Wanting to create change in your life just now? You might like today’s musing. I’d like to say the theory is mine. But I picked it up from the 92-year-old Russian Chinese man who taught me to hypnotise myself when I was 21.
Eugene Veshner was a former civil engineer who was told at age 40 he had only a year or two to live. He had diabetes. So had his mother and sister who both died at 40. He’d already lost part of his eyesight. To deal with the pain of such news he used his scientific brain to develop his own method of self-hypnosis to shift his outlook, which then, to everyone’s surprise, transformed his health.
The guy kept on living… another 50-plus years. And he got back most of his eyesight. And his carefully developed theory became the basis of the Nursing Mother’s Association huff ‘n’ puff classes.
I was Eugene’s last patient. He’d retired the year before, but he took me on because, he said, “You’re messy”. I’d been working in a womb-ish, burgundy-curtained feminist café (it was the ’90s in Canberra and such things did in fact exist)