliance where different kinds of knowledge come together. And and when I find that, it it's really exciting to me. And I feel like what you're really describing is this huge overlap is optimal, big brain state that's healing, and then having this caretaking, come take care of that infant and in and show up and want to do that. And huge healing happened. I think when people are just curious and follow the lead of our clients, this model somehow emerges or very similar.

Mike: 22:42

It does, doesn't it? Yeah. It's um it's interesting. And the whole idea that these ego states that they are a family, and the more we can bring in integration between them, when we're doing that, and I think that's integration through any method, is connecting ego states, connecting subpersonalities with actual neural pathways so that they're able to communicate with each other easily. Now, I'll give you an example. When I dealt with OCD, and when I had the practice, it was exactly the same as when I would deal with any kind of addictive behavior, because I just framed OCD as an addiction. What does it serve? What is the purpose? And I uniformly found out the person felt better when they did the behavior. So I look at it from an ego state model, and we're looking at a retro avoidance ego state. So we have we have a vated ego state at some level. It's invaded with fear, anger, sadness, trauma. It might be one that went through horrendous grief as I did. Um, other people go through different things, and that ego state does not want to become executive, does not want to connect to the prefrontal cortex, because when it does, all those negative emotions are felt in the body, and they have to be felt in the body for it to be executive. So what it does instead is it has a deal, either intentional or unintentional, with a an avoidance state that takes the executive to stop it feeling that. So do we see the same with smokers? You you just hide their cigarettes and watch what happens. And you get an anxious ego state, starts to become executive. That's the one that needs to be healed. The same with alcohol. If you if you heal the ego state that has the issues, the vaded one, make it executive, let it feel it in the body, clear the emotions. Then guess what happens? No ego state jumps in anymore. There's no need to do the behavior because it's healed. It is absolutely fascinating stuff. In fact, when I do my master hypnosis training in Toronto, the people who've already gone through the training, we a substantial part of the five days is ego state work and showing them how to communicate with their own through different methods I've created and to clear their own stuff because I think none of us arrive at perfection until eternity. And but I think it's incumbent upon us to become clean vessels, as transparent as we can, to deal with our own stuff. And I'm certainly not there. I haven't arrived, but my wife will tell you I'm better than I was 10 years ago, and I'm better than I was last year. And I want to say hopefully I'm better than I was yesterday. We allow the healing to take place. We must be willing, maybe to look at our own shadow, the parts of what we don't like, to look into that, into that turmoil, that maelstrom, that abyss, and see the darkness within us that needs to be healed and acknowledged. And until we push it as we stop pushing it aside, we never really get any crazy.

Dirk: 25:16

Right. It's really important to sort of look into our shadow with kindness and compassion. And and that sort of op unlocks the healing potential. And so we haven't yet said what hypnosis is, and and uh uh just sort of staying with this parts model or ego state model, how I'm sort of imagining it is that we have kind of this critical part or sort of a defensive part, and our brain doesn't want to change. Like there's a lot of our brain that is invested in not changing, which makes sense, right? We don't want to just willy-nilly change. And so what hypnosis might be doing is allowing us to sort of turn off that that guard that's preventing change. And and once the hypnotist has that rapport, has the prestige, has trust of the system, then that guard kind of relaxes. And now there's this potential to go into the basement and connect. And and hopefully the hypnotist is sort of kind and well-intentioned, and that's going to be healing. But that you know, it could go a different way if that person is some kind of a you know, a sinister guru or something like that.

Mike: 26:39

Oh, yeah, for sure, Doc. That's that's for sure. In fact, if you look back at George Esther Brooks, who wrote his book, Hypnotism during Second World War, and Anthony Jacqueline, my friend and colleague, calls it a work of fiction. But it's it's interesting. But Esther Brooks was Canadian. He was from Alberta, and he became head of psychology at Colgate University in the U.S. But he worked with M.T. Orney, or Orn as some pronounce it. And uh, anyway, the two of them were, and then Cameron Ewing out of Montreal, they were attempting to create hypnotic careers who could memorize information in a trance, not have it consciously available. And only when a binary signal was given, they'd go behind the iron curtain and so on back in the early times of the Cold War. And the idea being they would only be able to regurgitate this information in a binary way if the it was a certain person who hypnotized them, had to be a certain guy they knew, and then they had to give a certain code word, and the two would get to regurgitate this. The idea being, the intention was actually quite horrible. This became the MK Ultra program. And the whole concept, you know, you you and Cameron at McGill University of Montreal giving people doses of LSD without their knowledge. They gave people insulin shock. I mean, it was absolutely horrible what they did to human beings. It amounted to torture for their experiments. But the bottom line was they were attempting to create a Manchurian candidate, somebody who would kill and be, you know, able to be tortured and wouldn't know anything about it afterwards and not spout any information if they were captured. But they found it was impossible to do with hypnosis alone. That's why they had to fragment the personality with electroconvulsive shock and all these different things and traumatize people. Then when they did that, they were splitting off the different ego states from each other, and there were no neural pathways, I guess, between them. But I mean, it's it's horrendous what they were doing, but it was really based on ego states again, even then.

Dirk: 28:26

Is there a book about this? This this is something I don't know anything about. It sounds horrible.

Mike: 28:32

And I will research it, I'll find you the best info on it. I probably have it in my library. Yeah. And yeah, I mean it is horrible. But on the good side of all this, have you seen um are you familiar with inner active cards?

Dirk: 28:47

Yes. I feel like those that those are kind of IFS, the subpersonality. I I don't know if that comes from an I They're popular in IFS. I don't know if they come from IFS or from someplace else.

Mike: 29:00

I want to show you three things I've used for dealing with this sort of thing in when I had to practice uh 25 years ago. In fact, um on January 29th, that is my 50th anniversary of full-time hypnosis. Congratulations. It's my sixth, it'll be 60 years of doing hypnosis because I started in 1965, which is crazy. Thank you. Here, these are interactive cards. So these are getting a clear off, but these are wonderful. People want to look in. I think these are um fourth edition, the most up-to-date. I buy them from Cabisham Books in Toronto, which is I think the most um prolific purveyor of psychological and psychiatric books in the world. I mean, they really have that rep. But these are useful too. These are mythos. And and these photos. That's a good question. So all my master's students in the class get a deck of these, and we also work with uh Shivrul's pendulum and teach them to get very quick access to their unconscious. Then each one of them takes the entire deck of cards, looks At a card and said, Do I relate to this? Yes or no? No. Discard, discard. Oh, yeah, put that aside. So they put the all the ones they don't relate to back in the box. And I I typically put on, I like to put on some music with no words, just maybe something pensive, thoughtful piano. And I taught this in England, that's how we did it. People would sit all over the room on the floor and everything. We have a small group for the master class because I want to give them the personal attention because they've already gone through the training anyway. So now they have these maybe six to fifteen cards, whatever, that they relate to strongly. And I'll say, No, put them in front of me on the floor. Group them together. Oh yeah, these two, these two belong together. And they start to figure out the relationships between them and mapping their interactions. Are any of these problematic? Oh, this one. Okay, so take that card, look at it, and in your mind, talk to it, be very friendly, and trust your unconscious. What does it say to you? And these people are adroit by now going in and out of trances. The effects are phenomenal. So we've taken sort of a Jungian accessing these archetypes and accessing these different states just through um kind of a meditative, relaxed thing. But they got they've got self-hypnosis to go to. So that wham, right? And then they say afterwards, oh, the breakthroughs. This one told me this. I realize now why I was overeating all the time. And as our friend and colleague, excellent NLP trainer David Snyder says, the unconscious mind speaks first. It speaks very softly. You'll think you're making it up, and you'll want to edit it. And there's a couple more, but those really nail it. Quick breakthrough. So that's that's why I use the interactive cards with them. That's one way. And they can just take one card and keep it out for a while and keep it near them when they're working on their computer and just from time to time look at it and start to reinforce the bridge with it just by giving it the attention. It seems like intention does much. And just say for a minute, what is what is intention? Intention is not just wanting something to happen, but almost putting your will behind it. It was a Pisaguru who trained with Mesmer, and when he did a demonstration for the Parisian Freemasons, they said, Why is it that you can make this work on just about anyone? He said, Before I do mesmerism, which was primitive hypnosis, he said, I make a picture in my mind of what I want to have happen. And then I believe that that picture is true, and then I will it to happen, and it does. The intention is a will part. That's why I created the Mandel triangle. So you have an equilateral triangle with a C in the middle, which stands for calibration. You must be calibrating the person to see these shifts in their states and so on play across their face. You'll see it, hear it in their breathing, and so on. No one in a different ego state becomes executive. So working with the ego states like that. It seems like there's about a couple of dozen ways of getting to them, but doing it intentionally. Calibration is in the center. You're going to be congruent, meaning you're sending one consistent message. You're talking, okay, this is really going to work, and we're going to do no, it's okay. Here's what we're going to do next. I'm going to speak to that part of you. And we're congruent, friendly, open, supportive, and we're also confident. Confidence comes from congruence, but the third side is intention, which is really conviction, our conviction that it's going to work. And that gets you a long, long way with any of this stuff. In fact, it seems, and this is almost heretical, but it seems like sometimes the therapy is the least important thing. It's whether or not they like the therapist and follow the steps. It seems to be one of the elements.

