What Excites Us!

Episode 44: Hypno Kink with HypnoStory Part 1

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Gwyn: This podcast is about sex and sexuality, so please only listen if you are an adult without kids or other ears around that cannot, or do not consent to sensitive language and content. Thanks.

Hello and welcome to What Excites Us, the podcast that discusses sex and sexuality from a variety of perspectives. My name is Gwyn Isaacs. I am a certified sex coach who has been professionally helping people feel good about their sexuality and how to approach it with glee since 2017.

Today's episode is part one of two, with Hypnostory, who uses they them pronouns and who loves to share the joy and power of hypnosis with most anyone who will listen. They have been doing various forms of hypnosis for over 25 years and have taught for Charmed, Entranced, Kinky Con, and the Fetish Fair Flea Market, among others. In addition to erotic and recreational hypnosis, they occasionally perform as a stage hypnosis and work with clients using hypnosis for personal growth. Together with their partner Panda, they offer kink and hypno kink education through their company. Pandastory, and they also run CONsolation, a Discord server that presents kink education.

We had such a good conversation, and there is so much misinformation out there regarding hypnosis, that it seemed important to bring you all of it, and not make extra bonuses just for the Patreon members. And because I prefer podcasts that hover around the one hour mark, I decided to break this up into two episodes. If you would rather listen to it all in one sitting, I respect that. And I don't mind if you wait to listen to both of them together. Binge it, as it were.

In the conversation, we touch on the terms top and bottom and dominant and submissive. And for folks who might not be hip to that kinky lingo, a top is someone who is doing or giving an action, and a bottom is someone who is receiving said action. These can be the same or different. different from a dominant who is in some way in charge and a submissive who is not. And there are lots of nuances and differentiations in the submissive and dominant, but you don't need any of that for this conversation. I just wanted to make sure you had a basic understanding.

Although, if you are interested in exploring these more, Kink 101 people are my favorite types of clients and while I don't have coaching spaces right now, I will soon. And we can talk about that and see if we'd be a good fit and get you into the waiting room.

In today's part of the chat with HypnoStory, we go into what hypnosis is and what it isn't, and what HypnoKink is and what it can be. And what stage hypnosis and hypnosis for change work is and how they are different and the same from erotic hypnosis. We talk about some of our personal experiences approaching kink in general. And we talk about their hypno kink 101 course and their discord server. And how you can get involved.

Thank you so much HypnoStory. I can't tell you how excited I am about this conversation, and since you suggested it, let's start with What Excites You?

[00:03:50] HypnoStory: So lots of things excite me, but the big thing, the driving thing is about connecting with other people. That's why I do pretty much everything I do in relationship and in kink is it's all about exploring connections. And I'm sure we'll talk about this, but like I play in lots of different ways, in a variety of different roles with a bunch of different people. It's all about exploring this beautiful connection between who we are.

[00:04:23] Gwyn: I really love that and I, that is so much of my driving force as well. When I think about all of the things that I enjoy doing, Besides treasure hunting, which is a different set of things that I enjoy doing, but I, I deeply seek connection and you know, part of me is like, it's 'cause I was an only child and I don't have any cousins. And I'm like, it doesn't matter what the why is, I think it's just part of who we are and what makes us up, but it's really fascinating how it manifests, particularly in, in kinksters 'cause that's a, an interesting tangent. So let's just start at the super, super beginning. What is hypno kink?

[00:05:03] HypnoStory: Yeah. So let me take a step back and say probably something that will be frustrating to people, which is in the course of this, I am not gonna give a definition of hypnosis. And the reason I'm not gonna give a definition of hypnosis is I don't have one I'm happy with. When I wrote my first hypno 101 class, I had obviously in the outline, well, I should probably start by defining hypnosis. And I did a lot of research and looked at a lot of people's definitions, and I pretty much couldn't come up with a definition that I felt made sense, that I couldn't come up with a demo that could violate that definition and that yet most of the hypno people I knew would agree was hypnosis. So we're talking about something very squishy to begin with.

