Doug O'Brien: Sleight of Mouth, Havening, and the Horse That Knew the Way Home

Doug O'Brien: Sleight of Mouth, Havening, and the Horse That Knew the Way Home

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Doug O'Brien — NLP Master Trainer, certified hypnotist, Havening techniques practitioner, storytelling teacher, personal success coach, and the author of the User's Guide to Sleight of Mouth and the User's Guide to Storytelling — for one of the most wide-ranging, funny, and genuinely illuminating conversations the show has had. Doug joins from the same time zone as Ryan, which they both somehow find surprising. ACDC was originally scheduled to open. They called out last minute. Doug's entry into this world started in New York City, where he was playing rock and roll and scraping together enough money to stay in youth hostels. A friend dragged him to a Tony Robbins firewalk. He didn't want to go. He went. He found it surprisingly, genuinely interesting — and the 15-day certification course that followed brought in Richard Bandler for a day, Robert Dilts for a day, and a hypnotist named Dave Dobson, who stopped Doug in his tracks completely. Dobson became his primary mentor. Stephen Heller, who shared an office with Dobson and inherited his client list when Dobson retired to Friday Harbor, became another important voice. Doug has been studying, teaching, and practicing in this lineage ever since. The conversation covers a lot of ground and earns every minute of it. They dig into why NLP started as modeling and drifted into technique-selling, how Bandler and Grinder literally became Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson — adopting their accents, their postures, their cigarettes — before they understood what they were doing, and what it means to model someone at a level beyond their writings. Doug tells the story of Stephen Gilligan being double-inducted by Bandler and Grinder into a deep trans-identification with Erickson, then saying things to Gregory Bateson — personal, private things between two old friends — that Gilligan had no possible way of knowing. Bateson ran from the building. From there they move into hypnosis as a state of being rather than a technique, the bicameral mind and what Julian Jaynes thought was actually happening when someone goes under, why the other-than-conscious mind is purposeful rather than rational, why you can accidentally give yourself terrible suggestions while drifting off to sleep, and why prayer and manifestation work by the same mechanism. Ryan holds up the idea of trances like clothes — we're always wearing one, hypnosis just gives you the choice of which one to put on. Doug loves it. Then Doug breaks down Havening in detail: the four conditions required to encode a trauma, the neurochemical cascade that locks it in place, and how stroking the arms, face, and hands generates delta waves that open voltage-sensitive calcium channels in the lateral amygdala, dissolve the phosphate molecule holding the AMPA receptors in place, and remove them permanently. The trauma doesn't get managed. The receptor that was firing it simply disappears. Ryan points out that it looks exactly like Mr. Miyagi. Doug agrees immediately. Ryan then presents his theory that the subconscious might live in the mitochondria — which have their own DNA, inherited entirely from the maternal line, connecting every human back to a single original mother. He suggests the fascia might be how they communicate outward. Doug is quiet for a moment and says, wow. That's it. Just: wow. And then Doug closes with the Erickson horse story, which is maybe the best answer anyone has ever given to the question of how you do psychotherapy. Three quotes from Doug worth writing down: "We're in trances all the time. The question is, can you get into a productive one? Erickson used to say: discover their patterns of happiness." "The other-than-conscious mind is purposeful. Tell it to go forward, it goes forward. But you better be careful what you're telling it — because it's listening all the time, including when you're falling asleep." "I didn't know where the horse belonged. But I knew the horse knew. All I needed to do was keep its attention on the road." Connect with Doug O'Brien: Essential coaching skills membership: essentialcoachingskills.com Books: User's Guide to Sleight of Mouth, User's Guide to Storytelling — search Doug O'Brien on Amazon Doug teaches Sleight of Mouth, Havening, and personal success coaching — check his site for current training dates and membership options Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Janet Rotella: Faith, Energy Work, and What a Dog Named Little Big Daddy Knows About Healing

