by Mike Mandel
When’s the Last Time You Were Bitten by a Spider?
It might seem like a strange question, but it connects directly with both hypnosis and personal development.
First off, I should mention that I don’t mind spiders at all. I find them quite fascinating. Here in Ontario, we have the Northern black widow and the Wolf spider. While they are venomous, they typically don’t pose a threat to humans.
But I’m not talking about literal spiders in this email. I’m referring to metaphorical spiders, like the radioactive one that bit Peter Parker, giving him wall-climbing abilities and turning him into Spider-Man.
Naturally, I wouldn’t want to be bitten by a radioactive spider, and I’m sure you wouldn’t either. But that’s okay.
We all have one of Spider-Man’s superpowers already, and it resides in our unconscious minds.
I’m talking about situational awareness, or in common parlance, “spider sense.”
As a former police trainer and hand-to-hand combat instructor, I’ve lectured law enforcement personnel, right up to the federal level, and situational awareness is a major discussion point.
Your spider sense is always running in the background as part of your self-protective mechanism. You only need to learn to pay attention to its signals.
A number of years ago, I was driving to a small Ontario town called Greely. I had just performed a hypnosis show at Carleton University, Ottawa, and it was after midnight.
Typically, I would have stayed in Ottawa, but my friend Les lived in Greely and had offered to let me stay at his house for the night. He and his wife would be asleep by the time I arrived and had left the door unlocked for me.
There were very few lights on, and as I stepped from the front entrance into the living room, my spider sense went off. I stopped dead in my tracks, with no conscious awareness as to why.
After a few seconds of standing still, I walked across the carpet to the couch and looked behind it, where Les was hiding, planning to scare me.
“Mike, that’s impossible! I was completely silent. How did you know I was there?” he asked.
I had no answer. I didn’t know he was there, and there had been no conscious hint. But unconsciously, I had detected that something was amiss, and when I paused to consider this, I was drawn to his hiding place.
Just last summer, Chris Thompson and I drove to Schenectady, New York, to attend Timothy September’s wedding, which was an amazing event.
The night before the ceremony, the bridal party and close friends were treated to a wonderful supper by Timothy and his bride Marissa, in an upscale restaurant in downtown Schenectady.
Afterward, Chris and I headed outside to grab a cab or Uber to get back to our hotel rooms. It was a warm evening, so we were leisurely walking up the street discussing the upcoming day, when suddenly, my spider sense went off.
“Let’s not walk any further; let’s go back to the corner and grab a ride,” I instructed. Chris looked surprised but agreed, as he could tell I wasn’t joking around. We ordered an Uber and once in the vehicle, discussed the sudden change of plans, and he agreed with me.
It was subtle, but the neighborhood had been changing as we walked away from the restaurant, though nothing we would have consciously noticed.
But unconsciously, we picked up the clues…
There was a little less light, a bit more raucous noise, more signs of dereliction, and even some obvious drug use.
There was simply no reason to push our luck by continuing to walk into an increasingly unstable and potentially dangerous area.
As my friend and security expert Alan Bell warns: If you get into a situation, it’s because you screwed up at some point.
Obliviously continuing down the street we were on might have resulted in a violent encounter, which would certainly have qualified as “screwing up.”
And you have spider sense too. Gavin de Becker refers to it as “The Gift of Fear.” It’s a gift because it can keep you safe.
You just have to learn to listen to your spider sense and pay attention when it warns you.
That’s because you are only consciously processing about seven bits of information at a time.
But unconsciously, you’re processing three to twenty million bits per second.
That’s where spider sense operates. You only need to learn to listen to it because it’s designed to keep you safe.
And amazingly, you can enhance the sensitivity of your spider sense quite easily, using hypnosis, whether you do it yourself or have a hypnotist access that control for you.
Learning to work with your spider sense can quite literally save your life.