Hey everyone. It's Kristina Driscoll with the She’s Brave Podcast. You guys, you guys, I am diving into the unknown. You know, when you just want to learn something new that you don't know anything about and you're curious, you're maybe a little skeptical, but I think it's important that we always keep an open mind and that we always just learn as much as we can about different things because we never know what thing could help us.
So, today I want to let you guys know we have a very special guest. Her name is Hilary Leehane, and she is the co-owner of State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Center, where she helps people all over the world, move through stuck emotions and remember their true selves. That is incredibly beautiful. Hi Hilary.
Hi, Kristina!
And happy 40th birthday. You guys, we are recording this episode on Hilary's 40th birthday. Yay. My forties were an amazing decade as have been my fifties. It just keeps getting better and better. Like that's just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just want to tell everyone a little bit more about you, Hilary.
So for everyone out there in the audience, Hilary found herself going through a. Dark time. She was going through dark times years ago and through the use of hypnosis, she was able to come back to life, so to speak, recognizing her true potential and calling in life. She studied to become a consulting hypnotist so that she could help others do the same I have to tell you. Hilary is a very, very courageous woman. I was on her podcast, although I still don't know anything about hypnosis. So we're going to be learning about that today. And I think being in your field alone, to me, Hilary says that you are a very courageous person, that you live your life aligned to what you are.
Works. And even hypnosis hasn't really become a hundred percent mainstream. Like I'm old enough to remember things like when yoga people thought that you were crazy. If you did yoga, you know, and even my husband, like my husband was a non believer in yoga until he put his back out when he was dating me and I introduced him to So you 15 minutes of low back, you know, for low back pain yoga.
And he's a believer now. I mean, it's just funny how things work in life, right? So we're going to do this a little differently today. Most of the time we start out with your background, your story, how you came to where you are today, which is all your courageous journey. But for the benefit of my listeners, I think a lot of people out there are like me number one.
Okay. I don't even know what hypnosis is. I've never done the process. Number two, I'm a little skeptical. So let's start out first with the question. And I'm asking this for the benefit of my audience too, because I think there's still a lot of us out there that don't know anything about it, but Hey, let's find out more.
So let's start out with what is hypnosis? What exactly do you do?
Yeah. So as you would imagine, I get this question almost every day, right? Constantly bringing awareness to people that have seen movies and shows and stage performances and stuff like that. And so what I would say to those people, let's, you know, everyone listening is just to sort of clear your mind of those past ideas, right?
The idea of, someone controlling you. Anything like that. Hypnosis is the marriage between relaxation and heightened focus. Okay. So you know, you think of brainwaves. Those are big right now, right? Listen to different hertz of brainwaves. We go into hypnosis in the theta brain state. That's where we do hypnosis.
So we come from a very heightened conscious state. And in hypnosis, whether they're online or in the chair in my office here we're going through techniques to relax, right? Counting down, you know, down from 10 to 1 imagining a beautiful place, right? Pretending that you're in a beautiful place.
So we get to the subconscious mind that way. Through relaxation , your internal focus goes up. And so, you know, I will say that stage hypnosis is The same, but there's a big difference. So the people on stage are highly willing to be silly, right? , you know, 100 people go up there and 10 are left because, you know, the person has noticed that 90 of them are not willing to be silly.
And they're very good at it. They're very good at noticing those things, those hypnotists. But , the big, big difference is that. When you're working with me, you are highly motivated, not to be silly, but to make changes, right? To make those deep changes that you want in life. So, you know, there's no forgetting.
There's no out of control ness. If that's a word. There is, you know halfway through a session, if someone is like, Oh, I gotta, I gotta go to the bathroom. They just say to me, Hilary, I gotta go, I gotta go to the bathroom, and we put up the chair, or they get up from Zoom, and they go, and they come back, and then they're relaxed again.
There's really no magic about it. I don't have a magic wand. I can't control you. If I was to say, Kristina, you're now gonna cluck like a chicken, you would Be like no, no. Yeah.
I'm so glad you're addressing this Hilary, because I would say, I think that's, you just tackled like my biggest resistance to like being curious and exploring hypnosis is that because of TV, because of all these things that we've seen on, on like movies, television shows, whatever we think.
Oh my gosh. This is somebody who's taking control of my mind. That sounds really scary.
Yeah. It's something that we're always trying to do. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know that the movies like it because , it's out there and it's, it's kind of like click bait, right? It's, it's okay.
You know, to watch, but it's like that in real life.
Yeah. Yeah. And the other way I would describe it is being afraid of handing over control.
