Intuitive Magic: Kinesthetic Hypnosis

Intuitive Magic: Kinesthetic Hypnosis by sleepingirl

I had a dream about magic a little while back. In it, I was exploring different types and schools. I already had good, innate magical ability -- I could manifest power with my hands if I concentrated in just the right way. But I didn’t know how to refine it; I felt like I was limited by my lack of education. So I poured over books and asked others to teach me more formal magic. I learned complex motions, correspondences, even formulas behind making different things happen. Practice was slow, but steady; I could feel my energy changing.

But a few days later, I got into a situation where I needed to use magic on the fly; I was defending myself from some unknown source. Faced with having to do and not think, I felt myself immediately go back to old habits: concentrate, shift focus, and expend energy. My magic felt stronger and more fiery than it had in days. Having studied formal magic recently, I felt like a part of me was watching from the outside and noticing in detail the way that I was performing it. Even in the dream, I thought to myself, “Oh, this feels just like doing hypnosis.”

Shortly after, I woke up. Truthfully, I’d been spending some time looking into different traditions of magic in the past few months -- all of my knowledge and practice was from bits of Feri tradition and Wicca as a teen and in college, and I have been wanting to expand that, especially for the context of doing more with hypnosis, as I feel that they are linked. But clearly, at least some part of me was feeling like while that may be worthwhile on some level, what I already do intuitively is potentially more important.

“This Feels Just Like Hypnosis”

That sense that I had of doing “magic” as linked to hypnosis is not a new one for me. Kinesthetic hypnosis absolutely feels like magic on several different levels. When you touch someone in a certain way and they respond directly to that touch, there is a tangible sense of control that is almost more immediate and palpable than hypnotizing someone with words. You are actively participating, closing the gap between you and your partner, often using a touch that is very light to communicate intent and cause very heavy, intense responses.

Additionally, as someone who learned at least the muscle memory of moving energy or magic through my body (though my relationship with how “real” that is is complicated), I find myself relying on those patterns a lot when doing kinesthetic hypnosis. I’m used to magical exercises that involve visualizing “magic” as something tangible, and then making physical hallucinations so that I “feel” it moving through different parts of my body. In Feri, this often takes the form of blue fire, but when I was more actively practicing magic, I would play with that -- change the color, change the temperature, change the sensation, change the content or intent. When I go to touch someone hypnotically, I can’t really stop myself from unconsciously creating some sort of visualization and sensation in my own body. This means that I’m very aware of the physical sense of myself, usually a broad awareness of my whole body, then narrowing focus down to different parts.

Hands

In kinesthetic hypnosis, we often focus on our hands as the contact point to our partner. Rope and other disciplines teach us to use our whole body more, but there’s some obvious reasons that our hands get most of the attention. Exploring the world through touch is what they do. From when we are very young, we learn to reach out and touch people and objects with our hands, and we develop a sense of what things feel like through the nerve endings there. When we look at a cat and know vaguely what the soft texture of its fur is, we’ve learned that through experience of touch. Our hands are how we interact with and manipulate the world.

In the dream I had, the magic I used was almost always manifesting through my hands. There was something specific I’d do where I’d push magic through my arm so that it lay on my palm, and then as though it was physical I’d brush my other palm against it to pick some up, and could even put it onto other surfaces by touching them. I thought this was interesting, and it made me think about the relationship between receiving information from our hands and “pushing” information through our hands. These are both important elements of how we interact with the world, and especially with other people.

In any context where we’re touching someone, our hands tell us about them -- we get physical feedback about what they’re experiencing through how they move and feel. By the same token, we are communicating any number of different things through that touch. With kinesthetic hypnosis, we should be more aware of both of those aspects than normal. We shift our focus in a way that allows us to concentrate more fully on our partner, but also on ourselves. And that focus has a tendency to ebb and flow from different aspects of our experience -- what we are thinking and what we are experiencing through our senses, and the responses that our partners are having.

Visualization and Content

Sometimes I think in a model that conceptualizes our entire bodies as a place that can store or move around magic or energy. In that model, I think about how there are various anchor points that can hold that or manifest it more fully. I’m somewhat familiar with the idea of chakras, so that is one aspect, but I also think about the ends of our limbs as being significant -- something in our core would naturally flow outward, extending down our arms and legs. And the reverse is true: what we “pick up” from our hands and feet comes into our core. Loosely, I conceptualize this as flowing somewhere into the line of my spine (chakras).

In a hypnotic context, I think we can take the visualization exercises from magic and use them. We are familiar with the idea that oftentimes in a given partnership, when the hypnotist simply thinks about hypnotizing their partner and looks at them with that intent, the subject has a tendency to feel it, even if nothing else is expressed. We can also do this kinesthetically, and using a magical model, we would gather that intent to trance them in our body, move it into our hand, and touch them with it.