And I will also say, just by way of clarifying terms, that, some people talk about what I do as erotic hypnosis or recreational hypnosis. Some people talk about it as hypno kink, and mostly that's a framing thing. That people who don't particularly identify as kinky. It often feels more natural to think about it in that other frame. I kind of came at it that way and then was like, oh, but I'm really fucking kinky. I didn't know that, but that's interesting. Okay. And the more I've gone into it, the more that's become the natural frame. And so I tend to use a lot of the language of kink in talking about it. That said, what is this range of stuff we're talking about? People have said for years that the mind is the most important sex organ. And people, particularly kinky folks have played with state of mind' in lots of ways that are mostly kind of indirect, right?

Like a lot of Dominants that play with submissive folks are just like, yes, I know by doing the way I do rope, or the way I do impact, or the way I do whatever, that I can put a partner that I'm connected with into subspace, or into rope space or whatever kind of term you wanna use for that headspace. With hypno kink, at its essence, we are playing with that more directly. I'm gonna say this and then I'm gonna say it's not true.

Um How to work with the person's unconscious mind to create an experience. Now, why am I gonna say that's not true? Because I think if you ask most modern psychology researchers, they would say, yeah, we're not so sure that there's evidence for this unconscious mind, particularly not in the sort of Freudian Id kind of sense. So the mind works in metaphor, and that's a metaphor that I happen to find very useful so I use it a lot. There are people who do hypno kink who never talk about the unconscious mind. But I do think that there are parts of us, parts of our processes that we are more aware of that we can call conscious, and parts that we're less aware of that I would call unconscious.

And you know, most people are probably not thinking about if they're sitting in a chair, the texture of the chair that they're sitting in until I bring it up and then we take something that was unconscious and make it conscious, right? So we take that and we're using it together to create this experience that we want to have. Now, what can that experience be? It can be literally anything you can imagine and describe. So whatever someone is into.

You know, if I'm negotiating with somebody new that's kinky in other ways, If they don't have something specific in mind, I'll start by asking, okay, well, what other kind of kinky stuff do you like? You know, what pushes those buttons you really like to have pushed. And that can be a really nice entry point to thinking about what we can do with hypnosis.

On the other hand, my partner Yoshi, who is now my husband, but we, we weren't married at the time, we were doing a little class before a play party and somebody raised their hand and said, well, what would happen if you gave him a suggestion to feel or experience something that doesn't exist? Or that he had never experienced something impossible? I said, well, we're playing in the realm of imagination, right? So it would feel like whatever his mind conjured out of what I described so I just was sort of pulling something outta the air, but it's something I know a lot of hypno, kinksters are into.So I gave him the suggestion that he was being penetrated by a tentacle monster. And unbeknownst to me, I found out later that that was the exact fantasy that the person who asked the question was hoping it might be possible to experience. And so that was a fun, oh, we hit the nail on the head with that one. And so those kinds of things can happen.

Now, common questions we get, how real is the experience? And with almost everything with hypnosis, the answer is, it depends. So I like to say that hypnosis is a set of skills for the person being hypnotized, at least as much as for the hypnotist. And just like there are some people who they go and buy their first guitar, they watch two YouTube videos and can hack their way through a Jimi Hendrix solo. And everybody's like, how the hell did you do that? Because they just had a natural knack for it. There are people that their brains will do all sorts of fun stuff the first time they go into hypnosis that are things that not everybody does.

That said, almost everyone when they start will find at least some things that they might want to experience that maybe don't work as well as they're hoping the first time. And it really is just a matter of practice and most people can develop the ability to have most of the kinds of experiences that they can have. If they wanna practice and develop those skills, and particularly if they sort of hold the outcome lightly and find ways that are fun to play with it and just do it a lot. so that's an extremely long-winded way of talking around something because when the possibilities are infinite, which they are, it's not easy to describe, in a way that's succinct.

Right. And, I really want to make sure that we don't get too focused on the thing that a lot of people do think of when we say particularly erotic hypnosis. A lot of people are thinking of making someone orgasm on command without being touched. Or have other kinds of sexual sensations. And don't get me wrong, I love doing that. It's actually one of my favorite things to do. Yoshi and I don't teach together anymore because he, is just not so into doing that. And now I teach with another partner, Panda. And we have a kink education business together, and we'll talk more about that at some point. But Panda and I teach a class that's usually an hour and a half.

