I had interviewed hypnotherapist Dr. Dwaine Hartman a week before going to his evening workshop at the urban chic Inner Flow Athens City Centre space in Monastiraki, and I’d watched several of his video talks and interviews. Yet I didn’t expect what I experienced within those four hours at his Feel The Magic event, and how I have been experiencing the world in a different way since. As soon as I saw him in person I felt a certain familiarity that neither shook or confounded me but that felt reassuringly pleasant. As I took my place at the front of the class on one of the few remaining empty cushions, I turned to look at him and our eyes connected for what felt like a long time but was probably just a few brief minutes; there were no powerful messages or feelings, just a comforting connection, like saying hello again in a gentle way to someone you have not seen in a long while. “Separation is the core of all problems in our society,” Hartman says. “Nobody looks into each other’s eyes and says “I see you”.

His workshop centred on issues that have been central in my life during the last few years – the importance of being able to connect with myself as well as other beings on a real, deep, heartfelt level, without the mind infringing upon this process; my hungry desire to reaffirm the importance and power in my daily existence of my imagination, (which I rode on throughout my childhood and adolescent years, sometimes with incredible results as I manifested things big and small that I’d relished in dreaming up, but had lost touch with this way of being when I became a busy, stressed and somewhat jaded “adult”). Albert Einstein said it brilliantly when he wrote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Another major focus during the workshop was developing the awareness and ability to locate, face, observe and let go of the dastardly internal critic, of which he says: “The base to all human suffering is the lack of connection to our supportive unconditional source. So what do you think gets in the way of that connection …. that is right … the internal critic. Now what if I was to share with you that this part doesn’t even belong to you?” Resulting from years, maybe aeons of social conditioning, the inner critic resides in each of us, and manipulatively finds ways to sabotage our best efforts, especially as soon as we start to feel we are finally getting where we wished to be.

Hartman teaches above all the essentiality of connecting to our inner child, who came into this world sill completely in tune with its source. He reminds his students that in our heart we hold an inherent knowledge of truth. He teaches his students to acknowledge, befriend and utilise their own god / goddess nature, that part of them that is the creator of their reality at large.

I watched him work with personally with attendees  to help them let go of thoughts, ideas and physical feelings some had been carrying and felt confined by for many years, and I recalled the concept that miracles don’t have to be huge and dramatic, with thunder, blazing lights and holy visions of biblical proportions – even a small but significant shift in one’s consciousness, a reawakening to our sense of who we really are beyond the ego and a mind inundated with messages of who to be by the media / education systems / certain family practices and society can change one’s life forever. It can bring on spontaneous healing, which will sometimes last for minutes or hours before one stubbornly returns to a prior state – but will have shown them who they can be nonetheless – or can create a forever shift. Either scenario, presenting the actuality of healing whether short-lived or eternal, is a miracle, when the alternative is continuing to live in a stagnant state of hypnotic misery.

This, above all, is what I enjoyed of observing Hartman’s teaching – his combination of creative yet practical, good-humoured techniques with a renewed sense of remembering that it is up to us how we choose to perceive and live our life. He is neither the first nor the last teacher to convey this awareness in others, but he is definitely one of too few inspiring therapists who this world needs in order to shift its consciousness for the better on a mass level.

Amusingly, most of Hartman’s one-to-one interactions with participants ended with shared laughter; the type that comes from relief, when seeing that the horrifying monster in the mind was in fact just a little mouse ingeniously practising trickery with shadows; the laughter that comes from the gratitude of acknowledging that with patience and observation, answers can be found; and of course the giggles that bubble up from finally being able to laugh at one’s self for its long-held, life-defying and ludicrous need for intricately structured drama. That very drama can cripple us in so many ways, which can be very severe, but once we can see beyond it, and detach our self from the clutches we have so kindly paid to sponsor the services of, then we can hopefully laugh.

Hartman calls himself a Trance Alchemist, and works with people on a one-to-one basis through Skype and in person, as well as travelling around the world to teach workshops. His two-day workshop is a more dynamic extension of what we got a taste of on September 11th, and following that, he runs a five-day course for those who want to learn how to be Trance Alchemists who can then use his techniques professionally or personally on clients and friends.

Dr Dwaine Hartman is the author of ‘Value Your Vibration’. CLICK HERE TO VISIT HIS WEBSITE NOW.