AWAKEN with Ryan DeJonghe

Carlos Casados: Modeling Excellence and the Path to Authenticity

• Ryan DeJonghe, Founder of TranceWell.help • Episode 31

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:06:36

In this episode of AWAKEN with Ryan DeJonghe, Ryan is joined by Carlos Casados, a master of NLP and hypnosis who specializes in modeling the mindsets of high achievers. Carlos discusses his journey through various modalities of change, focusing on how we can bridge the gap between our current selves and our highest potential by understanding the internal structures of success.

The conversation dives into the heart of the Authenticity Show, exploring what it truly means to live a life aligned with one's core values. Carlos shares insights into his work with Sacred Medicine Journeys, discussing the integration of ancient wisdom with modern psychological tools to facilitate profound breakthroughs. From deconstructing the "strategy of excellence" to navigating the vulnerable path of personal discovery, Carlos offers a grounded and sophisticated look at how we can rewrite our internal programming to live more authentically.

Key Takeaways & Meaningful Quotes

  • "Modeling is the heart of everything I do. It’s not just about copying what a person does; it’s about figuring out how they perceive the world so clearly that success becomes the only logical outcome for them."
  • "Authenticity isn't a destination you arrive at; it’s a constant process of stripping away the layers of who you thought you had to be to survive, until all that’s left is the truth of who you actually are."
  • "When we work with sacred medicines or deep hypnotic states, we are essentially opening a window into the soul. The real work isn't just the 'journey' itself, but the integration—how you bring that light back into your everyday life on Monday morning."

How to Connect and Work with Us

Connect with Carlos Casados: Carlos offers a range of services from high-performance coaching and NLP training to guided integration work for transformative experiences.

Work with Ryan DeJonghe: Ready to explore your own transformation through hypnosis?

SPEAKER_01

All right. Welcome everyone. We have my guest, Carlos Casadas. Welcome, Carlos, for being here.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks so much, Ryan. It's nice to be here.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And what got me in your direction is we had Scott Sandlin on, who is probably knows every hypnotist in the world because he runs the world's largest hypnosis conference. And people all over the world, the top stars of hypnosis, come in to Las Vegas to Scott's conference. And when I had him on, I said, okay, Scott, who should I interview next? Here we are, Carlos. Scott thinks very highly of you.

SPEAKER_00

And I'm so and I'm happy to have you here. So we were practically neighbors, actually. We lived like, you know, a mile or something from each other for a long time. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01

One of those serendipitous things. Yeah. So Carlos, what got you started in hypnosis?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, um, I kind of knew about hypnosis since I was a kid, you know. Um, and I was engaging a lot in guided visualizations and meditations and things like that since I was really little. Um, and then I think by 11 or 12, I was reading books on simple books on hypnosis. And then um my martial art teacher at the time, he was a hypnotist, so he was hypnotizing me. And we were doing a lot of work with altered states, you know, and and um I I trained in in Chinese internal kung fu mostly. So tai chi, xing yi, bagwa, um, that means you know, we learned a lot about Chinese medicine, Taoist philosophy, and um qigong. Qigong is the you know, the energy manipulation, right? The development of energy skill. Um, and so when you're looking to develop sensitivity to things like energy, what people call energy, um, you really can't avoid talking about trance because trance is how you experience something subjectively like that. Um, there's certain mental states that would be more likely to have you experience it than others, right? So you have to start to become sensitive to um visceral sensations and you know, fascia communication in you know, in through your body, so warmth and pressure, tingling, electricity, um, stuff like that, right? Um, so you're already bordering on a lot of trance language, you have to speak in a certain way, you know, you kind of have to capture the attention and the imagination in a certain way to tease out these um experiences, right? Um so you could say I kind of had a little like dip into it as a teenager, and then eventually um after having been hypnotized a few times, as I got older, um I started taking classes with different people, you know, and became super curious about it.

SPEAKER_01

I love how this went from hypnosis to energy speak. And the reason I I love it because on our Facebook group of I don't know, 30,000 hypnotists. I feel 90% ignore this major component of what it is is that energy transfer. And there's some hypnotists out there that do that like the nonverbal kind, which I think is hugely fascinating. And you mentioned mesmerism. Mesmerism, yes. And then you mentioned this fascia. Is that what you said?

SPEAKER_00

You were pointing at your arm and yeah, you know, um that's a good one. I think it's I'm kind of on a on a bender right now with with uh learning about my fascia and diving into um the fascinating science of it too. Like if you if you just you know went on YouTube and and said, you know, what is uh fascia? Uh you get a lot of intro videos that tell you a lot um about what it is. But basically it's the connective tissue. So underneath your skin, over your bones and muscles, wrapping and kind of spiraling throughout your body, is this stuff called fascia. And it used to be that they thought it was just like, you know, like the peanut stuffing inside of a shipment, right? It's not necessary. Let's just scrape that off and let's get to the real real stuff. Yeah. So after a while, scientists realized that's not true, and now they don't do that. Now they realize wow, the fascia is actually very important. So what is it? Um, it's a very unique tissue throughout the body, it's all throughout the body, by the way. Um, it surrounds and protects and conveys uh information throughout the body. So it's involved in proprioception, which is the ability to kind of navigate your way through the world, right? That's proprioception. Um, it's very much involved in giving the feedback um about your environment and about yourself in relation to the environment. Um, and that connects right into the nervous system, right? So the fascia is what they say. Um, some of them are thinking, like when I say some of them, the scientists are thinking, that fascia is another sense organ. They think it's one of the largest sense organs because it stretches all throughout your body, kind of like a soccer net or something, like woven material. And um it helps you navigate the world, you know, even allows you to feel certain touch sensations, pressure, and you know, kinetic movement. And in Tai Chi, um, when we're practicing Tai Ji Chuan, we we as we make contact with somebody, the moment our arms touch or your hand touches, or part of the body touches, there's kind of a radar or sonar or something that happens. It's like you're you're you're able to feel beyond your body and you can connect up into them and feel their balance, you can feel their tension points. Even if you're touching their arm with your forearm, you might still feel something going on in their back. So it goes much further than what you can visually see. So if you're to struggle with someone to move them around, let's say in a in a in a situation where you're you're uh pushing against somebody, you can push with brute force and with speed, and you can try to catch people's balance and grab their skeleton and things like that. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. But there's you know still a limitation to it. I mean, um but when you start thinking about the fascia and connecting into the movement of yourself and actually accessing someone else's fascia through touch, you can move a much larger opponent with less physical effort. So your mental effort is high because you're you have to learn the skill, right? But your brute force is less. So you're still using force, but the Chinese would say you're using intelligent force rather than steep force.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so I have a question.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So this we'll call it energy, this fascia, the something that senses. For instance, the way I see it is if you close your eyes and you already have a map of your room, you can kind of sense when different pieces of furniture or the walls are near you.

