For PSYCHOSPIRITUAL: A Spirituality/Hypnokink Essay Jam
This is an essay about bonfires, Quaker meetings, Judaism, and the entirely transcendent nature of hypnosis. I'm sorry in advance to philosophers and scientists. Don't come for me until you've seen God in the ceiling through your fluttering lashes!
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Rationality is a core value of modern western society. Materialism and objective, evidence-based science are seen as the gold standard for how to view the world around us. It’s easy to see why -- this approach has catapulted humanity forward over a relatively short period of time, technologically and philosophically. Finding the truths of the universe through hard evidence and math is extremely compelling and much more logical than basing our views off of conjecture or old religious texts.
Hypnosis entered public western consciousness in tumult. Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism clearly worked, and he had theories of why, but they didn’t hold up to scientific rigor. Really from its inception, hypnosis has been fighting to be seen as legitimate as a medical practice, and as compatible with evidence-based science.
It’s not that it doesn’t make sense that hypnotherapy fights so hard to be accepted as a “real” discipline, or that it needs to go through studies to be practiced on patients. We value medicine that is objectively safe and effective -- for good reason.
That being said…
I am not anti-science. But I do think if we don’t acknowledge the methodology’s limitations, we are being dishonest and misleading -- with ourselves and with those we teach.
Here’s the thing: We are not doing therapy with our partners. We don’t need to be beholden to these limitations. Not in our theory, and especially not in our practice.
We are free -- more free than any other practitioners of hypnosis -- to accept and celebrate its irrationality.
And when we stop trying to shoehorn our experiences into being understandable, we are free to explore and experience unbelievable things.
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In terms of spiritual beliefs, I would describe myself as a skeptic-leaning agnostic. I think that how you are raised is a major religious influence on you, and I happened to be raised in an atheist household. Despite branching off from my family and taking spiritual exploration seriously, I would never confidently say “I believe in God” or “I believe in magic,” nor that I am even particularly convinced by my handful of difficult-to-explain experiences.
While my spirituality intersects with hypnosis, I am not here to tell you that hypnosis is the result of God or magical forces -- and I’m not here to define how hypnosis fits into “magic” or vice versa. I think that too is a kind of rationalization -- it’s trying to explain something nebulous in a concrete way, trying to fit it into a box.
I don’t think that calling hypnosis irrational should cause us to seek alternative, definitive answers outside of science. I think that we as humans need to be comfortable not knowing, not labeling -- a space that can be very uncomfortable for us, but one that ultimately allows us to have less-filtered subjective experiences.
Subjective experiences are the core of hypnosis. No matter what method is purported to be “objectively” best, the one that you should actually use is the one that makes your partner feel trance most intensely. Science simply cannot anticipate, direct, or account for the subtlety of the subjective experience of hypnosis.
Scientific tests cannot accurately measure anything about hypnosis, because hypnosis relies almost entirely on the softest variables: the interpersonal relationship and biases we have, the way a person is feeling or primed on a given day, the slightest changes in tone or delivery or nonverbal language. We might say that standardized hypnosis is a completely different activity from the hypnosis that we practice with real partners.
A brainwave-measuring machine cannot communicate the intricacies and depth of a trance. I would not be surprised, if I was hooked up to an EEG, that many of my “trance states” would not produce expected effects on the device. Even physically observable signs of trance do not tell the whole story -- I can be having an intensely hypnotic internal experience while appearing completely awake. There is simply not an objective way to tell when I am hypnotized -- it is completely based on my own feelings.
And yet, with shocking accuracy, my partner can tell the exact moment that I slip into trance, even if I give no discernable outward response. When pressed, he often can’t identify what the signal is -- it is very, very subtle, if anything.
It is a moment where his focus on me melds into my experience, into my mind.
Really, there have been countless times in hypnosis that I feel with total certainty that my mind is being read or that I am reading my partner’s mind. It’s shocking, and sort of maddening, and I have heard from many others that they’ve experienced the same thing. Our urge is to say, “Well, that’s a result of unconsciously reading microexpressions, of knowing a person’s nonverbal language intimately, of having a robust internal map of a person, being good at anticipating hypnotic responses, linguistic cold reading tricks.” That’s rationalizing, and it’s all very logical and certainly has some element of truth to it -- but it causes us to say “OK, case closed,” and sigh in relief that we can dismiss the question and no longer be faced with it.
