Podcast #68: Mind if I ‘Scape you?

Chris: Welcome fellow Storm Riders! You are now officially a rider on the hypnotic rash. It’s spreading like wildfire. He believes Janis Joplin is the greatest blues singer of all time.

His favorite candy is Jelly Babies and he is without a doubt the smartest and funniest person he knows.. But I judge him because he still hasn’t spent sufficient time on personal modesty. If that’s what they’re calling it these days. Please welcome Mike Mandel.

Mike: Hahahaha! (coughs)

Chris: Oooh!

Mike: Oh fantastic! I began the program by coughing on Chris’s neck. Just fantastic, he is looking really startled right now, he is pointing at the microphone but I am still glorying at the actual cough and the neck and gripping his shoulder convulsively while I did it. That’s fantastic.

Chris: That was. About five podcast ago, I think you explained that, hilarious thing to do.

Mike: I can’t let it go though, I think I’m gonna do it every five podcast just hoping you’ve forgotten.

Chris: Oh, I will not forget about that. Now, we have a very special guest with us, let’s introduce Susanne, and we’ll talk about why we’re actually recording this podcast today. Susanne!

Susanne:   Hey! Hi everybody, How are you?

Mike: It’s good to have you here, Susanne is Mindscaper Extraordinaire and we’re gonna be talking about Mindscaping on this. We’re gonna be touching base about Hypnothoughts and we’re gonna be discussing why Chris keeps talking about a rash, a hypnotic rash, it’s spreading, it’s fantastic.

Chris: (laughs) Yeah, We came up with that, I don’t remember when but the original idea was the Hypnotic Storm Riders because there’s a storm raging worldwide and how do we know? Because we caused it.

Mike: Yes, we did.

Chris: Which really means you caused it Mike.

Mike: Thank you.

Chris: And then we decided to call it a rash or a virus, a hypnotic virus.

Mike: No, it wasn’t a virus. I call my rash Saddam because it just reached my Bagh-dad.

Chris: Oh that’s horrible! Unbelievable.

Mike: Just mentioning a city, nothing wrong with that.

Chris: I can’t believe you put that in podcast ..

Mike: We’ll edit that out.

Chris: That’s way too funny. Of course by edit that out it means, we’ll leave it in.

Mike: We’ll leave it in.

Chris: Alright. I’m gonna introduce the concept, the topic and why we’re gonna talk about Mindscaping, I will not turn this into a Ken Sweatman story.

Mike: No..

Chris: I know that in the show notes you will accuse me into turning this into a Ken Sweatman story as you shuffle paper.

Mike: It’s well on its way.

Chris: Alright. So Mindscaping is something we talked about last podcast, in episode 67, and we got quite a lot of questions about it. I think it’s probably the podcast where you went into the most depth other than in our paid products.

Mike: I think so.

Chris: And we’re gonna go into a bit more depth about Mindscaping because people have been asking questions and we’re gonna talk about some case studies, we are gonna relate it back to general life and so even if you have no interest at all in learning Mindscaping, I think this podcast will help you learn some tools to make you a better conversationalist to help people.

Mike: Chris you did that remarkably well. That was all cogent and congruent and I’m listening.

Chris: Totally non Ken Sweatmanny..

Mike: Totally non Ken Sweatmanny. I’m thinking I actually wanna learn this! I wanna learn this.

Chris: Haha! Of course, you created it, and the reason Susanne is here is because myself and a few others including Susanne were your initial students. Where you taught version 1.0 and what do you remember about those days Susanne?

Susanne: That’s a very good question, I remember Mike coming to me and two other therapist and asking us if we wanted to learn this and it really changed my life.

Chris: Of course, you said yes.

Susanne: Yeah, and it changed my life and subsequently the life of many people. So thanks Mike!

Mike: It’s a cool thing and it was there all the time. Chris is pointing at the microphone. It’s a.. I know how to work this folks, he’s pointing a lot and..

Chris: I just wanted to make sure they’re all close enough.

Mike: That’s why we have our editor go over it, just erase the noise and tweak it.

Chris: No. It’s not gonna happen.

Mike: Disregard previous message but yeah. Mindscape is cool. I didn’t really invent it, I sort of discovered it, and I remember running past you and Diddy and Nancy and the three awesome women who are my Hypno-babes and they..

Chris: Hey. Hey, you’re missing someone.

Mike: Beta tested it and.. No. You are actually the first person I ever Mindscaped Chris.

Chris: That’s true.

Mike: And maybe we’ll talk about that.

Chris: Yeah, sure. But before we do, let’s just make sure..

Mike: And maybe not.

Chris: I don’t want to go into talking about Mindscaping before we explain a little about what it is then we can go through some case studies and we can relate it back towards how everybody can use this, just this concept of unconscious change in life.