To do this, it helps to explore what that intent feels and looks like, which can cause us to stretch our self-hypnosis muscles. Does trance have a color or pattern? Does it have a sensation, like TV static or temperature? What happens when you move it into different parts of your body? Can you imagine it going into the tips of your fingers and then transferring into the air or into something else that you’re touching? Does it stay connected to you through a tether, or leave your body?

Some knowledge of submodalities helps here. Submodalities are the aspects or details of our senses -- for vision there may be aspects like color, brightness, or size, and for touch there may be aspects like texture, hardness/softness, and weight. What do you feel are the intuitive submodalities of some magical manifestation of trance? What happens when you change those qualities? Generally thinking about these details can help to create strong anchors and can also make hallucinations more vivid.

Note that this entire exercise of “manifesting” trance is a hallucination. Hallucinations get a bad reputation because there are a lot of misconceptions about how they are defined. A hallucination does not need to be identical to reality, nor does one need to be blind to the fact that it’s not “real.” Actually, in this case where we’re creating hallucinatory experiences within ourselves, this is very clear -- we’re not trying to trick ourselves or replicate something that is real, and that gives us a lot of room to play around with.

Motion / Elements

Hallucinating something can change the way that a person behaves, because that hallucination becomes a part of their world and experience that they interact with -- even if we know the hallucination isn’t real. For example, we often say that a helpful trick for public speaking is to imagine the audience in funny hats (or naked). We know that’s not reality, but it can help us relax.

When I use visualizations/hallucinations in kinesthetic hypnosis, I like to pay attention to the way that that affects my behavior. Perhaps one of the most noticeable changes for me is in the way that I move. Focusing something in my hands often causes me to move them more slowly, as though I was literally holding something, or moving through water. My muscles tend to engage in different ways as well.

Notably, when it comes to touching my partner with that kind of intent, I become aware of how I move relative to them. The act of closing the distance between us turns into something very tangible -- there’s a big difference between entering someone’s space without intention and entering their space with intention. It is almost like there is a bit of a forcefield to get through in order to make contact. This is actually a really important part of kinesthetic hypnosis in general -- the part that comes before the touch. Our bodily awareness extends out past our body to some imagined space around us; we’re familiar with the sensation of our “personal bubble” being closed in on and the very real physical response that creates. In kinesthetic hypnosis, that first approach really defines the interaction.

I heard a bit back about a model of eroticism within magic that talked about different kinds of movement and touch as within the traditional model of the elements in magic, and I think that’s a really helpful system to think within when we’re considering motion in this way. If we’re paying attention to the way we move and touch someone, how could we interpret an elemental association from that? We all have unconscious associations with different elements -- they are essentially symbols for concepts. Even taking the idea of entering into someone’s space, perhaps we think of a pointed and faster movement as being like fire, a slower and flowing movement as more like water, a steady movement with tensed muscles as being more like earth, or a light and balanced movement as being like air.

This kind of elemental association can also affect our visualizations and sensory hallucinations. If we imagine a fire-like motion, do we feel heat or see more warm tones? What comes to mind both in our movement as well as our sensory experience is dependent on the way that we conceptualize the elements -- my experience with the elements as symbols might be different than someone else’s. This kind of exercise can help us to flesh out our personal understanding and relationship with these associations.

Hypnotic Touch

When we think about traditional kinesthetic hypnosis and the techniques involved therein, we might consider different qualities of touch or movement. “Ambiguous touch” is perhaps the most well known, attributed to Erickson, where a touch is light and seemingly undirected, but still causes the subject to respond. Usually this is within the context of some sort of handshake induction, where the aim is to establish catalepsy in one form or another. In hypnokink, we expand our understanding of how we can use touch in a hypnotic way. There is not much discussion of these kinds of techniques in traditional or vanilla hypnosis literature (which makes sense; touch is often not appropriate in these settings).

When I consider what I do to induce trance in someone through touch, I think about two different concepts: touch that affects someone’s physical experience in a way that is “trancey”, and touch that carries some sort of metaphorical communication. Physically trancey touch includes things like changing someone’s perception of their balance -- when you start to move their body in such a way that their center of balance changes, and especially when they begin to experience you as the catalyst for that. Ambiguous touches that cause someone to move in a way that is not as familiar to them are also a good example of this, as is moving someone in such a way that they stop “expecting” which way to move and their muscles don’t engage as normal.