SPEAKER_00

Like you have a spatial awareness kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And the other part is if we can sense and influence another being like this, it brings to mind where people use healing touch on other people to cure them. And then I think of the mouse study, which is fascinating because the mouse doesn't know they inject the mice with cancer, and then they put their hands over the mouse, and the ones that put their hands over, the cancer went away. And the ones they didn't put their hands over, the cancer remained. And the mice doesn't know one, it doesn't know it has cancer, and two, it doesn't know what that person is intending to do, so it eliminates the placebo effect.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I imagine that's something similar going on there.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I don't know about that particular study, but that's I'd like to read it, read it, it sounds great. Yeah, yeah. But you know what it made me think about um the importance of the fascia itself, because if the fascia is very involved in feeling things like pressure and electricity and warmth and things like that, um, certainly if you become very sensitive, you can feel air pressure on you too, on your right.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_00

So your level of um spatial awareness goes up as you practice these, we'll call them internal arts because the focus is on the inside, right? Like um it's about your internal alignment, your you know, mental attitude, um, you know, the clearing away of uh psychic resistance, you know, right? Like a lot of that's the spiritual part of the practice. Um and fascia, because it can go from an almost crystalline state all the way down to almost a liquid-like state. Um, because of that, it it has all these really unique properties, and um, it may be responsible for why we're able to feel what we feel when we're doing qigong, the kind of huge pressure moving through the body. And um I've heard it explained to me, and I think it feels more or less like this. Instead of pushing, like so if you're a lot bigger than me and I'm pushing against you, and I'm pushing with all my might against your structure, that's kind of like how you would push a car, right? Right, you just go straight into the mass, you lean in and you hope that's right, you get a little momentum going, and then you keep driving forward. Yeah, but when you're moving someone with your fascia against their fascia, it's harder to detect where the force is going, so it's difficult to adjust to. So it throws you off. And the way you push is not as directly into the skeleton, but it's almost like rolling a wine barrel that's filled with wine, right? Like it's so heavy that what you're really trying to do is kind of skim the surface a little bit. You want your force not to go into the center of the mass, but along the barrel, and that's how you get the momentum happening. And so um, I've done this myself, and I've also seen wonderful examples of small, like a small lady, right? Against a really strong bodybuilder kind of guy, standing really tough, and all she's doing is basically grabbing onto the fascia. Yeah, yeah, and that guy's trying not to be moved, and she's just moving him back or moving him forward.

SPEAKER_01

It's funny you say that story and made me laugh because I a former United States Marine, I'm a big dude, 6'2, number station. Oh, yes, number five, man. So stationed in Okinawa and part of the USO, they had for the people that were depressed to go on this awesome experience, and I was one of the depressed Marines, and then I gotta go meet the guy that Mr. Miyagi is based off of. Oh little short Okinawan dude, right? And he had these black belts, he did this demonstration, flipping them over like he was Yoda, right? And then he had us stand up and do these jabs. Of course, I was throwing punches, and he comes over. No, no, you you're you're hitting like an American, and he just takes my palm, not even a pressure point, just takes it, and just all of a sudden, I'm on the ground and he's spinning me like one of those lassos you see, like a cowboy spins a lasso on the ground, just spinning me. Like, what is going on, man? I double or triple this guy's weight and he's doing this.

SPEAKER_00

And he just spun you around.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, just spun me around. I was I was standing and then I was down on the ground.

SPEAKER_00

Love it.

SPEAKER_01

But and then I want to bring it back to, I guess that's why I talked about the mouse study and healing properties, because I feel hypnosis as an element of healing, both psychologically, but also I've seen physically people heal through hypnosis. So, how does this fascia and this energy from the Tai Chi come into play in the session with someone in front of you for like your major thing is like anxiety and performance, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, I focus a lot on that. Sometimes relationships as well. But okay, cool. So let's the three primary things that I deal with.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, relationships is a huge one. So someone comes in, you're like, My life is just terrible. My life is shit, you know. So, how are you, Carlos, with your fascia and your energy knowledge going to help someone sitting across from you where they're they feel like their relationship is shit?

SPEAKER_00

So I'm because you we're woo adjacent, right?

SPEAKER_02

We can talk about Wu adjacent, yes. Back by science.