Mike: Right and you did get that remarkable email, we’ve had a couple of them come in, from people who’ve had..

Chris: More than a couple.

Mike: ..who have experienced using this. Now, even with their own families..

Chris: It is.

Mike: ..it worked for this kid..

Chris: It is an easy thing and I think even if you don’t have any training formally other than this podcast, the description we’re gonna give you here is probably sufficient for you to use your imagination and make some changes happen for other people.

Mike: So maybe I’ll give you a bit of definition, and then we can jump in from there. Mindscaping is a way of building a bridge to the unconscious mind of the person you are working with. Whereby the unconscious mind of that person offers you, metaphorically, the keys that will solve their problem.  In other words, their unconscious minds gives you the keys to the kingdom. And you make it work from that.

Chris: Right, now this relates to hypnosis for those of you hypnotists understanding the Ericksonian Methodologies, you know Erickson taught a lot of.. or told not taught.. told a lot of metaphors..

Mike: We’ll edit that out.

Chris: And yeah. So the stories would resonate with the listener and people would go away and go how that.. you know they wouldn’t necessarily understand but their unconscious would hear the story and go, “Dude that applies to your life. This is what you need to do.”, and the guy would go and make some changes.

Mike: Right.

Chris: And so if you are a brilliant Ericksonian hypnotist you can come up with these stories, that’s wonderful. But if you’re not sure how to come up with the right story, the easiest thing to do is use a tool like Mindscaping.

Mike: Right.

Chris: Because the subject’s own unconscious generates the metaphor. If you wanna put it and that describes..

Mike: And why do we wanna do that Susanne? Maybe you wanna answer that. Why would it be the best interest of their unconscious to generate the metaphor for you?

Susanne: Well, you’re unconscious mind is keeping you safe.

Mike: Right.

Susanne: It wants to protect you so it’s going to give you the information you need to make the changes and we just facilitate you getting there.

Chris: Right, and it’s actually a metaphor that fits you personally exactly the way it should as oppose to me coming out with my metaphor to tell you for your problem of whatever. You know driving too close to other cars..

Mike:  It reminds me of the story of my daughter Evelyn.. (Mike joking around)

Chris: If you’re a habitual close driver or tailgater or whatever, then I have to come up with a story that I think will resonate with your unconscious as a..

Mike:  Which is easy if you’re Milton Ericksonian..

Chris: Right. But if you’re not, then it’s easier to have you come up with the unconscious metaphor yourself, this is what Mindscaping is. Let’s do it really quickly here and explain. You start like If I understand correctly, I think I do..

Mike: I think you do.

Chris: You follow a protocol that..

Mike:  It’s very specific but it’s very simple.

Chris: And it’s a protocol that will preframe for the subject this existence of a map that will apply to their problem, their specific problem.

Mike: Right. Chris’s said specific problem. That’s true. You’ll realize Mindscaping can be used with something that is enormous, like health.

Chris: Right.

Mike:  Or relationships.

Chris: Right or something specific.

Mike: Right. Or you can do it with something specific like it’s that meeting that you have tomorrow morning with your boss. You can aim it with tremendous specificity. And I know Susanne, you’ve done a lot of that.

Susanne: Absolutely.

Mike: Right up.. (6.21 broken audio?)

Susanne: With cancer patients, I’ve worked with self-esteem issues, I’ve done, Oh my lord, I can’t even..

Mike: You’ve worked with MS.

Susanne: I’ve worked with MS, you’re absolutely right with that. And people that needed to be congruent in the moment and uptime for meetings the next day.

Chris: To large sweeping health issues just general I-need-to-be-going-into-that-meeting-feeling-confident.

Susanne:   Absolutely.

Mike: Right. Now continuing to that. We preframe this existence of this internal map, and there is a protocol, I’m not gonna tell you the whole thing now, but the basic idea is their unconscious opens this map which has really interesting 3-dimensional features on it and the client goes into a trance by default. You don’t even have to do a formal hypnotic inductions and if you’ve never done hypnosis, Mindscaping works really well because you get Hypnosis any way. Automatically, and unlike a typical trance, for some remarkable reasons. Chris you’ve hear me say so many times don’t get people talk in a light hypnotic state because you’re fragmented and you’ll come out of it.  You need a deep trance for that. But with Mindscaping, they go to a state where they are able to talk fluently and tell you exactly what they see in front of them, behind them, what the sky is like and describe the remarkable structures. One woman told me of a building in front of her that had the word trust on the top of it and she started crying when she saw this. You told me the example of the kid who had a fish behind him floating in the air.  