Of one demo after another of ways of messing with arousal and orgasm. And it's one of my favorite ones to do because it's so much fun. So if that's what you're hoping for, don't worry that's out there. But I find that people kind of fall into two camps with this, and some are in both. So that's kind of a third camp, that there are people who I call hypnosis fetishists. People for whom the process of hypnosis in and of itself is hot or is what's exciting. And it may be that a hypnosis scene with them all they want is a very kind of deep, intense experience of the hypnosis itself. And then there are people who are more sort of hypnosis as a tool. Right? Where it's more about hypnosis is a way to create experiences that we can't have or can't have easily in other ways. And I kind of came at it more from that side, although now it's definitely both for me.

Because really I started as a magic fetishist. When I was in college looking for porn, that was interesting to me. You know, I did what sort of society suggested I should do looking for porn and looked for pictures of fem presenting people with naked bodies that I thought were hot and was like, yeah, this is okay, but it's not really doing it for me. What do I want? And I started to realize that really I was much more excited by the idea of, you know, things like, what if I could wave a wand at someone and make them come or make their clothes disappear, you know, like it was that kind of stuff. And so I went looking for it and I found this thing, which is still on the internet, the erotic mind control story archive, which I sort of have mixed feelings about recommending because there's definitely some material there that, I'm not super comfortable with being out there and particularly that I think doesn't have adequate content warnings and stuff.

So I tend not to recommend that site anymore. I tend to recommend, one called Read Only Mind, which is excellent, but you know, 20 plus years ago there was what there was. So I found all of these stories about magic that were part of that but a lot of them were about hypnosis. And I'd already been interested in hypnosis, but more from a therapeutic change work kind of standpoint. And I read these stories about hypnosis being used erotically and thought, boy, wouldn't that be cool if you could really do that, but no way. And it was also not the kind of thing that at the time I would've had the confidence or even really the communication skills to ask somebody if they wanted to experiment with it.

You know, fast forward most of 20 years later and I found that there was a community of people who do this thing that I now tend to refer to as Hypno Kink and eventually got up my courage and started hanging out with them. Although I was terrified. You know it was the first weekend event I went to. I almost ran away like four or five times during the weekend because I was so, just so scared. I didn't belong, didn't know what to do. but I stuck it out and made connections with people, some of whom are dear friends still, and one of whom is now a metamor As life works out and, sort of the rest is history.

But I, I do wanna say to anybody who's listening to this that's thinking about going to a kink event, be that a munch or a play party or a conference. It's okay to be scared. It took me years of going to events before I didn't have to talk myself out of not running away rather than going. And that was, even once I was presenting at these things. Like, you know, that's not everybody's experience. But I've heard that story from enough people who are afraid that they're the only one who feels like that, that I really like to talk about my own experience because I want to normalize it. Because you are going into a different world where you are hoping that all of your sexy, often previously hidden dreams may come true. And so of course that can be scary.

[00:18:06] Gwyn: The first time I tried to go to a munch, I drove an hour to get there, pulled up to the parking lot and went, Nope. And drove away. Like, I could not mm-hmm. No. And in fact that reminds me, and, and maybe this will actually prompt me to finally do it. I have a, how to go to a munch for the first time booklet that I prepared many years ago and, and still have not actually put out into the universe. Um, it was supposed to be a freemium and, and then I never, what? It doesn't matter relevant. So, maybe I'll actually do that this time around. Let's back up a little bit though, when people think of hypnosis, they think of either stage shows or therapy.

[00:18:51] HypnoStory: Correct.

[00:18:52] Gwyn: How is it the same? How is it different? [

00:18:55] HypnoStory: Absolutely. So let's start with stage shows because I think it's important, and I've done a few stage shows and if somebody really, really wants me to do a stage show and is okay with paying the fee, I still do them occasionally. I have a background in performing. My degree is actually in design for the theater. And honestly, I don't do more stage hypnosis largely because I haven't had the energy to market it and build a career that way more than because I don't want to do it. But also as a kinky person, it's weird because the standards of consent in that environment are very different. I will also say there are a lot of shitty stage hypnotists who don't treat their volunteers very well.

