HinesSight

We just leased our third Chevy Volt, avoiding the games car salespeople play

My wife, Laurel, should be hired by General Motors as a Chevy Volt spokeswoman. She absolutely loves the car. Me, not so much, which is why I drive a VW GTI.

So Laurel and I don't always agree on what makes a car lovable. But we do agree on this: it is super annoying when car salespeople give you the runaround, playing ridiculous sales-games rather than being up front and open with us. 

This is why we've leased all three of our Chevy Volts through Kelly Stewart of Salem's Capitol Auto Group, even though Kelly is with the Toyota side of the dealership. 

I believe we got to know Kelly either when we bought our first Toyota Highlander, or maybe it was a Prius. Regardless, we liked Kelly's style so much, we asked him to handle the leasing of the three Chevy Volts.

Our attitude toward car buying/leasing hasn't changed since I wrote a June 2012 post, "Welcome to our day old car baby, Chevy Volt."

Thumbs up also to equally personable Allan Hadley, Capitol Chevrolet/Subaru Fleet Manager, who worked with Kelly and us on finalizing the sale yesterday. My wife and I appreciate car salespersons who act like normal human beings, and treat customers the same way -- as contrasted with the traditional sales games played by car dealership employees. After all, a high quality product should almost sell itself; just look at how Apple is doing.

In 2015 we leased another Chevy Volt through Kelly. That time he put us in touch with Nate McCall, the Toyota fleet manager (photo above). Nate also was a pleasure to work with, as I blogged about in "Lured with biscuit incentives, our dog buys a car at Capitol Toyota." 

But this time around, at first my wife talked with several salespeople at the Chevrolet side of the Capitol Auto Group.

Unfortunately, that didn't work out very well. She just couldn't get straight answers from them about anything: like whether it would be possible to turn in our leased 2015 Volt a month or so early, or what the price would be for a 2018 Volt. She ended up contacting some other Chevrolet dealers in the mid-Willamette Valley, but those encounters didn't go much better.

So in the end, Laurel emailed Kelly Stewart and asked if he could once again shepherd us through the process of leasing a new Chevy Volt. And today, once again, we spent a pleasant few hours with Nate McCall after he was able to procure what apparently was the only Chevy Volt within hundreds of miles that was the color, and had the features, my wife wanted.

(See photo above. The magnetic sticker on the right rear fender says "Kindness is Contagious." It used to be on the rear bumper of her 2015 Chevy Volt, but the 2018 Volt has plastic on the rear, so the magnet had to go on another part of the car.)

What we can't understand is why some car salespeople play the games that they do, because those games don't work with us. Several times Laurel asked staff at Capitol Chevrolet to give her a price for the Chevy Volt she wanted, taking into account that this would be the third Volt we've leased.

Each time they said, "Come in and we can talk." Laurel would respond, "I don't want to come in and talk. I just want to know the price of the car."

Now, those sorts of car-selling games must work with some car buyers, or I assume salespeople wouldn't keep on playing them. However, they sure don't work with us. Laurel did her best to give one of the Capitol Chevrolet staff a shot at leasing her a 2018 Chevy Volt.

All they had to do was be as direct and honest with us as Kelly Stewart and Nate McCall have been. When they couldn't do that, we returned to Kelly and Nate, because life is too short to waste time on the games some car salespeople play.

Laurel is going to send those Capitol Chevrolet staff a letter explaining why they didn't get to close a lease deal with us. Hopefully this will help them learn what works with car buyers like us.

Why it's so tough for older folks like us to leave their beloved country home

My wife and I moved to our house on five non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem way back in 1990. We were about forty then. The couple we bought the house from were in their mid-60's. 

When we asked them why they were selling, they said "It just has gotten to be too much for us to maintain."

Well, we're now pushing 70. (I'm pushing harder than my wife, but she's not far behind.) And a while back we bought the empty lot next door, so now we have ten acres to maintain.

So why aren't we moving to a house in town that would be much easier for us to handle? That's a big question with all kinds of answers. I've taken a stab at them in numerous blog posts, including:

Too old for ten acres and a big house -- too young for retirement living
A bone scan, my doctor's lifestyle advice, a nighttime walk in the country
Musings on the problem of where to live after retiring
Retired folks need friends. Nature provides some for us. 
Our baby boomer quandary: keep living in large house, or downsize?
The joy of being crazy -- in a sane way

Regarding the last post... yes, it is indeed crazy to envision ourselves doing what's necessary to keep our house and property in decent order as we find ourselves heading into our 70s, which could be followed by our 80s. 

Yet we have neighbors who do just that: stay in their country home for much longer than most "sane" people would consider reasonable. 

An obvious reason for this is that it's really tough to locate a city home that offers us what we have now. We know, because we've given a realtor what amounts to a near-impossible task: find us a house in the Salem city limits that has privacy, trees, and quiet. 

That's what we enjoy on our ten acres. Finding it on a city lot is rare. So that is one of the anchors that keeps us moored to our current home.

There's other anchors, though. And they aren't logical or reasonable. Heck, they're barely describable. They're rooted in feelings that I barely know I have, because they're so engrained in how I view our property, I mostly take them for granted.

