Sometimes I make the mistake of answering the phone.  I could hear the wind blowing hard and I knew immediately someone was driving with the window open.  By the slight rasp hanging around the back of his throat, I could tell he was a man of age.

 “Howdy young lady! Are you a hypnotist?” he asked, nearly screaming over the wind.

 “Howdy!  and yes sir I am!” I hollered back.

 “Can you help me?”

 “Quite possibly, what’s on your mind?”

 “Well, I’m 95 years old.  My wife is bedridden, and I take care of her.  I still work full time, but I have never felt like I fulfilled my life’s purpose.”

 “Well, don’t put too much pressure on me now, ya hear?” I joked.

 He laughed suddenly, like when you catch someone off guard.  I love people.  So, I knew right then, I was going to do my best to help him.  How could I not?

 After I told him how I thought I could help him, he got very excited and said something that stopped me in my tracks.

 “I have been looking for someone like you my whole life.”

 Can you imagine being 95 years old and looking your whole life to be free of something that’s been bothering you?  Well, luckily for him, that is what I do for a living.  I help people dump a load of crap, so they can get unstuck and move forward in their lives.  If you don’t mind me saying, I’m kind of like a laxative.

 Anyway, It was on. He drove all the way to Dallas from East Texas, and if you don’t know how far that is, look it up on a map.  It took that man hours to get here.  To see me.  To fix his life.  At 95.  To say the least my confidence began to waver.  Could I help him?  Was it even worth trying to help someone at his age?  Could I take his money?  He called during a slow period in my business, so I needed the money, but he probably wasn’t making a lot at his age, or so I thought.

 As it turns out, when he walked in through the front door of my home, (My hypnosis practice is in my house, but I also do virtual sessions with people all over the world) his smile put me totally at ease. I admit to looking behind him at his truck.  You can tell a lot about a person by the truck they drive.  Anyway, it was a brand new “Found On Road Dead”, and his jeans were creased, the way they used to do around these parts on Sundays.

 I noticed, also, that his starched western shirt, complete with snaps and nearly a relic, gave him the look he was going for.  He tucked in the shirt behind a big silver belt buckle that said TEXAS on it.  He was lean, tan and the picture of health.  At 95 years old, he was still a very good-looking man.

 Session one was just fun.  There were several laughs mixed with somber sharing about his life.  I got the gist of what he wanted, and the rapport, something essential for hypnosis, was there.  So, I asked him to close his eyes and just listen.  My goal was to establish a deep state of hypnosis. Reaching a good depth allows the inner mind to do some googling for clues.

 He proved to be a very good hypnotic subject.  We achieved the perfect hypnotic depth in a matter of minutes.

 “You are now in a deep state of hypnosis.” I said, “You will hear and remember everything I say, but I am going to talk directly to your subconscious, because it is now particularly alert to my words.”

 The various levels of the mind work together like a biological computer.  There is a part that records everything that’s ever happened to you.  Most people regard that recording as memory.  I look at it as a person’s hidden treasure. Hidden because much of the data is not readily available for your everyday awareness.  And a treasure because it is full of surprises, and long wished for answers to life’s hard questions.

 Once clients are at the correct hypnotic depth, I can ask their inner mind/subconscious to collect data to help them understand something important about themselves.  So, in this session, I asked for the goods, meaning moments from my client’s life, that would give us an idea as to why he felt he had not fulfilled his life’s purpose.

 I went on to ask his mind to do this “uncovering of the data” work in the background over the coming week.  In other words, below his conscious awareness.  In doing all of this, we laid the groundwork for the next session, but this first session took about an hour’s time.  Then, he drove back to East Texas.

 He lit up my life again the following week.  Same big smile, different shirt.  It was time for age regression.  Age regression, or “AR”, to the few hypnotists who use it properly, is often regarded as the most powerful hypnotic technique in the profession.  It is also difficult to master. Mainly, because there are a lot of possible caveats, things that can happen that can completely derail the whole thing.

 Being that my client was of a certain age, one concern I had was, would his 95-year-old mind be able to bring to consciousness what we needed?  I literally had never worked with anyone quite this advanced in years.  When I find myself feeling uncertain in my work, which happens now and then, I just say to myself “something will help”, meaning I am open to a higher power’s grace.  This opening of myself up to grace has never failed me.

 So, on this day, since I grew up Catholic, and since I didn’t know the patron saint of Texans (I am from Louisiana), I gave the whole session, into the care of Big Tex.  Look him up if you don’t know who that is.  Then, I just shrugged my shoulders and said the words, the way I always say them to get him to go backwards.  He did. And magnificently.