And there are some that, I think do do it really well and with an awareness of consent and being supportive. But the most important thing is when somebody hires you to do a stage show, they're hiring you to entertain an audience, not to give the people on stage a good experience. And I'll caveat that by saying, I think if you're an ethical stage hypnotist, you want the people who are volunteering for you to feel good about having volunteered and to have a good experience in the sense of, it being comfortable and pleasant and interesting. But the focus is not on making people feel or live the suggestions you're giving very intensely. Internally, it's all about creating reactions that are gonna entertain the audience. And when you're a stage hypnotist, it kind of doesn't matter if they're acting as if they're having an experience or if they're responding because they had the experience. And neither of those, by the way, are faking it. Right.

So for me, as a hypnosis bottom, often if somebody gives me a suggestion of something like You know, when I snap my fingers, you're gonna feel like a flogger landed across your back. I will respond as if I felt a flogger across my back, but I will not actually feel the sensation, it just, so far my brain hasn't figured that part out. And it's something that the more I bottom, the better I get at all of this stuff. And I really hope that someday I get to the point that some of that stuff works, because that would be super fun. But a stage hypnotist doesn't care, right? If I'm giving a good reaction and I am feeling okay, they've done their job. Right?

Whereas this kind of stuff is the hypno kink is, tends to be much more inwardly focused. That it's about creating the experience that either the bottom wants to have or in a power dynamic that the top wants the bottom to have or the dominant wants the submissive to have. And I do tend to try to be careful about separating dominant and submissive being about power and top and bottom being about who's doing the thing and who is receiving the thing. Because you can absolutely do hypnosis in a way that has a really powerful power dynamic. And that can be really fun. But you can absolutely do hypno kink in a very egalitarian way, and that can be great too. So that's stage hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy is about and I'm gonna put that in quotes because most of the people who do hypnotherapy are not licensed psychotherapists and therefore are not licensed to diagnose or treat a condition. Right? That's the position I'm in. I've been trained and certified in hypnosis, but I never use the word hypnotherapy for what I do because I'm not a therapist that I like to talk about it as hypnosis for change work. And that's about using this same set of tools for things like habit change, for things like, people who find themselves worrying a lot or it's hard to slow their mind down. We can use hypnosis both through me working with them interactively and through teaching them self-hypnosis techniques that they can use on their own, to help themselves develop tools to make changes. And hypnosis can be incredibly powerful and a beautiful way of accelerating sometimes very, very deep change work.

And that's not something that we do in Hypno Kink. We try to be really clear that if something happens in a hypno kink scene that makes someone better, in a way they wanted to change that, that would be an unintended benefit. Not something we're going for. When you have people who are in very long-term deep dynamics, some people feel comfortable going a little further in that using hypnosis for change work kind of direction. And my take on that is if they are trained and qualified to do that kind of work. And they and the people they're doing it with have discussed that and determined that it's within their risk profile, I don't necessarily think doing it with hypnosis is any significant additional risk than doing any kind of self-improvement work as a part of a DS relationship, which is something lots of people in the DS and MS world do.

I take a very RACK sort of approach to kink, risk aware, consensual kink, and that I think there's risk to everything we do and that what's important is that everybody is aware of that and discusses it and consents to it as clearheaded a way as possible before you approach it. And honestly I think that there kind of is a lot of difference technique wise too between, hypno kink and hypnotherapy. In that I would say if you're at all kinky and you wanna learn hypnosis for change work, or if you're a therapist to use in your practice, go spend a couple of years in the hypno kink world. And then do your therapeutic training.

Because we play with this all the time. So there's often a bunch of us sitting around at a conference or at a gathering and saying, Hey, what would happen if we, and somebody will say, I would like to experience that. Let's do it. And so because we're so playful with it, we explore a lot in a way that if you are a professional who's being paid to help somebody, you are more likely, at least most people, I think, are more likely to stick to what is sort of a protocol that you've learned or that you've developed in your practice to, yes, respond to the client of course, but also you may go a lot less further out on the limb where it's just like, Hey, let's throw this at the wall and see what sticks. And so as somebody who had done a lot of change work training, I came to the hypno kink community and was like, whoa! I had no idea that you could shortcut so much of this stuff so easily. And that happens for a couple of reasons, right? One is we're really into this, so we do it a lot. So we get good at it, both on the top and the bottom. And we're also, I think, less wedded to tradition.