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Janet Rotella, certified professional hypnotist, Reiki practitioner, sound healer, meditation teacher, and the founder of Calm and Brite Holistic Wellness Services in Florida, for one of the most spiritually grounded and quietly emotional conversations the show has produced. Janet is presenting at HypnoThoughts Live for the second year in a row, this time for a full hour on hypnosis and energy work with autistic, special needs, neurodivergent, and non-to-low verbal communities. Little Big Daddy, her therapy dog and former service dog to her late sister, makes a brief but memorable cameo. Janet came to this work through a path that keeps proving her own point about coping skills: a background in marketing and communications, a mobile day spa that was the first business shut down during COVID, a COVID grant she used to go back to school for hypnotherapy, and a lifetime of watching her only sister, Andrea, navigate the world as a low-verbal special needs person who was given exactly two options at birth in 1968 or 1969 — an institution, or home with no support. Her parents took her home and did everything with her. Andrea learned to ride a bike, went to speech therapy for years, eventually developed a vocabulary that included a respectable collection of curse words, and became Janet's reason for every certification she ever earned. Janet brought her through nine months of terminal cancer using hypnosis, going all the way into OR rooms, inducing her at the edge of PET scan machines, and sitting with her every night to say a prayer they made up together. When Andrea passed at 55, Janet changed the last line of the prayer. She still says it. The conversation goes deep and moves around a lot. They talk about why the non-verbal community often responds to hypnosis better than anyone else — because they have no filters, no skepticism, no performance anxiety, just a lifetime of signals stuck inside them with nowhere to go. Janet's whole philosophy around the special needs community reframes autism and nonverbal behavior not as a cognitive absence but as a wiring short: everything is registering, nothing can get out. Her job is to give them a different way through. They get into the question Janet says comes up constantly: how does a devout Christian who serves at her Bible-based church every Sunday also run a Reiki and energy work center? Her answer is thorough, personal, and lands pretty simply. Nothing about holistic healing is new. Oils, laying on hands, healing through prayer, walking up to a bush and pulling off a berry to make a salve: that's biblical. She calls Reiki prayer on steroids and leaves it there. She also talks about doing explicitly Christian-based inductions for clients who want them, using scripture as suggestion, and finding that the framework of abundance and limiting belief maps almost perfectly onto what she was already reading in Jeremiah. There is also a conversation about God, the Holy Spirit, the soul, the subconscious, a corporate org chart, a Bentley with flat tires, a hard drive that needs defragging, and Dan Marino finally getting his Super Bowl ring in heaven. And then Little Big Daddy wanders onto camera, does his paws up, gives a big yawn, and the whole thing feels exactly like what Janet's center is actually trying to be: a place where you can just show up as you are, even if all you can do is make it to the parking lot. Three quotes from Janet worth writing down: "We have something for everyone, because everyone has something. And there is always help, and there is always hope." "I wanted her healed. I just didn't get her healed in the way I was expecting. But I got her healed." "If the ocean can calm itself down, so can you. Let's work on it together." Connect with Janet Rotella: Website: calmandbrite.com Janet is based in Florida and presents at HypnoThoughts Live in July — Little Big Daddy will be there too Calm and Brite also rents space to other practitioners and hosts group classes including Janet's signature Hypnoki sessions, a fusion of hypnosis, Reiki, sound healing, and meditation Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Grief, sorrow, and when the healing doesn’t seem to work (special episode with Lance Baker)

Yesterday, I broke down and cried in the middle of the grocery store. Here's an article I wrote about it: https://medium.com/trancewell/grief-sorrow-and-when-the-healing-doesnt-seem-to-work-592d48a353e6?sk=716685a230703bea6bed2babceae5e87 Please enjoy this episode. If you need support or want to explore what is possible in your life, write me at ryan@trancewell.help.

James Tsakalos: NLP as a Full-Contact Sport, the Art of Modeling, and Why Everyone Is Just Making It Up

