Mary Hale-Haniff was a beautiful dark haired girl and very susceptible to influence and easily hypnotized. She was enamored by Richard Bandler, saw him as a genius that he was, but I felt abused his powers and he found her sexually attractive. Master manipulator that he was, he had her completely under his spell and had hypnotized her so that she would go into a hypnotic state as soon as we sat down in a training. She was completely under his control and she didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes he would take her after the meetings and leave her on some street corner where I would have to find her to pick her up and get her back to the hotel. Although He was a genius and I was learning from him, I didn’t trust him and I was not so easily hypnotized. I didn’t do any of the techniques with anyone else. I watched in the back of the room and tried them on myself by myself just to see what would happen in my own mind. I had a fear/phobia of going to the dentist, a fear of throwing up (which made it very hard having kids) and anxiety attacks. I was able to fix all of these problems with the techniques they demonstrated. I also took the hypnotist program with Richard Bandler where I met Tony Robbins. Tony learned from this group and renamed some of their material for his own use in motivational programs. Although I played with hypnosis a little, I was more interested in why and how this all worked within the mind.
I would say that I was an agnostic when I met Mary Hale-Haniff . Although I had quite a few ‘out of the world’ personal experiences before meeting her I had such a traumatic childhood growing up in a dysfunctional Seventh Day Adventist family, church, and school.. My first husband was also a professor at a SDA private academy so I got to see the inside of how this worked. I was privy to the teachers meeting at our house where they looked to catch the students doing something wrong so they could be punished. “Be like Jesus” and “God is Love” became a question in my mind “If God is Love, Where’s the love?” Due to some turn of events I able to distance myself form that religion in 1964.
Through the years that followed, I noticed wondered about the serendipity of life. I also had died once and was brought back to life. Another time I thought I was going to die and was floating over my body watch through a long tunnel my body below being administered by a doctor. In 1982, married again living in Florida having difficulty with a neighbor who had legally forced us to sell all our exotic birds, I was standing at the door contemplating life. I heard the sound of a bird off in the distance and followed that sound through several streets until I came to the door of a house. I knocked on that door and a woman answered. I said, “Are you a fellow bird lover?” and she looked questioningly but said, “I feel impressed to give you this book.” It was the book “Shirley Maclaine Out on a limb.” I never saw that person again as I was caught up in so much dental work and drama at home but that book made me think there was more to life than what we see. I was open to new information to explore.
I spent some time looking at different religions and other modalities such as metaphysics and psychics. I met the famous Iris Saltzman. She would have a group of people come to her place for $5 and then talk herself into a trance. Once she was ready, she would point to someone and read the pictures she saw around them. She chose me once and asked me, Who’s name starts with M and ends with L?, Mermel, our lawyer” I replied. She said, “Watch him, he is going to disappoint you.” 2 weeks later he forgot to file some papers on time and we lost our duplex. What she later explained to me as I got to know her what that she was a person that could see the pictures hanging around a person’s head that were from past memories and perhaps 2 weeks forward in our lives. I accepted that as an idea but wasn’t sure I believed her. She died not long after that.