And as I say, more willing to experiment and it's different in how it goes. And we are doing this for reasons of intimacy, right? In hypno kink typically, and at least for me, it's about wanting an intimate connection. Whereas in a therapeutic situation, of course, you wanna stay at a professional distance that's appropriate because your job in that context is to hold space to help somebody have that experience.

[00:27:45] Gwyn: you know, frequently when I tell people what I do for a living, they ask for a hot sex tip. So what I say, not really knowing them or any of their situations is that most sexual issues can be helped with more and better conversation, or lube or both. Now, conversation is really on you, although I can help you if you'd like me to. I do that as a coach. But when it comes to lube, there are two brands that I always reach for first. Uberlube is my go-to silicone lube. It's pure. It's not full of any unnecessary additives that make it smell, taste, or feel, unlike you me. It comes in a beautiful glass bottle that I'm happy to have on my nightstand, and it's great in most situations. However, if you prefer a water-based lube or have some other intimate needs, I recommend Good, Clean Love. They have a variety of great products to help everything in the bedroom goes smoothly, huh. They've got some vaginal care kits, some cleaning solutions, oils and candles. It's really great. Now you can find an affiliate link for these at the podcast's website whatexcitesus.com And to be clear, you do help me out when you buy through these links, but I specifically reached out to these companies because I truly love their products and I believe in what they're doing. So help yourself. Help me help these lovely companies and get better sex with better lube. Go visit the links for UberLube and good Clean Love at whatexcitesus.com

Now is the mechanics of it the same, give or take?

[00:29:38] HypnoStory: Yeah. It can be. I mean, there's some stuff that is very much in the hypnotherapy toolkit that I would not be comfortable with people under almost any circumstances bringing into a hypno kink environment. But a lot of the processes of, you know, we talk about induction, the process of getting someone into a hypnotic trance. If that's something you want to use, and I'll get back to the if in just a sec, then yeah, you're gonna to use the same pool of tools there.

You know, that if you're working with someone in trance, a lot of the tools of trance management, applies no matter what kind of hypnosis you're doing. And this is why hypnosis is so hard to define. A lot of people talk about hypnosis from a very state-based model, right? It's putting someone into a trance state where they have higher suggestibility, et cetera, et cetera. Except that you can do most of this without trance.

The trance itself is almost always optional. And in fact, there's a guy in the hypnotherapy world, James Tripp from the UK, who actually teaches a training course called Hypnosis Without Trance. I've seen some clips of him teaching on YouTube, which I thought were really interesting. And that's as far as I've had time to go. It's one of those, like somewhere down the line. I would like to get further into his stuff, but, so I want to be clear, I'm not necessarily endorsing him. Or his, work 'cause I just don't know it. But it's possible to do a lot of this kind of stuff. And stage hypnotists do it all the time. Right?

If you have seen a stage hypnosis show, it's very often that they're gonna do some things often before they ask for volunteers, or sometimes once they have volunteers on the stage where they're going to, for instance, do something where some people's hands, they have them interlace their fingers and they end up feeling like their hands are stuck together. There's been no trance induction, right? But that's a hypnotic phenomenon.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's hypnosis. Because here's the thing, if you take somebody who's in that state, almost anyone that you've developed enough rapport with to create that effect and it worked, and their hands are stuck, and you look at them with intent and say, that when you tap their hands, their arms are gonna go loose, limp, and relaxed, and they're gonna drop into trance that probably has about a 95% hit rate.

That because it's not I think, and this is just a guess, that the hypnosis creates the experience of trance, not the other way around. Now, how would we know, and this is a rabbit hole, I don't want to go down because it's like an hour rabbit hole, but what I will say is. We need a lot more science done with neuroscientific tools like EEG that measures brainwaves like functional MRI where we can see activity in different parts of the brain. Which is something that I know just enough about to say. Wow, that's really cool and I hope people do more of it. In particularly in relationship to hypnosis and not enough about to actually talk about. And so, I think that we may someday, get to a point where scientists can agree that this thing we call hypnosis is defined as a specific set of stuff that happens in the brain. But from what I've seen, we're not there yet.

