Miko Brown

Miko (Miko/Miko's) is a consultant and facilitator who has received a Master's Degree in Social Change and has been trained in hypnosis and a psychotherapeutic process called focusing. Miko has partnered with individuals and communities throughout the U.S. to help foster a more just and compassionate world through national service with AmeriCorps, food system transformation initiatives, farmed animal sanctuaries, social justice education, community engagement, and mental health and wellness work. Miko’s approach is grounded in the emergent process of fostering relationships and communities of care and counter-oppressive practice that support individual and community wellness. Miko is committed to equity and justice; liberatory practices for the benefit of all beings and the planet; and affirming the lives and experiences of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other folks of color, as well as those who are LGBTQIA+.

Focusing, a term coined by late psychologist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin, is a process that individuals can be guided through with the support of an experienced focusing professional. Focusing is an internal process where we learn to make contact with “felt senses,” which are inner experiences that can unfold to reveal deep meaning, insight, and wisdom when given our attention and brought into clearer focus. The focusing process can help us to move beyond stuck places, identify needs and desires, determine a new direction, gain more clarity, and access and explore creativity. An ongoing practice of focusing can help individuals and groups to feel a deeper sense of grounding and to better cultivate an internal sense of direction, authenticity, peace, empowerment, security, trust, compassion, resilience, and freedom. EUGENE GENDLIN ON FOCUSING “Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.”

Hypnosis is a powerful state of focused awareness that can be used to uncover and dissolve the root causes of many issues people deal with every day. It allows us to access all of the intelligence and healing resources already inherent within the subconscious mind, promoting natural growth and healing from within. Hypnosis helps people to discover the subconscious motivators for their symptoms, thought-patterns, emotional experiences, behaviors, and habits. Specific techniques and tools can then be used to address those underlying causes and to facilitate the learning of new and more generative ways of being—subconsciously. Hypnosis has been sanctioned and used by the medical community since 1958 to help patients treat chronic pain, induce anesthesia, and address various psychogenic experiences.

Hypnosis works by achieving a level of focused awareness that bypasses the analytical aspect of the conscious mind that is resistant to change. One way to think of the analytical aspect of the conscious mind is as a comparing mechanism. When new information is introduced to the mind, the comparing mechanism compares the new information to what it already believes to be true or false. If that new information does not align with what the conscious mind already believes, then it will likely be rejected. That is why changing habits and ways of thinking by willpower alone can often feel so difficult. Hypnosis is powerful because it bypasses the analytical aspect of the mind with focused awareness, allowing for new, generative, and life-forward suggestions to be made—directly into the subconscious mind—without the comparing mechanism rejecting those new beliefs. We are then able to experience results much more quickly.

Hypnosis is safe—it is a perfectly normal and common state of mind that we go into naturally every day. We enter hypnosis regularly when daydreaming, watching a good movie or reading a book. During those activities we remain consciously aware and in complete control, just as we do when a professional hypnotist assists us in entering into a state of hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy is the applied use of hypnosis to help people bring about positive change in their lives.

Yes, you can! You have already been hypnotized anytime you have been highly focused on an enjoyable movie you are watching, a good book you are reading or during any other activity in which you have been in a state of concentrated and focused attention. Hypnosis is a normal and natural state of mind that everyone has already experienced. In fact, it is so normal that most people do not even realize they are hypnotized. All that is needed for you to go into a state of hypnosis is for you to be willing and able to follow gentle instructions for reaching a state of focused awareness.