The Path We Can’t See

Sometimes clients ask me how I ended up doing the work I do with hypnosis. Honestly? It’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t have a beautiful, linear origin story. No five-year plan. No childhood dream of becoming a hypnotist. I followed a thread, and somehow, here I am. On some level, I think the work was seeking me long before I knew I was looking for it.

For most of my life, I was pretty good at doing the normie thing. I had jobs—good jobs, actually. Safe jobs. I worked as an accountant for more than 20 years. I had relationships, friends, communities, a home, plans. I also left a marriage, lost most of my friends, left spiritual communities, moved from the country I grew up in to one where I didn’t speak the language, and unsuccessfully tried to build a life with my son’s father. So, you know. Normal.

Somewhere in between all of that, I travelled around the world, often alone, explored myself through jungle medicines, naively walked through the Amazon alone at times...and kept pulling at the thread of whatever was underneath this whole human experience. Because even when life looked pretty good on paper, there was always something deeper within me asking to be remembered.

I think that’s the thing about our highest self. It’s annoyingly persistent. You can ignore it. You can distract yourself. You can make more money, achieve more things, get the house, the relationship, the career, the accolades, the spiritual identity… and that deeper part of you will still be sitting there like, Cute. But is this actually what you came here for?

We go through seasons of perceived success all the time, and there’s nothing wrong with success. But sometimes we confuse having a life that works with having a life that is actually ours.

Dolores Cannon once told a story about an extremely successful man who came to see her after surviving a plane crash. He had lost his fortune as a result and wanted to understand why it had happened. More importantly, he wanted his money back. What he discovered was that, in this incarnation, he was meant to live a spiritual life—not a material one.

He had become so invested in the material world that he genuinely believed he was happy. He thought his life was perfect. Until life disagreed. Apparently, life had to get pretty dramatic about it before he was willing to look inward.

Sound familiar?

I meet people all the time who have gone through massive life shifts. People whose lives have blown apart. People who are in the middle of a complete rewrite. And then there are the ones who quietly admit they’ve been wishing for something to change for years.

So what do we do? Do we learn to listen when the whisper comes, or do we wait until the universe has to throw a brick through the window? Because apparently, both are options. Sometimes we listen. Sometimes we need the brick. There’s no shame in either one. We are creators. We get to choose.

My own path into hypnosis started when I began questioning my relationship with psychedelics and plant medicines. I started wondering: How do I access those same energies without taking anything? How do I connect with that depth without needing to consume a drop of medicine? What if the thing I’m looking for isn’t actually outside of me at all?

And then I got an answer.

Which sounds very mystical and profound until I tell you that I had never even heard of Dolores Cannon. She showed up to me as a vision—an older, grandma-like woman with a smile and a short perm, essentially telling me from the ethers to look her up and start studying.

Okay……I looked her up. And I followed the thread.

This is now the same advice I give my clients in QHHT hypnosis sessions: follow the thread. Don’t worry about figuring out the entire damn tapestry. Start with what’s in front of you. Notice what you notice. Experience what is there. Then see what comes next.

No need to judge it. No need to make it mean something immediately. No need to know where it’s going. Just experience it. Fully.

To me, this is a life principle. A principle of presence. We spend so much time trying to figure out where we’re going that we can miss the rather important fact that our actual life is happening right here.

Your life is here. Now.

And stepping into it may require an old version of your life to fall away. A relationship. A career. A belief. An identity. A version of yourself you worked very hard to become. Sometimes we get to gently release these things, and sometimes we get dragged kicking and screaming. Either way, something new is trying to emerge.

One thing I can tell you is this: you were created for this. Not some future, perfected version of you. You, right now.

One of my favourite teachings from an Ashaninkan Shaman teacher friend of mine is ridiculously simple: don’t worry.  Little by little, step by step, we grow. We evolve. We remember ourselves. It’s about remembering, after all.

And maybe, underneath all of it, we eventually remember that what we’ve been looking for was never really anywhere else than inside of each of us.