SPEAKER_00

Back on that. Um I'd like to say that for me, um, for a variety of reasons, I like to um go there first, that kind of idea where I recognize that my what I'm feeling is not just what I'm feeling, what I'm feeling is also what's going on in the room, right? For for example, um, I can ask my nervous system um or ask of myself, you know, is is what I'm experiencing in my nervous system uh is the origin me or is it somewhere else systemically and I'm picking up on it, right? Is is my nervous system getting hijacked? Okay. I also recognize the people in the room um may be having an experience like that too, where they may be feeling a certain visceral response, and they may not know whether that energy or that quality or that experience is from them or if they're absorbing it somehow, right? So if we're dealing with stuff like relationships, a lot of times, you know, we're we're dealing with old triggers, uh, underlying beliefs and identities, right? Like all of that's true, but we're also dealing with um the fact that people have or don't have physical connection, right? There's there's something that passes through and transfers between people. And there are things that in from my experience have to do with um generational sort of things, like uh uh systemic qualities that pass through from mother to daughter or from you know great-grandfather to grandson, you know what I mean? Like it it it can pass and skip epigenetically through the system. So as soon as they're in front of me, I'm thinking about all this stuff, like I'm aware of that, and I try to quiet myself and center myself. And then I go into my feelings of my own fascia, my own breath, my own anchors, and then I extend that feeling outward. And if I notice things like um the person I'm talking to is starting to calm down, or they're starting to uh uncross their arms and legs, and they're being they're getting more relaxed and settled. Notice their blink rate has reduced and the breath has gone a little deeper, you know, maybe their tonality is beginning to shift. Then I then I feel that kind of sense of rapport that's being built and connected to, and and and that I would say so it overlaps into what we're talking about with the fascia. You have to feel it, you have to feel it in your body, at least I think you do, you know, from my experience. So sometimes it might even be something like where I'm there already and I'm sliding into an altered state where I'm looking at them from the level of the fascia, right? So if I see uh a clumping of tension points through their body, um, I might explore that or I might ask them, you know, I might double check, I might put my hand on their shoulder if if they're okay with it. Um it might be a good just just any kind of physical connection like a handshake or a high five or or something that allows some connection there. And then if it's two people, uh there may come a point at which I'm instructing them on just doing a safe check-in kind of touch, you know, where you're holding hands with each other or um putting you know their hands on the other person's upper arms and slowly sliding towards the forearm, right? Just the it's the pacing. And if they're really, really don't know what they're doing and they and they want this kind of instruction, I'll even go so far as to say, you know, do you feel what I'm doing to your arm right now? Do you feel the pressure I'm using? Do that with this person now, you know. Um, I don't often get into the physical um teaching like that, but but sometimes that's been helpful when people are just unsure of themselves, they don't know what to do. They have a beautiful opportunity to make the other person feel safe and loved. Um and they're blowing it if they don't. So it's like, okay, sound like the presentation.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that word you just said, love, feeling love. And when you're talking about grounding yourself and centering yourself, and then putting out almost like a vibration or a feeling wave, it almost sounds like you're describing the act of generating love within yourself and beginning to send love out. Is that yeah, kind of accurate?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Um, I think one of the reasons why I don't mind, like I don't feel drained by dealing with people's stuff, is partly because I drop into a place of like compassionate feelings, right? So I'm going into the space of I don't need to feel what they're feeling, I just need to know about what they're feeling, and I need to care about them, I need to have a desire to be helpful in some way. And so that's kind of um if I can generate feelings of love like that, that type of agape style love, then it puts me in a better place to feel resilient, and also um, I don't feel like I've absorbed a bunch of yucky stuff, right? Like I can stay in a I can stay as a as a light in the midst of the darkness, if you will. Like if there's something difficult.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I I love, I want to touch upon that agape love you mentioned. And the way you're describing it, almost feels like the thing that pops my mind is a chess match. Like you are the proverbial white, the good guys with the love. And over there across from you is the black, the depression, the anger, the bitterness, the things that they've never forgiven, just sitting there. And it's like you're playing a chess match with them. You're sending out your love and testing what they're gonna do with their moves, and you're trying to get all your love down to their side. Is that kind of accurate? Like you're well, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You know, I I never really thought of it as a chess move, but definitely when you say that, what I think of is strategy, right? Like it absolutely requires you to have be a keen strategist. Um, but I guess my frame with it is more like um I'm negotiating with the if I were the shaman in that case, I'm negotiating with this obtrusive spirit that's been bugging them, right? And and I'm I'm not necessarily trying to demonize them, but to sort of say, you know, is it really necessary? Like, is there another way we can do this? Can can, you know, can you find a uh more beneficial way to use that energy, right? Like, like most of the time I'm finding you know convincing ways to um get the aspects of the the problem state to work itself out without being it's not like I want to jump in boldly and be some kind of dramatic, like out, demons, out, you know, and be like creating Magnus Carlson of the chess world coming like I'll take you all on at once. Yeah, it's it's it's more like I kind of just see the entire person and and and have a respect for uh sovereignty, really. Like I I feel that if I can invoke their highest and best by by getting them to talk about the things that are their highest and best, um, and if I begin to match that vibration or that quality and um speak to them in that way and hold that, kind of hold it in the sense of, I believe you are this, I have faith that you are this, and then speak from that place. That's the suggestive part of it that I think is really important, is that you know, the therapeutic relationship you've built is affecting them and they're getting better even beyond the things that you might think to do with all your years of healing experience. You might not have thought about that, but but because you're trusting that something higher, in this case, um, you know, higher aspirations, uh higher principles, purpose, vision, you know, a deeper sense of connection to the mystery or or even to the mission itself that they have. If we can stay congruent and aligned with that, it makes the rest of it easier. The rest of it just kind of flows from that.

SPEAKER_01

So, what's possible in this space where you're holding them in this? Magic. Magic. That's your and some would call it miracles. So let's what kind of miracles have you seen?

SPEAKER_00

Well, I mean or magic.