Dirk: 33:28

So just staying with it. So we have hypnosis and we're working on uh a definition, and there's you're explaining the Mandel triangle, and it and then I think we can tie that all into meaning. Um, and meaning being the story that that we create, that we we're always sort of we're getting all kinds of information coming in, light in our eyes, vibrations in our ears, and then we're assigning some kind of a story and meaning, and and that's what that's sort of the central drive in in us humans, according to Victor Frankel.

Mike: 34:09

And and I think Frankel is right, you know, the search for meaning. There's a man, he he survived the concentration camps, didn't he? Yes. And he came out and said he he was he was made stronger by it. He was going to make sure everybody knew it wasn't he wasn't crushed by it. And there's that thing, you know, there's working as a hypnotist and as a therapist for years, there's a huge difference between pain and suffering. Some people will frame something as pain, other people have the exact experience and it's suffering. I mean, it it depletes them, it enervates them. It just is terrible for them. And when we assign meaning, yeah, that changes everything, doesn't it? I like to say to my students or clients, it was like you have this immense tapestry, multicolored, and all we see is a stitch that we're working on at the time.

Dirk: 34:53

This this is a big deal. I treat people who are in uh in pain, and uh it's hard. And uh so so I would love to hear a bit more about this and and pain versus suffering and how that relates to the meaning that we you know, it's the same sensory information coming in, the signal comes in, but then what we do with it is different. So, yeah, how do you think about this? How do you work with pain? It's the power of the reframe, isn't it?

Mike: 35:24

It it's I have I have constant pain. I've had it since I was 14 because a inept, I used to say sadistic, but he wasn't sadistic, he was just inept, an inept gym teacher got me to do a dive roll and a neck spring, which I could not do. I was a very frail, small kid, and I I got acute tortocolis from it. I was literally like this. I I almost almost broke my neck, and the damage it did to my cervical spine is such that now it does not support the muscles. The musculature is forced to support the cervical spine instead. So every day, from the moment I get up, there's pain in my neck, literal pain in my neck. But the wonderful thing is I've reframed it. It it reminds me I'm alive, and I I keep it in a compartment. So I don't even notice it unless I start talking about it now. It's reframed as a useful thing because now when I was working with clients, I don't work with them anymore. I would see a lot of people with chronic pain, but it was emotional pain. And that gave me a model to recognize we can turn it down so people don't suffer. They're aware of it, but it's not dragging them over the coals. And the power we can do with physical pain is insane. Like I I uh I removed a sebaceous cyst from a very uh sensitive portion of the male anatomy at home. I did kitchen surgery and removed a piece of cysts, you use and uh well, I have access to skeletons and things, but I want to make sure I get the entire capsule out and then stop the breathing. I used the stip uh bleeding, I used the stiptic pencil. But I had one and my doctor sent me to a dermatologist and he removed it. It was a very unpleasant experience with cauterizing and smoke, and you know, I thought, you know, I've just met this man 10 minutes ago, and I permitted him to set fire to my scrottum, you know, and it was just very, very bizarre. So when I developed another one, I thought, screw this, I'm just gonna cut it out myself. And so I did. And I went back to our family using, you know, a bit of hypnosis to numb the area. I went back to our family doctor. I said, I've developed another sebaceous cyst, and you know, oh, I'll get you in with Dr. So-and-so. That's no way uh I cut it out myself. And he just goes, he's been my doctor for 30 years. He goes, Yeah, show me, show it. He said, actually, he did a really good job because I removed the entirety of the capsule. Well, here's the thing: I developed a growth underneath my right eye. I had it for maybe, well, I've had it for at least seven years because I hadn't seen my doctor in that time, and that's when he diagnosed it. It was dark, it looked like a mole. And he said, Yeah, that can be removed. An ophthalmologist will probably do it. He said, but they're gonna have to burn it off. And I thought, burn it off, like right under my the iris, you know, that's a scary, scary thing. And it got pretty big. I can't remember the name of it. So I was showing Chris Thompson yesterday when we did our podcast. I put myself in trance, numbed myself in the eye, yeah, a bit of a lidocaine that didn't exist, and I cut it off myself. And I just did that last week. And you can see there's not feeling anything crazy in my eye. Yeah, it's it's so the practical self-hypnosis for kitchen surgery is okay.

Dirk: 38:28

So you put yourself in trance and then you send the your mind sends the uh imaginary lidocaine into the area and yeah, just the fingertip. Yeah.

Mike: 38:41

Just listen on this, you know. Yeah. We in fact in our last training, we had Lisa who had multiple root canals and everything, had so much dental work that we videoed it and used it online, just me grasping her face the way a dentist does when he does the injection right into the nerve. I don't know what a buccal branch or some facial nerve, whatever it is, massive branch. She gets right down in here, and I pretend to give her a shot, and her face went completely numb on the side. And then we had a dentist in the room, and he came up and checked, and he said, Yep, that's the anesthesia. She talked and her slams started drooling, her eye was warm. There is no anesthetic. That is such a false nerve.

Dirk: 39:21

Yeah, I don't know if it's buccal or buccal or how do you say it, but but then uh yeah, the dental tooth pain. I had a root canal years ago, and before that, it's severe pain. And so the ability to change how pain is is processed uh is is is impressive.

Mike: 39:39

Turning it into a signal, you know, a message, perhaps. And that's a wonderful thing I got from my friend Freddie Jackwood, an excellent hypnotist and trainer. He um he says to people when he does his pain management or his pain relief session, which is uh the arrow that he came up with, and it's clever. He says, all that old, useful, unnecessary pain you used to have. So, like in my case with the neck, I don't need a signal that my neck is screwed up. I know it is. That's why I got this cavitation, it cracks 200 times a day. And I know it's injured. So now that I know it's injured, I don't have to be careful with it. And that's one of the ways that it's framed it as it was unnecessary, useless pain. And that works with people. When you've got the signal, it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong. When you get the signal, you don't need to keep feeling the pain anymore. You can be careful with it.

Dirk: 40:26

It's where we put our attention and how we frame frame the story. And it's incredibly powerful. Yeah, it is a story. Can you also tell the the story of the uh how you burnt your hands and uh twisting? Yeah, and and uh and how uh hypnosis can change sort of the inflammation process.

