As a former professional stage hypnotist and hypnotherapist, I’ve spent a long time thinking about hypnosis, not just as a practitioner, but as someone who eventually felt compelled to write about that world.

One phrase always gets repeated:

“Nobody can make you do anything against your will under hypnosis.”

It sounds neat. Reassuring. Safe.

My own experience suggests reality is far murkier.

Hypnosis is not cartoon mind control. But neither is it merely a harmless relaxation exercise.

It involves authority, suggestion, expectation, altered focus, compliance, social dynamics, and sometimes the strange manipulation of human consciousness itself.

I influenced ordinary people do extraordinary things on stage. Was it safe? Was it immoral? Or was it just a great way to show the masses the power of the mind and imagination?

That questioning eventually became part of a memoir.

But I’m curious about others’ experiences.

Were you ever hypnotised? Did it feel like full consent, cooperation, surrender, something else entirely?

Where do you think the line is between influence and free will?

For many years I chased altered states through drugs, hypnosis, meditation, and eventually Kundalini. I wanted the light, the power, the experience, the certainty. I did not understand the cost of that desire.

The journey began in addiction and ended somewhere I can only describe as silence. Between those points were hypnosis, recovery, devotion, disillusionment, destabilising experiences, and a very long process of integration.

I eventually wrote a memoir about the whole journey because some experiences are too strange not to document.

Has anyone else found that spiritual experiences can be as psychologically disruptive as they are transformative?

For many years I chased altered states through drugs, hypnosis, meditation, and eventually Kundalini. I wanted the light, the power, the experience, the certainty. I did not understand the cost of that desire.

The journey began in addiction and ended somewhere I can only describe as silence. Between those points were hypnosis, recovery, devotion, disillusionment, destabilising experiences, and a very long process of integration.

I eventually wrote a memoir about the whole journey because some experiences are too strange not to document.

Has anyone else found that spiritual experiences can be as psychologically disruptive as they are transformative?

What was this feminine energy that appeared at times to completely consume me?

I was changed. I was confused. My emotions were different. I was crying, crying in pain, crying in bliss. Waves washed over me for months and months. Depression, then bliss. Even my body felt different. I even wondered whether I was going gay. However, I was not. My attraction to women was stronger than a moth to a candle flame. My gait when walking, my physical actions, softer, more gentle. Every part of me felt feminised.

Remember how I said I thought I could read people's minds? To do that we must become receptive, feminine. To transmit, masculine. The over-sensitivity, the feminine energy, I could now see the dots joining together. It wasn't just sexual; it was feminine energy. It wasn't gender. The baseline was primordial feminine energy, and as a man it can cause arousal. I can't say what it would be like for a woman, but again, it causes arousal for women too. How do I know? I felt like I was a woman. Mental? Yes. No wonder some people end up on psychiatric wards.

Of course, what I was going through was another aspect of the alchemy that occurs as the kundalini serpent rises.

When Kundalini fully awakens and illumination comes, the false division between male and female shatters and collapses.

As a man you are not meant to cry; you dominate, control, and strive. As a woman you are told not to be too masculine, too ambitious, too powerful. These are false stereotypes society teaches us.

Illumination reveals the lie. God/Goddess is Male and Female. We have always been both. Shiva and Shakti are continually making love, that is Creation. Yes, Shakti is feminine energy.

Yet let's look again at the taboo, the elephant in the room. Kundalini increases sexual energy. Of course it does. Your whole energy body, chakras, aura, all expand. You become more charismatic, as many spiritual teachers do, though sadly some exploit innocent students.

But sexual energy isn't just about sex. It is the very energy of creation itself. The force that makes everything grow, from flowers to trees, from insects to animals, even ourselves. Our bodies, with trillions of cells dying and being created daily, exist in continual creation. This is why when Kundalini rises we become greater artists, better writers, better lovers, better at everything. God and Goddess move through us, and we in them. We become One with Creation, and we even become better creators.