A few photos I took recently of our yard brought some of those anchors into a greater sense of awareness. 

There's lots of rocks in our yard. Tons of rock, literally.

Many years ago Keith Ecklund, who called himself the Garden Poet with good reason, landscaped the area around our house. He got a good deal on a gigantic load of granite rocks, which was dumped on the ground and made good use of as Keith and his crew did their landscaping thing.

I love those rocks. Many have gotten buried under repeated applications of bark. I've got unburying them on my to-do list. For one of these days. There's no way we can take the rocks with us, and it's highly unlikely that a house in town would have the same granite'y feel. 

So those rocks make a good heavy anchor for staying where we are.

Then there's all the plantings we've cared for in our yard over the past 28 years. Many have come and gone, but the overall look and feel of our yard has remained about the same since the Garden Poet did his thing. Sure, any house we'd move to would have azaleas, rhododendrons, and such. 

But they wouldn't be the ones we've come to know and love. I'd miss them. They're another anchor.

We've got a large yard. A very large yard.

When we drive into Salem, naturally we're struck by how much smaller virtually all city lots are. Newly built subdivisions are particularly skimpy on yard space, given Oregon's pioneering land use laws that require buildable land within city limits to be largely used up before an urban growth boundary can be expanded.

We support those land use laws, since they preserve farm and forest land. But we also have grown accustomed to the expansiveness that comes with having a house in the country. So there's another anchor.

These twin fir trees, with Oregon grape at their base, along with a rock piece of art, have grown a lot since we moved to our house. I'd like to watch them grow more. 

Sure, they've gotten so enormous, one or both could crush our roof if they ever fell over in a windstorm. But they're old friends. I'd miss them, even if a new house had equally large firs, because they wouldn't be these firs. 

Then there's my Oregon grape "forest." A large area on the other side of the twin firs was left un-landscaped in the Garden Poet days. Brushy vegetation grew there. Year after year, leaves and branches accumulated. 

About five years ago I decided to reclaim that area. It took a heck of a lot of work to clear everything out and plant Oregon grape and other native plants. This photo shows some of the original Oregon grape, which is growing more happily now that the other vegetation is gone.

The Oregon grape I planted is looking good. Now that it's well established, in the spring, like right now, it gets yellow blossoms and a bunch of new growth. 

I can easily see myself watching the Oregon grape grow older, just as I am. Sure, it's irrational to want to stay in a house for that reason, but it's a reason that appeals to me every morning when I walk up to the road with our dog to get the newspaper. 

So anchors abound. We don't know how long they'll keep us rooted to our house and property.

Life might have other plans for us. Anchor chains can be broken in many ways: disease, disability, a change of residential heart. For now, though, those anchors are more of a pleasure than a pain.

In my final hypnosis session I meet the V.P. in charge of my goals

My sessions with Emily Cahal of Salem Hypnosis Solutions have been delightfully varied. Today, my fourth session, and the last for a while, featured me meeting the Vice-President of my psyche in charge of achieving goals. 

(I've described the three previous sessions here, here, and here.)

Per usual, before the actual hypnosis session Emily and I talked about how things have been going with me since we last met. Naturally the focus was on how I've been dealing with my chronic health problem, a bladder condition, since that was my motivation for giving hypnosis a try.

I told her that though it's difficult to prove cause and effect, I felt like the previous session did help me come to grips with a "caged" feeling of being unduly constrained by my health problem, which makes traveling long distances quite difficult. 

A symptom of that feeling had been a strong desire to revisit my motorcycling/scootering days, since my mind argued "If you can't travel very far, you should find a way to make traveling locally more fun." But after considering the pros and cons of a Can Am Spyder, or such, after our third session I found that desire had abated a lot. Almost non-existent, in fact.

Instead, I'd been doing my best to focus on what sounds like a platitude (because it is), yet is something I struggle to put into effect: Be Here Now. 

A motorcycle forces this, because otherwise you're at high risk of getting into an accident. But I can stimulate my senses and quiet my "monkey mind" without getting on two motorized wheels. I can simply pay closer attention to what is right at hand, rather than what awaits me around the next bend of the course my life is taking.

So that led to a theme of the pre-session discussion between Emily and me: how I need to find a better balance between (1) setting a goal and working to achieve it, versus (2) relaxing into the reality of the present moment. 

Before a chronic health problem became a big part of my life, I'd always felt that I could overcome my problems. Or at least, stand a good chance of doing so with sufficient effort and energy. So the frustration of being told by three urologists that I've got to cope with my problem for the rest of my life has sent my psyche into a sort of hamster-wheel frenzy.

It wants to escape the cage I feel myself in, but there's no way out. 

Emily summed things up in a wise fashion. She told me that instead of seeking a solution, I should aim for "mastery." Meaning, I should try to deal with my health problem, and problems in general, with less emphasis on a particular outcome. Instead, mastering a problem might not result in anything changing with the problem itself, but rather with how I look upon it. 

At least, that's how I view the term, "mastery."

During the hypnosis session Emily started off, as before, by getting me into a pleasantly relaxed state.

She had me imagine walking down a forest path and coming to a clearing. In the clearing was a crystal clear pond with pebbles on the banks. I sat down on a warm flat rock, picked up a bunch of pebbles, and tossed them one by one into the pond, watching the ripples dissipate before I tossed the next pebble, which I could see sinking down below the surface to the bottom of the pond.