Mike: 40:52

Absolutely. Um I read for years Dabney Ewan, who was an excellent hypnotist, who's professor of psychiatry and professor of surgery, which is an interesting combination, is somewhere in Louisiana. Excellent hypnotist, one of the best hypnosis books for beginners, is his book, 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Doing Hypnosis. And it's real quick and easy. Dabney Ewan, EWI, and highly recommend it. But he talked about how hypnosis can undo burns if you can get to the person within a couple of hours. And my experience is if you can get to the person within an hour, it's really good. He said you can switch operatokinin release, which of course causes the secondary pain, inflammation. It can go overboard sometimes. And so I'd I taught this for years, but I'd never seen it done. I just rested on his authority and that he knew what he was doing. And so would teach this to my students. Well, then I had the occasion to test it out because a few years back we were at our little 600 square foot cabin up in the Canadian wilderness where I spoke to you from last time with horrible copper wire internet. It was fun to see. I'm jealous of your cabin.

Dirk: 41:53

I uh I'm looking out at the bright wall here.

Mike: 41:56

Yeah. Oh yeah. So we, you know, I was making spare ribs and I had them in the oven. I think it was raining out, so I couldn't do them on the barbecue. And I had the oven set at 425 or 450 Fahrenheit. It's a damn hot oven on a metal tray. This wasn't aluminum, stainless steel, really held the heat. So the ribs are on it and everything's bubbly and crispy. Okay, time is up. Let's bring them out. I put on the gloves of the silicone, the blacksmith gloves, you know. Take this tray out, set it on the counter on a couple of trivets to protect the counter. I shut the oven, turned it off, and I turned back and saw that the tray was a bit wonky, sticking over the edge of the counter, because I put it down quickly. Without thinking, I've already taken the gloves off. I just gripped the edge of the tray to move it, and yow, my fingers stuck to it. And so I remember, you know, I did the Red Cross first aid course. I remember flush burns with cold water until help arrives. Well, it's not gonna be any help. So I under the cold water tap, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna give this a shot. So after my, I'd run the water for a couple of minutes, I said to my wife, I'm gonna go put myself in a trance and see if I can switch off this burn. I said, I'll be back in about 20 minutes. So I went, lay down, went into trance, which any good hypnotist can do in seconds. And I visualized uh a tiny little fireman with tanks on his back. He's a few inches tall, and he walked down my arm, he had a fireman's hat on and everything, but the tanks were full of liquid nitrogen. And he began spraying dutifully everywhere it hurt. It started with one finger. It was two in particular, it was uh these two. And he started spraying at the tip of it, and then watching it get colder and becoming ice blue color, and it stops throbbing. He goes to the next one and starts hosing that one down. And after a few minutes, the other one started hurting again. So we did it again. It just went back and forth between the two of them until it stopped hurting. I came out of trance, and the next day when I got up, I showed my wife, I said, Look, there is no burn. She said, Shut up, it's the other hand. I said, No, it isn't. There was not even a first-degree burning. So I I don't know how it works. I mean, shutting up brady kinem, but we've known for you know a hundred years you can get rid of warts with hypnosis, which people used to think was mobilizing the global immune system, but it can't be because I've had people with warts on both hands, and you can tell them which ones will dry up and fall off, and they do. The others are left alone. So it so now I know I think it's it's it's switching off the capillaries and we're gonna be able to do that.

Dirk: 44:17

It's a local immune system response with the warts. They there was um I remember reading a paper or or hearing uh uh uh somebody talk about duct tape and warts. So you can cure wortz with duct tape, but you don't have to put them on the wort. You could put them next to the wort and it also works. So it it somehow you can probably put it on your dresser. Maybe in your dresser. Maybe it's maybe it's the mental thing. I thought it was sort of locally stimulating some kind of uh inflammation. But but yeah, so you have the braidokinin, which is uh peptide that causes inflammation, and somehow you can your inner system knows how to access that nerve, that set of nerves, and and turn that off.

Mike: 45:00

So yeah, this isn't a but the implications of that, Dirk, the implications are, you know, we I used to work with a dentist in Toronto, Dr. Bilker, I helped him with some of his patients. And the literature says you can remove a secondary molar with no anesthetic, with a willing patient. And you can also tell the bleeding to stop. Now I've seen this, telling bleeding to stop when it reaches the top of the tooth socket. And it does. Now, the implication is our unconscious mind somehow has access to free-flowing blood cells, platelets that are aggregating purely in response to suggestion. Like, how far does this go? It flows my mind all the time.

Dirk: 45:39

So, yeah, it is mind-blowing. And so uh trance, what is, as you said, I put myself into trance and then I sent these little firemen to that part of my body. What is trance?

Mike: 45:55

With all the different models, some people think it is a neurological model, insofar as the left brain is becoming and a gross generalization, is quieting down, becoming a little muted, and the right brain is beginning to open up full of mythopoetic elements and music and color and all of these wonderful things. Well, we're putting the, you know, the analytical, digital um numbers, you know, sequencing and words and language, letting that rest and the corpus calls, and we've got like two hemispheres talking to each other, and the right brain is waking up. And that seems like a pretty good model, which is why you know the worst forms of self-hypnosis are to say, I'm going into a deeper trance, I'm doing using your left brain to try to run your trance. You know, you want it out of the way. Then the other model, it just says, Yeah, I think it was Raphael Rhodes who spoke about the uh law of psychic relative exclusion, which I said it does not mean that if your grandmother is clairvoyant, you do not permit her to come to Thanksgiving dinner. It's the whole idea, which I thought was freaking brilliant. I mean, you can't teach that stuff, it's a gift. But I think it's Raphael Rhodes, what he talked about was that we all have two minds. And one recedes and one moves into the foreground, but they're always present to varying degrees. And as we go into trance, we become more internally focused, more recognizing uh feelings and sense and this shifting attention, not looking externally so much for what the world is, but beginning to experience our inner world. And that's a good model, too. Another one of a pond of water. Everything below the surface is unconscious, everything above the sky, and that is conscious. And when we go into a trance, we get a bit of fog over the surface. So this information going back and forth, conscious to unconscious, the idea of depotentiating the critical faculty, the construct that is somehow preventing us from running the unconscious mind because it's there to defend us. You tell someone to go jump in the lake, they're not going to do it. But if you put them in a good trance and tell them the lake is warm and perfect, there's nothing in the lake more than to step, then they will, provided it doesn't violate their moral codes. We've given a rationale for the behavior. So I think the best one is trance is really effective communication that gets to unconscious resources and gets any resistance out of the way. And then we can we can make phenomenal changes because we can access the stuff that is down there.

Dirk: 48:13

Yeah. Somehow, for me, it's also sort of deeply relaxed, focused attention.

Mike: 48:21

But if you leave out the words deeply relaxed, I'd be inclined to agree with you completely. Because if you watch films like Triumph of the Will, the Nuremberg rallies, you're seeing literally thousands of people in a profound uh shared consensual trance, and not one of them is a but relaxation is a great way to get trance.

Dirk: 48:39

I mean, it's very useful. Interesting. So, yeah, so now let's think more about how does hypnosis heal. Um, so you've given a some great examples. So Well, it's unique to each person. To each person, to each problem.

