What I Found After Nothing Worked

When I was twenty-two, in graduate school studying to become a therapist, I went to counseling myself. Everyone in my program quietly did. There was one counselor other students were raving about, so I made an appointment. After several sessions, he said: “What I do with you, works with everyone but with you it doesn’t.” He wasn’t being unkind, he was just being honest. Here I was, training to become a therapist, and I was the one nothing worked on. I carried on with life, but underneath I felt defective and a bit embarrassed.

What I didn’t realize then was how much effort I was putting into just being a person. I showed up, I functioned, I was a good student, and everyone thought I had a great life. But underneath, there was a constant subtle tension. Little worries I didn’t name, an ongoing computation about how to be, what others expected, how to fit, whether I was doing it right.

Looking back, it was like I was wearing a costume without knowing it was a costume. Adjusting myself to match what I thought each situation required. It was exhausting, but I didn’t know I was exhausted because it was all I knew. Over the last forty years I’ve learned that a lot of people live this way.

In 1979, something happened that showed me what else was possible. I was in the phd program in clinical psychology at the University of Colorado, and seeing my own clients through the clinic there. Milton Erickson was offering week-long teaching seminars. Erickson wasn’t just someone; he was a psychological iconoclast who turned the rigid world of 20th-century psychiatry upside down. Often called the “Wizard of Phoenix,” the shortest distance between a problem and a solution wasn’t a straight line for him, but a well-told story. Erickson was a man who lived in the cracks between words, practicing a form of psychological jujitsu to use a patient’s own momentum to flip them out of their dysfunction. He believed that everything a patient brought into the room -their resistance, their nervous tics, their weirdest obsessions- wasn’t an obstacle, but the very tool needed for their cure. If a patient was stubborn, Erickson didn’t fight the stubbornness; he utilized it to make them “stubbornly” committed to their own recovery. Erickson had pivoted away from the “You are getting sleepy” style of formal hypnosis. Instead, he understood that the conscious mind is a watchdog, often blocking change to keep us “safe” in our ruts. By using metaphors, riddles, and complex storytelling, he would distract the watchdog so he could plant the seeds of change directly into the unconscious mind.

I was able to register for one of these seminars after a friend invited me to join her group.

On the first day, I walked through the doorway and immediately spotted him. An old man in a wheelchair in a bright purple suit. He wore that purple suit because it was the only color his eyes could translate. Gathering the courage I could muster, I walked over and asked if he would work with me privately on a personal question I couldn’t resolve. He smiled at me and said “yes”, but then turned away without explaining how or when. I was confused. Looking back, I realize this was likely intentional.

The week-long seminar began and with a small number of therapists we gathered each morning in Erickson’s home office, sitting in a circle, listening to him tell stories about his past clients. Stories he would sprinkle occasionally with a demonstration of trancework. I hoped he would choose me for one of those, so I would get my “private session.” When I noticed he often demonstrated with the person sitting in the chair to his left, I arrived the next day early to claim that seat. Sitting in his presence wasn’t just a seminar; it was watching a master weaver dismantle human problems by speaking directly to the parts of us we didn’t even know were listening. But he didn’t choose me. Each day I got my hopes up. And each day nothing happened.

On the last morning, I gave up.

And that’s when it happened.

It was an hour or two into the session. I was no longer focused on getting a private session, but just listening and hoping to learn. And that’s when it happened. In a matter of seconds, I felt different. Completely different. Up to this day it’s difficult for me to find words for it. A sense of complete wellbeing had somehow instantly emerged. It permeated every cell of my being, bubbling up out of a quiet knowing that whatever happened in my life, I would be okay. Really OK. Something inside had shifted in a way I had never felt before.

Right at that moment, Erickson looked over at me and said: “Your unconscious mind has just made an important decision… and you don’t know what it is.”

He was right. I didn’t know what I would do about the life issue I was facing. But I was completely at peace about it. And about everything else, too.