After that, my favorite part of the session was meeting up with a personified part of myself, the Vice-President in charge of my goals. He had a great corner office with a beautiful view. But I was the President, so I got to give the V.P. some marching orders, along with a critical assessment of how he's been doing.

In response to Emily's questions, I told the guy that while I appreciated his hard work, he needed to chill out more. Relax, dude, sometimes you try way too hard. That was part of his new job description. 

Several times Emily had noted in our pre-session conversations that intelligent people, among whom she was kind enough to include me, often are prone to perfectionism. I guess I knew that about myself, but it was good to hear it nonetheless, because sometimes the most obvious facts about ourselves are what we pass over.

So it was healing to be able to talk to the goal-setting side of myself, that Vice-President who is prone to pushing too hard when there's a brick wall between me and what I desire. Frustration results when I keep on forcing what is immovable. Pushing the river, in other words.

Interestingly, when I Googled that term and found the above link, the reference was to a chronic health problem:

The simpler description is this: my chronic disease can make me feel I’m drowning. The personal image that comes to mind is Venice during a heavy rainstorm -- when there is also an acqua alta (high water) alert. Then the canals overflow and flood the city. The only way to navigate is by walking on the top of the infamous catwalks the municipality quickly installs. During those times I have quite literally felt water flowing above and beneath me.

(I just ordered the book mentioned in the Psychology Today article, "Dancing at the River's Edge.")

It's hard to break life-long habits. I've always enjoyed the sensation of working hard to power through a problem. Even if I couldn't succeed, or achieve most of what I sought, my self-image was of someone who never quits, who fights on against long odds, who does his best to attain a Possible Dream.

But now I'm faced with what almost certainly is an Impossible Dream: having a functional bladder again. 

That isn't the worst thing in the world, not even close. I'm thankful that I don't have a host of other health problems that would restrict me even more, or be more difficult to deal with on a daily basis. Of course, with time I might have one or more of those worse health problems.

Emily Cahal has helped me better understand what I already knew: it doesn't make sense to get all tense and worked-up over a goal whose purpose is to make me happier and more relaxed. Down that way lies, if not madness, unnecessary anxiety. 

I'm going to do my best to master the art of trying not to try, of simply doing rather than worrying about what I'm doing while I'm doing it. Yeah, I know this sounds obvious. But if I'd been able to see the obvious, I never would have sought the help of Emily and hypnosis. 

Which, I'm really glad I did.  

Messiness of recycling talked about at Salem City Club today

Along with most people, I already was aware of the basic changes to the Marion County recycling program prior to today’s Salem City Club program, “What’s Up With Recycling?”

But the expert speakers provided a lot of useful background information, plus some good tips for dealing with the changes. 

So here’s some of what I remember from the talks by Peter Spendelow, a recycling specialist and materials management policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality; Will Posegate, the chief operations officer for Garten Services; and Alan Pennington, the Waste Reduction Coordinator for Marion County Public Works and head of the EarthWISE program for the county.

(I didn’t take notes, but my still mostly-functioning senior citizen mind believes that I’ve gotten what follows pretty much right.)

Way back when, the early 1990’s I believe, there was no such thing as co-mingled, or mixed, recycling. People sorted their recycled items themselves. But this resulted in low recycling rates.

Now everything goes in the blue bin and recycling is more popular. Not surprisingly, though, a lot of mistakes are made. 

Posegate said that bowling balls, propane tanks, milk cartons filled with needles, and all kinds of other nasty forbidden stuff show up in the conveyor belts at Garten Services, where employees have to wear gloves and kevlar protection to keep themselves safe.

One employee spends three hours a day cleaning screens on machinery that sorts out paper, but also gets stuck with flattened plastic and other stuff. So we all need to be careful with what we recycle, since our mistakes have to be dealt with by people who already have a really tough job.

The general rule is “When in doubt, throw it out.” An ancillary rule is “When in doubt, find out.” Meaning, for example, while only tin and aluminum cans are recyclable, some Googling will reveal local places that accept scrap metal. 

China’s refusal to stop accepting our poorly sorted-out materials is the main reason for the changes to the Marion County recycling program. It appears this is permanent, since one of the speakers said that China wants a .5% (half a percent) error rate, and the actual rate is much higher — over 10% I recall. 

A big screw-up is putting “plastic film” in the recycling bin. It took me a while to figure out that when the speakers referred to this, they basically were talking about plastic bags. The bags gum up sorting machinery, so they are a major no-no. Return them to stores that have a bin for them. 

Newspapers are one of the more lucrative items for recyclers, as demand is fairly high for them and other forms of paper. (Shredded paper, though, can't be recycled.)

However, we were told that because the Oregonian no longer publishes daily, and the size of newspapers has shrunk as reporting staff have shrunk and advertising has gone elsewhere, newspapers make up a smaller chunk of recycling materials. 

As shown on this handout (click to enlarge), many types of paper and cardboard still can be put in the mixed recycling cart. The biggest change is with plastics, since only bottles and jugs now can be recycled. The numbers on a plastic container no longer have meaning.