SPEAKER_01

We'll use that word. Because I feel we start getting afraid when we label it as a miracle without recognizing. It's like the rainbow. You know, we know how a rainbow works, yet we can still call it, we can all agree that's a miracle.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I mean, it really comes down to the definitions, right? Like yeah. Yeah. In my book, um, there's a lot to life that is magical. Um, and there's a lot to life that I would consider a miracle. You know, um, the fact that we were even that we even became who we are as human beings is a miracle, right? Um, that you or I were born out of um you know, millions of genetic possibilities is a miracle. Uh, some might call it chance, but I don't really feel drawn to call it that, really. It feels more respectful of the bigger picture to sort of say, like, wow, this is just incredible that this can happen. Uh so in a session, the things that I find mirror to be miraculous or uh impressive, right? Um when people's spontaneous autoimmune stuff goes away. That's a huge deal. That's a huge deal. I remember um uh a dear uh call a friend of mine who I knew in in junior high school um went through some serious health problems. And she had moved away, she was in in uh Scandinavia, and the doctors were just totally perplexed about her. And I didn't know how I'd be able to help, but I knew that I cared about her. You know, I felt a lot of love in my heart for her, and I didn't want her to suffer. Um, and so we did a couple of sessions just remotely over the phone. Um, and those sessions were quite long because I I felt like I was just sort of taking her on a journey. And in that journey, I I installed um hypnotically different kinds of uh bridges to um bridges to resources, I guess you could say, like metaphorical bridges, um, based on things that I knew about or based on things that we had talked about, and based on things that I just imagined and intuited. Um, and we just did that. And there was a lot of uh deep sense of resonance and care that went into it. And um having her tell me that all of a sudden all of the symptoms went away, the doctors were confused, all of a sudden she could go running again. I mean, there's all these things that she was no longer bedridden. You know, it was tempting to say, wow, I did that, right?

SPEAKER_02

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00

But it was also I felt cautious about that because um really what I need to feel is just grateful.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I was wondering. If you felt something moving between you and her, so like you were there and she was there, yet either one of you is not responsible for that. I feel like you probably felt something back to that energy. You probably felt that energy moving between you and her. That healing energy, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it was a bit like um the journey I was taking her on was absolutely the journey that I was on. I was like sort of uh translucently, you know, in the vision, in the experience, right? Right. Um, and I didn't end it until I felt complete, right? Um, and there have been a few things like that with people um, you know, really bad back problems, and um they want to go uh on a vacation to Mexico and do some climbing, and they couldn't do it until they came to me for a session and suddenly, you know, their back problem went away. Now, granted, I felt a little cautious about that because I'm like, you know, you gotta make sure you get checked, right? Like that was part of the thing. It's like, yeah, we had really good results with getting rid of those feelings, and she felt fantastic. But I said, just make sure you get cleared by a doctor, right? Right, right. Um, so she did do that. Um, and I felt better about that. I um I definitely um on the on the side of the kind of eerie and you know um esoteric, um, definitely the synchronicity aspect of um when people let's say we we talk about some important things, like uh I don't know, your estranged father or something like that. And then that week um the father calls, right? After doing a hypnotic ritual that involved connecting with the father in a mirror and doing a whole bunch of stuff. Um, to have that happen afterward is also like another indicator of like, well, that would definitely qualify as a sort of paranormal type of excuse. Right. Yeah. Even the the feeling of it when it happened was just like this um hair standing on the back of your neck, feeling right, the goosebumps.

SPEAKER_02

Yep.

SPEAKER_00

Um I I I pay a lot of attention to when I get um I get a visceral feeling. It's it basically goes up my fingers, through my arm, across my chest as my nipples get hard. Yeah, yeah, my my skin on my arms become like chicken skin. Yeah, and it always goes like this, left to right.

SPEAKER_01

Interesting. Yeah, interesting. Just like say the orbit of the earth. It's like everything is spinning in a certain direction, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And it'll be like just like instant, like they're just like, oh, all of a sudden I've got this feeling across my chest, and I'm covering my chest. Um because it's it's just like this instantaneous feeling, and that's clearly one of the ways that my nervous system is communicating to me that it's noticed something that it's made an association to, right? So it's intuiting something through the sensory acuity of my nervous system that it's satisfied whatever quality it was to create that signal, and it tends to be when these um intuitive events happen in with clients and and uh sometimes outside.

SPEAKER_01

That's so cool, and we love these stories because they're so dramatic and they inspire us. And yet, I feel in a lot of us, especially me, you always have that back speaker saying, What about the other people? So, like, yeah, I know I've had clients come to me and I couldn't, you know, I sure you see the good things with some clients, and other clients they walk away still with that autoimmune disease. Yeah. So, how does that happen? How does the healing happen for some and not others?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think I don't think anybody has all the answers to that. It's it's just theory, right? Like what I what I would say is is um it has a lot to do with readiness. Um I I can even recognize times in my own life when I wasn't feeling ready, even though I went and I wanted to be free of the discomfort. But there was something that I had a hard time putting my finger on, but it was like something inside was not ready. Um so I'm not saying that's always the case, but I think that probably that has a big part, plays a big part.

SPEAKER_01

It feels very much like Taoism, like step forward when is the right time to step forward?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Effortless the effortless effort that you're ready now the middle way versus trying to force the issue.

SPEAKER_00

How many people have you met in your life who didn't think as deeply or in as many layered levels as you? Have you run into a lot of people in your life?

SPEAKER_01

I have a unicorn, man. Like everywhere I turned, just be before I came on this podcast. I just had this thought about autism and gene expression. And yeah, and like I mentioned it to my fiance who's studying to be a social worker and is literally reading a DSM right now as part of her curriculum. And I'm like, what if it was the other way around?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And then it just caused this big fight. I'm like, I'm not trying to cause a fight. I'm just asking, what if? What's the possibility here? So it's rare, man. It's rare.