In spiritual traditions, what happened might be called a glimpse of awakening, or satori, the sudden seeing that Zen speaks of. But Erickson didn’t define his work as spiritual. And while the shift I experienced was profound, it changed everything about how I felt, it didn’t occur to me to label it that way either. I had no framework for it. I just knew something had fallen away, and what remained was just peace.

The question I brought to Erickson was whether to marry Steve, the man I was already building a life with, but couldn’t fully commit to. I wanted certainty. A yes or a no.

What came instead, in the weeks after that shift in Erickson’s office, was something more nuanced. Not a “yes” or “no,” but three “agreements.” I realized three things that would need to be true for the marriage to work. They arrived without effort, like something surfacing on its own.

When I shared them with Steve, I noticed something unusual in myself. I wasn’t waiting for his response to feel okay. I loved him deeply, but I wasn’t dependent on what he would say. I could hold the conversation from a place of openness rather than need. That, too, was new.

It was only years later, studying teachers like Ramana Maharshi, that I recognized what had happened in that small office in Phoenix. The words didn’t matter. What mattered was that I had tasted something. For weeks after, that peace stayed with me. Answers came without forcing them. Life felt simpler. I could just… be.

And then, gradually, it faded. I lost it.

The old tensions returned. The efforting. The costume.

But now I knew something I hadn’t known before: the kind of ease that was possible. And I wanted it back.

I scheduled another visit with Erickson, but shortly before I was to return, he passed away.

I felt abandoned. My ticket back to peace had been taken away. I’ve never stopped being grateful to him. Without that week in his office, the work I do now would not exist.

For years after, I searched. I tried to hypnotize myself back into Erickson’s office. I tried to “model” the change with NLP tools. Later I joined retreats with spiritual teachers. I started meditating. I experienced some benefit, but none of it brought me what I had lost.

One day, when re-reading Ramana Maharshi’s “Who am I” something really resonated with me. And I asked myself: where is that I, actually? Not as a concept. Where is it located, in my experience, right now?

I got an impression. Vague. But I went with it. I invited whatever was there to just dissolve and melt into the larger space that’s all around it.

What happened was subtle. A quiet relaxation. An inner stillness. Nothing dramatic. But something was different.

Over time, as I kept exploring, with myself and then with others, I began to understand. In those early years I’d been working hard without knowing I was working. Holding tension I thought was just “how I am.” Wearing a costume I forgot I’d put on. And every method I’d tried was asking me to do more, try harder, add something.

What I began to sense was something counterintuitive, and it turned out to be the thing everything else rested on:

Every problem actually takes more effort than the solution. We work hard to keep our struggles in place. We just don’t realize we’re doing it.

The peace I’d glimpsed in Erickson’s office wasn’t something he’d given me. It was what was already there, underneath all the effort. He hadn’t added anything. Something in me simply had relaxed.

The methods I eventually developed, Core Transformation, and later Wholeness Work, came out of this understanding. They’re based on something that sounds backwards but turns out to be true: holding a problem in place takes more effort than dissolving it. They’re not about fixing yourself. They’re about noticing the effort you’re already making, often without realizing it, and letting it soften.

When that happens, what’s underneath isn’t emptiness. It’s presence. Ease. A way of being that doesn’t require a costume.

This turned into Wholeness Work which I’ve been teaching now for almost 15 years.

There’s a kind of peace that doesn’t require years of practice. It doesn’t require believing anything. It doesn’t require becoming someone different. It’s already here. We just get in our own way with effort, and we don’t realize it.

Learning to notice that tension and allowing it to soften is the most natural thing in the world, yet we have been “educated” to do exactly the opposite. We have been taught to apply more effort, more “top-down” control, and more narrative. What we actually need is a reliable series of steps that leads to effortless softening.

That’s what I’ve been looking for my whole life. And that’s what I found.

The work that grew out of this -Wholeness Work- is what I’ve been living with since that first experiment in 2007. If something in this resonates, I look forward to meet you here.

— Connirae

Originally published on Connirae’s Substack. Subscribe there to get new reflections in your inbox.