Mike: 48:58

So I think uh yeah. Yeah, yeah. So Jason Lynette, a friend of mine, does a great thing. He's a great hypnosis trainer, teaches the business of hypnosis, and he does it very well. He he gets, I'm sure it's Jason, he gets people, well, what does hypnosis feel like? So okay. He said, just let your arms relax, just man, let your head till down a bit, just close your eyes. And he just lets them do it for like five seconds. That's what hypnosis feels like. So they're not expecting to be knocked out by, you know, nitrous oxide or something and have no idea what's going on and feel like they've been comatose. I mean, that can happen, but it's not the norm. The normative is whichever way they do hypnosis is the right way for them. And we do we're more educators than hypnotists. You know, it's uh I make friends with their unconscious mind. And so it trusts me. And then let it come to the foreground. And again, hey, Doctor, one of the things that interests me is assigning roles to these subpersonalities, which you can do really well with hypnosis. Now, when I teach in class, I send it in a class, I'm I'm working back and forth with three different ego states. I have my teaching ego state, which is the one I'm in right now. I can tell right away because my teaching state has two others that stay alongside it and they get along really well. And one is the one I call the librarian. It's this elderly guy who has access to everything I know about hypnosis and NLP and related fields. And he's there to provide support. And on the other side, I've got the jester, and he's like this hilarious Jewish comic from the 60s, 50s, 40s, and which is funny because everybody thinks I'm Jewish and I'm not. So we have a Jewish comic, and he just throws in hilarious lines because humor unlocks the model. And when we're teaching, we keep people laughing, they learn quickly. So I will be teaching and I'll sense he's got something to say, and I honestly don't know what it is. And he jumps in, becomes executive, says the line, gets a big laugh, the librarian notes what he's just said, and it becomes available for me next time, and the teacher comes back in. Now, the liability here is in this model. When I was teaching for NLP Canada years ago, I taught hypnosis. Their course, Derek Baumer hired me as this hypnosis gunslinger and said, I need someone to teach hypnosis, so he hired me. But teaching the people in the class how to work with these different states, it was really, really odd because, first of all, people are surprised to learn they have these different states and that you can assign them roles with hypnosis. But when people realize that and remove the restraint, you can do some amazing things. Now, I'd been teaching this all week and then went to do a hypnosis show because I did almost 5,000 shows from 75 to 19, 1980, oh no, 2018, 43 years. But in that time, I went to do the show East of Toronto, a place called Coburg, this rec hall, great event. And a friend of ours said, Well, you were different today. I don't want to say, Well, you seem like you were teaching everybody rather than being an entertainer. And I went, Oh, shoot, I was in my teaching ego stakes. I mean, doing that, that's not how you entertain people. They don't they don't care about, you know, what autonomic responses you're getting from people. Nobody cares. They want to laugh. So I began to really be specific as to which ego state was executive. But now we, you and I have talked about AI briefly. You can design um GPTs with hypnosis as well. And what I did was I got into a trance and asked my most resourceful, assertive, and powerful ego state. Resourceful was really the key to become executive whenever I had an emergency that it would was strong enough to push any other ego state out instantly, would deal with the emergency and become unconscious again. And I thought, what am I going to name it? So I named it 008. It became my pseudo-James Bond ego state. Very resourceful, right? It's only become executive once. This sounds like I'm making it absolutely true. I can tell you where I was. I was driving east from Toronto towards uh Oshawa, Ontario, on Highway 401. Now, people who've never been to Toronto who come over to train with us from Singapore or you know, France, they think Toronto's gonna be a backwater. They're amazed that it's the third largest city in North America after LA and New York. I had that reaction when I visited you guys.

Dirk: 53:03

Yeah, I was like, oh, this is gonna be quite beautiful.

Mike: 53:07

And uh it's a big city, yeah. The opposite is true. It's terrible at traffic, it's just it's a mess. But my wife and I are on Highway 401, so it's it's a high-speed highway. So we're going east, she's in the passenger seat. I'm just driving, you know, normal. The truck in front of us is a pickup truck. He's got a dresser on the back of it, and he's maybe 50 feet ahead of me at highway speed. The tailgate opens, and this freaking dresser falls into my lane right in front of me. And that ego state, 008, became executive instantly. I mean, I didn't have the music, but the I did this bang, changed, checked the line around like that. And you're putting a check the carotid pulse my pulse, no, and a Subaru. And my my pulse had not even gone, hadn't even gone up. My wife said, Wow, that was some pretty amazing driving. I said, Mandel, Mike Mandel. But it and it works. That ego state is always alert for those emergency situations, just by training it, what I wanted it to do.

Dirk: 54:07

So, yeah, so in terms of healing, we have this ability to access ego state stuff and and uh and and make shifts and and re-script, change meaning, change how parts of ourselves think about ourselves, really change core beliefs about ourselves. Totally. Yeah.

Mike: 54:33

Because we don't, we don't interact with the real world. We don't really know what it is. You know, we're just everything's going through a series of transforms. So the the only, you know, if we look at something that we get visual cortex stimulated to get the images upside down, it's binocular, our brain puts them together, flips it the right way up, adds 3D imaging, so we imaging. So we think we're seeing out there, but we're really seeing here. And it it's only, you know, it's only the sense of smell where we apprehend the world directly, because we're actually getting molecules in the limbic system when we smell something. That's why it's the expressed train of the brain. But these are tools that enable us to interact with this mytho-poetic universe, whatever we decide it is. And again, I'm not saying we're changing physical reality, but we're responding to what we believe and what fits our reality tunnels rather than what's actually there.

Dirk: 55:20

I want to hear a bit about your personal story. I want to hear your version of the history of hypnosis, and I want to hear some quick questions about meaning for you personally. Maybe starting with history of hypnosis, because you've created this neo-Ericksonian model of hypnosis. So I would like to for people to sort of understand what that is and and to get there, I feel like it's it's really important for people to know that hypnosis was a way of working with the unconscious mind before analysis, be uh Freud was working with the hypnotists and Charcot and Mesmer, and then and then that split in these different lineages where there were the direct hypnote hypnosis people and then the indirect Ericsson. So maybe if you could just sort of tell the story of hypnosis and then how that leads to you and your neo-ericsonian model.