SPEAKER_00

That's what I mean. So I bring that up because um there will be a lot of people who say they want something. That doesn't necessarily mean that when they say they want it, it's coming from the entire congruence of their whole being wanting it. Right. Right. Right. Um, if you even asked most people what their values are, they're gonna give you a whole bunch of nonsense that is not connected to the value.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, dude, it's it's so funny. You mentioned those synchronous moments. Yeah. Today I've been reading through the Course in Miracles, and it's over 365 days. Uh-huh. And so I'm on day like 22, or I forget the number day I am in. But today's thing is the thought that you just meditate on is I do not really know what I want. So you're like, you see this pen, and you're like, I want that pen. Okay, what's the reason behind that? What's the reason behind that? And pretty soon you'll be like, I don't really know what I want. I don't know if I want the pen because I want to impress my neighbor, if I want the pen just because I like pen, you know, like we don't really know. And there's often conflicting thoughts. Like, I don't want to spend the money for the pen, yet I want the pen. And so we don't really know what we want.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah. I mean, um, think of people like here's a really simple kind of example. People in high school who they they fall in puppy love with that one unattainable person, right? And then they they might maybe they're drawing pictures and you know, writing their name on a piece of paper and putting flowers and different kinds of images around them or whatever it is. It's almost like they're doing their little fantasy magic, right? On that experience. And then that's only to find out later on when they see them in a different context, they realize, wow, that person's mean or shallow or wow, gross. Why would why would I want that? Right. So it in the same way. I mean, just give me an example of like how just because people you have to respect what people tell you, but you also have to, I think, be sane about it. Like you got to run everything through a filter, right? Someone saying, I want to quit smoking, or I want to um really deal with my gambling addiction or something. It doesn't necessarily represent the whole truth. That's what our job is, is to kind of do our best to respect and not bulldoze them, but at the same time be a little bit of a Colombo and kind of figure out what's really going on behind the scenes. They may not even know what's going on.

SPEAKER_01

I like how you talked about negotiation earlier because it's like we have these different parts. Like, for instance, me part of me wants to be healthy, the other part of me wants to stay up late and play Pokemon and eat pizza, you know? It's like there's these these parts, they're just disparate parts. And then so you, Carlos, as to hitting a therapist starting a negotiator to get these parts to come together. It's like, how can we both be happy within us?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, the question you ask about about why sometimes people just don't heal. Um, I think that's part of it, is people not being ready. And readiness includes um being totally congruent about it. Like, are you gonna be okay with this once we do this? What's gonna change? Have you done an ecology check? How's it gonna affect your relationships? How's it gonna affect your identity? How's it gonna affect your job? How's it gonna affect everything? Right? For some people, they don't think that that's even intelligent to ask that question. What do you mean? Of course I want to quit smoking. Smoking's bad for you, right? Yeah, but I'm not debating that it's it's it's healthy or something, just in relation to you in your life and as a lifestyle, letting go of the habit and replacing it with something else. Are you really ready to do that? Are you ready to confront yourself? Are you ready to be honest if you if you fuck up, right? If you if you drop the ball, are you willing to say, yeah, I dropped the ball this week, you know, I had a couple cigarettes or whatever. Um it's the willingness to be honest to to to embrace the setback and go, hey, what happened? Let's do an after action report, you know, let's learn from this.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um, you know.

SPEAKER_01

I almost feel like sometimes honesty and the truth is the quietest voice in the room. Sometimes society might be telling that man, like, you need to do this. And it's like, man, I'm tired of the shouting all the time. And that quiet voice is, I just want a little break, man.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And maybe they're they don't want to quit because they just want a little break. But then I want to steer it totally, not totally different, but when hypnosis works is almost a hundred percent of the time. And what I'm thinking of is like pain management, for instance. We know hypnosis works great for anxiety, we know it works great for pain management almost a hundred percent of the time. And um, how do you get that confidence? Is hypnosis for pain? And when I say pain management, in my head, I'm thinking dental work because you took over a lot of Scott Salin's uh clients, and there he did a lot of dental work and even like skull surgery. He told a story where he went in and hypnotized this lady to just not feel pain, and then she went in wide awake for an hour and a half of skull surgery, and he had to be outside of the room. Yeah, just like I I know I'm a decent hypnotist, but I don't have the confidence to say to someone, you now can be pain-free for an hour and a half while someone drills on your skull.

SPEAKER_02

Yes, yep. Yep, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So how would how do you transcend to that level of confidence in hypnotists? Is it a different technique? Is it uh what is going on there?