Yeah. Yeah. So absolutely clients come to me and, of course, right. When I first started hypnosis, I thought before my first session, of course I thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to go to sleep and wake up a different person.
I'm going to lose control. What is it? And thank goodness I had a wonderful hypnotist working with me and she told me what we do. We help people through a pre-talk, right? So right now what I'm doing is a pre talk with you basically. Okay, cool. Where I'm just explaining hypnosis so that you're, you know, de myth, you know, de mysticized.
Yeah. Like, yeah,
yeah. All those myths are being debunked. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. So this is awesome. Cause I really feel like we had to start out this way because you know, I'm that person that wants to know everything. Like I'm always learning. So this was a great opportunity for me to learn about hypnosis with somebody who I've gotten to know a bit and felt comfortable with. You know, having you on the show so let's go back because I want to go back to what happened in your life that got you into hypnosis.
And I just want to commend you for listening to your intuition and following the path that you were aligned with to where you're at today.
Yeah, so thank you. I'm glad I listened to, but I didn't always listen and that's where my dark place came from, right? So I spent the better part of my 20s and 30s in university.
I just wanted to do everything, right? So I hopped and skipped and jumped from one program to the next. And I finally decided, cause I'm a creative, I decided to get my bachelor's in industrial design, which is designing product, you know, anything from a water thing to you know, this tube here, so , that's where I went and my, the one thing I did notice while I was going through school was my.
Ego was huge. I was like, I'm gonna be the best in the world, and there's nothing bad about that. But it was driving me to feel really Empty. Inside, right? So I graduated and I felt like I was on top of the world. I had, you know, the whole idea of manifest. I manifested my job and I just felt like I had everything.
But I remember coming home one day and saying to Les, I am so, so unhappy. Right. I feel like I've got everything, but I feel so unhappy and within I don't know, it was a couple of weeks from then , there were a few things that just happened in life including that and. I hit the ground.
My soul was just like, no, you're done. And I wound up with a very rare sleeping disorder. And, , maybe one day we'll find out what it was. But it's basically a take on hypnic jerking, right? So we all twitch a little bit in our sleep as we're falling asleep, but mine was quite violent and I would wake and wake and wake.
Oh, wow. That sounds incredibly difficult.
It was terrible. And I hit the ground so hard. I was designing kitchens at that time. I was also designing products downtown Toronto. I had to basically let go of both jobs. I had to shut my life down, right, because I went into a deep depression within a week.
Anxiety. I couldn't even move off the couch. I basically watched YouTube non stop just to keep my mind from going anywhere else. Hit the ground. So we have a wonderful friend, Peggy Kelly Davies, who is a hypnotist and she helped me with hypnosis gently come out of that.
Wow. That's amazing.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting that you tell this story of like how suddenly this deep depression and anxiety came on. I just finished reading an amazing book. It was written, written 13 years ago and it's called the five regrets of the dying by Bronnie Ware. She's Australian and towards the end, she, she really was like, she was a caregiver, end of life caregiver for eight years and she loved it, loved it, loved it.
And then she burned out. And so like, she did learn all these incredible lessons, but she realized, okay, it's time for me to leave. And then she did, like, she dove into really quickly. Same thing as you, like she, she had been this like incredibly motivated, cheerful person, and who could literally write a book about people dying.
And it's not even scary. Not even it's uplifting. It's not, it's not a downer. It doesn't make you cry. It's like really, really good. And and then boom, like it was really fast with her. So it's interesting. Like, I'm just kind of talking out loud, exploring, like how sometimes. Some people gradually get depressed or gradually get anxious.
And then some of us, you know, it's just like very, very fast and very, very like almost violent, you know, like deep. And it's so interesting because your situation is very similar to hers and people didn't understand her. Like they literally were saying to her. Like, but you've been cheerful your entire life.
Like what is going on? It was almost like they didn't believe her, you know?
Yeah, it can hit fast. Especially when you're not sleeping. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I felt totally disassociated. Yeah. Yeah. From myself. Yeah and luckily, the hypnosis brought me out of it. And eventually I had this real struggle with going, okay, well, you know, like I just spent the last 11 years studying to be this one. Yeah,
that's a lot. That's a lot to let go of. That is a lot to let of. And you said your ego was really enmeshed in that. Like that was who you
were. That's who I was. Absolutely. Whatever I was studying, that's what I was.
That's who I was. Yeah. And yeah, and, and so I came out of that and I decided, okay, well, you know, if hypnosis helped me the way it did I wanted to help others with it. Yeah. That's
an incredibly powerful story.