Mike: 56:26

I will bullet point it for you, Doc. So the oldest examples we have is is going back um about a thousand years ago, where we had the Egyptians had sleep temples where people would go in, they had problems, and they'd be put into a trance without knowing what it was, with torches burning and incense and chanting and so on. It created this wonderful atmosphere for suggestion. The Greeks liked it. They picked up on it and made it hypnosis in the temples of Asclepius, who was a snake god. Its temple was full of snakes. And if you could fall asleep in there, you'd wake up and apparently your problem would be gone. One can only assume that you're not going in for, you know, herpetophobia, fear of snakes in the first place, because it could be counterproductive. But that was the initial stop. Plus, if we really look back, it went back further than that because wise women and medicine men would tell the stories, the tribe's mythopoetic story of why they're there and all their history, the dream time with the Australian Aboriginals. And this would be hypnotic. They'd be reasserting and reinforcing the tribal memory around the fires. And these would be incredible trance states with lessons learned and the proverbs of interaction, animal stories, and so on. But it really was Mesmer who started the move towards actual hypnosis. He was a medical doctor out of Vienna. I had some unusual ideas about the planets, but he was pretty straightforward back then. This is the 1700s, so 18th century. And Mesmer studied with Father Maximilian Hell, who was a Jesuit priest. Now, back then they used bloodletting for everything. So no matter what was wrong, you know, they would open a vein and take out a pint of blood. And uh the idea was removing these sanguine humors that are making you sick. Back then, bloodletting was a cure for everything. If you'd go to get your blood taken for this, it was a barber who did it. So a barber was the surgeon of the day. They set bones, they did bloodletting, and you see, they would get you to hold a stick that was wrapped in bandages as they opened a vein, and the stick would get all gross and gory looking, so they'd wrap it with more bandage, and that became the symbol of the barber pole, the red and white striped pole, although they've added blue now for patriotic reasons, I imagine, in the United States. But it is blue as well. And so they did this. In fact, people don't realize they did it for everything. Um, George Washington died from bloodletting. He had some sort of infection, maybe pneumonia, traveled with his surgeon, i.e. his barber, and got really sick. So they took a pint of blood, and amazingly he got worse. And so they thought, oh, he's not taking enough. They took more. And I think they did like five, they took four or five pints, and you know, removing all the macrophages and all the things he needs to fight the infection and the antibodies. And he died despite that, and it was put down to death by pneumonia or strep throat or whatever the heck it was. So this was just what everybody did. So Mesmer learned this, but he learned from Father Maximilian Hell, who had lodestone, magnetite, naturally occurring magnets. He would move the magnets over the vein astery, he'd open it up, and a clot would form. So now we know we're causing palatolid aggregation just through suggestion. Now we see what happened. So when Mesmer says, wow, he was all over this. So he starts doing his mesmerism, or he starts doing his bloodletting thing. One day he did not have his magnets with him. I guess he left them at home. So he grabbed the nearest thing and it was a wooden pointer for a blackboard, passed it over the person's arm, and amazingly the bleeding stopped. Now, Mesmer did not apply the proper razor, which in this case would be Occam's razor, which should be that the lodestones have nothing to do with it, it's nothing to do with magnetism. What is the explanation that requires the fewest new hypotheses? Well, something else is going on here. And it was indirect suggestion. Mesmer draws the wrong conclusions. It's me! I have magnetic powers. So he becomes like an X man. His superpowers, he thinks he's magnetizing people, starts passing his hands over people. Sets up these seances, as they were called, and people started to get well, purely purely with anticipation and prestige. Prestige gets you a foot in the door right away. And so the aristocracy, he went to Paris. Anybody who was anybody went to Mesmer if they were sick. And so he developed this, and but unfortunately, he wound up dying in obscurity. He asked King Louis to do a royal commission to prove that what he was doing was real and it wasn't. They said Benjamin Franklin was on the board, as was Dr. Guillotine, who was a pain management specialist who created the ultimate pain management, removing your head from your central nervous system. And Lavoisier, the chemist, who was actually killed on Guillotine's guillotine later on in the French Revolution. So Mesmer was discredited, dies in obscurity, buried somewhere in Switzerland or something. He he contributed nothing scientific to hypnosis. He just got everybody think about this energy thing. But it spread, and Elliotson in England was taken in by it, and James Esdale in Calcutta was a British Army surgeon, 300 serious operations using mesmerism as this transinducer. But it started to come out of the dark ages with Braid in Manchester, England, where I'm from. And Braid was uh doing an ex, he saw an experiment of a stage performer, La Fontaine due mesmerism, and Braid thought it was all bunk, and he went up on stage, got a hat pin, and thrust it under the person's fingernail to the root, and they did not react. And he thought, okay, there is something going on here. Later on, Braid discovered that eye fixation would cause hypnosis, but he thought it was eye fixation. It was really the fixation of attention that did it. He created the Braid method where you stare at something, a lighted disc or whatever, and he gives suggestions for falling asleep. And everybody did this cause and effect direct hypnosis for a couple hundred years. In fact, Freud was trained in it. He studied with Charcot. I think he studied with Libo and Bernheim in the two schools, Saint-Petrier in Paris and the Nasi School. And they're starting to formulate this. Now, Bernheim was great because he was a neurologist. And Libo was a medical doctor, and they kept really good records. And his book, Suggestive Therapeutics, written in the 1880s, it's still a good read because he documented what they were doing using purely cause and effect direct suggestion. This will happen. This is happening. This is happening. Your pain is disappearing. All of that. Great results. Freud checked it out, was a lousy hypnotist. He had dentures that were falling up because of cocaine use, rubbing the cocaine on his gums. And, you know, it's not easy to do an induction if your false teeth are falling in your lap. Tends to put people off somewhat. But he had um decided he would create psychoanalysis instead. And he said, My therapy will not be for the poor. He will average 100 to 300 hours to effect a cure. All of a sudden, nobody can afford it except the wealthy. And it takes off, and they put hypnosis on the back burner and it just disappears until World War I, when there are all these traumatized soldiers with battle fatigue, shell shock, PCSD. And they took it off the shelf to detraumatize them quickly by taking them back to the event, abreacting all the negative emotions, giving them positive suggestions. They're cured. And then it went back, and the psychoanalysts had it taken off the table again until World War II rescued us. And people like my mom and dad went through the Manchester Blitz where the firebombing and the bombing of Manchester and the Battle of Britain, 3,000 houses blown up in one night. I mean, just every day they'd get up, you know, keep calm and carry on. You just had to do that, go back to work. But they're traumatized by it. And the powers that be said, hey, wait a minute. Since we can't psychoanalyze everybody, what if we take that hypnosis thing back off the shelf? And well, I guess we could do. Well, that did a lot of detraumatization for civilians as well. This was total war, not just fighting in trenches in Europe, but now all of people were hurt. And the results were phenomenal. And so it kept growing, it kept growing. And it was still this direct hypnotist does something, subject goes into trance and follows instructions. Authoritarian, paternal hypnotist as the wanting control, the locus of the focus. And then this amazing guy, Milton Erickson, came along. And Erickson went from, I believe, Wisconsin, wound up in uh Phoenix. He trained with Clark Hull, who was professor of psychology at Yale. Um, Hull wrote the book uh Hypnosis and Suggestibility, still a really good book. But Erickson was prodigy. He had polio twice. He learned to calibrate people because he had polio.

Dirk: 1:04:12

He couldn't move. Go ahead. So that was an amazing history of hypnosis and of the initial sort of direct hypnosis. And you're talking about, you know, going way back, and then these people who developed Sdale with these deep, deep trances, doing surgeries and different medical doctors, and then using trauma. And I'm curious about why it's always sort of this weird sort of fringe aspect, but but that's a really nice lineage and and done very quickly. And I left a lot out. And you left a lot out. And and uh yeah, no, there's so much to get to. And then there's Milton Erickson who who everything because he was very direct, very direct in his early days.

Mike: 1:05:00

Like he he was super direct. But here's a guy who hypnotized people pretty well every day for like 50 or 60 years, and he developed the indirect method. And I said earlier, we'll show it to the camera. This is the brick from Milton Erickson's house, which is freaking amazing. One of my students got me that when it was knocked down to put up a parking lot. And uh, Ericsson then began noticing naturally occurring trance states with people. And Erickson was calibrating, they've gone into a trance. So he would utilize the trances they're naturally going into, and then he would tell stories and he would do the most miraculous things. People couldn't figure it out. It didn't seem like science. So someone would come in, and one kid was a recidivist. He kept going back to crime and they hoped Erickson could fix it because Ericsson was a medical doctor, psychiatrist as well, and came out of psychoanalysis, which is why he hypnotized people multiple times at first because he was used to doing extended several sessions, several extended sessions. But this kid is there, and you know the the story is he's come, he come in, he sits down next to Erickson, and Ericsson's entire therapy was, how surprised are you gonna be? Sitting in his wheelchair, gravelly voice. How surprised will you be, Johnny, when you leave this office and find out you've already. The kid goes, really surprised. And he yells, get out of my office. Kid doesn't go back to crime again. That's it. He finds his way in using naturally occurring states, using conversational hypnosis, and using metaphor. Metaphor is great for this. So the neo-Ericksonian approach that I teach, on one end, we have this very direct, powerful, you know, fixing things like your bleeding is stopping, that sort of cause and effect hypnosis. At the other end of this continuum, we have Milton Ericsson talking fluff and verbiage all over the place, but getting into the unconscious purely through using language. But it's not two sides of a coin, it is a continuum. So I teach my students to be as indirect as possible, because it's mostly undetectable, but as direct as necessary. Even Died in the Well Ericksonians go into direct hypnosis when you're in a deep enough trance. There's no point doing that, of course, then. You've already got their unconscious front and center. And so with me, the thing is always simplification. What can we do that is simple, effortless, and enjoyable for the subject to get them the changes they want? There's no need to complexify things. It is the mark of the dilettante and the novice that they mistake complexity for cleverness. And in reality, the real brilliance is doing something, and no one knows you've even intervened, but their problems disappear.