SPEAKER_00

It always helps to have enough in the way of techniques that you can fall back on different stuff, right? That that's always gonna be the case. That uh it helps to feel some competency. Otherwise, you're doing Dunning-Kruger effect, right? Um, thinking that you're better than you actually are. Right. I think you can go in. So we we have competency and we have confidence, two different things. When you're dealing with someone else's serious situation, you you know, you need to demonstrate some competency. You know, that's important. And you can just do that through practice, and you can gain that part. But the confidence part is more of a I almost said a trick. It's not a trick, it's a hack. That's a better word for it. It's a hack. So, how do you hack confidence? It's really kind of simple. Ask yourself like, what's the physiology of confidence that's um somewhat relaxed and full? Yeah, right. That's the physiology. It's like, okay, my body feels full, but there's a sense of you know, no excess tension, right? Just whatever needs to be to feel like the natural tensegrity of your body, but but relaxed and full, kind of expanded physiology. So you're feeling somewhat good about yourself in relation to everything else, right? So that's important because confidence means you know, confidere is to proceed with faith, right? So, how do you have faith as you move into the unknown? Because that's really what we're talking about, the relative unknown. Well, understand that you're always entering into the unknown with a lack of knowledge. That's that's a basic NLP presupposition. We all we who study NLP know that one. You're always proceeding into the unknown with a with a lack of knowledge, always, no exceptions. Uh, so if you can accept that and you can recognize that you need a relaxed, open, expanded physiology, then what's what's what else needs to be there? Probably curiosity and enthusiasm or interest, right? I'm really interested in this, right? If I had a card trick and I wanted to do it for you and I didn't want to screw it up, um, a confident version of me would just say, you know what, I'm just gonna do this. He probably, you know, I'm just gonna do it with with gusto, right? I'm gonna put my energy into this. I'm gonna embrace the role. If something happens, like I screw up and I fling one of the cards upside down or something, I'll make a joke about it. Or I'll pretend that I did it on purpose or something, because you don't know the trick. Right, right. With hypnosis, people don't know the trick usually. You know, you're always going in and you can make some mistakes. That's the thing. Um, there are serious no-no mistakes, and then there are really mild, um, unnoticeable kinds of irrelevant types of mistakes. All that matters is that the person who's being hypnotized is highly motivated to do this. Like they don't want to feel pain and they they're allergic to the you know the the chemicals, so they gotta do it this right. So there's a high need, a high expectation. Uh maybe uh as as Scott Sandlin likes to say, the ritual to what is it, ritual to expectation ratio, right? If if they're um if your expectation is very high, they don't need quite as much ritual. If they don't know what to think, you might have to do more ritual to convince them that they've been hypnotized. But you can always work into the kind of thing that you're talking about with Scott gradually, right? You get to a point where they might be willing to um put a sterilized pin in the back of their hand, or or maybe willing to be pinched or something like that, um, or to do ice, right? You could you can test it over time. And when I worked with a a gal who had her wisdom teeth removed without any um uh anesthetic, uh she just really believed she could. And so I worked with her just a couple of times, and she was able to get that level of anesthetization as well as um uh a lack of anesthesia. I'm sorry, a lack of um pain. No, sorry, anxiety. That's the word I was looking for. Um so just having her be confident in herself, like believing this could work and that she can go into a vacation mode in her mind, and she can be partially aware of what's going on in the room, but she doesn't have to pay that close of attention because you got professionals around, and you know, that ability for her to have that control to kind of steer her attention and and her signals in her own consciousness that way, yeah, giving her that confidence didn't take long for her. For another person, it would, you know, like like everyone's different.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And looking back on Scott's story, he was probably crapping bricks because he only had and we all want to succeed. Well, he only had like a day, day and a half before the surgery. He's just notified similar, yeah. So, like, not like a lot of time to really prepare. And you mentioned going to that vacation mode. So, as the teacher, as the hypnotist yourself, how often do you find yourself going voluntarily into that vacation mode? Because that sounds awesome.

SPEAKER_00

Well, if you're asking me when I use that with my clients, or are you asking no yourself?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, the self-hypnosis, the self going on vacation.

SPEAKER_00

Um not as much for me. It's been more, at least lately over the past couple of years, it's been more um kind of going back in time and making edits, kind of doing memory reconsolidation. Um because I've been very inspired over the past couple of years. So I actually created a um like an eight-week training course um in that particular modality. So I find myself doing that a lot, myself kind of going, yeah, finding a point in time that that could use more resources or I could get some insight, or maybe change the the narrative a little around something so that I get a different experience in the present.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so for the un people unaware here, and I'll just use myself as an example. That's something I haven't been very public about was being sexually abused as a child. And then so that seems like a perfect opportunity to rewrite history, is basically what you're saying. Yes, and then so are you recreating history so that way your present day is different?

SPEAKER_00

In a way, you're changing the way you're showing up for yourself in that experience, and so you could say that yes, the memory does get modified through that process. I mean, you are reconsolidating it, uh, you're remembering it, right? Like members, your arms and your legs, right? You're putting things back together, recreating, right? Um, memory is as you know, and most people who are studying hypnosis these days know. That um memories are not fixed, you know, they they they change depending on the state of mind that you're in when you remember it. So one way is they they say the easiest way to remember something is to not ever think of it again because you're not modifying the memory at all. Yeah, everything that you remember is being affected by your state, you just don't know it.

SPEAKER_01

Right. And I totally get that. I totally get it.

SPEAKER_00

Memory syndrome is a real thing, it does happen.

SPEAKER_01

Right. And I understand how as hypnotists you can recreate memories or add things that weren't there, and then it's possible you can remember things that were there. Yeah, and the the part that I struggle with mentally is so like as a child, I try to escape. That feels like a real memory to me.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Like it feels like that was practically documented. So do we change it as if it didn't happen? Like I did escape. Is that the new memory?

SPEAKER_00

I don't generally do it that way, no. Um for me, I think it seems uh more respectful to the totality of who you are to start exploring what would allow you to know that you had an experience like that and to no longer feel triggered by it. What what qualities would have to be there for you to not be triggered by it? Be able to say, yeah, I recognize that that happened. Um, it would never happen again. It will, and and now I see that deep down inside of that experience, I've always had resources. I didn't always know how to tap into them, but now I do.

SPEAKER_01

That's beautiful, yeah. And and it really, that's the answer I like a lot because I know with Tad James, he talked about doing the N minus one and plus one of the of the event. And like, okay, that kind of makes sense that way. If you see a similar trigger, you're not gonna be triggered in the same way. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00

In my experience, it does change, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um sexual trauma and abuse is you know, it's sadly a very, very common thing. So, you know, it it's so common that if you are good at making your clients feel safe, there's no doubt that sooner or later clients gonna admit that, right? It's just it's just so common.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_00

One in three, one in five, you know, I mean, depending on the type of population you're dealing with.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. Uh when you were saying that too, I was just thinking how my fiance, she works with immigrants, and yeah, it's pretty high rate uh in certain populations. And I like what you said though about how you now you're giving yourself resources in the past so that you have those resources to make sure that past event doesn't happen again. Yeah, you're better equipped with those resources.