Yeah. Yeah. It, it feels, it feels right. You know, it, it feels. Like it was always my soul's plan, you know I just had to go through that right.
Right. To know what I really needed.
Yeah. Yeah. So what, tell us more about, actually, let's tell us more about your process or are there different processes depending on, cause I know you treat quite a few different people. Things, you know, in people like even stopping smoking is one of them, you know, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. So my that the process which I've trained in a lot of different processes, but when it's all mixed together usually when I help somebody now we Focus on specific emotions. So when you sign up, say with, for a program with me we go through anger because we want that wall to start coming down, right?
Wow. Is that the first thing that you address? Interesting. I love this. Okay, because if you imagine like a brick wall, right, we've got a black wall in our mind and we think of it as anger. We might not walk around being angry people, but there's some level of wall there, whether we can't see over it or it's really low and anger, you know, the wall of anger I describe as, you know, each brick.
That makes up that wall is an unresolved hurt, sadness, fear, those kinds of things from childhood, right? Right, right. So we look at that, we look at that anchor and we, you know, sort of time travel back and do some inner child work. We bring back the inner child into the present moment so that they're sort of working with the mind.
that you have now instead of the mind that's sort of locked in back at five years old. Yeah. Right. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And then we just go through the emotions gently through each session. I do sessions in six, nine or 12 and they're pretty long sessions. They're about an hour and a half. So lots of time to get it.
And then we go, yeah, from anger to sadness to fear and hurt , all the way up to anxiety, all kinds of emotions. Now I have that process, right? But if you came to me on your third session and said, you know, this week I've, I've really been struggling with guilt, you know, cause it's like you're up and out, up and out stuff, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So we would go there. I wouldn't go, Oh, well to this, we're supposed to go. That was actually
going to be my next question. Yeah. , so you do end up tailoring it to the person and where they're at, because it's not going to be the same for every single person. Not at all. Some people are going to take longer in one area and maybe don't need that much work.
Everybody's different. Okay. Wow. I love this concept of working through your emotions. That is incredibly powerful. One of the things that I've been hearing and reading about on the internet is how we are currently just being on the other side of COVID, , we were told to stay away from each other, stay away.
Don't connect, you know, well, human beings, we are like meant to connect, you know, and this lack of connection now, all of a sudden , we're like trying to get connected again. And there's, it's, it's hard for people to reconnect and yeah. Yeah. And it's a process. And, and what's happened also is because of the lack of connection, there's actually a lack of empathy right now.
And that's why people are being so mean to each other, you know, like people just getting angry, having angry outbursts, you know, all of that. It's, we're all trying to process. Emotions from being socially isolated for a while, you know,
exactly. And honestly, most of my clients, are, you know, coming to me with some social anxiety aspect.
And also, you know, when we move through that emotion, well, whenever we're moving through emotions, there's always a reframe you know, of when we look out into the world. If we're struggling with others or connecting or, you know, looking around us and being a little angry or frustrated with others, there's this lovely reframe of everyone that you see when you go to the grocery store, say, right?
If you start to look at each person as a struggling child in an adult body, right? We have this adult face. Yeah. We're both really. Our inner child is struggling, right? And that's where you see these unresolved hurts and fears and sadnesses and angers from the past just come out in little spurts of anger or whatever you see, frustration but it really opens up you.
A kind of a lens of compassion for others when you, when you see them as well as yourself as a struggling child sometimes, right? Right. Yeah.
Yeah.
What else would you like us to know? And this is again, coming from the perspective of someone like me who really doesn't know that anything about him. I'm going to say, I really don't, I didn't know.
Anything. I've learned a lot already.
Yeah. Well, I can definitely, you know, speak to not working only with emotions but also limiting beliefs. Oh, I love it. Patterns. Patterns that , bring up. From childhood, usually and so we work on releasing those limits and beliefs. So how I work, just go back to process a little bit.
I do a lot of timeline stuff. So, you know, whether your imagination is, really there or not, doesn't matter. But we sort of pretend to go along back and forth , on your timeline. Right. And we always call in a support system, which is really fun. Some people want their grandma there in their mind or their dogs.
Oh, I love that. Yeah. It's just this lovely extra, you know, layer , to feeling calm and feeling supported. You know, you've got me in the background , and the support system flowing with you, whether you're going back I love that concept. That is so beautiful.
A long time ago, I had a CD and I think, what was his name?
He was a doctor and he had this anxiety CD that you could listen to. And that was actually in one of them where you could like bring, you got to meet up with somebody. , it could be like. Like we said, like your grandmother, your grandfather, like someone in your past, or , it could be a cartoon character.