[00:33:29] Gwyn: That makes sense. My mom would say we know just enough to be dangerous.

[00:33:33] HypnoStory: Yeah. And, what I'll say about it is we actually know a lot about how it works. Right. Like, and, and I'll compare it to electricity, right? We had worked with electricity for hundreds of years before we really understood and could prove what it was. And in the same way that, you don't need to be able to change the head gasket in a car engine in order to drive the car. That I think that because hypnosis is so interesting and squishy, and a lot of the people who are drawn to it are pretty geeky already. it can be really easy to go into the theoretical and go down that rabbit hole forever, and it's really fun, but it's not actually important to being able to do it. It's actually kind of unusual when we teach about this stuff, to go even as far down the rabbit hole as we have today. And part of that is I don't have a person with me that I'm demonstrating with because usually my answer to what is this is, let me show you. And then we just go from there. And the definitional stuff kind of never comes up.

[00:34:49] Gwyn: Yeah.

[00:34:49] HypnoStory: But particularly for an audio podcast, I didn't think demoing was gonna be super useful. So I thought it'd be more interesting to sort of have separate conversations.

[00:35:01] Gwyn: Yeah. Well, let me take this moment to plug the course, which I started watching last night, and it is stunning to watch just even in that very first introduction episode to watch Panda go zoo and just, I was watching you while I was eating my supper, and I literally was like, wow. Like I had to stop, put my fork down for a second, rewind it, watch that piece again, because it is, it was breathtaking to

[00:35:29] HypnoStory: And the reason we start the class that way is because I wanna make sure that people know where they can go. And because there's kind of a bunch of stuff to learn. The primary content of the class is about five hours of video broken into 13 lessons. And the goal is for it to take somebody who has no experience with this, but some basic understanding of kink and things like power dynamics and negotiation. And by the end of that class for us to feel comfortable saying, okay, go out and start doing this with someone.

It's that long because, well, it's that long because we're long-winded. But the shortest form we ever teach, that class is three hours. Because that's how long it takes for us to feel like we're giving everybody enough grounding in what they need to know for me to be comfortable saying, okay, go play.

[00:36:34] Gwyn: Yeah. And I really like that you also have the discord set up

[00:36:37] HypnoStory: Yeah, so we have this Discord server, which we call CONsolation, because I like puns. And we started it because a conference we were supposed to be teaching at in person got canceled due to the pandemic. And I have a background in production, and so I said, well, why don't we take our classes online and see if some of our friends who were presenting this was a general kink thing, you know, wanted to also do that. And so we ended up with Panda and I and friends of ours who are rope presenters that are wonderful. And we put together a weekend on the weekend that would've been the conference. And so the whole thing was sort of the consolation prize. And then I heard that there was a sci-fi con, I think, or a fan con that's called convergence with the C O N capitalized. I was like, oh, CONsolation, I like this.

And uh, so that's our kink and hypno kink education discord, where people can come and ask questions and meet each other. We're explicitly not a hookup space, but we have a couple of places that we recommend for people who do want to find play partners. Just to mention one, there's another Discord server called Mindless Abyss that the owner is a dear friend and I think they're wonderful and there's lots of finding people to play with. Although it's not a hookup server, it's a community, but it's a community where looking for play partners is one of the things that happens there.

[00:38:07] Gwyn: just the fact that you are providing any space at all for people to talk about these sorts of things is wonderful since, as we know, lots of those places have been taken away,

[00:38:17] HypnoStory: yeah. Yeah. And, I love that when we started consolation, we only thought as far as that weekend event. We had no idea what was gonna happen after that. And we were open to, maybe there's an after that, we'll see how it goes. As people started to join and age verify and start having conversations, it became clear that what we had was this really lovely community developing. And about two weeks before the scheduled event, people started asking, so what happens after that Sunday when the planned stuff ends? And at that point I said, I will promise you that the server's not going away. We're not gonna delete a lovely community. And I have no idea what it's gonna look like. And no spoons to think about that until after we get through this.