Chris: Yes. Right, and we’ll get to that one in a little while. It is a really simple thing. Basically Mike, if people don’t take any Mindscaping training with you, they can probably experiment with this just by saying to the subject “I want you to pretend that there is a map, that’s appropriate for this problem.”

Mike: Right, but then they are gonna miss a lot of the protocol, which is avoiding abreactions and avoiding a lot of the problematic things, and pushing them to the process very quickly because there are two aspects to Mindscaping. One, is the discovery of the person’s individual map, and Susanne I know you’ve experimented with this and found as I have that when you are doing a Mindscape, you start to see it yourself, even though you are the hypnotist.

Susanne: Yeah, you see absolutely, No, I shouldn’t say you see absolutely everything but I’ve been able to tell people afterwards about the road they were on, the car they were driving, that they pulled into the home, explained everything exactly and he said that’s exactly..

Mike: Exactly.

Susanne: ..exactly what he is seeing.

Chris: Right. As long as you..

Mike:  Because you had such rapport.

Susanne: Exactly.

Chris: Right. And as long you’re feeding back the information that matches what they told you in the first place, we are not changing things or distorting things.

Mike: Right. So we are eliciting the map and by eliciting it, that alone will often give the subject the clues and the changes they need. And in other cases, maybe 20 percent of the time, we actually landscape the map. We change things, we remove structures, we replace things in their place, when I went to remove an entire forest for one subject that was in his way, it was thorny and impassable, and he said:

“No, there’s owls in that forest and I like them.”

So ok, we build a road around the forest instead and let the owl stay there because they serve some unconscious purpose.

Chris: Right, so Mindscaping is essentially identify what is it you want to help the person work on, then you preframe that there’s some map that’s going to appear, you follow the protocol to bring the map up, then you elicit details about the map then you landscape the map, make changes to it if necessary, then you bring them out of trance. And that is essentially the equivalent of telling somebody a metaphor to apply to their problems so that they then can go on and change things in their life and fix them.

Mike:  Right, but as you know it goes way way way beyond..

Chris: It involves the subject or the client..

Mike:  And also, we’ve discovered that Mindscaping changes go very deep and they tend to be very ecological, we’re calibrating the subject the entire time and after four years of doing this now, we’ve seen remarkable things, but the change is continued to resonate for days, and sometimes weeks, as things fall into place. And people report over and over and over, I don’t know what you did but my life changed, this stuff works. Remember Layla, we totally transformed her life, she’s moving into the Caribbean, she said this stuff works, she didn’t say stuff but she said..  

Chris: “This ‘stuff’ kinda works man.” So let’s do some case studies then. I wanna talk about the one that you already preframed here Mike which was the guy, a father, who did Mindscaping, he actually bought the program that was online. He learned it from himself that, not having any therapeutic background, but learned the skill and he wanted to use it on his son who had anger issues, and this was like an eleven year old kid I think, if I recall correctly, and behind him is this weird blue fish, and in front of him was a tree and the tree had red leaves, and he didn’t like the tree so he had the kid change the leaves to green and different colors and what was around was this dry arid desert, that was redundant, isn’t it?

Mike:  Right.

Chris:  And beyond that was a road with cars that were all like broken down and zombie-ish kind of people walking around so he landscaped that an entire scene, changed the tree, changed the dessert to a forest, he changed dirt ground to grassy ground, all kinds of changes and this kid felt so much better in the end right. So there are lots of different scapes that have happened, that we’ve seen, and we never would have guessed what the person’s gonna imagine is in their map.

Mike: No. And it’s astounding what comes up, Susanne, what are some of the things you’ve run into?

Susanne: I had a fellow who came to me, he was a painter, he was an artist, and he just couldn’t paint, he wasn’t able to be creative any longer, and that point I put him through a Mindscape, and it was amazing that I could see what he is seeing, that was a dry river bed, and it didn’t matter how much we went into this, he just couldn’t make the changes. Long story short, it ended up that he came back, and he was doing a repercussion Picasso’s to a T and out of that I ended up having a reproduction Alfons Mucha that I absolutely adore and it’s coveted now.

Chris: So that’s really cool. So you’re saying that an empty riverbed like a dry riverbed, did he make any changes to it?

Susanne: Well of course.

Chris: What did you do? Or what did he do?

Susanne:   I’m not gonna give that away.

Chris and Mike: (laughs)

Chris: Okay, but he made some changes.

Susanne: But he made some changes, absolutely.

Chris: Hopefully, people can imagine that the reason metaphor is cool is because metaphors help relate to things they already understand. Everyone listening can probably imagine that a dry riverbed whatever you said was the correct term was Mike.

Mike:  A wadi.

Chris: A watty.

Mike:  Wadi, with a d.

