Close to Fifty Years of Practicing Something I Still Can’t Name

I was 15 when I found a Psychology Today article about self-hypnosis, and something in me recognized it immediately as something I needed to know how to do. I do not remember the details of the article anymore. I remember the feeling: that there was a thing that could be learned, a thing that could be practiced, a thing that would give me access to something I did not have. I tried it. It worked. I have been doing it ever since, which means I have been practicing this for close to fifty years, and I still do not know what to call it, which seems important somehow, like the naming would be the wrong kind of precision.

In high school, I tried an experiment with a cigarette held against the back of my hand to see if I could override the pain response. I could. Not all the way. The pain was still there. But it was like I had moved to a different floor of the building. It was there, but I was somewhere else. I remember being struck by that as evidence that the mind and the body were not as bound together as I had thought, that there was a space between the stimulus and the response, and in that space you could do something. Decades later, I would read Epictetus and understand what he meant: that we do not control what happens, we control only our response, and that space between the two is the whole ballgame. But I knew that at 15. I just did not have the words for it.

The treadmill is where it works best now. I have a morning practice, and the treadmill is the place where ideas come loose from wherever they are stuck and present themselves clearly. I am running, and somewhere around mile two something opens up. The conscious mind stops pushing so hard and the other thing gets to work. Ideas come in pieces. Solutions arrive that I was not even looking for. Sometimes I will get an insight into a problem I have not thought about in months, and it will just appear with full architecture intact, like it had been sitting under the surface waiting for the treadmill to come along and shake it loose. I bring my phone sometimes and I voice note everything because the things that surface do not survive the transition back to ordinary consciousness without being written down. The moment you stop running and you come back into regular thinking, the clarity starts to fade. You have to capture it while you are still in it.

The forgiveness work happens in there too. I will run back through versions of myself, through mistakes and small cruelties, through times I was wrong and did not know it, through years when I was scared and that fear came out as something sharp. And somewhere in the treadmill state I can choose not to blame that kid, not to blame the teenager who did not know any better, not to blame the man who was wrong because he had never been taught to be right. The treadmill state allows something like grace toward yourself. You can see the person you were from a distance. You can understand why they did what they did without deciding that they were not worth understanding. That is harder to do in regular consciousness. The regular mind wants to judge. The treadmill mind wants to understand.

The seventh chakra focus is the language I use sometimes, though I am not really a chakra person. It is just the language that comes closest to describing what the feeling is like. A kind of opening at the top of the head, an elevation, a shift from ground-level thinking into something that has more space in it. Power naps are part of the practice too. I learned years ago, driving long distances, that if you can drop into something for 20 minutes, you wake up completely restored. Not rested in the normal way. Restored. Like you had descended into the water and come back out again. It is not sleep and it is not meditation and it is not hypnosis in the traditional sense, though it might be something on that spectrum. It is the thing that works, and I have stopped trying to name it precisely.

The honest answer is that I do not know what I have been practicing for close to fifty years. I have no clinical language for it. No tradition that I am formally part of. I just know that it works. I know that there is a state that I can access, that I have always been able to access, and that in that state something happens. The walls thin. The problems look different. The person you are feels different. And the things you do in that state stick with you. They are real. The insights are real. The forgiveness is real. The clarity is real. You do not have to understand a thing for it to be real. Some of the most important things we do are the ones we cannot fully describe, the ones we keep doing because something in us recognizes that they are necessary, even when we do not have the vocabulary for why. That is what this is. That is what it has always been. And after close to fifty years, I am still showing up to the treadmill and dropping in, not because I understand it, but because I trust it. And sometimes that is enough.