Who is Wes Graham?

What a long, strange trip it’s been

I want to start by admitting that this is hard for me, even though I’ve lived my life wearing the mask of an extreme extrovert, in my heart, I’m extremely private and even a bit socially awkward. I have been many things in my life, for purposes of clarity (and brevity) I’ve included in this bio mostly things that pertain to my experiences with hypnosis.

There are few, if any, people in this world who could claim that they were born to the field of hypnosis, but that’s what can be said of me. In the 1950s, there was a lot of experimentation with hypnosis, and my mother was involved in some of those experiments.  In 1958 the first major surgery in America that used only hypnosis as anesthesia was performed.  That surgery was my caesarean birth.

During the surgery my mother was not only able to control her pain, but she was wide awake and also able to control her bleeding.  This is a skill she retained for the rest of her life even to the point of requesting no anesthesia for a carpal tunnel surgery she had when she was in her eighties. (It really freaked the doctor out having her awake and talking to him.)

For better or worse, since long before I can remember, my mother used the hypnotic techniques she had learned from that experiment and others as part of my childhood development.  I learned of hypnosis and hypnotic techniques, literally, at my mother’s knee. By the time I was in high school I was quite skilled and a hit at parties doing stage hypnosis demonstrations.  Of course, like many adolescents, I had a short attention span and lost interest in hypnosis and it drifted out of my life until many years later.

My experiences with energy work also date from my childhood as well, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.  To me things like “feeling” the energy of a tree and even phenomenon like astral projection were just fun and interesting childhood games.  In hindsight, my sensitivities may have been a side effect of my mother’s hypnotic ministrations. I never knew the concepts of Chi/Qi energy until I heard about them from Bruce Lee movies. And quite honestly, I was in my twenties before I ever heard of a Chakra.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when my first wife was diagnosed with a terminal and untreatable disease, that I went back to my roots.  The shock of that diagnosis, and the “there’s nothing we can do about it” attitude of our physicians, forced me to look inside for answers that western medicine could not provide.

I researched and found a Chinese Qi Gung Master, not easy to do back in the 1980s, and began what ended up being three years of study. During this time, I witnessed things that would be called magic if you didn’t know the science behind them.

I also enrolled in hypnosis training and began my formal study of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. As an aside, I must note that I was surprised at how the perception and practice of hypnosis had changed over the years.  The experimentation of the 1950s was long forgotten and the bread and butter of hypnotherapy had evolved into primarily stop smoking and weight loss programs and being as an adjunct to “traditional” psychotherapy.  The profound effects that the mind in the trance state could have on the physical body had been left behind or deliberately set aside, probably to avoid trouble in our now litigious society.

My wife and I then engaged in years of what could be described as hand-to-hand combat with the Grim Reaper.  We had many successes holding off the disease process—altering her blood chemistry and immune system with hypnosis and controlling drug side effects with energy work, massage and acupuncture, but ultimately we failed.

The disease had been too well established before being discovered, the western medical treatments had been too harsh and a dozen other rationalizations did nothing to make me feel better.  So, I once again drifted away from hypnosis and energy work and set off to find normal.

Years passed as I healed and built a new life for myself.  A good life with a beautiful new wife, stepdaughter, home, dog, two cats and a good respectable office job, but something didn’t feel right. I was not being my best, my highest self. So, I spent the next few years doing an inventory of my life, trying to figure out what the “best” was and what I could do with it.  Out of this soul searching came the concept of Hypno-Energetics.  It’s my way of trying to do something positive with the unique circumstances and experiences of my life.

PS.  Please don’t worry, I’ve kept everything except the office job.