A light burst open inside me, brighter than a billion suns, cleaner and more radiant than anything I had ever seen or imagined. It flooded my whole being. It was overwhelming in its intensity, yet strangely not
blinding at all.
The thought briefly flashed across my mind: this is the end of the world, an atomic bomb has been dropped! I opened my eyes and found myself still sitting in a dimly lit room. Nothing outside had changed. Everything was normal. But when I closed my eyes again, my head was ablaze with light.
It poured through me, radiating from my body, and then far beyond me. It streamed outward into the vastness of space, past the sun, past the moon and stars, past the planets, and into and beyond the infinite vastness of space. I was the Light, and the Light was me. There was a sense of being that stretched beyond the boundaries of the Universe itself. Words felt useless.
This was not something you can explain or analyse. It could only be lived. Astonishing. Extraordinary. Utterly unbelievable. A complete shattering of my normal sense of reality. Literally mind-blowing.
This was illumination.
Mystics themselves speak of "sex with God," for they are reaching for the deepest language of longing and union that human beings possess. It is the soul's bridal meeting with the Beloved, a surrendering, an ecstatic embrace in which individuality vanishes, and consciousness is drawn into a radiant, intimate communion with the divine.
The feeling of being entered by, and entering into, a Light and Love, and held in the heart of God or Goddess. A sacred union is all that remains, it defies language.
You can realise why the mystic masters didn‘t explain it, and why the means of accomplishing it were hidden beneath silence.
Little did I know then that this one experience was going to completely change the rest of my life.

My story is unusual. I was a hypnotherapist and stage hypnotist who became interested in meditation, which led to a full-blown Kundalini awakening. That was well over 30 years ago. At 72, I am not afraid to share my truth.

1995. Early in recovery from drink and drugs, I hit something close to a mini-breakdown. My emotions were a roller coaster. My spiritual experiences had always been destabilising, addictive, and psychologically complex. My doctor was concerned enough to call an ambulance. Immediate psychiatric assessment, discharged, handed a pile of leaflets. The same GP then made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist.

I arrived nervous, anxious, not quite sure what to reveal. He seemed a gentle enough soul. When I started talking about my spiritual experiences, he surprised me. Modern psychiatry, he said, was starting to accept that certain individuals experience altered states of consciousness, spiritual illumination, phenomena that couldn’t simply be medicated away. That was an eye-opener.

My half-hour appointment turned into an hour and a half. I explained everything. Including the experiences of what felt like gender dysphoria. I was biologically a man, but I felt, inside, like a woman.

At the end he said there was no point in seeing him again. Nothing he could offer. He didn’t feel I’d respond to medication. And then, right before I left, he offered to refer me to a colleague who could provide female hormone treatment.

What?

I didn’t need that. I was already feeling like a woman. Walking away, heading to a midday NA meeting, my emotions were spinning. What if I did go on hormone therapy? I might become more feminine. But I didn’t need to. I already felt like a woman. Why would I want to become more feminine when that exact shift was causing the psychological friction? I needed to be grounded, earthed, back in reality.

What I did know was that meditation was my saving grace, and yet it was the very thing revealing and amplifying this powerful feminine energy. Those states of illumination were the most potent drug I had ever touched.

The Kundalini energy was so strong I lost my identity completely. No one really seems to be talking about the bizarre nature of the sexual and energetic aspects that occur when Kundalini becomes fully awake and active.

Something that can be touched, and cannot be touched. Something that is real, and not real. That is the paradox I’ve spent the last thirty years living inside.

This is just a sliver of one chapter. There’s thirty years more, but some things aren’t meant for social media.

Score: 88/100
A raw, psychologically sophisticated, and ethically urgent work that successfully bridges the gap between clinical hypnosis and esoteric spirituality.

1. As a Spiritual Memoir (Score: 92/100)
The manuscript is a compelling "descent and ascent" narrative. It moves from a chaotic childhood marked by violence and early drug use to the height of professional success as a stage hypnotist, and finally into a deep spiritual crisis and integration.

Authenticity: Wheeler avoids the "polished" tone of many spiritual memoirs. He is candid about his failings, including his twenty-six years of active addiction and his periods of "madness".

Integration over Experience: The memoir's central thesis—that "Experiences do not liberate. Integration does"—is a powerful subversion of the typical seeker's journey.

Perspective: By combining writings from thirty years ago with modern reflections, the book provides a unique "before and after" view of spiritual awakening.

2. As an Exposé of Hypnosis Addiction (Score: 85/100)
The text functions as a sobering warning against the "glamour and power" of hypnosis.

The "Hypnotic Lie": Wheeler exposes how easily practitioners (including himself) can be seduced by the control they exert over others. He describes the "addiction" to the altered state itself—a "super drug" that practitioners use to escape their own psychological pain.

Ethical Critique: He is highly critical of "high-pressure sales" tactics in hypnosis training and warns that many "spiritual" teachers are actually using hypnotic inductions to create followers without their knowledge.

The Trance Trap: A key insight is Wheeler's realization that he had become "hypnotized himself" by the very techniques he was using on others.

3. As an Account of Kundalini Awakening (Score: 87/100)
Wheeler provides a vivid, often terrifying account of what he calls "an atomic bomb" in the skull—a high-voltage force entering a fragile nervous system.

