I really wish it was obvious and clear that learning hypnosis shouldn't stop after the 101/beginner material :( There is so much more and it would help a lot of people who struggle to get the experiences they want.
I get so jealous of the rope community sometimes because rope is obviously, visibly complicated, and you have to really strive for tangible proficiency. This is DEFINITELY not about everyone but I think we settle for too low, in general.
Here's a few spitball ideas of what I might consider different levels of learning material:
Beginner learning:
How to do an induction
Simplified ideas about what hypnosis is
Giving basic suggestions, making triggers
Basic safety practices
Novice learning:
Ideas about ways to play/themes
Simplified âindirectâ suggestion (might/may)
"Standardized" techniques (yes sets, 7+/-2, etc)
Some basic variation around suggesting phenomena (hallucinations, amnesia, etc)
More sophisticated safety practices/theory
Intermediate learning:
Various codified language patterns (NLP/Zebu card etc)
Moving away from âinduction > deepener > suggestionsâ style
Moving away from "standardized" tech
Different models of hypnosis
Beginnings of connecting psych/philosophy/other disciplines
Advanced learning:
Sophisticated command of concepts behind language, less reliance on patterns
Moving fluidly between many models of hypnosis/psych
Sophisticated connections between psych/philosophy/other disciplines
Large breadth of theory/ideas behind techniques
--
It's very hard to codify what "advanced" means
Clearly with my 101 resource (http://learnhypnokink.com) I think we should be teaching certain things much earlier
I believe you can't teach past novice level with one book/resource, and it gets harder to go up from there
(Pulled from my Twitter)
Aye definitely. 100% agree! I wonder how much of the difference compared to say rope is individual learning vs group learning. Yet another indirect consequence of thereâs very few places with a decent concentration of hypnokinksters, let alone decent enough to have good learning environments form in. i.e. To learn rope, youâll find a class thatâs going on (because itâs reasonably common in a lot of areas) so itâs a bit more formalised, and you get lots of exposure to more âadvancedâ stuff and people to talk shop with, and you can THEN find people who specialise in specific directions to take your rope (suspend? self-suspend? dynamic rope? predicaments? ect?). Whereas a lot of us hypnokinksters are self-taught out of necessity. Whether it be via the few books that are out there aimed at us, which as youâve hinted at runs dry a bit past Novice level, so to go further you have to be both dedicated, AND be able to figure out for yourself where you want to go deeper in (pun intended :3). Or via assimilation/trying what works via experience, which is very unformalised and oft leads to people whoâve got a lot of practical experience but arenât able to quantify what they know very well/get very surprised at what would be Beginner/Novice concepts (also all the pseudoscience folklore passed down the ages thatâll forever float through hypnokink land).
Yes I think this is part of it, BUT it's also a chicken/egg question at this point.
Since COVID the online scene for hypnokink has EXPLODED. Hypnokink is like a popular mainstream fantasy at this point and the majority of people engage with it (for play) online. There is, however (comparatively to the entire population of "people into hypnokink online"):
A lack of people interested in education
An exponential disparity between beginner/novice and intermediate practitioners, and even further between intermediate and advanced practitioners
Education in the scene suffers a lot because it's mostly novice-level material that's getting shared around. Maybe that's the one book some people have read, or the few classes they've attended. Then those people are visible online either through just being visible or teaching. There's a smattering of folks teaching intermediate stuff but the issue is that you need to be at a certain level to be able to understand it. Basically no one is teaching/writing advanced material, even the people I can think of who could.
Because you teach down, and the subset of folks who ARE coming to learn are mostly still getting their feet wet with intermediate material.
So mostly we're stuck with a community that is utterly and completely accessible but the pool of knowledge is getting wider and not deeper.
Like you're saying, attending a rope event and watching people do "advanced" rope is huge. It's visible and it's in your face and the education is available (if, often, prohibitively expensive -- tangent for another day). Hypnosis is visible in different ways but the "advanced" stuff is simply not as easy to see, or doesn't even exist.
As a side note, I think we as educators are worried about "leaving people behind," e.g. walling our classes and materials off to novices. We are fucking obsessed with teaching beginner/novice hypnosis. I think we need to get more comfortable with teaching purely higher-level material -- because truly the people being left behind right now are the folks who are trying to make it to or past a really comfortable intermediate learning. There is PLENTY of beginner/novice material available.
I had a beautiful little conversation with @/seattlefemdom on Twitter as a result of this thread where we agreed: "Advanced" hypnosis is 100% a product of your ability to effortlessly synthesize things from outside of "hypnosis" into the entire ethos of your practice. Things from your life, art, history, music, philosophy, psychology, writing, spirituality, etc... Understanding hypnosis not as "how do I build a scene out of this idea" but sort of like "how is this idea inseparable from hypnosis?" And how do you teach that?
I have some ideas. Sometime soon I will be offering a workshop I'm building that is a collaborative textual analysis of Milton Erickson aimed to teach the beginnings of these kinds of critical thinking skills. Every single thing I have done for education -- all my books, articles, podcasts, classes -- are aimed at the people who want to become familiar with intermediate material or start moving a little bit past it. But like. I am one person, and the niche is very small (and while a ton of what I make is free, a lot of is paid too because it's my job). I just want to make the pool deeper so overall the level of education increases.
Sorry this got SO long and really beyond the scope of what you are talking about, but clearly I had more to say! You had a very good point.
Donât worry about it being long!! Awesome read and you pretty much said a lot of what I was trying to get at way more eloquently! đ One thing I thought of straight after my previous reply was a really simple factor:
A rope class will run regularly. Like weekly or fortnightly. You constantly keep building on things by going repeatedly. (Caveat: I live in a part of the world where rope classes are relatively cheap even for more advanced stuff.)
Classes on hypno stuff are a once in a blue moon thing, even for basics. IRL itâs not viable in 99% of the world, and online it just doesnât happen often even in communities that could sustain it (but then itâd be people teaching for free, and you canât really check in on progress will on online classes and such).
Advanced classes happen at cons, but those are prohibitively difficult to get to, and a 2 or 3 times a year thing. Iâm Australian, itâs not happening (SO much money), for instance.
Which tracks back into what you just said now about advanced learning and what I was pondering earlier.
People donât really get to the advanced stuff because maybe theyâll find one class teaching beginner stuff every few months, and so never get to the point where they know enough to start directing their learning past âhow do I drop a cute person?â.
This is a bit weird now cause Iâm agreeing with you by disagreeing, in that Iâm thinking as I pull this together that there isnât enough structured beginner learning floating about, which means the demand for more advanced learning isnât there. (The material is out there in abundance, the ability to learn beyond go do it on your own isnât.)
It kinda pokes into a trend Iâve noticed in a lot of online hypno spaces: 95%+ of shop talk is newbies trickling in individually and asking the usual basic questions, cause there isnât somewhere to direct them besides âok letâs give the information one person at a timeâ. That said I donât think advanced shop talk happens anywhere near enough compared to say rope and thereâs probably a culture thing at the root of that too like youâve said. đ€
One last quick tangent before I stop my own essay too đ, I may disagree slightly with the concept of âAdvancedâ as youâve presented it which is an entirely different conversation, but thatâs more I see it advanced as being able to start take it your own direction and really make it your own (or to put it another way, really understanding the concepts and rebuilding them to your own preferences without needing templates and such), so itâll look different to everyone as weâll all take different bits of all the various advanced topics and use what fits for us and not use what doesnât. But thatâs probably just nuance thatâs impossible to fully convey in a paragraph or two each (itâs been on my mind due to my own rope learning very recently, so the comparisons have brought it out in full đ )











