running vs. hypnotherapy
Running teaches me that in order to change, we must embrace sameness. Pink elephants could never.


Last year, I spent $200 on a hypnotherapist who hit on me during our session. His office was small and utilitarian. The walls were navy blue. He had dark, bushy eyebrows and salt and pepper sideburns, equally bushy.
At the start of the appointment, he asked a series of questions (did I feel like I could emotionally connect with one or both parents? Did I feel comfortable being affectionate with my partner in public? Did I think people judged my physical appearance when they first met me?). After he finished going through his clipboard list, he told me, based on my responses, that I was highly hypnotizable.
“Now close your eyes and imagine a pink elephant,” he said. “Do you see it?”
I nodded. It glowed like a neon sign, its large ears flapping.
“Are you scared?” he asked.
“A little nervous,” I said, eyes still shut.
“What are you nervous about?”
“I don’t want to lose control.”
“Of what?”
“Of my mind I guess.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he asked. “Because you already lost it?”
I was there to fix my anxiety—or maybe it was my lack of confidence. Or perhaps more aptly, my crippling deficiency of self-belief. However I framed it, I was there because—sure, it was true—I didn’t feel totally in control of my mind.
Still, I worried something would happen in the session that would make my mind slip away even more. This is why I don’t do drugs (lol)—out of fear that it will unlock something within me that, even in a sober state, I won’t be able to snap out of. On New Year’s Eve 2018, a fateful bong hit put me in a jittery, paranoid state. I spent the evening pacing around a Midtown Manhattan block. It was seventeen degrees outside, and ice crusted parts of the sidewalk. I was wearing a skirt, and my knees were cold. I saw a club bouncer kick out a drunk man who was spewing slurs. It was 2 a.m. I eventually went into a diner and ordered peppermint tea. My boyfriend at the time was with me and convinced me I didn’t need to go to the hospital. Months later, I still felt off.
I booked the hypnotism because I wanted to change. Some days I wanted to change entirely—become someone totally new, maybe a mysterious brunette who only drinks decaf and rejects social media; she sounds cool. But in that room, with this man who kept pronouncing “soften” with a hard T, change felt scary. I didn’t trust him.
“Is the pink elephant still there?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. You can open your eyes.”
I blinked as my pupils readjusted to the room’s light.
“Giving in is imperative,” he told me, and then droned on about a garden metaphor that involved getting rid of weeds and focusing on just one plant. Either the weeds died on their own or I had to kill them. I’m not sure—I stopped following.
“But don’t worry,” he said. “Hypnotism is not like psychedelics. And I’ve been on many psychedelic journeys.”
In the thirty minutes that followed, he guided me through a hypnotism that didn’t work. I felt nothing. Either he was a hack or I didn’t “give in” enough. Probably both.
The next day he texted: notice any improvement? :) I didn’t respond.
This was not my first attempt at a quick fix. I’d tried other methods to become a different, “improved Lydia,” to self-actualize. Three years ago, I Venmo’d $70 to a self-proclaimed healer on Instagram. She instructed me to write down my fears, burn them, and bury the ashes. She also kept calling me “my beloved” and that honestly felt really good.


My boyfriend at the time came downstairs to find me striking matches over the kitchen sink, a plate below to catch the ashes of my affirmations, which I planned to bury in the dirt in front of the house where the hydrangeas grew in the summertime.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“A ritual,” I said, as if it was obvious.
I’ve tried reiki, sound baths, colonics, gratitude journaling, Unitarian Universalist church, hot-cold therapy, actual therapy, medication, breath work, meditation, veganism—all in pursuit of radical change.
And nothing has given me reprieve like running.


Repetition of sameness as a mechanism of radical change. It’s oxymoronic—this idea that to truly change, we must have the patience to do the same thing over and over again. This is what running has taught me.
Unlike all my other attempted methods of self-improvement, the change that came from running was not quick. It was quiet, subtle, sneaky. The movement itself was a form of repetition too—simple and rhythmic, one foot in front of the other, arms swinging at my side, breath in and out again, again, again.
And somehow, over the past several months, from this meditative monotony, I’ve changed drastically.
Last Saturday, I finished the final long run of my London Marathon training cycle.
It started raining at mile 11, when I was on the West Side Highway. Droplets stung my cheeks, and my legs were blotchy from the cold. But I was happy because I knew I’d changed. Quietly. Without drama. Without hypnotism, or pink elephants.
Someone asked me on Instagram the other day: how do you not get bored on your long runs? I thought to myself: boredom is kind of the point. Running—especially long-distance running—is boring. But I think this is also how meaningful change should be: tedious and boring. It’s not a miracle or a breakthrough or a sudden snap of clarity in a hypnotist’s chair. It’s a quiet, persistent march forward. It’s loops in Prospect Park, one day after the next. It’s the same playlist of pop songs cued again and again. It’s workouts that repeat each week. And then, suddenly, when the rain is pelting you on the West Side Highway, you realize how different you’ve become, how you exist in a body that can run 20 miles of New York City with ease, how your mind has developed a callous of resilience. How you feel something warm, and glowing, and enduring within you and you think: this must be what I was looking for.
Running teaches me that in order to change, we must embrace sameness. Pink elephants could never.
And oh shit—what was that? A man just passed me wearing white spandex (remember, it’s raining). Bulge fully exposed. Diabolical.
The London Marathon is in three weeks, and I will be standing on the start line a changed woman, changed only because I spent months showing up and repeating the same, simple act of running.
“….this idea that to truly change, we must have the patience to do the same thing over and over again.” So good!
Bert R
Yes, I do understand the calm when I started jumping rope, fifty years ago, not to mention the lucid dreaming at nights!
After millions of turns of the rope, thousands of miles of brisk walking and cycling, years of playing Squash I still,to this day, crave and enjoy my minimum five miles of walking each morning..irrespective of the weather. As I write I look forward to my 87th birthday…..and still more of these activities.