A plus, said one of the speakers, is that yogurt containers don’t have to be washed out, since they’re thrown away. Being a daily yogurt consumer, I’ve noticed that convenience. 

My wife and I buy ready-made salad in “clamshell” containers, along with strawberries. These used to be recyclable, though not easily. Previously a neighbor would take clamshell containers to a recycling location in Corvallis, so we’d store them up and give them to her periodically. 

But those days are gone, so we cram the large salad containers into our kitchen trash bag, then fill the clamshell with other garbage. Not ideal, but we’ve entered into a new age of recycling.

Which feels like a significant step backward. 

Hopefully one day future Oregonians will look back on 2018 as a temporary setback for recycling. Perhaps technological advances we can’t foresee from our current vantage point will make recycling super-easy and super-efficient.

My third time is a purple charm with Emily Cahal of Salem Hypnosis Solutions

Today I had my third hypnosis session with Emily Cahal. I've blogged about the first two sessions here and here. It left me feeling good.

Not that the first sessions had me feeling bad. Quite the opposite. I simply felt like today we went a bit deeper into my psyche, which might be a result of me becoming more familiar with Cahal's style and with hypnosis in general. 

I like how Cahal blends traditional counseling with hypnotherapy.

First we talked for about fifteen minutes about what's been going on with me during the past week. My focus, of course, was on my Damn Bladder Problem. (Hopefully I'll eliminate the "damn" in my description of it when I feel more comfortable with a new normal, as the saying goes.)

I told her there were two ongoing storylines in the psychological drama within my head. One is a lingering sense of self-criticism and self-blame caused by my feeling that I failed to recognize and deal with early signs/symptoms of the bladder problem. 

I realize this sort of judgement isn't productive, but it's been tough for me to stop ruminating about it. Cahal had an interesting observation that rang true to me: when I piece together chains of cause and effect that led to my health problem, I'm not seeing the entire picture.

Meaning, ruminators like me seize on parts of the big picture, yet fail to grasp the entirety of what went on. So when I berate myself for not having gone to a urologist before my bladder decided to go on strike, I'm not realizing that whether or not I did this or that, the outcome might very well have been the same.

That made me feel a bit better, so thanks to Cahal for that.

My second concern was feeling confined, like I'm in a cage -- albeit an expansive one -- since my bladder problem makes it difficult to travel, and my peeing now is on a schedule, rather than being "free form" like it was before. 

I told Cahal that my wife, Laurel, has been looking into van conversions that feature a mobile bathroom. While I appreciate Laurel's concern, and recognize that this could make it easier for me to travel, I'm not all that enthused about the idea, since it screams "old man with a bladder problem" to me.

What does excite me is memories of how much I enjoyed my Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter that I rode for three years a while back.

Because I feel caged-in by my health problem, and motorcycle enthusiasts like to call cars "cages," this helps explain why my psyche has been longing for a freer form of transportation, maybe a three-wheeled Can-Am Spyder for increased safety over what a regular motorcycle offers.

So those themes set the stage for the hypnosis session. 

After getting me nice and cozy with eyes closed in her zero-gravity chair (poetic license, of course) via progressive relaxation of my head, eyes, arms, legs, and such, we went back in time to my troubled 16-year old self.

This was when I first recalled feeling that all was not well with the world, that it was really shitty, in fact, because my mother's alcoholism was in full bloom, and things got really weird at night when she was drinking heavily. Now, the first few times Cahal had me recollect childhood memories struck me as a bit strange, since I had trouble seeing a connection with my present problems.

But I'm beginning to understand the wisdom of why she does this in her hypnosis sessions. At least, I'm gaining some understanding from my point of view.

Cahal asked me if the painful experiences my 16-year-old self had were caused by me, or by the situation I was in. I had to answer, "the situation," since I couldn't see how I was responsible for my mother's drunken ravings that I couldn't help hearing, even with a pillow over my head, from the bedroom next to hers.

Likewise, my current difficulties aren't really caused by me, even though I'm the one experiencing them. They're caused by my Damn Bladder Problem. At least, most of them. (Naturally I wasn't perfectly happy before my bladder problem; I just had different sorts of difficulties.)

So it was freeing to relive some painful memories and realize more fully than before that I wasn't the cause of them, nor was my mother, really. We were both trapped in a situation not of our own making -- which fits with my long-held conviction that free will is an illusion, albeit an illusion that is very difficult to see through, or give up.

My favorite part the hypnosis session was near the end, when Cahal introduced me to a bag that was purple for some reason (best not to wonder too much about the why's and wherefore's of hypnosis, especially during a session; but I couldn't resist Googling this, and did find a You Tube video about a purple bag hypnosis session that seems similar).

The marvelous thing is that everything went into the bag. I mean, everything. 

Cahal likely was reading from a script (I had my eyes closed, so couldn't tell), but this doesn't matter. If it was a reading, it was a highly dramatic reading, beautifully done. What went into my purple bag was every conceivable thought, memory, emotion, experience, desire, fear, pain, worry, joy, experience, imagination, whatever. 

The bag must have been infinitely expandable, because by the time Cahal was done, I couldn't envision any part of me, or my life, that wasn't in the bag -- past, present, future, it all was in the purple bag.