[00:39:12] Gwyn: Yeah.

[00:39:13] HypnoStory: And I put up a survey, I. At the end of the weekend for people to let us know, you know, what did you like? What would you like to see going forward? What are you interested in? And there was a lot of interest. We thought about, okay, how do we do this in a way that's sustainable for us? And the answer was to not do a big weekend event. Because, that becomes a, okay, we need to take time off from work, we need prep, we need a recovery day. It's just a lot. And so what we ended up deciding to do is, um, a sidebar here that I think is interesting is that what we think of as a conference is the shape it is because it requires travel. Right. the whole idea of we all go to a hotel and there's multiple things happening at the same time because it's the only way we can cram it into the two or three or four days that we can be away from our real lives. Once we go online, all of that changes because we're doing it from our bedrooms or our living rooms or our, wherever we are, with a phone in the park. And so we thought, well what if this is like a conference that's going on all the time, but slowly.

We started with, we're gonna do one class a month. And that's evolved into often two sometimes three, occasionally four. I've learned that three or four is often too much for us. And so I've been kind of trying to keep it to one or two. It's also mostly not us teaching because Panda and I have been involved in producing events and teaching at events and so forth for a long time. And we know a lot of amazing presenters who know way more than we do about the things they teach. and then we don't have to have new material every month. 

Cause we put a lot of time into, you know, our classes are structured and rehearsed and we mess around with them a lot. And so, you know, because before consolation there was New Hampshire Hypno Kink we're based in New Hampshire and before the pandemic, we ran an in-person group. And I hope it can come back someday. I'm not really ready to do that. But the focus of that group was education and we did a class once a month. I taught probably eight out of 12 of those in a year. It meant that a lot of them were either repeats or I sat down, wrote down a half a dozen things on an envelope and taught a class. And it's okay, but it's not the kind of work I wanted to do.

And so this way we're able to address a lot more things. We're able to have, you know, some wonderful folks, a few names people might know. Uh, we had Sarah Sloan. We've had Devon Stone and his property Guan Xuan have taught a couple of really amazing classes about their dynamic, which is very unusual and fascinating. We've had Hannah, the Scribe who if you don't know Hannah's work and you're into service, particularly domestic service, Hannah is amazing. She's actually going to Butler School to be able to provide kinky service at a professional standard.

[00:42:53] Gwyn: That's so cool!

[00:42:54] HypnoStory: It's super cool. She is fascinating. And so we've done a wide variety of stuff. It's funny, we actually have not been doing that much hypno stuff because there's kind of no plan. it's really been, oh, we should get Hannah, you know, I see Hannah's teaching a class someplace else. I'm like, our audience would be really into that. Let's do it. I was saying to Panda about a week ago, I was like, you know, it's time to put us back on the schedule 'cause we haven't taught for our own server in a long time. And that's really where the video version of the 101 came from, is that there kept being need for it.

And so it felt like every time we were gonna teach on our server, we were doing the 101 because people needed it. And like I said, we can compress that class to three hours, but we're looking at the clock the whole time and it's not as much fun as some of the other stuff for us because of that time management thing, which is just an extra drain. After doing it six or seven times in 18 months, and we were just like, we don't wanna do this again. And I said, well, why don't we try recording it and offering it for sale for what we hope is accessible. We offer it on a sliding scale.

The standard price is $57. And the sliding scale goes from 35 to 80 there's no, like, we don't qualify people. Everybody decides where they fit and what's comfortable for them. And it's actually worked out really well for us that most people do seem to pay the, around the 57 that we say is the standard that we're hoping most people will pay. And we have had, a few people who are generous and can pay more than that. And we've had a number of people who need a lower price and are able to choose that.

You know, because there's a part of me that would like to give this away. Like, honestly, there's a big part of me that would like to give all of it away, but getting that course built and into a website and so forth is literally hundreds of hours of work. And so we have a Patreon and we have the class and that helps us to afford to be at more events. We just got back as we're recording this from Beguiled, which is the Midwest Hypno Kink or Erotic Hypnosis Conference, and I don't think we would've been able to afford to go to that if it wasn't for the combination of our patrons and the 101.