SPEAKER_00

And there are a lot of ways to do it. Um, I wrote a manual that's um gonna be um extended into a book um as soon as I have time to finish it, but the manual's finished, but the book isn't um on this particular topic. And there are so many ways to do the same thing, right? Many roads lead to Rome. Um you know, I was just reading a couple of weeks ago about some studies that they were doing that confirmed that simply um going back into the memory and bringing, like, let's say, the therapist into the memory, and having the therapist, you know, protect the person or scold the person off or whatever, and having them picture that really clearly, and then going like 10 minutes into the future and then kind of coming back to the present, that alone edited the memory. Interesting. A large portion of the of the subjects. So they were basically showing that that that um their access to the traumatic aspect of it was greatly reduced.

SPEAKER_01

So they remembered the event, but it kind of surprised them a little that they were like it's almost like recoding the trauma of it. Like how our emotions code the event. And by looking at it in different ways, whether it's rewind technique or whatever you call it, it's like the event is coded now differently. It's the same event, but just has a different emotional impact on you.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, like I mean, people who do NLP usually know what they call the fast rewind. Yeah. Um, sometimes they call it the phobia model or different things. Um, but um, or or RTM, the reconsolidation of traumatic memories that's been used with uh um war veterans and things like that, which is an NLP technique, by the way. Um RTM. Uh in fact, the two people working on that model uh for the psychology association that they were working on, it was uh uh Steve and Connie Ray Andreas. So even though they weren't calling it NLP because of the prejudice against NLP.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's gonna be my question. You're writing this this manuscript that'll be into a book, then how do you get this book into universities? If it works, it works, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'm not gonna worry about that. I'm just gonna I'm gonna share my information, yeah. Um, and people will do with it whatever they do with it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's part of uh what's that book? The war of art, you know, you just are responsible for the art, and then whatever happens after that.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01

I'm I'm wondering, and that's very Dallas W2, that woo-wee, you know. Yeah, that's hard. That's hard as a human to have that on the touch.

SPEAKER_00

It's above my pen grade. Mine too, you know, and then amorfati. You know amorfati? No, so so it's just kind of a stoic um guideline. There's a mentor mori, right? Which is Latin for remember death, always it's basically very similar to the Buddhist idea of a niche impermanence. Everything is nothing's gonna last, and death is always near, right? Like, so so make friends with now, even however you young you are, make friends with death because it'll never be far away. Right the other side of that is they call the formula for living um a successful life kind of thing, is mementumori amorfati. Amorfati means love your fate. So if you can change something, uh great, you have influence to change it, go change it. If you cannot change something, it's out of your control, then great, it's out of your hands. Accept that there's probably a lesson uh in it, and that you have the strength to overcome it to the best of your ability. And and basically, if you do those two things, if you can accept death and you can accept your fate, it leaves you a lot of flex room to then be creative with what you have. Like what how do I live a life that I'm proud of? How do I appreciate every moment as if it were my last? How do I um move gracefully and resiliently through life? That kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01

All I picture while you're talking, you're talking these concepts. I picture the Egyptian book of the dead, uh like going through the death to like wrestle like every night. You know, he goes and wrestles with the God Rah and the darkness and the sleep, and then it comes out and it's a brand new day. Um, and speaking of, you mentioned just a moment ago roads to Rome, all roads lead to Rome. I want to go to that in just a moment. Everyone that's listening, watching Carlos will give you all a little hypnotic gift of sorts. We'll get to that just in a moment. And this last question, I'm wondering, well, not last question, but in roads to Rome, going back to that woo adjacent, and we're talking about going down the rabbit hole. Do all the rabbit holes eventually lead to the same place?

SPEAKER_00

I wouldn't put it that way. No, I'd say they would they lead to different places. But uh, there are some roads that do lead to the same place, um, but they get there differently. Um, I don't think it would be, at least I personally wouldn't summarize it as all the same place, but I would say that uh many things have equal value depending on context. Um so for example, um you know, is hypnosis or hypnotic trance states the same as um a heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms? I don't think they are.

SPEAKER_01

No, they're not the same thing, they're different roads, but they may lead to the same place.

SPEAKER_00

What place is that?

SPEAKER_01

Right. Well, you mentioned a person's highest good before. So I feel like if we believe in this thing of high vibration, like we're all seeking that, you know, the full consciousness of the movie early on.

SPEAKER_00

That you can chunk up, you know, the term chunk up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the sense that you can chunk up to things that become undifferentiated, then yes, all roads lead to the same place.

SPEAKER_01

The the oneness. And I guess the context I have is being a former Christian pastor, and then now I'm into Buddhism, and people in the Christian realm are like all upset because I'm into Buddhism. And the thing is, the way I see it is that everyone's pointing at the same thing. We just get so fixed on who's doing the pointing. It's like, oh, Jesus is pointing. No, Moses is pointing, you know, Buddha's pointing. Well, what are they pointing at?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's it's um we play the game, you know, in basic NLP class where you know, chunk up from train and chunk, you know, chunk laterally from car. You know, we we do these little games where we're we're we're playing with the level of abstraction, right, in the language. And uh, you know, at some point you get to something like existence. And how do you chunk up from existence? You know, there are a few words like that that you could interpret as you know, we don't have a logical concept that's that's bigger than that, right? Right. Uh, like if I said everything, you know, or right, even nothing. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, it's like I was about to say when you said existence, what's a chunk up of that? And I the first response was non-existence, but I was saying no, they're they're at the same existence and non-existence are the same. And then here for those listening, is I'm making kind of like a yin and yang symbol, you know, it's like a flowing balance.