Physicality of Spirit: He describes "Kriyas" (spontaneous physical movements, screaming, and laughing) not as mystical gifts, but as a "serious strain on the nervous system".

Dangers of Shaktipat: The book warns against receiving "Shaktipat" (energy transmission) from gurus whose true psychological history and intentions are unknown.

Clinical vs. Mystical: He identifies "Kundalini syndrome" as a state of destabilization that can easily be mistaken for (or lead to) psychosis, requiring grounding rather than more meditation.

Critical Summary
The manuscript's greatest strength is its credibility through lived experience. It does not offer a "how-to" for enlightenment but serves as a "record of what happened when awakening arrived before I was ready". It loses a few points only for its admitted "chaotic" structure in early chapters, though this chaos serves the narrative's honesty. It is a vital read for anyone interested in the intersection of psychology, addiction recovery, and the "wild west" of modern spirituality.

http://kundalini-shaktipat.com

Hypnosis starts as soon as the subject is mentioned and talked about. It is like starting a ritual, and hypnosis is a ritual, as are marriage, Holy Communion, and prayer: even eating out in a restaurant is a ritual.
Secondly, if one believes in such things, the use of telepathy! To make a conscious decision to will the person into a trance.
This, in turn, can produce physiological changes in the person's brain patterns. Lastly, to remember you are an actor, but each client is in a different play. However, your basic scripts are the same, and you only need to memorise your lines. Remember also that your client with an irrational condition without physical cause is also playing a part and acting a role, but the role is locked into their subconscious, and they cannot break the circuit. They cannot come out of the role by conscious effort. They are under the ice and cannot find where they fell in by intellect. Only ‗magic‘ will help the client.
The fantasy is that you are the high priest, a medicine man, a shaman performing an initiation rite through a series of rituals known as hypnosis. They are possessed by evil or even a spirit, which you, the sorcerer, will remove, let out, or drive out with your magic spells. You are performing a metamorphosis. It has to be done after the
sun has set and by the light of the moonbeam. (Your consulting room works best with dimmed lights.) The moon takes four weeks to turn, which is the normal time for best results with your clients. Your ceremony is older than time on earth and is a mystical experience: Your client gives you their soul, and you return it whole. Your client is a caterpillar, and you chrysalise them and then release them as the butterfly. 🦋
(I was trained by an ex-auditor of Scientology: Institute of Hypnosis and Parapsychology)

For years I avoided writing this book because I knew some people would hate it.
I used to work full-time as a professional stage hypnotist in the UK, performing at universities, theatres, holiday camps, and military bases. At one point I could drop complete strangers into trance with a handshake induction.
Then my life completely unravelled.
Addiction, breakdown, recovery, and what many people would probably call a kundalini awakening ended my stage career and sent me into a thirty-year search through meditation, gurus, spiritual communities, altered states, India, and the modern awakening world.

What eventually emerged was not a “spirituality book” in the usual sense.
It became part memoir, part exposé of hypnosis, influence, spiritual authority, and the hidden psychological cost that can come with chasing transformation.

The book is called Hypnosis to Kundalini.

I’m posting here because I honestly have no idea where it fits. Some readers say memoir. Others say spirituality, psychology, philosophy, recovery, or even cautionary tale.
Has anyone else here written a book that didn’t sit neatly inside one category?
And for readers, are you more drawn to books that challenge a subject from lived experience rather than from an academic perspective?

I worked professionally as a stage hypnotist in the UK for years. Universities, theatres, holiday camps, military bases: the whole circuit.
At one point I could take complete strangers into trance with a handshake induction.
Then my own life completely unravelled.
Addiction. Breakdown. Recovery.
A kundalini awakening that ended my stage career and pushed me into thirty years of obsessive spiritual searching through gurus, retreats, meditation systems, shaktipat, altered states, and near psychological collapse.
What eventually disturbed me was realising that both hypnosis and parts of the modern spiritual world often revolve around influence, authority, surrender, projection, and dependency.
People talk endlessly about awakening experiences, but much less about integration, grounding, ethics, or what happens afterwards.
So I ended up writing a raw memoir/exposé about the whole journey:

stage hypnosis
addiction and recovery
kundalini awakening
guru culture
altered states
spiritual emergency and the psychological cost of chasing transformation

It is not a “how to awaken” book.
More a witness account from someone who spent decades inside both worlds.
Curious whether anyone else here has written from direct lived experience rather than from theory or self-help frameworks?