The reality is this: Those are guesses. They are probably pretty good guesses, but I believe we fall into this trap of assuming the logical-sounding guesses we make are objectively correct, even in the absence of evidence.
Ostensibly, the vast majority of “answers” we have about why hypnosis works are just that -- theories, models, best guesses. Science doesn’t even have a singular accepted answer on whether hypnosis is an altered state. Often, working within a given theory (or two) gives us structure and allows us to perform more effectively. But when we really think about the nature of hypnosis, the truth is that we really don’t have much of a solid idea why and how it works.
That’s uncomfortable. I’m not pushing that because it’s the cold, hard truth, or because accepting it is some form of mental asceticism (nor spiritual gateway). I’m saying it because living in that liminal space of irrationality will actually change the way you do and experience hypnosis -- because it frees you from the limitations of feeling like everything we do has to make sense.
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I have my own theory about why we want to make those logical guesses: Because it feels embarrassing to say we are hypnotists and yet there are things we don’t understand. Because we are afraid of judgment if we say we are actually mind-reading or doing magic, even as a shorthand for a complex invisible process. I think these are unconscious biases -- a result of seeing ourselves as rational people in a rational world. Spirituality is seen as lesser and fake -- entertaining the idea of magic gets you labeled as immature or crazy.
But when you try to remove your biases and think about it, it is crazy that we use just our words to make people forget things, hallucinate things, have orgasms, experience dissolution of the ego. And we don’t really know why.
True curiosity and wonder are hypnosis’s best friends. New subjects who struggle to experience trance or suggestions often are stuck because of their expectations -- they feel like they know what is supposed to happen, so when their experience doesn’t line up, they perceive it as failure. It’s why one of the best ways you can set a person up for “success” in hypnosis is to really cultivate a sense of curiosity, of not being judgmental of their experience, of not assuming they know what is happening.
Even still, this model of trance often has the subject experiencing wide-eyed wonder while the hypnotist actually holds the esoteric knowledge of what’s going on behind the curtain. But in my opinion, the real magic happens when both parties are prepared to question everything they know, to be surprised, to not take for granted, and to observe without rationality.
My most treasured memory is one that I keep close to my chest. Briefly: it was at a hypnosis-friendly bonfire on the autumnal equinox. My partner and I embraced and for an hour had a completely shared experience, wordless and hypnotic and bizarrely spiritual. Neither of us were “driving” -- we were both passengers, almost like being possessed. No drugs were involved, just the two of us in the right place at the right time, able to let go of the feeling that we were “crazy” or being illogical, or that we knew what was going to happen. We were both really shaken by it.
That ultimately led us to being able to have trances, occasionally, where we mutually let our guard down and play without the usual “rules.” We can’t do it intentionally, but sometimes we hit on little pockets of magic, and then the trance becomes like spellcasting, and spellcasting isn’t bound by the laws that supposedly govern hypnosis.
We know that hypnosis is influenced largely by how we expect it to work. We give pretalks to set expectations that often function as suggestions, boundaries, and definitions: “All you need to do to be hypnotized is pay attention -- it’s OK if your thoughts drift.” “Hypnosis might feel different from what you expect, like floating or sinking.” Even: “You can always come out of trance if you need to.”
I believe my partner and I are on similar pages about whether magic is “real.” The word “maybe” does a lot of heavy lifting in my worldview. It’s really more about being open to different perspectives, and playing in different models. So if we can dip into a perspective where hypnosis behaves a bit more like magic -- or otherwise irrationally -- then that actually, literally changes the way hypnosis works.
This is the true nature of hypnosis -- it is a shapeshifter. If you define hypnosis as a science or as a spiritual practice, it works either way. So if you can change the beliefs you inhabit, you will experience wildly different trances. And it may be irrational to assign spirituality and magic to it, but it is not absurd.
