To be honest, Time Line Therapy didn't do it for me, although Denise seemed to get a lot out of it. You're supposed to picture your time line and "traverse it." I didn't. I had a hard time doing the exercises. On the other hand, Denise did them and she reports feeling some profound changes, including the releasing of anger, sadness, and guilt that she's been carrying with her for a long time. Me, I'm still pissed off and ornery.

If I were you, I'd approach the Time Line Therapy portion of the course with an open mind. It's a fascinating theory and it very well might work for you. If it does, it'll have some really positive rewards. Over the next few weeks, I plan to re-read the supplied textbook and take another shot at it, because it does intrigue me a great deal.

Finally, we did a few days on hypnosis. If any of you know me, you know I'm rather involved in hypnosis practice. By formal education, I'm a computer scientist. With computers, if you want to fix something, you tweak it and move on. I always figured it'd be great if I could also tweak my mind, so, for example, I'd get up at 8am instead of 10am or finally decide I liked vegetables. I figured that if I could program computers, it'd be cool if I could program the mind as well.

Sadly for my goal to take over the world, hypnosis isn't quite what I expected, although it's a very powerful modality. You can't use hypnosis to make people do anything they don't want (although I did hypnotize a friend who wanted to...and did...stand on her head and sing Danny Boy--an experience I'll cherish for years). Instead, hypnosis seems to open up the mind in a way that allows the subconscious to be more effective. If you're a geek, you'll understand this concept: for all intents, hypnosis is a way at getting at the mind's debugger. A key thing to know about hypnosis (and NLP, for that matter) is that it's not a "do to" discipline, but a "do with" practice. In other words, I can't do hypnosis to you, but I can do it with you.

Before attending the seminar in Hawaii, I was somewhat familiar with hypnosis, having already received my certification as a clinical hypnotherapist, and started work on a doctorate in the field.

Even so, I still learned a great deal during the course. In particular, I learned much more about a branch of hypnosis called "Ericksonian" hypnosis, named after the father of modern hypnosis, a nice old gent by the name of Milton Erickson. Uncle Milty's a pretty cool cat. He developed a whole series of hypnotic practices based on metaphor (stories) and word patterns. I'm not going to go into the details of those word patterns (I'd hate to leave all of you hypnotized out there in Internet land), but suffice it to say they're both effective and a lot of fun to play with.

The big value of the hypnosis portion of the course, again, was the exercises. We had a chance to run through a wide variety of inductions and therapies, and to see them in action with a wide mix of people. I think I learned more in those few days than I would have in six months of reading and practicing with friends.