 In a flash the subconscious traveled back through his life landing in a farmhouse kitchen to when he was about a year old.  His very young mother was already a multi-tasker, and this was way before the word had ever been thought of, much less invented, circa 1917.  It was very hot that day.  She was sweating and fanning herself, and even though windows on each side of the house were open, not a breeze stirred.

 Rushing to get dinner on the table before her husband got home, she put a stirring spoon in her mouth to check the taste, but suddenly, she saw “them damn chickens” on the porch again.  If she didn’t get to them, they would make a real mess, a mess that would take hours to clean up.  So, she ran to the front door to shoo them off, the spoon still in her mouth.

 When she returned to the kitchen, she realized her baby boy, my future client, was squatting and grunting by the stove.  She pulled the spoon out of her mouth, and bending quickly down to her son, she did an old-time momma test feeling for any fullness, weight, or warmth in his diaper.  Yep, he definitely needed changing.

 The kitchen smelled very pungent, a combination of body odor, baby poo and fresh baked bread.  She swooped up the little one into her arms to change him and seeing a stream of something looking like puréed pumpkin running down his leg, she quickly plopped him down on his back, right onto the kitchen table to keep the mess off the floor.  She would never have changed him there, but she was running out of time, and this was an emergency.  It was instinctual.

 On the table, beside the baby, with this legendary river of poo, in stark contrast, were the freshest greenest beans, beautiful yeast rolls with butter, strawberries and cream and a pitcher of sweet tea on a handmade white doily.  His mother moved as fast as she could, feeling the pressure of her husband being home any minute.  Regretfully, and in a panic, she used her apron and her hand just to get the baby’s monsoon somewhat under control.

 She just kept wiping and wiping because it just kept pouring out of him like lava.  As a mosquito landed on her cheek, she quickly scratched the itch with her soiled hand.  Then, suddenly and to her horror, her husband, the love of her life, the man she wanted most in her young womanhood to impress, walked unexpectedly right through the doorway.  With a “honey I’m home” and a big smile, he didn’t see anything.  At first.

 Hearing his voice, a shock ran through her body.  She stood straight up and quickly tried to maneuver herself in between him and the baby, but it was too late. He saw the pumpkin poop mudslide. And not only was it on her hands, face, the baby, the floor, it also was on the table ever, ever so close to the coveted buttery rolls he had been dreaming about all day.  The heat, the smell, and finally the awful scene, caused him to retch.  Grabbing his stomach, he blurted out, “Oh my God that is so horrible!”

 My client’s young eyes met his father’s and even though he was still just a baby, he reported feeling ashamed.  He also said that he thought the whole thing was his fault.  Not just for making his father sick, but for messing up the meal his mother had so painstakingly prepared.

 When his father said, “that is horrible”.  My client took it to mean that he was horrible.  Apparently, this was the pivotal moment that set him up for his failure to excel, and thus to be unable to achieve his life’s purpose.  His father never meant it that way, of course.

 Upon witnessing the scene my client was able to see things more clearly. Once he got over the shock of the subconscious bringing the event up so clearly, he realized his original take on the whole thing had been a mistake and he just began laughing.  First, it was a wistful chuckle.  Then, a snort, which finally led him to laughing so hard that it seemed he couldn’t stop.  Tears rolled down his cheeks as I gave him a tissue.

 After a while of utilizing other hypnosis techniques, we ended the session.  He opened his eyes, blew his nose and stared quietly into space like clients so often do after age regression, taking it all in.  When he finally spoke, he said something that I will never forget.

 Thank God, I found out when I did.”

 This was very different from what I had usually heard from clients after such an experience.  What I usually heard were words of regret, regret at all the time wasted in mistakenly believing something for years.  But this man was much different.  He was so grateful that he had finally found out the truth, and to him, it was just in the nick of time before his life ended.  He left my office, a very happy man.

 The next week, the day before what would have been his 3rd session out of a scheduled series of 5, he called me, wind once again whistling loudly through his truck window.

 Shouting, he said, “I got what I needed!  I won’t be coming back for the next session!  Keep the money!  It was worth it!”

 I smiled as I remembered back to that first call. Only this time I was so grateful that I took the call that day.

 A month later he called me again.  This time to tell me he had gotten hired for the job of his dreams.  He thanked me profusely for helping him, and he went on to say that he was the happiest he had ever been in his entire life.

 This session not only changed my client’s life, but it also changed me, and many clients after him.  Now, when clients tell me they regret wasting their lives because they carried around an erroneous belief, I tell them the story of the old man from East Texas.  And you know what?  Ever since I started doing that, I’ve noticed something.  Clients don’t mention their regret anymore.  They just get on with living.