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In this way, belief and perspective is actually where a lot of the nature of hypnosis sits.
After the “bonfire incident,” I was motivated to do some spiritual seeking, and I started going to Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings are simple but intense: People get together in a room and sit silently, opening themselves up to “messages” from within their own hearts or outside themselves, and if they feel moved to share a message, they stand up and speak it. There is no discussion, just completely passive listening and speaking.
I found this to be an extremely potent spiritual environment. We weren’t meditating, per se, just going quiet. Sitting silently for an hour with no other stimulation was luxurious, and felt quite a bit to me like a kind of trance.
I went regularly for a few months. I never spoke, but I did listen. There was one meeting I remember vividly where I was sitting and thinking about something, and at that moment, a woman stood up, and shared a message that was very close to what I was pondering over.
Then another woman stood:
“I know sometimes in this room,” she said, “we feel like we are all thinking the same thing when someone shares a message. This is one of those times for me.”
There was no fear of judgment, nor proclamation of metaphysical experience. It was just a statement of fact.
Quaker meetings taught me to be curious. If the bonfire opened the door, Quaker meetings honed my ability to be irrational. There was a period while I was going regularly where I was seeing wonder in the world at every turn -- a leaf falling on my back felt like a tap on the shoulder, the wind felt like a whisper.
And when my partner and I were doing hypnosis, my rigid belief system became so flexible that I was utterly open to suggestions about my experiences. He would tell me things and I believed them completely, almost like being on a drug, or completely enchanted. We were doing serious magic back then, tempting reality to peel back and reveal the “truth” underneath. It was intoxicating, and it certainly had an element of danger.
As intense as it was, I found this magic to be frustrating too, because I wanted to understand the nature of it -- I wanted to understand hypnosis so badly, and I wanted so badly for magic to be real. I thought that maybe there was a facet of hypnosis that I’d been missing -- some spiritual facet -- that would take me one step closer to an objective, unified, overarching hypnosis model.
I was right that I had been neglecting to think about spirituality with regard to hypnosis. But of course the idea that was leading to some overarching truth was a red herring. The real truth is that there is no overarching truth -- hypnosis can be seen from many models and perspectives, but there isn’t a singular “correct” one.
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I have written extensively about how I feel this is core to hypnosis -- both in educational articles, an upcoming book, and in a personal essay about Judaism. My Jewishness is critically important to me, and has taught me a lot about the value of diverse perspectives, including on the spectrum of rationalism versus spirituality or mysticism.
By some, religion is often seen as incompatible with science (or rationality) -- unprovable mystical forces, an unseeable omnipotent creator. But there have been a number of important rationalist thinkers throughout history, across world religions.
Judaism’s most famous is probably Maimonides -- Moses ben Maimon. He lived in Spain in the 1100s, a time and place where Jewish mysticism was thriving. Maimonides was both a scientist and a deeply religious, learned Jew. One of his greatest contributions to the culture was in codifying Jewish law and practice in the common tongue to make it accessible to the average Jew at the time. In doing so, his rationalism made a great impact in Judaism as a whole.
Maimonides brought Aristotalian philosophy into Judaism, which came with a full rejection of the supernatural -- with the exception of God as transcendent creator. (The creation exists, so it must have been created.) One of his major theological tenets was that there was no conflict between the scientific and the teachings of Torah -- that the revelations of God were completely compatible with science. To Maimonides, for example, angels were not supernatural beings, but a metaphorical personification of the natural forces of the world. There are “angels” for why the wind blows, and “angels” for why we are held stuck to the earth.
If something appeared to be at odds with the natural order of the world -- whether it was from Torah or a perceived miracle -- Maimonides said that was our own lack of understanding, both of science and of the “secrets” of Torah. Essentially: everything that seems irrational has a rational explanation.
There are pros and cons to this, in my opinion. First, it’s neat, elegant, and sensible -- and I think it’s compatible with a measured view of hypnosis. Hypnosis is real -- no one is disputing that -- and while it has unknowable parts to us at our current point in history, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it behaves counter to the natural order of the world.