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan goes down the rabbit hole straight through the Earth's core and comes out in Melbourne, Australia — where he finds James Tsakalos, one of the most respected and quietly influential figures in the NLP world, running a live Master Practitioner training in the room right behind him, whiteboards covered, Italian pasta lessons happening between sessions. James has been teaching NLP for over 30 years, and the reason people in the field — Lance Baker, Melissa Tears, James Tripp, Jonathan Alfelt, and others — keep saying his name with a particular kind of reverence is simple: he teaches NLP the way it was originally meant to be taught. Long, immersive, embodied, in-person. Not a 7-day certification. Not a Udemy click-through. The real thing. He describes it as a full-contact sport, and he means it literally — most of what NLP is actually about lives in the body and in unconscious competence, not in techniques and language patterns you can read from a slide. The conversation goes deep on what NLP actually is at its core — not a bag of tricks, but a process of reverse-engineering extraordinary human performance that most people never encounter. James draws a sharp distinction between the modeling process itself and the techniques that come out of that process, and explains why the field drifted toward selling the outputs rather than teaching the method. He introduces apprehension vs. comprehension — the difference between knowing something through your senses and nervous system versus knowing something through logic and explanation — and makes the case that most of the important things we learn in life, from language as children to reading a room as adults, we learn through apprehension. Trying to get there through comprehension is the thing that blocks it. They also cover: why kids are the best models for the state you need to do real modeling work, why the comparison and judgment that emerges around age 6 or 7 might be the original sin of learning, how Gregory Bateson introduced Bandler and Grinder to Milton Erickson, what metaphors like the "brain as computer" silently do to how we think about change, pattern detection vs. pattern understanding, language evolution, the funk, the Tao, and why if a trainer is being presented as a celebrity with the power to change your life you should run in the opposite direction. And then — what James did or said in the two minutes he stepped off camera while Ryan accidentally stopped recording — remains the secret to having everything you want in life. We'll never know. Three quotes from James worth writing down: "NLP is an attitude of wanton curiosity, and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques. The techniques are not NLP — they're what NLP left behind." "Your ability to understand something has nothing to do with your ability to perceive its existence. Pattern detection and understanding are completely different things. And one of them will prevent the other." "Everyone is just making it up as they go along. Everyone. The most successful people you've ever met — they're all just winging it. Be okay with that." Connect with James Tsakalos: Website: jamestsakalos.com  Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Brandi EMME: Energetic Medicine, Metaphysical Experiences, and the Art of Neutral

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Brandi EMME — certified clinical hypnotherapist, shamanic practitioner, astrologer, former fitness instructor, cuddle therapist, and the force behind EMME Therapy Lounge — for one of the most wide-open, spiritually electric, and quietly profound conversations the show has produced. Brandi joins from wherever her life has landed her, carrying two decades of vegan living, a Tibetan shaman master who changed everything, and a last name she invented — which turned out to mean exactly what it needed to mean. Before they even hit record, she pulled up Ryan's natal chart. Libra sun, Gemini moon, Sagittarius rising. She had notes. Brandi came into hypnosis through a Tibetan shamanic lineage — not a weekend certification, but years of deep practice with a master who refused to give her the one thing she showed up wanting: amnesia. She arrived with money in hand, ready to erase a childhood that included watching her father shoot her in the face and murder her mother. The shaman said no. Instead, he put her in neutral — and spent the next two years watching her fight it. When she finally stopped fighting, something shifted. The anger valve disconnected. She noticed it the day a stranger rode off on her bicycle and she just... let him go. The session that changed her relationship with hypnosis entirely came during a past life regression in school — when she found herself in a beautiful, lonely castle in a white satin slip gown, and then watched her mother roll in, in the same dress, in a glass casket. And heard, clearly, that she was doing exactly what her mother had done — staying loyal to a man who would destroy her. She left her ex-husband shortly after. She credits that regression with saving her life. From there the conversation goes everywhere it wants to: why Black and Hispanic communities are underrepresented in hypnosis (it's not mistrust of hypnosis specifically — it's mistrust of the category, rooted in religious culture and historical good reason), how Brandi accidentally discovered she was conducting body attunements during cuddle therapy sessions without knowing it, a woman who came for fertility work over Zoom and two days later had baby footprints mysteriously appear on the back of her car window — and three months after that, a baby. A smoking cessation session that turned into a full shamanic extraction. And why Brandi doesn't use scripts, doesn't guarantee specific outcomes, but does guarantee transformation. She also breaks down what EMME stands for — Energetic Medicine Metaphysical Experiences — which she didn't consciously know when she chose the name. It came to her a year later, as a joke, in a conversation over drinks. It clicked immediately. That's pretty much how her whole life works. Three quotes from Brandi worth writing down: "Whatever I'm doing to you, I'm doing to me too. Energy does not discriminate. We're just channels." "I went to look for my anger, and it wasn't there. I said, come on — where'd you go? And it just... wasn't there anymore." "You will never leave the same way that you came in. No one does. And you never will." Connect with Brandi EMME: EMME Therapy Lounge Linktree: linktr.ee/EMMETherapyLounge  Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]