The Hidden Link With Silence
I sat down with Katherine Hinchey for Episode 26 of her podcast Hyp Talks, and the recording is now out. We were classmates at HMI, so it was an easy, unhurried conversation, the kind that wanders into the deep places without rushing. We covered the monastery, arthritis and pain control, being neurodivergent, Obsidian and AI journaling, and the book I'm writing. But the thread running under all of it was silence, and the hidden link between silence and the work I do now.
Before I ever guided anyone into trance, I spent four years as a Carmelite friar which includes five hours of prayer a day, two of them in pure silence. People often find that terrifying, because in silence you can't hide from yourself. I was drawn to it for exactly that reason. What those years gave me was a lived familiarity with the interior landscape: how to be quiet, how to sit with what surfaces, and how slowly a person is actually changed.
I've always known that the hypnotic state and contemplative prayer were not the same thing, but I didn't really know how to articulate it. Hypnosis is not the same thing as contemplation, though one can turn a hypnotic session into prayer; the placebo is not the soul. They are not unrelated. They are different levels of the same column — the same IT, to borrow John of the Cross's no sé qué, "I know not what" — appearing at different depths of human experience. The thrill of a concert, the trance of deep music, the quiet of contemplation, the encounter of a life of prayer: all these things are not equal, but they can participate in one another, the lower always pointing toward the higher. Just like how Plotinus, the father of neo-Platonism, describes the nature of beauty. He first acknowledges the beauty of sight. Then goes on to note deeper and truer levels of beauty, like beauty of character, then virtue, then ultimately arriving at the infinitely deep and true form of the beauty of love and union, which ultimately results in procreation.
That matters, and not only philosophically. It's the honest position for a hypnotherapist to hold. The trance I can induce is real, but it sits near the base of the column, not the top. It's vivid and easy to point at; contemplation is quiet and impossible to reach on one's own, yet it sits deeper and closer to the source. What is loudest to the senses is nearest the surface. What is truest is nearest the foundation.
Near the end of the conversation, Katherine let me lead a short exercise built on that idea, a descent through levels of beauty toward what I think of as true north. You bring to mind the most beautiful thing you've ever seen with your eyes, then the beauty of character, then the beauty of love, and you let each one act like a large magnet right in front of you, drawing the scattered compass needles of the self back toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. It's the shape of the whole episode in a few minutes: exposing the quiet parts of us to the light.
If you've ever wondered whether stillness and inner work belong together, or whether hypnosis and faith can coexist, I think you'll find something here. My thanks to Katherine for such a generous conversation.
Episode 26 — The Monastery Experience & the Hidden Link With Silence