Then...the good part. 

I was asked to take out of the bag what I really needed, and wanted. Cahal loves the word "useful," so I'm pretty sure she used that term to describe what should come out of the bag. This is the stuff I need to keep. The rest could be discarded. Which we did in a football-like fashion.

The bag was kicked away. Far away. So far away, it went into interstellar space. And beyond. For all I know, the bag has reached the edge of the known universe. Maybe even the edge of the unknown universe. 

Now, as with my other descriptions of my hypnosis sessions, I realize that I'm not doing justice to them. And I'm being much more analytical in those descriptions than my state of mind was during the sessions. Like I said, for me hypnosis is an intriguing blend of counseling and... something else that's difficult to describe.

I only speak a few words during our sessions. So the work that's being done, and it might be better to call it play rather than work, is happening mostly on an unconscious or subconscious level. Or rather, on a visualizing/feeling level rather than conceptual/thinking level.

I have a feeling -- that's all it is, a feeling -- that the benefit I'm getting from Cahal's hypnosis sessions isn't something that I'm aware of. Which sounds sort of strange, since usually we know whether we're getting our money's worth from someone. Yes, ordinarily this is true.

But I've read enough neuroscience books to realize that most of what we are isn't known to us.

Our conscious awareness is just the tip of a much vaster unconscious iceberg. A thought comes to mind and we think, "I'm having a thought." Actually, though, the thought came from elsewhere, not from an "I," because there is no one at home inside my head, certainly not me. 

Tai Chi philosophy: Dissolve and try something different

I've been learning Tai Chi for fourteen years. One of the things I love about Tai Chi is that it is Taoism in motion. Meaning, Tai Chi embodies Taoist (or Daoist) philosophy. 

I can't think of any other form of movement -- dance, sport, whatever -- that similarly has deep philosophical principles reflected in it.

Yin and yang, of course, are central concepts in Tai Chi.

Softness (yin) and hardness (yang) alternate in the flowing movements. Of course, what passes for "hard" in Tai Chi is much softer than in other martial arts, so the "soft" is really soft.  

Recently my instructor, Warren Allen, came up with a saying that really appealed to me.

Dissolve and try something different. 

He illustrated it by showing how a forceful punch can be gently deflected, or absorbed, until it loses its punchiness. In other words, the force of the punch will dissolve when the impetus behind it is exhausted. 

Ditto with a kick, or any other form of attack.

But dissolving applies both ways. The Tai Chi practitioner also dissolves by not meeting force with force, but force with emptiness. 

In contrast to hard martial art styles such as traditional karate (which I studied for about 12 years before taking up Tai Chi), Tai Chi aims at accepting what is directed at oneself with little attempt to change it. 

This is considerably more difficult that forcefully responding in kind to an attack, such as by delivering a punishing block to a punch or kick.

Dissolving, of course, has both psychological and physical sides to it. It is almost impossible to move physically in a truly relaxed fashion if one's mind is tense. So Dissolve and try something different is wonderfully appropriate for many sorts of situations. 

The "try something different" part follows a relaxed, soft, embracing acceptance of what could be a difficult situation. Instead of fighting the situation right off the bat, the Tai Chi approach is to first accept it without resistance. 

Then, with the energy of the situation reduced, if not dissolved completely, it is easier to see what the best response might be. For example, if someone is angry with you, listening calmly to their ranting and raving is better than yelling back. 

Their anger can't be sustained for long. When it subsides, which is facilitated by your not responding in kind, the potential to try something different arises.

Ask some questions. Suggest ways to move forward amicably. Apologize if this is called for. Whatever comes to mind.

I'm not saying that I can do this well.

But Tai Chi has given me a model, an approach, an attitude toward dealing with conflict that is something I can keep in mind when I'm tempted to meet force with force, or feel overwhelmed by a negative situation that  seems to demand an energetic response, but which really would turn out better if I took a softer approach. 

My second hypnosis session got me way small

As I said in my blog post about my first hypnosis session with Emily Cahal of Salem Hypnosis Solutions, we had to make a decision about which way to proceed.

She told me that there were two basic ways we could go with hypnosis. Basically, one way would focus on my particular presenting problem, so to speak. The other way would be more general, delving into my habitual way of dealing with life's problems. 

Interestingly, as we chatted before beginning the second session, Cahal indicated that though we went the more general way last week, she favored going the more specific way this time. Which was just how I'd been feeling.

It wasn't that I didn't find value in delving into some childhood memories of how I deal with stress. I simply wanted to experience a session or two where we focused specifically on my bladder problem, and my worries associated with dealing with it.

So last Monday Cahal started off like the last time, getting me loose and relaxed with eyes closed through what was a lot like a guided meditation. Body part by body part, head to toe, we got rid of physical tension I was carrying. 

Then I got small. Psychologically. Cahal had me imagine a Small Brian who could go anywhere in my body, sort of like Fantastic Voyage without the submarine. Small Brian journeyed to my bladder, where he reported on how things felt down there.

Then I got to imagine teeny tiny massage therapists doing their thing on tight muscles in my bladder area. That was even more fun. As an added benefit, Cahal suggested that I envision some soothing lotion being applied to the muscles also, to get them even more relaxed.