But I think Maimonides contradicts himself. If you claim to be humbled by the secrets of the world and revelation, why would you so vehemently reject that the world might behave differently than you understand or expect?
How can we claim to “know” the natural order of the world in any capacity beyond what we can observe? How can we claim that our observations are universal or objective?
If we can’t know, we can only experience, explore, experiment. It is brutally human -- reaching out to the world with our limited five senses and our remarkable consciousness. By the nature of us being humans, our explorations will all produce different perspectives and models, all of which have an element of truth to them because all of our experiences are “real,” true experiences.
Hypnosis operates necessarily with/on the human brain -- two unique human brains -- so we each see a unique, limited facet of it. By talking, playing, and connecting with each other, we learn about other facets and perspectives which influence our internal models of it. On a larger scale, as a community, we create, bend, and break rules about it as our community experience evolves. We actually change what hypnosis is, how it works, and how to do it.
Even in just 15 years, I have seen firsthand how hypnosis changes as the community changes. If you look back at historical sources about hypnosis, you can see that we do something radically different nowadays -- which we think of as more sophisticated, but then again, historical hypnotists were doing amazing things too.
Hypnosis as a thing evolves as we explore it more -- as we explore each other more -- and push its boundaries.
We can’t pin down what it is. We can’t model it. But we can participate in it.
It is transcendent -- as Maimonides and Aristotle say God is transcendent; utterly beyond us.
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Part of my experience of being hypnotized really intensely is a deeper acceptance of what I am feeling or thinking, moment to moment. It is a kind of radical acceptance that what my brain is doing is important and real. It’s not that I don’t understand that I’m hypnotized, or that I don’t make any critical judgments about what is happening. It’s just partially that if I feel something “weird,” I don’t dismiss it out of hand.
When I am in deep trances, weird stuff often happens. I get spontaneous sensory hallucinations, I get stray thoughts that can blindside me.
Occasionally, I have this unmistakable feeling that I am “seeing God.” That felt like a crazy thought to me the first time I had it -- like a person of capital-F “Faith” would have. It didn’t suddenly make me believe in a higher power, but I was left with that feeling that I had touched something divine while my partner murmured into my ear and took control of me.
Hypnosis is not just transcendent by nature or in a vacuum -- it feels transcendent. It feels like nothing else in this world; it completely transcends language and the realm of usual experience.
It makes sense that when faced with this kind of experience, it makes a skeptical person like me feel for a moment that there might be something more, something ineffable. It makes sense that when I have spiritual experiences with hypnosis, it feels innately spiritual to me.
But also it is true that hypnosis is simply very weird.
Why do I feel like I am connecting with divinity in deep trance? Why do I feel certain that my partner and I are reading each other’s minds? Why have I felt a quality of presence or possession?
I can believe it or disbelieve it all I want. I can rationalize it in any way I want. You can relate to me, or think less of me and judge me. But none of that takes away from what my experiential truth is.
What hypnosis feels like is not just more important than what it “is,” that is what it is. The subjective experience that we inhabit is hypnosis.
Humans are moved by weird, irrational, transcendent experiences. Those are the times our worldview is affirmed or shaken. For those of us who are spiritually open to the idea that the materialistic world might be more than it seems, these moments are bright sparks of light, motivating, inspirational.
Hypnosis does this to me all the time. I am constantly amazed by it. I truly believe the only reason we look at it as a mundane phenomenon is because we assume our world is mundane -- we take it for granted.
But it is not mundane. It is two people communicating in such an intimate way that it behaves like a psychoactive drug. It is striving to know another person so deeply that you innately understand what they are thinking and feeling and you don’t know why. It makes the impossible seem possible; it makes magic feel 100% real.
That’s not some perspective that is out of touch with reality. That is the grounded view of hypnosis.
We are allowed to have crazy experiences with this art. Our main job is not trying to sell people on the idea that it is real. We work so hard to portray ourselves as sane and grounded -- we imitate therapists who need to have an answer to skeptics walking into their office. I think that at a certain point when we are doing intimate hypnosis we are allowed to say, “OK, I know this is real, and you know this is real, so let’s drop the bullshit and acknowledge that what we are doing is actually completely crazy.”