Then we get to the idea that touch in and of itself is communicative. Of course, all of the previously-mentioned concepts are places where you are communicating different things as well. This is a concept that has been explored in different disciplines (especially in rope -- see Georg Barkas’s “The Archaeology of Personalities”) but is extremely important in hypnosis. Philosopher and psychologist Paul Watzlawick famously said, “One can’t not communicate.” We are always saying something with our body language, expressions, and touch. On a very basic level, we know how our physical experience changes when we are feeling different emotions. Touching someone when you feel a strong sense of affection, for example, can make a very special quality of touch that both you and your partner interpret.

There is also a quality of metaphor that’s included implicitly in touch. I’ve talked about conceptual metaphor before -- the linguistic philosophy that metaphors are baked into our understanding of the world, for example, how we associate hypnosis with “downwards” and related words/concepts because of our bodily experience of unconsciousness (laying down). We see this kind of metaphor pop up especially in kinesthetic hypnosis, where we often use touch that is symbolic. Intuitively, we do things like draw our hands downwards over someone’s arm or make circles and spirals with our fingers.

This is another place where submodalities can help us -- thinking about the distinct qualities of touch itself and how they are symbolic. Pressure, speed, weight, texture, duration, location, and sensitivity/intensity are all aspects of touch, and all of these aspects can have symbolic or metaphorical qualities in context. A firm, fast touch might feel aggressive, or passionate -- but so could a soft, measured one, depending on the exact environment and personal history of both partners (plus all the other variables that affect communication).

Symbols in Hypnosis vs Magic

Symbols and metaphors are, in my eyes, the primary tool in magic. I might define magic as being “the connection of different symbols.” In my eyes, to make magic, we invoke associations from different symbols (such as shapes, elements, directions, ingredients, actions, colors, words, etc) and put them together in a way that makes sense to us in order to express intent. For example, a spell about love might include pink or red colors, something floral, a lit candle, and focus on the chest (or heart chakra).

With hypnosis, it’s very much the same. I might say that hypnosis is “the connection of different concepts,” and we could very easily argue that those concepts are represented by symbols. In hypnosis, we are looking to change someone’s perception, and we often do so by getting them to buy into shifts of focus through one idea leading to another. For example, in a simple induction, we might ask someone to stare at a visual fixation, and then connect that to a sensation in their eyes, which connects into them focusing internally, which connects into trance.

We often do this verbally with hypnosis, of course, and we’re not necessarily used to thinking of words as symbols, but understanding conceptual metaphor helps us realize this. (Of course, there are physical symbols involved in hypnosis as well.) And when we start to move away from the idea of words and towards the idea of touch, this similarity between magic and hypnosis becomes even more clear.

When I go to touch my partner, I’m thinking about the kind of expression I want to make, and I focus my attention in such a way that I express through symbols. All of the aspects of touch and motion are the language that I use, and I connect one “utterance” to another in a way that makes sense based on context and the feelings that we are sharing.

Intuition vs Intent

Thus far, this has been an exploration of what I feel are the kind of things that I do in both kinesthetic hypnosis and magic, and as such, there is a little bit of codifying parts and pieces that I don’t usually think about consciously when I’m engaging with a partner. In my dream about magic, the “moral”, so to speak, was that all of the book-learning in the world pales in comparison to doing what feels right, and I think this is important both in magic as well as trance.

Intuition is wildly important. We can talk about touch as though there is some sort of methodology for touching someone hypnotically, but the reality is that the most hypnotic touch is the kind that is done with less planning, less conscious effort. Expressing oneself through touch happens most genuinely when one’s focus is on one’s partner, paired with some open introspection. When I go to engage with someone, I give myself focus on what I’m feeling, what I want to say, and then I let my body do what feels natural when I go to touch them -- in the way that I most want to touch them in that moment. It is expressive, and I am paying attention to it, but it is not really calculated.

Whim is incredibly important to me in my hypnotic relationships. When I interact with a partner, I want to feel like I’m acting intuitively, on instinct, in flow. This is what makes hypnosis really feel like magic. This essay is not really meant to be instructional, as I feel that the differences in every person’s interpretation of symbols in magic and hypnosis are the important parts of their own practice. I would encourage personal exploration over accepting anything dogmatically.

In Conclusion

I think there’s a lot to be gained hypnotically from almost any discipline. Magic is simply one framework where I have experience and feel that there’s a lot of overlap -- additionally, the “magic” that I’m familiar with is a particular style that is unique to my history and experiences with it. I think that hypnosis is something that simply highlights patterns that we see in many other philosophies and activities.

I have always thought that we can gain more knowledge and experience about hypnosis by comparing it to other things, seeing overlap, and forcing it to evolve and change. I encourage you to look at your own personal history and find things that are important and resonant for you. Even in dreams.