I must have been more into a hypnosis zone this time, because I don't recall as much from the second session.  But I do remember being guided into an examination of my Book of Life.

The book basically contained a record of all my experiences.

Cahal had me zero in on some noteworthy negative experiences, those that carried some powerful emotional residue. She explained that the pages of my Book of Life were encased in acrylic, or some such material, so that when I touched them, I wouldn't feel the hurt they embodied.

I didn't reveal what the pages consisted of. I just recollected various experiences one by one. Cahal then said that we were going to take out that page, crumple it up, and throw it away. Bingo! Bad experience discarded. 

To add some extra oomph to the exercise, with my eyes closed I could hear Cahal ripping a piece of paper from a notebook, crumpling it up, then tossing it away. As I recall, after we'd discarded a bunch of unwanted pages from my Book of Life, they were incinerated into ashes, then the ashes were thrown to the winds. 

Can't get more gone than that. In my imagination, at least. It remains to be seen how really gone those negative experiences are from my psyche. I can only hope...

What gives me extra hope is some scientific findings contained in an article in the April 2 issue of The New Yorker, "Are We Already Living In Virtual Reality?." I'd brought a copy of the article to give to Cahal, since some portions of the piece about Thomas Metzinger, a philosophically-minded neuroscientist, seemed highly relevant to hypnosis. 

As you can read in the excerpt below, Metzinger speaks about our inability to recognize the unconscious mental models that determine how we experience reality. In his book, The Ego Tunnel, which I've read and enjoyed, Metzinger speaks of the walls of the tunnel as being transparent to us. 

Further, he says in the book, "Although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there is no little man running things inside our head. The Ego and the Tunnel are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical self-organization on many levels."

Here's the excerpt from The New Yorker article:

In a Frankfurt cake shop—“They say this is where Adorno took the women he seduced; many historical conversations happened here!”—Metzinger teased out the implications of this view of existence. “Do you know what an ‘illusion of control’ is?” he asked, mischievously. “If people are asked to throw dice, and their task is to throw a high number, they throw the dice harder!” He believes that many experiences of being in control are similarly illusory, including experiences in which we seem to control our own minds. Brain imaging, for example, shows that our thoughts begin before we’re aware of having them.

But, Metzinger said, “if a thought crosses the boundary from unconsciousness to consciousness, we feel, ‘I caused this thought.’ ” The sensation of causing our own thoughts is also just another feature of the self-model—a phantom sensation conjured when a readout, labelled “thinking,” switches from “off” to “on.” If you suffer from schizophrenia, this readout may be deactivated inappropriately, and you may feel that someone else is causing your thoughts. “The mind has to explain to itself how it works,” he said, spreading his hands.

Lately, Metzinger has been thinking about his own experience as a meditator. At the center of the meditative experience is the exercise and cultivation of mental autonomy: when the meditator’s mind wanders, he notices and arrests that process, gently returning his mental focus to his breath. “The mind says, ‘I am now re-directing the flashlight of my attention to this,’ ” Metzinger said. “But the thought ‘I am redirecting my mind-wandering’ might itself be another inner story.” He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “It might be that the spiritual endeavor for liberation or detachment can lead to new illusions.”

He looked at me reassuringly. “This doesn’t mean that nothing is real,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that this is the Matrix—the simulation is running on some hardware. But it does mean that you are not the model. You are the whole system—the physical, biological organism in which the self-model is rendered, including its body, its social relationships, and its brain. The model is just a part of that system.” The “I” we experience is smaller than, and different from, the totality of who and what we are.

It turns out that we do, in this sense, possess subtle bodies; we also inhabit subtle selves. While a person exists, he feels that he knows the world and himself directly. In fact, he experiences a model of the world and inhabits a model of himself. These models are maintained by the mind in such a way that their constructed nature is invisible. But it can sometimes be made visible, and then—to a degree—the models can be changed.

Something about this discovery is deflating: it turns out that we are less substantial than we thought. Yet it can also be invigorating to understand the constructed, provisional nature of experience. Our perceptions of the world and the self feel real—how could they feel otherwise?—but we can come to understand our own role in the creation of their apparent realness. “The compensation of growing old,” Virginia Woolf writes, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” is that, while “the passions remain as strong as ever,” we gain “the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.”

Black ice story in New Yorker brings back some slippery memories

I'm hoping that a story in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, "Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91," will make people more aware of the dangers of black ice, and also reassure people like me who live in areas that don't get a lot of snow, but do regularly get black ice, that we aren't winter weenies.

(The title of the story in the print edition is "Six Skittles: the danger of black ice.")

First, the story makes clear something that it took me a while to realize after I moved to Oregon from California in 1971 and began hearing tales of black ice. 

The ice isn't black. It is clear. So the color of a black roadway appears through the ice, which makes black ice a mostly hidden danger. Excerpt from story:

Black ice means any thin, clear coating of ice, without the trapped air bubbles that render thicker ice cloudy. If you take an ice cube from the tray and look at the bottommost layer, it will be clear. Black ice often forms at night, when the dew point is near freezing and the cold pavement turns moisture to ice.