Chris: It speaks to emptiness and something is lacking and supposed to be filled with water which is a resource.

Susanne: Since creativity had dried up.

Chris: Right. And so I bet you if he is talking about it he would probably say “Oh my creativity dried up” and to no surprise that the map that he made matches that so congruently.

Mike:  It’s amazing how that works and creativity responds very well to Mindscaping. I worked with a young man who is a part of Neil Strauss’s Society International and worked with him on Skype and Susanne and I both do this, we call it MindSkyping, it works really well over Skype and we see clients that way and I worked with him. He was in Brittany, France with a good connection, worked on his creativity with a Mindscape and I ran into him in Toronto when Neil Strauss came into Toronto last year, we hung out together and we had dinner and this guy was there. And he came up and he gave me a big hug and he said he has written 50,000 words since the Mindscape, he said that his creativity has exploded.

Chris: That’s amazing. I wanna ask you a quick question about this one Mike. Remember we’ve talked so many times about how a subject needs to be at threshold. Do you see any difference here or Susanne for you as well, any difference here, do you need to be at threshold to make changes with Mindscaping or by taking someone through the  Mindscaping progress,  can we bypass that in some way, I’m curious to what’s your answer is.

Mike:  So I am assuming you meant process when you said progress, so I’ll have to act on what I’m thinking. ..which is a horrendous mistake Mr. Thompson, but yeah Chris you are bang on with that, apart from the word that was wrong,

Chris and Susanne:  (laughs)

Mike:  You’re bang on because while on typical therapy with NLP or Empowering questions or whatever, you typically need someone at threshold, something has to change, it has to be now and it has to be me. But one of the great ways you can use Mindscaping is, I’ve never used it for something like the screaming phobia or whatever, but it is great to prepare the way for dealing with other things. So Mindscaping – a good session can actually put people at threshold or you can use it after a session to tie up any loose ends at the end of the therapy. It’s really fluid, you can use it in NLP, or any of the tapping regimens, and it’s hypnotic in and of itself.

Chris: Right. I was thinking you can’t make somebody wanna quit smoking, let’ say, but you can use the Mindscaping session to help somebody understand the pathway towards where they wanna be and be more clear about that and that may bring..

Mike:  Bring in wellness and things like that instead, Right.

Chris: What are your thoughts on that Susanne?

Susanne: I am thinking exactly the same things you guys are.

Mike: She takes the easy way out.

Susanne: Of course I do. Hahaha!

Chris: Perfectly acceptable..

Mike: You’re right.

Susanne: It’s intimidating being with you guys, I gotta be honest.

Chris: Hey, you’re welcome to join us anytime. Let’s talk about your situation because you, I believe, are the only person who have ever to have Mindscaped Mike Mandel.

Mike: Yes. She is.

Susanne: Oh, that was an amazing.. that was actually my first Mindscape.

Chris: Is this okay to talk about Mike?

Mike:  Oh, it is. Certainly.

Chris: Are you sure?

Mike:  Yeah. (laughs)

Susanne: Well it was my first and it was the best I would think and..

Mike: (Old guy impersonation) Women always say that about me. (laughs)

Chris: (laughs) I was gonna make a joke about that.

Mike:  The vigour of a man half his age

Susanne: That’s right. And..(laughs)

Mike:  ..and strength of a 15 year old boy.

Chris: Seriously, let’s talk about that..

Susanne:  What would you wanna know?

Chris: What were you working on Mike?

Mike:  Well, what happened is when I was teaching the three amazing Hypno-babes, How to do MIndscaping, they were actually my Beta testing group as I started to formulate this. And I wanted them to tell me whether or not it worked. To go and do this on people and get results. In the session, each one got to do a Mindscape on someone else on the room to make sure that we are doing it correctly and Susanne got to do the Mindscape with me and I had the most amazing Mindscape, Chris. It’s incredible how this has worked out because what happened was.. Do you remember what it was?

Susanne: I do. It was the water and the two islands and the Sun, with the water..

Mike:  And the boat.

Susanne: And the boat. The pirate ship.

Mike: It wasn’t island, it was the horizon was sort of rocky low mountains, it was twilight with the moon and the sky and full moon shining over the water, which of course is wonderful symbol of the unconscious. It amazes me what the unconscious will throw out. And in this lagoon was this wooden Pirate ship, this kid’s pirate ship, which is actually on my desk at home. And I always said I find it funny working for the corporations and pillaging them because I’m in essence of Buccaneer and I’m self-employed and..

Chris: You’re a pirate.

Mike: I admitted to it. It’s ok. So this was my symbol, and this huge ship was sailing towards this gap in the lagoon out to the open sea and Susanne said how does that make you feel? And I said something like “challenged” but I find it really exciting, and interesting like opportunity. When you checked back with my Mindscape a few weeks later..