Dirk: 1:07:35

Can you unpack what you did with the um the initial uh memory? Oh, the memory thing.

Mike: 1:07:44

Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. It's quite easy to do once you get a flow of so-called Ericksonian language. One of the things I'm doing is I'm speaking in nominalizations a lot of the time. So a nominalization is a noun that one cannot put in a wheelbarrow. You know, things like lamp, crow, empire state building, they can all go in a big enough wheelbarrow. But when we talk about finesse, empowerment, understanding, strength, concerns, uh, learnings, all of these things are nouns, but they have no physical form. And as such, they mean something different, either slightly different or radically different for everyone who hears them. We have our own rules as to what that word means based on our own experience. For example, someone might have the uh nominalization of success. And to them, success is running five multinational companies. To someone else, success means getting out of bed every morning in good health. Now, which one is most likely to fulfill his rules for success? Well, obviously the guy just has to get out of bed, but I can't presume that that's what that means for everybody. So when I begin to speak, I'll speak with nominalizations and I use one long sentence that never ends. And as I build that sentence and as I point their attention, there's another nominalization, into that sort of shifting world where all of the things that you're thinking, that's right, those things. I'm talking to the unconscious directly, and I'm setting up something which is verbal fluff without saying what it is. And then I'll say, and the second important thing, or I'll say the second freaky thing. Now I haven't even demarked what the first one is. So they're trying to grasp, you know, it's like trying to nail jello to a wall. Now I say the second important thing, or the second freaky thing, is that hypnosis starts happening as soon as you start talking about it. Now that puts them in a bit of a, uh-oh, he's doing it now.

Dirk: 1:09:31

So then let's say now I've created a story in my mind that you've told me two things, right? That that you by how you introduce that, now you have changed the story that that I hold in my mind. And now you're setting up the forgetting piece. Yes, absolutely correct.

Mike: 1:09:51

We change the story that I'm doing hypnosis, and they're realizing themselves. I'm not saying it, I'm just saying that you know, when we start talking, hypnosis begins to occur naturally by talking about. And then I hit the third one and I say, but the real question, or something to that effect, is how easy is it for you? That's right, to totally forget the first important thing now. And I wait and I watch them do a transgerivational search, their eyes are going through all their brain systems trying to find the information. And I'll say, What else did you just forget? Whoa, that makes it weird. And then I'll say, and that internal disorganization you feel now is because you're unconscious. I pause and say, mind. So I'm told they're unconscious. I say, is listening. But I think it's important for you to be certain to remember, to forget certain things. And then I end it with, haven't you? It's causing this continuous reconsideration of the information.

Dirk: 1:10:46

And we're always trying to make information of it, right? We're trying to make meaning. And then once we have a story of like, oh, he's he's created magic or something, then our mind can rest. And so you're playing with our meaning-making machinery and in really fun and interesting.

Mike: 1:11:04

And setting up a zygarnic loop so there's no resolution of it right away. We're looking for resolution. We want things to be understood so we can nail that box shut and move on to something else. And while we don't provide resolution, we leave everything dangling. It's very, very strange. I was at a flower show with my wife. It's called Canada Blooms, and it's every spring, nice beautiful flower show to get everybody ready for spring at the exhibition grounds in Toronto. I was walking through my wife and I and another couple. The man is an NLP trainer, excellent hypnotist, and he's always trying to get me to do stuff. So we're walking, he and I are walking, our wives are behind us. He said, Come on, do something, do something, do something. I said, Okay. I said, watch this guy walking towards us. So the man's walking towards us, I'm ostensibly talking to Steve. And just as the man gets near, I turn to his face and I said, Amnesia, like that, and just kept talking to Steve. And we walked about 10 steps. He said, You've got to look, you've got to look. I look back, you guys standing there just blinking back layers of trance, just because I've gotten past the critical faculty with surprise. Now, why is that guy said amnesia? Did I forget something? And when I got my license plate, when they switched in Ontario from seven digits to eight digits, I was at an airport, Toronto airport flying somewhere. My wife said, they're switching to eight digits. I said, get me hypnosis right now. She said, Yeah, you can pre-order it. I see you have to pay a fee. I said, get it right now. She said, Okay, I'll do it in the morning. I said, No, honey, I'm getting out of the way. Do it right now. So she got it for me. And it was hilarious because I'd stop at traffic lights and in the mirror, I'd see people going, let's say, pull up at the light, looking around, they're waiting behind me to go. And I drive away, and often they'd still be sitting there until someone honked behind them. The word itself is doing the job. Just, you know, if it isn't fun, it's not worth doing. It really isn't. Let's keep the humor. Absolutely. But meaning, I love what you're saying about meaning, though, because I mean, uh, I think it was Jordan Peterson who wrote, was it, Maps of Meaning? Excellent book. And the whole concept of we are invariably attempting to understand things in the context of our own reality tunnels. And Robert Anton Wilson wrote some tremendous stuff on this in Prometheus Rising and some of his other books. It is without me, without context, there is no meaning, though. So we're always looking for a context. I say, if if you paint your face blue and take your shirt off and run down Young Street in Toronto yelling and waving your arms, they'll put you in the Clark Institute of Psychiatry, and rightly so. But if you do that at a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, it's not only acceptable, it's it's enforced behavior. I believe something that's entirely appropriate. Context changes everything, right?

Dirk: 1:13:35

So, yes. I want to get to some rapid fire questions about meaning. Sure. I think you you've talked about your origin story on other podcasts. And I want to hear a little bit about just what turned you into a hypnotist? Where were you born and what were the what was in the ether that sent you in this in this direction?

