In the Nineties, my hypno career began fairly early, with trancing at uni and eventual relocation to a small comics store in town which became a sort of hotspot for erotic hypno.
In 2002, that comic store closed due to tragic and unforeseen circumstances, and that was it for that unofficial little hypno hub.
Not long after that, though, Miss G turned up.
I have to explain. Miss G was what you would call in the trade a domme. Her line of work involved helping out men who needed chastisement for various unspecified misdeeds, and whose fantasies included submitting to a higher power - namely, her.
I'd encountered her once or twice, in the hypno hub. Miss G was a Heathen, a practitioner of Asatru. She was always using the comic store's contacts to acquire books from authors like Nigel Pennick. Occult books, just not the awful Llewellyn commercial stuff. The sort that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end when you so much as hold the book in your hands.
The ones that give you real, practical instructions that work.
Her focus was on seiðr (pronounced "seethe"), an ancient heathen art of trance-weaving. Basically, ASMR techniques to induce trance states.
We met several times, in that comic store. And we'd frequently retreat to the corner cafe afterwards to chat about my technique. And one day, she showed me how seiðr works, and that was the first time she tranced me.
Miss G explained seiðr to me, and taught me more about how to induce trances through methods I had never encountered before, including conversationally.
Part of her research had included a hypnotherapy course, in which she learned about the storytelling trance technique of Milton H Erickson. And as she'd progressed in the course, she explained to me, she realised how much it resembled ancient storytelling techniques from oral tradition societies, where the storyteller would drag the entire community into the stories she would weave, inducing trances through the ASMR of the fireplace, the cadence of her voice, the hypnotic power of the words, the song itself, to weave seiðr in the audience.
You know the spoon-in-the-cup ASMR hypnotic induction sequence in Get Out? She had been using that technique since the Eighties on her clients. That was a form of seiðr.
So, until our paths parted, she taught me many things about being a hypnotist - being responsible for your subjects or clients, how to look after them, how to recruit your unconscious mind into helping me with the instructions.
She taught me a lot. And her biggest lesson to me, her last lesson, was this.
Trust your unconscious mind. It knows how to do this better than you do.
So that was my "apprenticeship" under Miss G who, it seems, was the only domme in the area who used hypnosis as part of her schtick. Truth to tell, as far as I am aware, now that she's gone, there is nobody else in the area who uses hypnosis as part of their schtick.
We last met at the hospital. She had an appointment. I'd come with her to be with her in the waiting room, so she would have some company. I never saw her scared. Not once.
And as the surgeon came for her, her last words to me were "Look after your unconscious mind. And look after your people. You'll know them when they come to you."
That was actually late 2009. December 28th.
I didn't see her again, after that. Just a small notation in the paper, with her legal name, and a date for the funeral.
It took another tragedy, this one a family tragedy, to catalyse me into branching out, casting aside the mantle of apprentice and beginning the next stage - where I am now.
And that story is in the next part, which will lead us up to the present.
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