Susanne: It had changed.

Mike: Yeah, it changed. The ship was still there but it had moved now but it was much much closer to this gap in the mountains. After that, the stuff Chris and I were doing just took off, the business took off and everything’s just gone to the planet.

Chris: Yeah, you can totally see it, in this case, I will use the word see correctly because it’s a very visual thing, how that is a metaphor for growth and personal development and change and expanding your horizons quite literally!

Mike:  Yeah.

Chris: That’s really cool. And you got to do that Mindscape on Mike and obviously that’s the kind of thing that sells you immediately because you’re not planning on putting.. when you’re experiencing it or doing it on someone else, you’re not …let’s say you’re the person experiencing the Mindscape, you know what I’m saying, “Oh, what do I see? I think I see a pirate ship.”

Mike: No. It’s always a surprise.

Chris: No, it just pops in. then you go “Wow, that’s cool.”

Susanne: Can I interject you?

Chris: Yeah.

Susanne: That same day, Mike put me through a Mindscape and we changed my internal map. Everything was wonderful, I felt great and then he said to me go and find just a little present..

Mike: Oh this is wild.

Susanne: This is wild. So I came back and I had found a snail. It didn’t make any sense to me at all.  My Mindscape..

Chris: A snail.

Susanne: I know, so the Mindscape was about, I have been to 12 schools in 13 years and never felt settled. So it’s about feeling settled. Come back with the snail. Afterwards, Mike says to me, “Do you know what the snail is about?”  I said “No, I can’t even imagine.” So it took about, I don’t know maybe 6 to 8 months, he kept coming back to me, “Did you figure the snail out yet?” I said “No, I didn’t.”

Mike: Because we never explain the Mindscape.

Susanne: Never explain it.

Chris: Never interpret it. Never offer an opinion. Just do it.

Susanne: Exactly. So about 6 months later he said “Did you ever figure that out?” I said “No, tell me.” So he finally told me, he said that the snail was about, he’s carrying his home on his back..

Mike: He takes his home with him.

Susanne: He takes his home with him. And that’s where your home is. And I felt much better about that and that made sense to me and after the Mindscape I did feel amazing..

Mike:  And I wouldn’t have explained it if you haven’t kept on insisting..

Susanne: I wanted to know. But it would make it crazy..

Chris: Normally you wouldn’t see a client often enough to go see them again 6 months later to explain it.

Mike:  Right.

Chris: You have fixed them and they may be long gone to have an awesome life.

Susanne: Exactly. Fast-forward to two or three weeks ago, I was doing a client thru Skype and he wanted to be more congruent with a meeting that he was going to, so we did the Scape on that, we changed everything that we needed to change, he was congruent, he was feeling better and all those resources, he was in uptime and he was amazing. But I’ve known that he had flown up to the other side of the country and he was in a new apartment and he didn’t feel settled and he didn’t feel safe and he just didn’t feel like it was home. So I just brought up the Mindscape that I had with Mike. And I said “Did I ever tell you about my first Mindscape?” I said it had to do with me, 12 schools, 13 years, whole story and then I told him about the snail, and I kept elaborating on the snail and going on and on about how beautiful the snail was, and that first it was slimy, and now..

Mike:  And something happened.

Susanne: And something happened.

Chris: But there’s no such thing as conversational hypnosis..

Mike: (laughs)

Susanne: (laughs) No. Of course there’s not. Long story short, again he sent me an email about three days later and he said “I don’t know what you did”, he said “But I’ve cleaned up my apartment and I’ve thrown out the things that I didn’t need, I’ve hosted a dinner party and I’m keeping my place tidy.” All because of a metaphor about a snail.

Chris: He was messy, not feeling connected to his new home, and don’t have a lot of friends yet, and all of a sudden he has a dinner party and a clean apartment.

Susanne: Exactly.

Chris: Awesome

Mike: So your metaphor..

Susanne: Yes.

Mike:  ..of your Mindscape, explaining to him mapped across and maybe it shifts in him as well.

Susanne: Exactly.

Mike: I don’t know many are gonna get up and clean your apartments and get your friends right now .. that’s right ..

Chris: That’s really awesome. Now let’s do another one here, we had a father again, this is someone who purchased the Mindscaping program online from us. He’d never done it before and I’m gonna keep the details private because we don’t have the information to share all of them so no names, but the father had a son who was preparing for private school admission test and they were having a struggle. Whatever the issue was, his son was just not getting a high enough score on the percentile scale to get admitted. So they took him through MIndscaping and the father did Mindscaping with the son. And really in this one is a classic example on them not having a lot of Mindscaping, they elicited the map which again interestingly involved a tree and finding a path around the tree to get to what was beyond it. But they don’t have to make seemingly any major changes. It seems that just by having his son elicit this map and noticed the path around the tree that was enough. And then the aftermath is he wrote us and he said I did a practice test and our son scored 30 percentile points higher than on his previous test.