Mike: 1:13:57

I'll give you the headline edition. Born April 29th, 1953, in Chatterton, which is part of Greater Manchester, England. And people say, well, I guess you don't remember. I remember perfectly. If 34 Wellbeck Avenue, our phone number was fails were 3270. I mean, it's just I remember it perfectly. And we moved to Canada in 1957. My father was an engineer. He was recruited in Britain, as was a colleague of his, friend of his, uh, to work for Bell Telephone Company of Canada. He was an electrical engineer, brilliant man. Designed the testing gear for the transatlantic telephone cable. I mean, interesting guy, nicest guy you'd ever meet. An enemy in the world. So we moved to Canada. Him, my mom, and my sister and I followed by ship a few months after he'd come over and got a job. My sister is seven years older than me. And we came to Canada and I was fascinated by Canadian television and American television. Because back in Britain, we only had two channels, BBC, not even BBC, two or BBC and ITV, independent television. And they go off the air about 11 p.m. or something, in a big band, off the air test pattern. And we moved to Toronto and I got became a TD TV addict, but my parents swear it was just uh the commercials fascinated me. Commercials, I come running in the room, watch the commercial, and run back out again. And by the time I was 12, 1965, my dad said, That's a problem, lad. You're watching far too much television. I want you to read some more books. That's how we spoke its own back then when I were a lad. I could switch it on and off. I still can. So it's uh, I want you to read some more books. I said, get me some. So he took me to a Coles bookstore in Toronto, which doesn't exist anymore. It was a chain. And he said, Any book you want, you can have. And it was Walter B. Gibson, who was a magician. It was called The Key to Hypnotism. And I was like, oh I memorized the content and I learned what was essentially a braid induction, staring at something, in this case a coin. But there was a variant on it called Hypnosis for Difficult Subjects. And I just thought, okay, here's the easy way. Let's presume everyone's a difficult subject and use that one all the time. It seemed to make sense to a 12-year-old boy. I went next door, two kids, Max and Wayne Gibbs. Wayne I reconnected with a decade ago, hadn't seen him since then. And um, Wayne was about 10, Max is about eight. So to Max, it was a big joke, joke. I went to hypnotize him, got Wayne in a trance immediately, and his hand was cataleptic. And I pushed um a pin. It was either a hat pin or a safety pin, I can't remember which, through the flash, like not through the skin, but through the flesh of his middle finger and out the other side. And he said looking at it, and it's bleeding, and he's absolutely emotionless, no, no blink reflex, nothing. Somnambulism, bang, right away. So my first patient zero was a good one. And I just kept playing around with it uh for years, and I was about 18, 19. Then in in November 1974, as a 21-year-old man, I went and saw the amazing Creskin do his hypnosis, he called it power of suggestion, and um Mentalism Act in Toronto at Minkler Auditorium. Saw that in November, said to my friend who was a booking agent, I think I can duplicate almost everything he's doing. He went, What? Show me. So I went into his work. It's called Music Shop International, it's a booking agency, uh, demonstrated for the agents some of the stuff I could do. And then January 1975, January 29th, I did my first event, which was a TV show in Edmonton. They flew me out. I was on with Cab Callaway, the jazz singer. And it was just, it was fantastic. Had a blast. The bug bit that I was a telephone operator at the time earning $2 an hour, which put me below the poverty line. I was working in an office with over 100 women, which was great. I was the only guy. And uh if I hadn't lived with my parents, it would have been, you know, I would have starved to death. But I kept doing shows and it just took off. And I I didn't know anything about hypnosis outside of that book. But I found I had a knack for it and um maybe some of the theatrics in it as well, and did almost uh close to 5,000 shows in three continents and retired after 43 years, then retired from doing my corporate speaking engagements about three years after that, and now it's just teaching. We've taught nine, about 9,000 people in person, twice a year at the Ontario, at our Toronto home, which is you know the Hypnotic World Epicenter, Toronto, Canada, and once in Las Vegas, we go there for Hypnoths Live, have a blast there. But mostly our stuff is online now, and we take people who are complete beginners or psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors, pain management specialists, and turn them into excellent general practitioners so they can then decide what they're gonna do with it. So I've eaten, lived, breathed hypnosis since 1975, and that's since it's been full-time. 50 years.

Dirk: 1:18:18

Amazing, amazing. So let me ask you some rapid fire questions about meaning. So my first question is this is sentence completion. According to me, Mike Mandel, the meaning of life is wow, variable.

Mike: 1:18:41

It's context-driven. There you go. We're back to context-driven. Nice. Well, it's like it's like you get discussions with people about just about anything. And what I always say is everybody has a worldview. Everybody does. It may be Marxism, it might be atheism, it might be capitalism. In my case, I have a biblical worldview. I'm a Presbyterian elder, I was a licensed minister in in Ontario before. Got a left foot of fellowship for pretty well accusing them of heresy, but that was just me. But I just explained, you know, I I I never shove my Christianity down anyone's throat, but I explained, that's essentially what I believe. Everyone has a worldview, and you have to determine if it is working for you and if it makes sense for you. And our worldview is going to determine everything that's going on in the world. I a very good friend of mine contacted me three days ago and he said, I'm just terrified because of the U.S. elections. He honestly thought he was going to be put in a concentration camp or something. And I said, Well, we'll wait and see. I specialize in being apolitical. And uh I have essentially no control over what's going on in the world. So I sort of observe, I notice we seem to be living essentially the Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times. These times are really, really interesting. And I said, But I have a biblical worldview. I look at everything in terms of seeing how things are playing out in terms of Bible prophecy. And I like looking at the world through that lens, which keeps my faith high because it's certainly happening. And um it's just that's my context. That's my lens I look at everything through. But Derek Bomber, my mentor, Cambridge linguist, NLP trainer, who I did my NLP trainer track with, which was a two-year course, he said everyone should have three models of the world, minimum. And I thought, why? And he said, because if you have only one model of the world, you have no choice. And we work on the maximum that choice is always better than non-choice. And then he said, but if you have two models, now you're in a dilemma, this one or this one. Ah, you're the you know, the donkey stuck between two piece piles of hay, which one do I eat? I don't know, no, no. But he said, if you have at least three, one of the models will tend to jump out as being most appropriate regardless of what you're doing. So I've got my my biblical worldview, I've got my um scientific worldview, and I've also got hypnosis to fall back on.

Dirk: 1:20:52

Amazing. Um, second question. The most meaningful thing I did yesterday was. Oh, good question.

Mike: 1:21:01

Um probably vacuuming, even though I'd done it two days earlier because my wife had asked me to, and I realized we got people coming over, and in her mind, the place is filthy. So the meaning, the meaning was me doing this is reframing it as it's not something that's gonna take an hour out of my day. This is something that's strengthening my marriage by doing it. Beautiful. Wow. And we can attach positive meaning to all kinds of things. I, you know, it's the beautiful thing is Scott Adams wrote a great book on reframing. And he's a hypnotist. Not just the guy who writes Gilbert, but he's a hypnotist, and he's he's a very smart man. He's he clearly has a very high IQ. And his book on reframing is terrific because he's made the discovery you don't even have to believe a reframe for it to work. And I used to get, you know, my wife and I have been married since 1981. Yeah, it's a long time. And I jokingly still refer to her as my first wife or my current wife, you know, keep her on edge, but she's sharp as a tack. And um, I realized like things that used to irritate me. Why doesn't she get just and she's thinking probably the very same stuff about me? Why is he being such an idiot? But I stopped framing things as, oh, this is an unimportant part of the conversation. Why does she bring up things that don't matter? And I reframed all of that as my wife is the love of my life. And man, oh man, did that ever change everything? The meaning in everything then became my definition of love, which is putting the well-being and happiness of someone else above your own. That's real love. It's not a feeling, feelings follow later, which is why so many arranged marriages work really well in those cultures. They meet, they commit to each other, they have family support, they don't give up, and then the love follows, the feelings follow. But love is an action and reframing things. It's been a wonderful journey because I I had such a freaking ego problem for years. I mean, I really did. And I'm not saying it's completely gone, it probably never will be, but it's it's a lot better than it was. And I realized that I wasn't serving myself or anyone else by being an egotistic jerk. It really wasn't. It's people a lot smarter than me have done a lot more with their lives. And I went to Hypnothoughts live the very first time with Chris Thompson, my business partner and best friend. And I went with the attitude, why are you dragging me to this? Every hypnosis trainer I've seen is a freaking idiot. I might have used more colorful language. They're living in the dark ages. Why don't people move on? And he said, let's just go give them a chance. And the first trainer we saw was terrible. Her induction took 40 minutes. I think it just really bad. So I said, prove my point. He said, just stick it out. And we met some phenomenal trainers, people like David Snyder, Melissa Tears, James Trump, Carl Smith, who are close personal friends now. And I really believe everybody has something to offer if we listen, if we listen for their story. Everybody may be, you know, a diamond in the rough, but we can get to that gym if we really listen and put ourselves out of the way. And God knows I'm not there yet. I mean, I'm certainly not there, but I've stopped competing with the other trainers. I yeah, now I go back, and what Chris and I do is we applaud all the other trainers because Zig Ziggler, the motivational speaker, said a really profound thing. And even Freddie Jackwins adopted it since I told him. I always credit source when I can. Zig Ziggler said, you can get anything you want out of life if you help enough other people get what they want. And man, is that ever true? There is a reciprocity that happens with you, call it providence, the Tao, karma, whatever. And when we just put our stuff out there and help people without expecting anything in return, it really does all come back on us. So we've stopped competing. We help our friends, they say, can you do this with it? Sure. You know, you want to be on our podcast? Absolutely. I never say no to a podcast unless they have, you know, unless they're Satanists or something, but they don't ask me to go on anyway. But yeah, we put it out there, we give back. And on that note, something wonderful has happened lately. And I went to Wexford Collegiate, which is an art school, performing arts and visual arts, as well as a high school. And um, I was a bright kid. I skipped from grade four, that's grade three to grade five, but was put in a mix five, six class with a sadistic teacher who expected the grade fives to work at grade six level, make his teaching easier. I've now gone effectively from grade three, A plus and everything, to grade six, bombing out. And he he almost gave me a nervous breakdown as a little kid. And my parents finally got me out of the class, and I hated school now. And I failed grade nine, failed grade 11. I spent years trying to learn, and I eventually got out. My parents put me in a hippie free school called West No Hunt. I was the only Gentile in an all-Jewish school. They were great to me. Basically, you become an autodidact. It teaches you to teach yourself anything you want to learn. And that's what I did. And began learning this stuff and just recognizing if we if we treat life as magnificent and possibilities, options, and help other people get dragged into the backwash of that as well. It really gives us good lives and we can lay the ego aside. It doesn't become important anymore. Whereas, you know, that's what we can direct people to the other people. I say, you know, Freddie is great at this stuff. Go go check out his training. So all of that to say we are continuously growing and changing, or at least changing.