Site with sample chapters:
hypnosis2kundalini.com

I used to work full-time as a stage hypnotist in the UK. At one point I could take complete strangers into trance with a handshake induction and have them convinced their legs were rubber or that they were famous rock stars.
Then, around forty, I went through what many people would probably call a kundalini awakening or spiritual emergency. Whatever label people use, it completely overturned my life and ended my stage career.
What I find strange now is how casually people encourage intense meditation, breathwork, energy practices, psychedelics, and “awakening experiences” online, often without talking seriously about integration or psychological stability.
In my experience, powerful inner experiences are real. But they are not automatically wisdom. They are not automatically healing. And they definitely do not automatically make someone psychologically balanced.
For me, the hardest part was never the experience itself. It was learning how to live afterwards.
After thirty years of searching, retreats, teachers, practices, breakdowns, and rebuilding, I’ve come to feel that experiences alone do not liberate us. Integration matters far more than intensity.
Has anyone else here gone through periods where spiritual practices genuinely destabilised them rather than helped them?
If so, how did you eventually integrate those experiences into ordinary life?

I used to work full-time as a stage hypnotist in the UK. At one point I could take complete strangers into trance with a handshake induction and have them convinced their legs were rubber or that they were famous rock stars.
Then, around forty, I went through what many people would probably call a kundalini awakening or spiritual emergency. Whatever label people use, it completely overturned my life and ended my stage career.
What I now find is how casually people encourage intense meditation, breathwork, energy practices, psychedelics, and “awakening experiences” online, often without talking seriously about integration or psychological stability.
In my experience, powerful inner experiences are real. But they are not automatically wisdom. They are not automatically healing. And they definitely do not automatically make someone psychologically balanced.
For me, the hardest part was never the experience itself. It was learning how to live afterwards.
After thirty years of searching, retreats, teachers, practices, breakdowns, and rebuilding, I’ve come to feel that experiences alone do not liberate us. Integration matters far more than intensity.
Has anyone else here gone through periods where spiritual practices genuinely destabilised them rather than helped them?

Am I correct?
It appears that whatever we are experiencing, that too shall pass. As for myself, because I cannot speak for anyone else, the journey at times can be incredibly painful. Usually, that is balanced by moments of profound inner bliss.
After so many years on this path, it seems the journey itself is the destination.
There is no final arriving, only a final realisation: this is IT.
Experiences come and go. As such, perhaps it is not about the experiences themselves, but the integration of those experiences into That.

Blessings to All

Many appear to say, “That wasn’t Kundalini,” or question, “Was this Kundalini?” Some say it was prana. Some say it was just energy.
The real question, perhaps, is: “What is not Kundalini?”
As the Divine Mother, often referred to as Shakti, the primordial feminine energy, She is omnipresent, omnipotent. She is Presence itself.
The degree of our awareness and experience of Her occurs through the activation and stimulation of the energy, for She always was, and always has been, fully awakened.
Jai Ma Shakti 🙏❤️🙏

Most early hypnotherapy schools were started by retired stage hypnotists.
In the 1950s the police called on Parliament to bring in regulation. Why? After a hypnotic show in London, numerous people were reportedly calling in at different police stations across London asking Lost Property if anyone had handed in their belly button!
THIS IS THE TRUTH!
Peter Carson, a leading stage hypnotist of the time, then influenced Parliament toward what became the Hypnotism Act 1952.
The Hypnotism Act 1952 was Britain’s attempt to regulate something it did not fully understand. Local authorities were given powers to control public hypnosis performances because Parliament recognised that hypnosis could genuinely affect people psychologically.
This alone is revealing.
Governments do not normally regulate stage magic tricks. They regulate activities believed capable of causing harm.