Mike:  The following day after Mindscaping.

Chris: Right.

Mike:  It’s Mind-blowing. And hearing this again and again from people, it’s startling, some of the things that show up for the imagery. I worked with a man on Skype, who makes this Green Men for gardens. The Green Man is an English symbol, it’s actually all through Europe. And you see.. we have one in our backyard on the wall and it’s a face made up of twigs and branches and things. It’s an archetypal symbol, and he makes this garden symbols. And I worked with him for smoking cessation and did some Mindscaping just to help him over the hump. We did this on Skype and his freaking Mindscape Chris was, in front of him was twigs and branches in his face and he was looking through them.

Susanne: Oh, cool.

Mike: He didn’t even notice it. Sometimes the unconscious of the subject will share with you as the Mindscaper,what it is he is doing, he didn’t even noticed his face had become the Green Man.

Chris: So his Mindscape was looking out the eyes of the Green Man.

Mike:  Yeah. And he never even noticed.

Chris: If it had eyes.

Mike: He just saw “oh, there’s all these branches in front of my face and I have to push through them”

Chris: Oh, that is wild.

Mike: Let’s talk about how weird this can get. There has been interesting examples. I worked with a man who had a golden tree on his horizon. He loved it was his target state and he was trying to get to it. And he just couldn’t quite get there. He felt like he was blocked so we worked to build a pathway and made the tree bigger and brighter so he can see it from where he was. But he was looking through a city and on his left side was a sudden drop-off, with a wire along what you‘d see on a highway, with wire and posts. On the right side was a row of buildings that looked like old warehouse buildings, and I said “How does it feel?” He said bleak, empty. I said you “Wanna put some lights?” and he said “yes”. We put a row of streetlights where the buildings were right down through the city. I said you want to do anything else? “I need some people in the town though”, and we added some people and his state was improving and I watched him feel better? And then I said, “what about that drop-off to your left?” He said “I already looked at that.” He said “there’s just some yachts down there and boats,” he said “they’re fine.” But his brain is filling some of this things purely decorative. And one of the things we’ve noticed that is consistent, is every single time the person has a waterfall in a Mindscape, I get him to look behind it. If they reach through the water, there’s always a cave behind it, and there’s always something in the cave for them to find.

Chris: Isn’t that interesting? That is so true. I think I remember going through a Mindscape and I had a waterfall at some point in the class and, yup, there was a space behind it. I can’t remember it..

Mike: We cannot let this go without discussing the goat man!

Chris: Oh No!

Mike: (laughing)

Mike: Hey, listen to this guys, I worked with a young East Indian engineer on Skype and he wanted to make some personal changes in his life and Mindscape is great for generative change, you’re not fixing something wrong but you’re improving things you already do well. You’re making them even better. So he wanted to improve things to make it even better, no big problems, although he had some issues with his father, and his father died a few years ago, this is still in the background. I didn’t know anything about this. So we’ve done his Mindscape and everything’s fine, I asked any final thing you wanna check out and he’s got his eyes closed and he’s on Skype, you know on my monitor. And he said “Yeah, there’s one thing that keeps catches my attention” and I said “What?” and he said “It looks like a subway tunnel down to my right here in front of me, an old one like New York city old dingy subway tunnel” and I said..

Chris: Oooh!

Mike: This is my first encounter of the things underground. And I said, what do you wanna do? And he said I kinda wanna check it out. And I said okay. So my voice will go with you, you check down the tunnel, and I’m watching him and suddenly he’s kind of stunned, and he said, “Okay, it’s really weird down here.“ And now saying “down here” … he’s associated into it. And I said what do you mean and he said “It’s an abandoned subway, it’s not being used in years. There’s just some work lights on, the tunnel is very dark and there’s a couple of candy bars and old pop cans lying around” and he said “it’s really weird down here.” And I said, “okay do you wanna come back?” And he said “hang on,” and he just paused and he said “someone’s calling me from down the tunnel.” Susanne’s freaking out. She hates this story.

Chris: I know it too.