Literally it could be a person on TV, anything you wanted, but they were like your support person on this journey of, you know, examining your anxiety and what can I do to feel better about it? Kind of a thing. It was like really cool. Yeah.
, and then so there's this magic moment when we go back in time, right, and we look at an emotion, we tap into the emotion just a little bit for contrast, but then we apply wisdom and understanding to that emotion, and it's amazing how it It's fast, you can release the emotion.
It's not about stuffing the emotion down somewhere. It's about moving through it. Right. So, you know, I want you by the end of the session to go, Oh yeah, I can't even feel that anymore. Right. I can't feel that anymore. Yeah. So it's just this, , lovely back and forth and we test and we go back and we test until you can't, tap into the emotion any longer.
It's not bothering you, right. Moving forward. Yeah. When I work with weight loss clients, same thing, right? There's a lot of, especially, oh my gosh, with women. You know, we, we hold on to , simple, simple things, something like a cat call, right? You know what I mean by a cat call, right? Yeah, I do.
And they whistle at you and you're walking down the street. Yeah.
So I've had clients that go back to that and that shut down their ability, cause they want to hide. Right. And when you have a part of us, parts work is also a part of it, part of it. We have a part of us that is wanting to hide. That part can kind of get in the way.
It feels like it's protecting us. But there's, there's a back and forth, there's a, there's a conversation that we need to have with that part of you that might be hiding behind something whether it be that cat call or, or whatever, there's so many different things in life that you could hide behind.
But , you're helping them move through each and every layer that might come up in a hypnosis session. So , we look at the emotion that's, , you know, what they're dealing with right now. And then as that emotion dissipates, that's where we get a little heart comes up.
Wait a minute. I'm not so happy with this change. Right. Well, why aren't you happy? Well. Okay. I'm not going to be protected anymore, right? We need to be protecting so and so, right? And then we work with the part, right? And then there might be a limiting belief, and so we work with the limiting belief.
So it just goes kind of full circle. We can kind of turn on a dime if you need it, that kind of stuff. Yeah. You know, the thought just came to my mind as you were talking, to me, it's sounding like very direct therapy because I think one of the issues sometimes with conventional therapy is People will hide things.
They just can't get themselves to bring something up. Whereas it sounds like your process is, it'll make you go the places you need to go. So , it's almost more efficient. See, it's like the analytical side of my brain trying to figure this out.
No, that's okay. It can be. Definitely I could never call myself a therapist cause I never trained to be a psychotherapist or anything like that. Got it.
No, I know it's completely different training. I totally agree with that, but to me, it's a very, very different process.
Well, we're going to the theta brain state, right? Okay. Total relaxation. Ah, okay. Okay. You know, , you get so relaxed. , it's the same relaxation that you go into. You know, we go into the theta state as we're falling asleep at night, right? We get really relaxed. Suddenly the body feels Heavy.
You're waking up in the morning and it's a very natural state, right? You're waking up in the morning. , your body feels so heavy. Oh, I don't want to move. Right. Yeah. And then other times that we go into lighter hypnosis, reading, knitting, watching, fascinating, lighter hypnosis. Yeah. Yeah.
I would agree with that certain books in particular, I am reading my very first book by Yung Pueblo. That's not actually his name. It means young people in Spanish, but he's in his thirties raised by immigrant parents. And, he's amazing. Like somebody recommended, I read one of his books and I was open to it. So I said, okay, fine. And I'm halfway through. It's been about a month. Because I read a few pages and I underline things, I write things in the margins and it's just like a lot of reflection, you know?
Yeah. And that's, Absolutely in line with hypnosis too, right?
It was just a huge reflection, huge reflection. I love that definition, huge reflection. And like, that's how we learn and grow because the first step is that self awareness and that's huge. Like that's probably half the battle there is when somebody suddenly starts realizing, Oh, like maybe instead of with my teenage Kid, every time they say something kind of rude or, you know, something to trigger me practice the pause, right?
Just like, I'm not going to answer that. I'm going to take a few breaths. I might actually even, you know, walk away and to another room for a few minutes or, or even a half an hour, an hour and give myself a little time and grace to respond. Because our first response is actually like, I learned this from young pup pep Pueblo is our first response is actually not who we really are.
It's just a reaction. Yes. It's we're not really answering from the essence of who we are as a person and, you know, as a spirit, as a beautiful, loving spirit. So yeah.
Yeah. We're usually answering if I was to take it a step further, our first response is usually that child version of us.
Yes. Totally agree.