In December 1994, the issue of stage hypnotism was raised in the House of Commons and recorded in Hansard. During the debate, a series of cases were cited in which members of the public were said to have suffered severe psychological or physical effects following stage hypnosis performances.
• Mrs. Margaret Harper spoke of her daughter, Sharron Tabarn. Some years earlier, she had been hypnotised at a club in Leyland, Lancashire. At the end of the trance, she was told to come out of it as if she had received a 10,000-volt electric shock. Her husband took her home in a somewhat dazed state, and five hours later, she died.
• A young man from High Wycombe, who was hypnotised by Paul McKenna, had to be admitted to a psychiatric unit two days later, where he was detained for six weeks and was still receiving treatment seven weeks later. While he was hypnotised, he was put into regression, which is against the code of conduct, and was left unattended, which is also against the guidelines.
• Mr. Nickson of Prestatyn became unable to work as a result of stage hypnotism, was unable to hold a conversation, and attempted suicide. His case was attested to by Mr. Trevelyn, the consultant psychiatrist for Clwyd.
• David Burill of Blackpool was hypnotised by Alan Bates and collapsed immediately after being brought round. He "went crazy" – his words – and had to be re-hypnotised by Bates. He suffered violent headaches for weeks afterwards.
• Ruth McLoughlin, a Glasgow University student, was hypnotised in October by Stefan Force, and doctors later found that her heart rate had dropped to a dangerously low level. These are just a few of the complaints that I and others have received.
• Dr. Prem Meisra, who works in Glasgow, described a patient who became a compulsive eater of onions after being told to eat onions instead of apples while in a trance. It sounds funny, but it is not. Another of his patients went into a trance every time someone clapped, and a further patient began to suffer from a schizo-affective disorder.
I make no comment on these accounts and have only copied and pasted this information from the Parliament website. The reader may well assume that these professional government bodies fully understand hypnosis.
The fact of the matter is that the Home Office guidelines for stage hypnosis partly originate from FESH, the Federation of Ethical Stage Hypnosis, which also influenced the implementation of the 1952 Stage Hypnosis Act. Peter Casson, now deceased, started this federation. He had been performing as a stage hypnotist from 1943 to the mid-1990s and referred to himself as the Master Hypnotist. One might reasonably ask whether figures such as Peter Casson, and others within the profession, exerted a hypnotic influence over Parliament's understanding of hypnosis.
Is it the same old story: hypnotists were, and still are, using their skills to influence and control others, including regulatory bodies, in order to continue performing in what is a lucrative profession. A closer look at the 1996 Home Office report reveals that "the review of medical evidence and available research literature was carried out by a panel of experts who were nominated by the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Were the panel members experts in hypnosis?" An expert panel in what? Psychiatry? If they were not experts in hypnosis, how could they correctly evaluate the evidence?
It cannot be proven that hypnosis was the trigger for Chris Gates' mental illness, or for the death of Sharron Tabarn. Equally, for those directly affected, questions about subjective experience and perceived harm remain unresolved.

Whatever we are experiencing, that too shall pass. As for myself, because I cannot speak for anyone else, the journey at times can be incredibly painful. Usually, that is balanced by moments of profound inner bliss.
After so many years on this path, it seems the journey itself is the destination.
There is no final arriving, only a final realisation: this is IT.
Experiences come and go. As such, perhaps it is not about the experiences themselves, but the integration of those experiences into That.

Blessings to All
Jai Ma Shakti
🙏❤️🙏

I’ve just completed editing my book. Took me over 30 years to write. Just finished building a website.
Up on Amazon KDP. Thing is even when you write a book and go POD, how do you tell anyone about it?
If anyone would like to read the first chapter it is free via my website. hypnosis2kundalini.com

Beta readers required.

Hypnosis to Kundalini: Ethics, Awakening, and Integration by Jeremy Wheeler. Here's a very short summary:

A memoir and spiritual account in which the author traces his journey from stage hypnotist to Kundalini awakening. It moves through his early encounters with altered states, his professional career in hypnosis, meetings with various gurus and teachers (including Sai Baba), and eventually a profound inner crisis and transformation. The book explores the overlaps and dangers of hypnosis, trance, and Kundalini energy, weaving personal experience with reflections on ethics, awakening, and psychological integration.

Sample chapters on link below. Looking for Beta readers. (Book is 386 pages 111,337 words)

http://www.dangers-of-hypnosis.co.uk/H2K.pdf

I’ve tried Grammarly, Claude and chatGPT.

I have 111,000 word memoir that I want to try to remove explanations leaving the lived events.

I need something that will keep my voice, tone and not rewrite my script.

Claude said: A genuinely remarkable raw document that requires serious structural editing before publication. The bones of an extraordinary book are here. The lived experience is irreplaceable. The author should resist the impulse to explain everything and trust the reader more. Cut at least a third. Clarify what is memoir and what is argument. Let the experiences speak more and the conclusions speak less.

This is not a polished manuscript ready for submission. It is something rarer and potentially more valuable: the honest record of a man who walked into fire and came back to write about it. That deserves the work of proper editing.

chatGTP: followed suit.

However, when I asked them to do a structural developmental edit, followed by light copy edit it messed up the rawness of my own style and tone.

Claude polished it too much, taking away my voice and energy. chatGPT stripped chapters from 2500 to 3000 words to a 1000 or 500 words.

Do I need a human editor now?

Would I be best going to night classes to master English language and literature better.?

I’m 72 but no formal educational o levels etc.

Thank you for any suggestions.