Mike: He said “It’s my father’s voice. He’s calling me from down the tunnel.” And I went “Okay.” Now I am checking ecology as I am going. “I said do you wanna go down there?” He said “I don’t think so.” I said “Can you see him?” He said “No, it’s too dark.” So we use a trick. We put his hands up to his eyes and so he’s got binoculars and right away he can see down the tunnel and he said “There’s something there but it’s still too dark” and so I said “make them night-finder googles,” turn the dial, and he suddenly says.. he looked stunned, he’s got his hands at his face, his mouth dropped open and he says “it’s not my father.” He said “it’s something using his voice”, and I went “What kind of thing?” He said “It’s a man but it’s got a goat’s head with a flaming torch burning between the horns.” And I said, “I don’t think you wanna go down there.” He said “No”. So we leave the subway tunnel. He boarded it up, chained it up and put a “Do not enter” sign. Now this is not some demonic manifestation, this is something from his unconscious, an archetype that his unconscious is offering for him to deal with and but he hasn’t dealt with it yet.

Chris: Right.

Mike: Now, we have to just close this point. How many NLP practitioners does it take to change a lightbulb? Seven..

Chris: plus or minus two.

Mike: ..plus or minus two. How many Ericksonian hypnotists does it take to change a light bulb?

Chris: That’s right.

Mike:  That’s right.

Mike: And how many Mindscaper’s does it need to change a lightbulb? Justin’s brillaint line: None. You get enough light from the Goat man’s torch.

Chris: Hahahaha. Which is brilliant. So I hope that this gives those of you listening..

Mike:  A horrible scare!

Chris: (laughs) A real sense of what’s possible and ..

Mike:  The creativity the mind will generate.

Chris: The power of your unconscious mind, I’m sure everybody has this experience where somebody says to you something like “think about happy childhood memory you haven’t thought of in a long time.” If you think about it, something pops up and you go “Wow that’s cool, I haven’t thought about that in a long time.” Your brain is a very very powerful. So if you’re working on an issue on with intent and you’re asked to elicit a map and make some changes to it.

Mike:  It will happen.

Chris: It will happen. So the process is really cool and of course if you are using this every day, you don’t want to necessarily Mindscape someone formally over a beer at the pub when they’re talking about their problems. But if you just use language to elicit the problems, talk in metaphors to help them identify what is there desired place, what is it that they are trying to accomplish, where are they trying to go, help them frame a pathway towards that, you will help people solve a lot of their own crap.

Mike:  Absolutely Chris. And while we’re on that, Susanne, you are available to do Mindscaping online, aren’t you? Mindskyping

Chris: We all are.

Mike:  We all are.

Chris: Let’s plug Susanne.

Susanne: Thank you guys.

Chris: You’re now online, SusanneWitt.com, I believe it’s correct.

Mike:  Susanne with no zed all S’s .

Susanne: Right.

Chris: I’ll put the link in the show notes. S-u-s-a-n-n-e is the spelling for your first name and W-i-t-t SusanneWitt.com and you can email your info at SusanneWitt.com.

Susanne: I’d love to help you with whatever you need.   

Mike: And if you just want a Mindscaping tune up, If you wanna experience this, it can really make some phenomenal shifts and changes in your life and I’m a living example of that..

Susanne: You are.

Mike: And Chris’s too.

Chris: Absolutely, We haven’t have the time to talk about my own Mindscapes and the changes I made in my life and the results of it but it’s really freaking cool.

Mike: And where does this come from? This comes from Jungian archetypes. It comes from the way we code time and space in our brains which was hinted at through conversations I had with my mentor Derek Balmer, about time circles, about elements of Timeline therapy that came into this, and surprisingly it even ties into Graphology because in Graphology where handwriting is in three zones, the upper loops are imagination and your moral code, you spiritual aspirations. Your middle area, you’re a’s, your o’s, your m’s and n’s, for day to day communication, your conversations, your day to day life thinking, and then the low descenders that drops the baseline, they are all the unconscious stuff and of course belongs to the Id in Freudian psychology, where your unconscious drive for booze, money, sex, etc. Mindscaping’s the same. Everything up in the sky is the abstract, the spiritual aspirations, and everything on the ground is your pathway through life, your daily communications, your conversations, your thinking processes and down below ground, where you find the goat man or stuffs like that..

Susanne: Stop it!

Mike: That’s where you find the unconscious urges and drives and the Id and so on. So there’s a lot of stuff there. So contact Susanne at SusanneWitt.com and have some fun Mindscaping or you can contact me and Chris.

Chris: Right, Now I also wanna mention though for those of you listening, and you’re saying “I wanna learn more about this Mindscaping stuff”, you can go to MikeMandelHypnosis.com/mindscaping, all one word and you can learn more about that there, but Mike and I and Susanne are all gonna be attending the Hypnothoughts Live Conference this August in Las Vegas, Nevada and Mike is teaching a one-day Mindscaping class which is being given away as a free bonus to anyone who is a customer of our Mindscaping online training and of course on top of that after you buy the digital training, you get  a significant discount on your ticket to the Hypnothoughts and it makes it totally worthwhile.