Hypnosis is amazing. It is just amazing. I am not saying that it is completely impossible to understand -- I think it is fair to say at this point that my life’s work is trying to understand it and communicate that understanding. I am saying that we need to not cut ourselves off from amazement, from confusion, from wonder, from not-knowing -- those are crucial to understanding, even crucial to science.
It is a form of respect to the art and to our partners to inhabit a space where we don’t know, to relax our egos and say that hypnosis is more than we can comprehend. To listen -- to ourselves or our partners -- when weird stuff happens.
Hypnosis will grow with us as humans if we let it. We have the opportunity to open ourselves to it, to greet it curiously, and to truly surrender to our exploration.
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Sleepingirl (they/she) is a hypnokink educator with over a decade of experience on both sides of the pocket watch. They’re the author of several books, many articles (patreon.com/sleepingirl), and LearnHypnokink.com (a guide through the foundations of improvised hypnosis).
Their body of work in hypnokink is extremely extensive and spans many mediums -- see everything at https://sleepingirl.info/.
Even when we didn't ask to be broken so horrifically (because karma doesn't work as simply as that), we have to take responsibility for inner growth, to reach self acceptance. Otherwise, we continue to stagnate in suffering. We can sometimes find people to help, but true and long-lasting healing is rooted within.
rent lowering gunshot for my regular audience In all seriousness, this is an entry for sleepingirl's psychospiritual hypnokink zine jam, about the intersection between religious guilt and hypnokink.
As someone who grew up in a Christian household - and, more importantly, within social circles dominated by Christian moral values, even if they were not directly religious - I absorbed a lot of beliefs as a young child to do with the morality and legitimacy of sexual behaviour. For context: I'm transgender and a lesbian, so I was pretty much always going to run into some issues regarding my gender and sexual orientation with traditional Christian beliefs; but how these played out and the role hypnosis eventually took in addressing them in later life has been key to my experience of sexuality as a person.
In the beginning, both of my parents are not what I would consider evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. In the present day, both of them are openly pro-LGBTQ individuals who I don't consider to be homophobic or transphobic at all (except maybe my father, but that's less conscious and more a facet of older generational bias.) This is important to mention because: while I did still end up with the sort-of stereotypical 'christian guilt about sex', I do not consider it to be (mostly) my parents' fault. My parents were never really 'weird' about sex and did not tell me anything like that it was a sin to be gay, or that masturbation was bad; that was just what everyone else around me in the world did.
In the early 2000s-2010s, the internet was - perhaps contradictory to how it is nowadays - a rather conservative Christian space in some regards. It could still be argued that certain parts of the internet are very conservative, but I at least would say that the internet as a whole has liberalized enormously in the 25 years since my birth; evidenced by how certain slurs - including the use of 'autistic' as an insult - are now relegated to specifically conservative places like 4chan, rather than in wide use everywhere as they were during my childhood. One particular element of this conservatism was around sexual behaviour and relationships: I grew up at a time when it was very common for gay people to still be called 'fags' online by non-queer people, and what limited amount of Christians I did meet online were very much of the "if you have gay sex you're going to burn in hell" kind.
Independently of references to gay people, masturbation in particular was considered to be 'gross' or 'disgusting' near-universally in all spaces during my childhood and teenage years. It was considered socially embarrassing to admit to or be accused of masturbating; particularly if you were not conventionally attractive, which I was not at that age (it's okay, I got better after transitioning.) I can remember my classmates in high school making all sorts of jokes about how embarrassing or 'cringe' it was when certain other low-social-status members of the class would be thought to have crushes on girls. While this itself is not directly related to religion, I am of the view that the vast majority of prudishness and sex-negativity in Western culture can be traced back to Christianity; even that displayed by children at this young age.
The result of all of the above was that I grew up terrified of my sexuality, believing that my urge to masturbate was both sinful and shameful and that I would be ostracised by my peers if it was ever discovered that I held sexual desire; as well as quite possibly being sentenced to eternal damnation for my actions. As with most all other queer former or current Christians I know, this did not actually stop me from masturbating, and instead just made me feel extremely guilty and fostered a deep self-loathing and feeling of resentment for myself.