SPEAKER_00

Well, and because what stimulated this was you saying, you know, do do I think they're all going to the same place? I think like when you say they, I was interpreting that to mean like um someone who might do Reiki healing versus someone who does um Ericksonian, you know, hypnotherapy. Right. Are they going to the same place? I I don't know that we could say that in all fairness, they're going to the same place, but we could say that there might be equal value depending on someone might respond better to the energetic um inductive experience, and and maybe there's something going on there beyond just the words.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And another person who's having the Eric Ericksonian hypnotherapy experience might be having something happen spiritual that the hypnotist doesn't even know is happening. So so we're dealing with a lack of ability to really truly witness everything because we can't. We can't witness everything, we can only witness what we're capable of witnessing. Human beings are generally horrible at being their own witness, like that, you know, other people can notice tons of things that you don't even notice about yourself, and yeah, vice versa. You know things about yourself that nobody else is noticing, right? So so it's just there's just a lot of um blurry gray areas that can't be covered. I love it. I love it all. We should all have respect for the different directions people go, and there can be reasons for going in different directions, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I like what you're saying too. You're mentioning like you might have Reiki and you might have Ericksonian hypnosis, and I like how you said and my question to you about pain is you have several different things you can fall back on that might work. So you're well-rounded, and you're obviously one of the most well-rounded, most respected if Scott is recommending me to talk to you. So thank you again for being here. And before we get to the hypnotic gift, just one question. When I ask, I wonder what bubbles up for you when I say if you had one message to tell the world right now, what would that one message be?

SPEAKER_00

Remember that we're all in this together. Beautiful. That's really it. Doesn't matter what you call yourself, it doesn't matter uh what labels you want to use um or what political party you happen to be on, you can feel free to argue with me on this if you want to, but it doesn't change the fact that we are all in this together.

SPEAKER_01

I love it.

SPEAKER_00

Beautiful. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

All right, folks, if you're driving, uh just I encourage you to pause and get to a place where you can be just relaxed and engaged with the following process at your comfort and leisure just for a little bit. Thank you so much, Carlos.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you're welcome. First of all, for anyone who is hearing my voice right now, I'm grateful for your time and I'm grateful for your openness. And if you'll allow me to serve you for a moment by guiding you with a few encouraging words. Take my words in the way that it lands for you just right. So wherever that is for you, this may affect you in your health, your physical health, uh, it may affect you in your feelings, your philosophy.Anywhere you want my words to land, you just place them there. And if you're in a seated position or a lying position, or if you're even going for a walk, whatever it is, put your attention on the body for a moment. Just notice. Notice that as you're in one position, you can feel the shape of your body. And if you're sensitive, you can feel where gravity is flowing into you. Meaning you'll feel that vertical relationship. The bones that carry the muscles in the skin are very much like the hanger hanging clothes off of it. Imagine if your crown had a sky hook, like one of those scion skeletons hanging beautifully off of the hook. And if you can take some of your attention and place it on the skull at the very top, you might imagine that there's some kind of permeability or an aperture that opens. In the same way that a beautiful flower spreads its petals to receive the light of the sun. Imagine that you could look upward. You could gaze with fascination at a skylight or a beautiful glowing space above you. It's just your imagination, but you'll find that as you're imagining it, the awareness gets stronger. And you can say yes to this light, simply acknowledging that this beautiful light holds something vital for you. Be it a pure energy, a set of insights, a realignment of the subtler aspects of you, or just a pure healing sensation. And as you invite this light to come down into you, as you make yourself more and more spacious, you gaze upward and feel it flowing down in you the same way as if you're pouring a milk into a glass container. All that beautiful flow would go all the way down, down, down into the depths of your being, and as it fills you from the inside out, you might begin to notice that even your breathing has begun to shift. We start by breathing with intentionality, drawing the breath in and out, and even watching and experiencing this breath until it feels as though the breath is breathing through us without any effort. No longer are we doing the breath, but we are experiencing the breath as it moves effortlessly deep inside of you and all throughout your body, beyond your lungs, into your skin. Even the pores of your skin begin to become permeable as you exchange this energy with the atmosphere around you. Every inhalation drawing this light deep down into your core, filling your essential energy, filling you into your core and exchanging with this universal force, knowing that deep inside of you is the reminder of the spark of insight, the spark of genius, the generative force, the generative intelligence, the breathing through, connecting and expanding beyond your body now. Into the atmosphere around you. Expanding and expanding from a beautiful place of centeredness. A place that expands beyond the room that you may be in, out into the sky. Larger and larger into the atmosphere. As if you can become everything around you. And the larger you become, the easier it gets. Effortless experience. Bliss and all the things you can imagine having in your life. Beautiful things that you might desire to experience more of. They are drawn to you like warmth is being drawn into you. All of the things that you could deeply want. All of the resources you could possibly need. All available to you. Drawing in deeper and deeper. Drifting and following into this daydream. A place beyond limitations, out here. You purely being you. And we invite this originality, we invite these insights, and we invite this wisdom to find its way weaving back inside of you in ways that benefit your life, that bring you abundance and prosperity and health and clarity and peace, connection. We remind you that you have a solid, healthy body. We remind your energetic system that it knows where to coalesce and store deep inside of you. And you are reminded where you are in space right now, physically. In the room or wherever you are, orienting yourself in the here and now. And you can find that your eyes will open when it's time for your eyelids to open. Unlocking themselves effortlessly as you come into the present state, taking a breath, moving your fingers and body, opening your eyes and seeing and noticing a different quality. quality of light. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So good. So good. Carlos, thank you again. We'll make sure that we have your links to everything you got going on. You talked about a lot. You got you got a lot of pots on the stove. You haven't you got an extra stove just for all your pots.

SPEAKER_00

That's true. Well it was lovely talking with you. Yeah. Yeah. And I look forward to any other conversations we get into in the future. Yeah. There's so many things we could talk about. It's just it's oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So much fun, man. All right. Take care everybody.

unknown

Take