Mike:  It’s kind of a no-brainer.

Chris: It’s almost, It’s not quite like getting Mindscaping the digital training for free but you’re getting a significant discount on the Mindscaping digital training and you’re getting to come for free to the one-day Mindscaping with you, Mike, in Vegas.

Mike:  And Susanne, she will be co-training with me with me.

Chris: All for the discount. So to get that or to check that out or if it’s something that appeals to you, got to the MikeMandelHypnosis.com. One L in Mandel, MikeMandelHypnosis.com/htlive2016 and you’ll get all the details on the awesome promo, and if you wanna hang out with us in Vegas, come and take that class.

Mike:  Let’s talk about Hypnothoughts Live, Scott and Richard will do a phenomenal job on this conference, they’ve been building and building it. I think it as the best, the most exciting hypnosis conference in the freaking world and you will see a cross-section of people who are doing hypnosis and all kinds of hypnosis, NLP etc., from stage performance from street performance, to serious therapists and psychologists, this is for anyone who is remotely interested in hypnosis and it’s the best because Scott and Richard opened it up to every style. So they really are not selective, they’re not cutting people out. They’re, opening it to everybody, and you will make some life-long friends on the conference, be there for about three or four days and Chris and I are gonna have an evening Hypnotic Stormriders drink-off event in an Irish pub ..

Chris: I thought you’re gonna say Hypnotic Rash Event.

Mike:  (laughs) We’re gonna meet at the Irish pub one night with all our Stormriders and if you’re wearing one of your T-shirts, you can get in and we’re just gonna hang together and talk hypnosis and have an absolute blast..

Chris: So If you’re not wearing a T-shirt, we’ll bring you one.

Mike: We’ll bring you one, Dammit. Yes. But check out Hypnothoughts Live, Scott and Richard will make a phenomenal conference, it was great last year, it can be even better this year.

Chris: We have said this on many podcast and we’ll probably say it in many more, it is a fantastic conference, I’m sure Scott and Richard could have priced it to make a whole lot of money off of selling tickets but they have not. They have really picked a venue that is low-cost but is nice, they have provided a lot of meals that are of good quality, tons of training that is all included in the ticket prices something like 329 bucks or whatever, and that’s before getting the discount, you can buy the MIndscaping training, like I mentioned, through us and you’ll end up getting a discount on your tickets so it’s just an absolute no-brainer for anyone looking to improve their hypnosis skills. This August in Las Vegas!

Mike:  Yeah. Check it out.

Chris: Alright.

Mike: Chris, why don’t you give our empowering question now Chris.

Chris: Yeah, before we do our traditional wacky ending, let me ask you this..

Mike: See now, this is the thing now where you and I take issue. Being a Brit, I recognize the necessity of not telegraphing the wacky ending..

Chris: Oh, but there’s one in every podcast..

Mike: ..coming up now, you just do it, you never talk about it. I’m declaring this is the moment where we stop talking about the wacky ending.

Chris: Sure, let’s do it. I’m the marketer, it teases people to keep listening.

Mike:  Okay.

Chris: Okay, here we go. So I’ve admitted it though, so it’s OK.

Mike:  Haha!

Chris: Here is your empowering question.  When you fail to consider what you didn’t not do over the last year, how haven’t you avoided resculpting those aspects of your life and why won’t there be consequences to that you do not do? In other words..

Mike:  (laughing)

Chris: It’s one year from today, looking back, what miraculous changes have you made in your life and how did you resculpt things to bring yourself to this place of fulfillment?

Mike: Whoa.

Chris: That’s right.

Mike: (Mike puts on hilarious older surfer-dude accent) It’s put me in a weird spin man. I just killed six people with an axe and slit the throat of a man your age. (laughs)

Chris: With that, I wanna thank you all for listening. This has been podcast episode 68 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel. I’m Chris Thompson and with our special guest Susanne Witt..

Mike:  Hurrah!

Chris: ..from SusanneWitt.com. W-I-T-T and we have been talking about MIndscaping. If you’ve enjoyed this and you wanna learn more, we would love to get your emails, give us your feedback. If you wanna have your questions included in the next podcast, go to MikeMandelHyp.. Sorry not MikeMandelHypnosis.com, go to SpeakPipe.com/hypnosis. You can record your voice, ask us your questions and we will be happy to include that, provided they are appropriate in the next podcast. Go to iTunes, leave a rating, and we are also now on Stitcher radio.

Mike:  Yes!

Chris: With that thank you and..

Susanne:   Good night!

Mike:  fellow rash riders!

Chris: Susanne said it too early, we’ll edit that out.  We’ll just do that again, ready all three of us. One, two, three, We thank you and..

ALL: Good Night!