John Seabrook, who wrote the story, lives in New England. He says, "Northerners know to fear black ice, but its deadly nature is not widely understood by people from more temperate regions, and figurative language doesn't help." (Again, since the ice isn't black.)

Those of us in Oregon, where winter temperatures often hover around freezing, and rain frequently falls through a colder part of the atmosphere closer to the surface (temperature inversion), producing freezing rain, learn to be wary of black ice.

My most notable experience with black ice was in central Oregon. I was driving our Volvo station wagon to a cabin in Camp Sherman that we co-owned with three other couples. A work party had been scheduled that weekend for a remodeling project.

I'd gotten off the main highway and started to head down the road that leads to charming Camp Sherman. When I got to the first curve, I realized that the car suddenly felt much different. It was like the tires were barely in contact with the pavement. What went through my head was, "If I make any sudden movements with the wheel, the brakes, the gas pedal, I'm going off the road."

It was a scary feeling. 

So much so, if somehow I'd come across someone with a roadside stand that had a sign saying, "Snow tires, studded or studless, $2,000," I would have pulled out my credit card in a flash. 

Since no stand of that sort appeared, I had to drive slowly and extremely carefully to the cabin. Getting off the asphalt and onto a gravel road felt marvelous. That's the thing about black ice: it's so nasty, there's a joyful feeling when you're out of its clutches.

The New Yorker story has a happy ending, thankfully. Seabrook was driving a Ford F-150 which ended up still drivable even after he'd spun off a black ice-encrusted road, narrowly missing a guardrail and a propane truck, and slammed into a snow bank. 

He points out that ABS, which his truck had, is of no use if none of the wheels have traction. Ditto with all wheel drive, obviously. Seabrook says that studded tries are the only remedy for black ice, but I'm a big fan of studless winter tires, which I put on two of our three cars in mid-November. 

From what I've been able to learn, modern studless snow tires perform almost as well on ice as studded tires, and they're much better on dry and wet pavement. So I figure it makes sense to use them, since mostly precipitation falls as rain here in western Oregon during the winter, not as snow or ice. Here's what Consumer Reports says about them:

Most winter tires are what we call studless, that is, there's no provision for installing metal studs to enhance grip on icy roads. Based on our past testing, studded models do indeed grip well on ice, but they do not always out-perform studless models, which have more advanced winter tread compounds that stay pliable in the cold.

Even though the two sets of snow tires are mounted on wheels, it's still sort of a pain to have a tire store mount and dismount them every year. But like I said, when you hit black ice, cost-effective thoughts fly out of the startled mind. The New Yorker story, by the way, includes considerable discussion of Seabrook's frame of mind during the few seconds it took for his accident to materialize.

Time slowed down. He felt calm. That's the source of the "Six Skittles" title -- he'd glanced at the back seat to check on his children when the accident was imminent and saw six skittles on the seat, a number that turned out to be correct. 

Give the story a read. It has some scientific information about why black ice is so dangerous. Here's a sample:

Mine was garden-variety black ice. It formed the same way that the clear ice on my windshield formed. Even at higher elevations, where raindrops could be five degrees below freezing, they don’t crystallize into sleet or snow, which would be less slippery; instead, they remain in a liquid, “supercooled” state, until they “nucleate”—become ice—on striking anything hard, such as the road surface or a car.

“Warm ice” is the term used by Professor Erland Schulson, of Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering (Exit 21, Hanover, New Hampshire), for ice that is close to melting. That is the state of “most ice we encounter in the world,” he explained, when I visited his office. Melting ice with a thin layer of water on top of it is as slippery as the natural world gets—“nothing slipperier than that,” the professor said; hard frozen ice is much less slick.

Here's how my first hypnosis session went

Today I had my first real hypnosis experience with Emily Cahal of Salem Hypnosis Solutions.

Back in college I'd dabbled in self-hypnosis as taught by a Yoga teacher I was studying with.

And I'd seen a form of "show business" hypnosis during an assembly at a high school where I briefly was a teacher's aide following my college graduation. A hypnotist did his thing on stage with a female student, then told her to go find Paul Newman in the audience. She walked by me, looking into the bleachers, then leapt into the second row where I was sitting and gave me a hug. 

I suspect I was singled out as Paul Newman because I was older than the other students, but at the time it made me feel a bit movie star'ish regardless.

During the introductory part of today's session Cahal made clear that what she does is nothing like that sort of hypnosis. She explained that much (or most) of what results in our thoughts, feelings, and actions originates in the unconscious, which isn't under our direct control. 

My reason for making an appointment with Cahal was that my wife, a retired psychotherapist, thought it could be helpful in getting me to relax more with what I like to call my Damn Bladder Problem. I'm managing OK with it, but sometimes tension, anxiety, or some other force makes it difficult for me to do the self-catheterization owing to a tightening-up in my pelvic region.

As I explained to Cahal, I can feel relaxed and "normal" (whatever that is), yet at times some of my bladder muscles clearly have a mind of their own. So I was hoping that hypnosis could help me stay in a relaxation sweet spot.

She told me that there were two basic ways we could go with hypnosis. Basically, one way would focus on my particular presenting problem, so to speak. The other way would be more general, delving into my habitual way of dealing with life's problems. 