And we will have more video classes coming too. I'm hoping we're gonna shoot another one this summer, although I will make no promises about when it will come out. 'cause we shot the 101 in December and I think it was late February when it first went up for sale. And of course, for anybody, this is sort of inside baseball about small business stuff, but for anybody who's done this before, there's a lot more work than making the product. You know that there's the legal structure of making an LLC, there's the website, there's the payment processing, which for anything related to sexuality is really complicated. And really that's what took most of the time the class was done in a draft form by Thanksgiving, roughly. And it took months for us to get it the rest of the way.

[00:46:32] Gwyn: Yeah, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that I think most people aren't aware of. And it's nice to be able to offer things at a sliding scale for just the reasons that you mentioned. But it's also nice to have the patrons, and I feel like it's a, um, everybody's, it's not just patrons pay you and you're happy. It's a then you get to be able to provide more for the patrons and for the classes and every, you know, and, it's not a one-sided thing. I think that people think of these things as like, oh, that's your business. You're making tons of money. Like, no, but also, it enables us creators to be able to put more out for folks to enjoy.

[00:47:11] HypnoStory: That's absolutely right. And and our Patreon. We do, depending on what tier people subscribe at, both educational content and hot, we hope things that we have. You know, videos of, so at the, upper end are files where Panda or I are leading trances, that people can listen to the file and have a trance experience of different levels of spiciness. Um, that, and we try to give very clear content warnings so folks can decide what sort of stuff they're in for. Some of them are really gentle and relaxing and some of them are very kinky.

And we try to do a, a variety of that. We have videos of scenes that, up to this point have been just scenes Panda and I were doing at Beguiled we've collaborated with a number of other content creators where we've shot stuff that will go on both of our platforms that, uh, will be coming out with some people who I am just so honored to have gotten to make things with, because it was just, they're just wonderful people and we made some really hot stuff. Uh, which is also good.

We do at the lower levels we do what we call car talks, which are, when Panda and I are in the car, we tend to have these long philosophical conversations about kink. And so we got a pair of headsets that plug into my phone and started recording them. Uh, sometimes we actually record them in the car, other times we record them someplace else. and then it becomes bed talk, uh, or office talk, but the, what we call them car talks anyway. And then we do an office hour once a month, which was really intended for people to come and ask questions. Although our experience has been that mostly it's a relatively small number of people who are regulars pretty much every month who just want to come out and hang out and talk about kinky shit, which is awesome.

[00:49:09] Gwyn: Yeah, that's super fun.

[00:49:10] HypnoStory: Yeah, so we do lots of stuff you know, we've been very lucky to get some support that lets us do more than we would otherwise be able to do.

[00:49:19] Gwyn: Yeah, I wanna go back a little bit to my cynical side...

That's where we pick it up next time, diving into my cynical view. Please come listen to HypnoStory clear up some misunderstandings and give us more fun ideas and ways to play with this. Hey! Did you catch that subtle mention of Patreon that I did in the intro? Well, in case you didn't, here is a less than subtle reminder that there is one for the show and you can find it easily by going to whatexcitesus. com.

There you can also talk back to me, you can listen to past episodes, you can read show notes and all the other things. There is one thing that I'm begging you to do. See I'm on my knees and I'm begging you to please, please, please, go rate and review What Excites Us wherever you listen to podcasts. All the places that you might occasionally listen to podcasts because by getting that information out there, it helps more people find it. It raises it in the rankings. And then we can have a happier, better world because people won't be so uptight, wrapped up in shame or whatever else is discouraging them with their sex and sexuality.

Are you also enjoying the snippets of my life that I'm putting at the end? I don't know if I should keep doing it. So let me know one way or the other. Feedback is so useful.

What Excites Us is produced, edited, and hosted by me. I'm Gwyn Isaacs. Our podcast host is Tickle. Life. All the music I use is under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The opening song is The Vendetta by Stefan Kartenberg, and this is Quando by Julius H. And here is today's snippet.

This weekend is my partner and my 12-year anniversary. And so to celebrate, I rented a cheesy hotel room with a hot tub in it. And I'm super excited about it.