It is perhaps only natural that, with all of the above being said, I began to yearn for a way that I could experience sexual pleasure without all of the associated pain and guilt. This is where hypnosis came in: I discovered hypnotism very early on in my life - somewhere around the age of eight, I think, as a result of watching old cartoons like Scooby Doo, Teen Titans, and Inspector Gadget - and was immediately fascinated with it; arguably even before I'd been traumatised around sex. I can remember watching scenes of Penny getting hypnotised in Inspector Gadget and getting an erection before I even knew what one of those was; which I think to me suggests I would always have found hypnosis sexually attractive even independent of any trauma.
But with said trauma in mind, hypnosis became a way for me to have sexual experiences without needing to bear the guilt of voluntarily engaging in them. If I construed hypnosis as something akin to mind control in my mind - focusing specifically on the elements of it that allow one to plausibly tell themselves that they are behaving involuntarily - then I could let myself be 'convinced' to engage in sex without actually doing it of my own accord. In other words: if someone hypnotised me and then told me to have sex with them, it wasn't my fault because they made me do it. This absolved me of all guilt relating to willingly engaging in sexual behaviour, and gave me a plausible-enough excuse to deny committing what I still thought of as sinful behaviour: sure I certainly still had sexual desires, but I was only acting on them because someone else did the equivalent of placing an enchantment on me that made me unable not to! What was I supposed to do about it?!
This became my default mode of engaging with sexual behaviour by the time I was around fourteen, and I suspect is what has contributed to the development of my hypnofetish in present day; in which I am basically unable to have sex comfortably without being hypnotised, or at least having my control taken away/alleviated in some way (I would eventually discover that certain non-addictive drugs like cannabis and psychedelics made for an excellent alternative, but I would still say that hypnosis is probably involved in 95% of instances in which I get off.) Any time I was aroused and wanted to masturbate, I could only do it to some variety of hypnosis porn, which I could at least tell myself was putting me into trance and so would therefore make what I was doing not my fault. The same applied to actual sex, and to date, I have only ever had intimate partners who have been part of the hypnokink community.
At my current stage in life, I do not still need my hypnosis kink to be able to feel okay about having sex. In recent years I've been blessed to have been able to find a number of very accepting queer friends, and since around my 21st birthday, I've gradually worked on trying to unlearn much of the sex-related trauma that I came about through my Christian upbringing. In spite of how I may have made it sound in this essay thus far, I still am actually Christian: I believe in God and do identify somewhat with the label of 'Christian', but I recognise that my doctrinal views are probably very different to those of the average Christian. For one, I do not believe that gay sex or masturbation is sinful; I frankly just don't think it makes any sense that God would care about something like that, and I also don't think there's any good biblical evidence for masturbation being sinful. Because of this, I don't really 'need' hypnosis in order to be able to have sex the way that I used to, but I still very much enjoy dipping back into that portion of my life for the purposes of having scenes involving guilt kink, corruption, shame play, etcetera.
In general, of my partners (I'm polyamorous and so have quite a few people that I play with), I think just about every single one of them has some form of guilt around their sexuality; and they all use hypnosis as a way to try and alleviate that. The one exception in the group is also Christian, and funnily enough, she's the woman who helped me arrive at my present stance on things like masturbation being non-sinful and God really not minding if you trans your gender. Generally speaking though, I've seen an enormous amount of people in the Discord hypnokink space who have spoken of using hypnosis as a disavowal mechanism to alleviate guilt related to sex. Some of these have been religious, but even of the many who are not (or have since become atheist), many had Christian upbringings. I would therefore say that in conclusion, my biggest association between hypnosis and my faith is of using hypnosis as a way to sidestep guilt in order to be able to enjoy having sexual experiences without pain.
Eleonora is an advocate for a balanced and blunt conversation about how to best approach underground entheogenic use in a way that reduces the potential for harm from charlatans, predators, or naive guides.