This second way would take us into my childhood where, Cahal said, we first develop our coping mechanisms. I told her that I liked that idea better, since I'd like to be able to relax more generally in various types of situations, not just those involving my chronic health problem.

We talked some about a subject that fascinates me, both intellectually and personally: how efforts to resolve a problem, which in my case was excessive tension, often backfire because effort can exacerbate the problem -- such as not being relaxed enough. It's kind of like the familiar "don't think of an elephant."

Trying not to do something can paradoxically make that something happen. So this is an argument in favor of hypnosis, which works on more of a subconscious or unconscious level. 

I then was invited to sit in a zero gravity chair that, when reclined, put me in a pleasingly comfortable position. Cahal started off by inviting me to relax both physically and mentally with my eyes closed. 

I won't go into too many details of the hypnosis session. I'll just hit some highlights that struck me as particularly interesting.

These involved a latter part of the session where I was interacting with my youthful self, initially 10-12 years old, then more like 16 years old as Cahal led me into some questions about my relationship with my mother during a period when her alcoholism was in full bloom.

She had mentioned that I shouldn't over-think my responses to her questions, but rather respond intuitively with what first popped into my head. This made the hypnosis session quite different from a regular counseling session, which in my experience involves more cognitive deliberation.

Heart versus head, basically.

The most moving part of the session for me was when I was invited to give my youthful self advice from the perspective of my current 69 year-old self. I have to admit that I've been skeptical of the value of "inner child" work, because rightly or wrongly it's seemed to me that I've pondered my childhood, with its mixture of dysfunction and normalcy, in sufficient depth to make any further pondering superfluous.

Hypnosis, though, had some surprises for me.

I found it easy to give some advice to the youthful me as if he was still a child: "Don't worry, everything changes, mostly for the better." I also enjoyed Cahal's observation that it was the situations I found myself in that were the problem, not me.

She asked if I felt I was a good person, and if I felt my mother was a good person. I answered "yes" to both questions. It was freeing, in a way, to speak out loud what I'd said to myself countless times after my mother died in 1985. Well, not only to myself, but also to my imagined mother (being an atheist, I don't believe she can hear me now).

"You were the best mother you could be, so thanks for that." 

We then moved to the present, with Cahal inviting me to imagine my youthful self co-existing with my present day self. Give your youthful self a hug, she said.

I then realized something that had never occurred to me before: I couldn't recall ever being hugged by a man during my childhood years. I had no contact with my father after my parents divorced when I was three, or thereabouts. My male relatives weren't hugging types. So when I visualized my youthful self getting a hug from my current self, it almost brought tears to my eyes.

Now, I don't know what all this means. Much more, of course, occurred during the hour or so hypnosis session. I don't know what all of that meant either. 

Strangely, which really isn't so strange, really, this is why I feel positive about hypnosis after my first experience with it.

I've done an awful lot of conscious deliberating about my life, both past and present, since my bladder problem changed a lot for me. If all of that deliberating had been fruitful, I wouldn't be feeling the need for help with relaxing into what could be called my "new normal."

(I don't like that new normal, so I've been loathe to use that term, but as time goes on I'm coming to recognize that reality doesn't really give a shit about what I like or don't like, it gives what's coming to me regardless.)

So I enjoy the feeling that what occurred in today's hypnosis session is akin to seeds planted in my unconscious which will germinate outside of my awareness. I've got several more sessions scheduled; thus, more seeds should be planted. At the very least, I'm trying something new, and this old dog should be able to learn some new tricks.

I want to mention that throughout the hypnosis session I felt quite normal, not at all under the control of the hypnotist. It was a lot like a guided meditation, though I readily admit that almost certainly there was more going on behind the scenes of what Cahal was doing than I'm aware of. 

Here's how Emily Cahal describes hypnosis in the FAQ page on her web site. This rang true for me, in part because I'm habitually prone to locking my car door, walking away a few steps, then returning to check whether I really did lock the door. 

HOW DOES HYPNOSIS WORK?

Using analytical hypnosis to address issues, such as: weight loss, smoking, depression, childbirth, stress, sports performance, confidence, habits, cravings, and fears, is about behavior modification. There is a developed behavior that is guiding your automatic reactions to events.

These reactions are based on your previous experience. When you are trying to change a behavior, it can be a very real struggle as your conscious mind attempts to change what your subconscious mind already has in place. You can compare it to the mindless way you may have trained yourself to lock the door when you get in the car. At first it takes conscious effort. Eventually it becomes automatic, to the point that you may not even know if you locked it or not without checking. Once that simple habit is in place, changing it is possible with some effort and repetition.

A habit can become stronger and more complex when you apply emotions and time. If someone has a strong fear about car doors being unlocked, they probably took on that fear at some fearful time in the past. It could have been someone’s innocent statement about car-jackings, a horror movie or a personal fearful moment. Any of those situations have the potential to create a fear behavior. The emotional content of this habit makes changing that behavior more involved. The simple fact that our mind does create behaviors means that our mind can change them, if we understand how.

Hypnosis has shown to be a rapid way to change behaviors, especially with modern hypnosis techniques. When using the very same principles behind our natural behavior creation, we can easily quit old habits as well as create new ones.