Dirk: 1:26:28

I love that answer, and I'm gonna go back and listen to that carefully. There's so much in what you just said. Um, we're just gonna do a couple more questions and bring this, land this plane.

Mike: 1:26:38

But that there was a lot of-Just before you do, I missed one part there, which is at my high school, where this all began, my wife and I set up the Mike Mandel Performing Arts Award this year. It's a cash prize for a student chosen by their by their peers who exhibits camaraderie, intelligence, talent, all of these things in the performing arts. And we've got it in my estate. It'll run for 20 years. Beautiful full circle story. It's it's a blessing, but it's such a blessing to me that the stage I started on is where I got to deliver the prize to this kid. Um, you know, Miles Jordan. Beautiful.

Dirk: 1:27:11

So you've delivered your first prize? Yeah. Yeah. That must feel amazing. It's just wonderful. So if uh next question, if I come to you and I say, Mike, I feel like I don't matter, my I'm this little speck. And uh what do you do if I come to you with sort of a meaning existential crisis? What's your approach?

Mike: 1:27:30

I use my two Jedi questions. The first one is, how did you come to believe that you don't matter? And I'd use their exact words. I'm not interpreting. I'd use some clean language to unpack what they're saying. So it's how did you come to believe that you don't matter? Not no, I'm saying belief, questioning it right away. And then when they tell me, I say, well, how do you know it's true? I want the epistemology here. I want their evidence criteria, and then I'll start challenging it, challenging that belief. I had one client years ago, and he told me, uh, he said, I do a bit of bodybuilding, he said, I do this. He said, if he didn't like me, he was going to throw me out the window. I didn't know that at the time. We were on the ground floor. And as a as a jujitsu instructor, he might have discovered it was more difficult than he imagined, but he said, I can't do anything. I'm I'm only a jack of all trades. I can do a bit of carpenter, I can do a bit of pool, I can do a bit of bodybuilding. And he was just down on himself. He said, I'm no good at anything. I'm just a jack of all trades. I said, You're right. You're no good at anything at all. He said, I can't master a thing. I said, No, you can't. The only thing you've mastered is being a jack of all trades. And he just went, and his face flushed. That was it. That was the entire treatment.

Dirk: 1:28:37

Most meaningful work of art that I've seen in the last week could be music or painting or a play or TV or sis.

Mike: 1:28:48

My wife bought me this. This is an original oil painting.

Dirk: 1:28:52

Um Wow. So this is a bear with an arrow, sort of uh He's got a quiver of arrows and he's overlooking this vast domain with mountains and stuff.

Mike: 1:29:02

I'm gonna put it here. Uh my wife bought me that. And I subscribe to the Enneagram system of personality. I'm I'm type eight. Type eight is the rarest number. At our best, we're the white knights. We protect the puppies and the little girls and the abused, and we're the firefighters who run back into burning buildings when there's bombs that can go up. But at our worst, we become the mass murderers. We're the ones who go crazy in them all with a, you know, the shotgun or something. So I'm not at that end of it. Type eight is the boss.

Dirk: 1:29:29

What is the type eight?

Mike: 1:29:30

No. It's sort of the protector. Okay. Yeah, and that's how Heather saw that picture. It's actually called the Protector. And so she said, This is you. And it it made me cry when I saw it because that's what I want to be. I want to, I want to help people live good lives. I want people to thrive and have a great. So that one I have in my office here, and I just look at it all the time.

Dirk: 1:29:54

I'll ask another question. When I'm dead and gone, the thing that I most want to be remembered for is.

Mike: 1:30:04

When I'm dead and gone, the thing I want to do that I tried to be a good man. My father's standard was so high. He was so open to things. When he discovered I had gifts in hypnosis, he would have loved for me to be an engineer like him. But he said, son, he said, I don't care if you want to collect garbage. He said, if you're happy, I'm happy for you. And that was the best piece of wisdom because it freed me to do whatever I wanted with his support the whole way. I'd love to be support like that. How old were you when he said that?

Dirk: 1:30:32

There's a lot of my students. How old were you when you said how old were you when you said that?

Mike: 1:30:37

Probably uh early 20s, maybe 21, just when it was starting. And there's a lot of my students, I'm Uncle Mike to them. They call me Uncle Mike because I had great courtesy uncles who were terrific to me and stretched my mind and got me to do things I wouldn't have done. And I like to be that for people. I'm a I'm a surrogate father for another one of my students because her father treated her like crap. And I don't do anything big, it's just they know I'm there for them and they can always come to me. And not having kids, it makes it easy. I'm more of a father to my cat, my Egyptian mal.

Dirk: 1:31:07

Well, you've been really helpful to me in terms of reframing my personal approach to each day, the way I ask questions, the way I set intentions, the way I don't really watch TV anymore, and follow my curiosity and your model of just learning whatever, learn, learn art, learn, you know, follow your interests, and it all will pay off. It's been really inspiring, and I really appreciate you being with me now. Is there any anything we didn't cover or any last messages you would like to share? Good grief.

Mike: 1:31:44

Well, check out my website, Mike Mandel with one L, MikeMandelhypnosis.com. We have a deal on right now where you can check out everything we do for like a dollar guest pass. Check out MikeMandalehypnosis.com. We've got a ton of stuff on YouTube. We have our full training online, including some of the things that I've created, like graphology protocol and uh mindscaping and a bunch of other stuff. But um, our aim is to help people replicate excellence. That makes me happier than anything.

Dirk: 1:32:13

I really appreciate you. This has been such a great conversation. Peace and love, my friend. All right. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed that interview. I sure did. There's so much packed in there. What what a cool, fun, interesting, generous, and nice guy. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend checking out Mike Mandelhypnosis.com, his website. I love looking at the mind from different perspectives. Thanks for joining me on this journey as I move into various healing communities seeking meaning. Keep up to date with everything at our website, developingmeaning.com. If you like this episode, share it with a friend, share it with an enemy, spread the word, give us a nice rating, and so much more to come. More on hypnosis. We're gonna go to ketamine, psychedelics, lots more to explore. I'm gonna talk to music therapists, art therapists, people who do therapy with using animals. We're gonna look at meaning from a lot of different perspectives. Until next time, I hope you have a meaningful, meaning-filled month. And if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know.