Dan Ryan at the Maha Rose Center for Healing (Photo: Kristy Ann Muniz)
When I first met Dan Ryan and he told me he was a hypnotherapist, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it — mainly because I had no idea what that meant. Nonetheless, I was intrigued, so I decided to sit in on one of Dan’s Past Life Regression Workshops at the Maha Rose Center for Healing in Greenpoint.
Only two other people had shown up for the group session, both of whom happened to be hip, attractive girls in their mid-to-late twenties. The workshop began with Dan briefly explaining his practices. Initially, I was skeptical: While I’m interested in taboo traditions, I also consider myself to be a pretty logical person, so the chances of me discovering some “past life” seemed too unrealistic for my taste. As it turned out, I was in for a surprise.
Before the full hypnosis, Dan had us do a bite-size trial. We sat up straight, in the silent room, closed our eyes, and were given breathing instructions. He then told us to imagine a happy place (most people picture a beach, he said). We were advised to observe the details of our location: What did it look like? What were our feet touching? What were we wearing? etc.
He pulled us out of the brief trance, and suggested that we lay down for the next round of hypnosis. It began the same way as the previous meditation, until he told us to envision a door. Without hesitation, a bedroom door from my childhood home appeared. This particular door holds several painful memories for me, as my brother used to kick holes in it on a regular basis — one time he even tore the door down when my mom placed a lock on the outside of it to keep us safe during his violent outbursts.
It was a hard way to start off the session. Dan then directed us to go through the door, and once we did, provided no explanation of where we should be. I was having trouble trying to conceptualize a scenario, and it was also difficult to stop thinking about that door and everything it represented. I became nervous that I wouldn’t see anything and that this whole therapy was a joke. However, after a couple minutes, visions such as sand dunes and friendly lions started appearing. It was as though I was dreaming while being awake. The aesthetic of these images made me want to go home and start designing t-shirts — an activity I hadn’t done in over a year.
(Photo: Kristy Ann Muniz)
Mixed in with the peaceful illusions were more traumatizing thoughts of my youth. Unlike those of the door, these specific remembrances weren’t triggered by anything; similar to the first hypnosis, Dan had only been asking us to examine our surroundings. I started tearing up, but the feeling of sadness associated with these recollections was quickly overshadowed by a sensation of strength and inspiration.
Dan concluded the hypnosis by telling us to dream up a spirit guide. We were to ask the guide, “What is the purpose of this chapter of my life?” and “How do I fulfill that purpose?” Obviously, we were answering these questions ourselves, but the newly founded state of tranquility allowed solutions to come easily. I suddenly felt a whole new sense of clarity that I didn’t possess prior to the hypnosis.
The girl next to me had fallen asleep during the trance, but shortly after awakening, she started crying uncontrollably. She looked confused and kept repeating that she wasn’t the least bit sad and had no idea why she was crying. Dan explained that these experiences stir up emotions and that something must have connected for her, adding that she might understand why she was crying a few days later, once she was able to fully process the session.
Following the hypnosis, I sat down with the 34-year-old therapist and asked him a few questions about this mysterious treatment that has girls in Greenpoint weeping. In the process of doing so, I started to think that maybe too much communication is the cause of the Emerging Adulthood stage of life that has left so many scholars baffled, and that perhaps hypnotherapy is the key to growing past it.
(Photo: Kristy Ann Muniz)
During the workshop, you said you prefer to explore sources of joy, rather than pain, but painful memories often arise during therapy. So, should one just focus on learning how to draw positive emotions from negative experiences?
I certainly think that is an important part of life. There is a rule at play in therapy, that says we can’t change the past, but we can change our perceptions of it. And we do all the time. Our perceptions of the past are constantly changing and drawing positive out of negative is a big part of that. You’re allowing that perception to change.
Do you believe in talk therapy?
Of course. I’ve been to talk therapy and it helped me. There’s not one tool that’s going to work 100% of the time. A valid criticism of the entire field, from the most fringe things like what I do, to the most conventional, is that it’s set up poorly. There’s no structure. When somebody needs help, they don’t know what tool is for them. Hypnosis needs to get into [pop] culture, because if it’s in the culture, then young people have an idea of what’s going on. Talk therapy got into pop culture; think of The Sopranos, or In Treatment. Even if it’s on a TV show, when hypnosis is portrayed, it’s not portrayed accurately, there’s always an element of tricking people.
Why do people often relate hypnosis to negative connotations such as being tricked?
Stage hypnosis is all about tricking people.
How do you think regression therapy differs from conventional therapy?
Wildly. Most people who come to me have tried that and it didn’t work; most people who come to a regression therapist have tried most things and now they’re coming to me–and that’s fine, that’s actually a good place to operate from. I also feel, and this is agreed upon with most people I speak to who are either hypnotherapists or mental healthcare professionals, that the talk therapy model set up by Freud doesn’t work for anybody below the age of 40 these days.
Why is that?
The generation divide. Different needs. The baby boomer generation, there’s a lot of repression there. The general tendency was to repress things. Do not talk about them. So people sought therapy to talk. Today there is so much communication. There is so much voicing of how we feel. It’s a very different thing. Today people need things like focus. They need a connection to the present moment. People need mind-influence practices. The tools haven’t changed, but the needs are very different from what they were. The quarter-life crisis of people between the ages of 22 and 28 is a very real thing; People not knowing what they’re doing when they get out of college, it’s very natural. It’s everywhere.
How can hypnotherapy help people figure out what they want to do for a career?
It’s a tool for self-examination. It’s a wonderful tool for understanding our own ideas. I love working with creative people with hypnosis, writers as well. For instance, if you have an idea for a piece you want to write, in hypnosis we can follow that idea to its core, emotionally: What powers that idea has. Where did it come from? Does it trace back to some memory when you were four years old and this certain thing took place? And that idea that you had, that has blossomed into a story, began with that feeling.
There’s a Camus quote, that I’m surely going to get wrong, but it’s something to the effect of: “[A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek] to rediscover, through the detours of art, those [two or three] great and simple images in [whose] presence [his] heart first opened.” So, in the presence of those images where our heart first opened, when we’re creating our artwork, that’s what we’re trying to get back to. With hypnosis we can actually facilitate that and go in our minds to the inception of our creative power.
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