Totally agree. And I think he's basically says some version of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very
interesting. In hypnosis, it's like you get that barrier then, right? , it's like you see the emotion coming and instead of you getting sucked into it and spiraling, you can have that moment, like you said, right?
Yeah. Well, do I want to feel that right now? Is that going to help me? Yeah. So it gives you that boundary between emotions. So you're not, Responding so quickly or getting sucked into your own emotions. We're very much in hypnosis. I'm teaching you to become an observer. Right? Love that. So you become, yeah, the observer of your own life, own emotions.
Mm
hmm. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Oh my gosh, Hilary. This conversation has been so incredibly enlightening and I've got to admit hypnosis is not anything like I thought it was like I was that person that would watch it. The swinging pendulum on TV, like the little stopwatch, you know, like total control themselves, like that's scary.
Right? Like that is scary. I would never. So here we are. Thank you so much for explaining hypnosis to us, explaining how it benefits us. Because I know, you know, we're always, all of us are always looking for those tools to help us, to help us grow, to help us learn, to help us be a better human, if you could teach the world, like one thing about hypnosis, like just maybe it's benefits, it's greatest benefits or just, you know, and I'm, I'm not going to make you say it in a sentence.
I'm going to let you talk as long as you want, but like, what do you, what do we need to know? About what you do.
So basically I have it kind of written on the board behind me, but in hypnosis, it's all about going back to an event that in that moment, we applied meaning, right? We applied meaning to that event.
You and I could look at the same event and apply a different meaning, right? Which would in turn Apply a different emotion, the meaning and the emotion that we apply to an event creates our experience. So in hypnosis, we go back to that pause between the event and the meaning and we change, we change the meaning.
Oh my gosh, I love this. As soon as you change the meaning, the emotion changes and your experience moving forward changes. Right? Wow. So we think, well, you know, just as a quick example, which we all do, including myself in the, you know, why did I just eat that whole bag of chips?
Right? Why did I just do that?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe there is something from the past that we go back to and we change the meaning we change, you know, in changing the meaning of that event. The emotion changes about it. Maybe now there's not a void that we're filling with chips and now your experience is different and that's how people let go of the chips.
It's not like, you know, I'm going to hypnotize you to never eat chips again, but you're going to be very, very aware of it. Yeah. Yeah. You're very conscious. So you're, so you're going from an unconscious human being, just being thrown around and sloshed around by life to a very conscious being right. Unconscious being conscious being,
I love that so much. In fact, A thought just popped in my head when you said chips, because for some reason in the last few months, like that's kind of been an interesting thing for me. Like I, in the afternoon, in the mid afternoon, after I'm done with something big, like recording a big name person or whatever doing it, I'm teaching a class right now on podcasting, all that stuff.
You know, I've been rewarding myself with a bowl of Lay's original potato chips. And, you know, I just kept thinking, why am I doing this? Like, I'm not really hungry. And what is this all about? And as you were talking, I was thinking about that bowl of chips and all of a sudden I realized what it was about when I was a child.
It was that brand. It was Lays brand original. , we'd have them at our house. And my mother, you know, like once a week we'd get to have those Lays original chips with lunch. And I would eat as many as I could as fast as I could, because after about five minutes or less, my mother would say that's enough.
And she'd put the bag away. Yeah, you know, and so I think there's just, again, that little girl in me is like, I deserve those potato chips, right? Yeah. And then you would work on reframing that. Yes. Wow. That's so cool. So cool.
All right, Hilary, this has been. So informative. I know my listeners are going to want to get in touch with you.
How can we get in touch with you?
Yeah. So my email is. Info, S O M H Y P N O S I S dot com. You might be wondering what the S O M means, it's state of mind. Oh, state of mind, yeah. Yeah. So we're basically changing our state of mind, right? Yep. So state of mind hypnosis is, is our training center's name.
And So emails. Good. Are you putting information below? Let me just, I am, everything's going to go into the show notes, but I always like to have you verbally say them that way. If people are, you know, maybe at home, they can jot it down or, if they have their phone nearby, they can just, you know, tap it into their phone right now.
So exactly.
So below this podcast, wherever you are there will be a link, a Calendly link if you want to reach out for a free 45 minute consult and there's the website. Okay. Wonderful.
And what's your website? Psalm hypnosis. com. Okay, cool. All right. We are set. Thank you so much, Hilary, for sharing your brave journey of really going through something dramatic, changing your career, your identity, your whole identity and becoming who you were meant to be.
Thank you so much for sharing your story today, Hilary.
Thank you. Thank you for providing this platform to help people share that story and inspire others.
