I want to take one lesson, early, to tell you who I am — not because credentials matter to the spiritual realm (they don't) but because you deserve to know whose hands you are placing your training in. I am Susan Lawrence. I am a Certified Spiritual Clinical Hypnotist, a Past Life Regression Therapist, and an NLP Life Coach. I have been in private practice as Get Joyful Hypnotherapy & NLP Life Coaching for over fourteen years, and in that time I have sat across from many, many thousands of clients — in my office in Florida and, since the pandemic, on Zoom from every continent except Antarctica.
Before any of this, I was a teacher. For most of my adult life I stood in front of classrooms of children, and that quiet daily practice of holding a room, watching faces, and adjusting my approach to whichever child was in front of me turned out to be the most important training I ever received for this work. Hypnotherapy is teaching. It is teaching the nervous system to soften. It is teaching the mind that it is safe to look at the thing it has been afraid of for forty years. It is teaching a soul, sometimes, that it has already paid the debt it thinks it still owes. The classroom prepared me for the office in ways no certification ever could.
I came into hypnotherapy the way many practitioners do — through my own healing. I will not lay out my whole story here, because this is your training, not my memoir, but I will say this: I came in carrying things I had carried since childhood, and I sat on the client's side of the chair long before I sat on the practitioner's. When the spiritual realm first opened to me in a session of my own, I wept for an hour. I knew, in the way you know these things, that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my working life. I went home and started training the next week.
My foundational certification in past life regression was with Dr. Brian Weiss, whose book Many Lives, Many Masters is the reason past life regression is taken seriously in clinical psychology today. Studying with Dr. Weiss gave me the clinical rigor that keeps this work grounded — the precise language, the careful pacing, the respect for the integrity of what the client reports. I went on to certify as a QHHT Level 2 practitioner under the late Dolores Cannon, whose work mapping the higher self and between-life states gave me a second lens on what is actually possible inside a deep trance. I was certified as an Akashic Record Consultant by Reverend Gabrielle Orr — whose international training is the most beautiful, careful introduction to the Records I have ever seen — and I am also a student of the A.R.E. (the Edgar Cayce organization) in Akashic readings rooted in the Cayce tradition. Along the way I trained in NLP life coaching and developed the H.O.P.E. Hypnosis Technique that I use for specific clinical work. Those teachers and tools shaped the bones of how I work, and you will hear echoes of each of them throughout this course.
I opened Get Joyful Hypnotherapy & NLP Life Coaching in 2011, and what began as a small Florida practice has grown into a global one — clients on Zoom from every continent except Antarctica, a co-founding role in Divine University (an online spiritual growth and healing center), invitations to teach at the International Transformational TV and Summit and at the Duncan Center, radio interviews, and the gift of time spent in person with teachers like Louise Hay and Neale Donald Walsch, both of whom shaped my understanding of how plain spoken truth and the Divine fit together in a single sentence.
But the truth is that the deepest training I have ever received did not come from any workshop or any teacher. It came from the clients themselves, session after session, year after year. The Masters who arrived in my clients' sessions taught me how to ask better questions. The grandmothers and grandfathers who came in to say goodbye taught me how to hold silence. The past lives that surfaced unbidden — the soldier on the battlefield, the woman in the village, the child who did not survive — taught me that the soul carries far more than this single body ever guesses. After about year five, I stopped feeling like the practitioner running the session and started feeling like the most well-trained, most reverent witness in the room. That shift is what I am trying to give you in this course, in months instead of years.
Along the way I wrote three books. The first is The Divine State of Mind®, a #1 best seller that is part memoir, part teaching, and the book where I first laid out the framework that gives this course its name. It is the book I hand to clients before their first session if they want to understand where I am taking them — and the stories in it (Ouch!, Walled In, The Tree House, I Speak to Jesus, Falling In Love Again, and many more) are the real sessions, with real clients, that taught me what this work is actually capable of. The second is The Complete Guide to Spiritual Hypnotherapy: Master the Art of Guiding Clients into the Spiritual Realm for Life-Changing Transformations, which is in many ways the printed companion to the course you are taking right now — the full session flow, the scripts, written out so a practitioner could open it on the desk during a session and find what they needed. The third is The RESET Technique© (Releasing Early Suppressed Emotional Trauma), where I document the specific protocol I developed for unwinding the early imprints that show up under almost every adult presenting issue. We will work with all three in this course.
So why teach this now? Two reasons. First, because the world is loud, and the number of people in genuine spiritual pain is rising. There are not nearly enough trained Divine Healing Hypnotherapy practitioners to meet what is in front of us. Every practitioner I train is, in a very real way, a relief to the field. Second, because I am old enough now to know that what I have learned is too important to die with me. The lineage of this work — Dr. Weiss, Gabrielle Orr, the practitioners who taught them, and the practitioners who will learn from you — has to keep moving. You are the next link.
One last thing, and then we begin the technical work. I am not interested in producing practitioners who imitate me. I am interested in producing practitioners who do this work in their own voice, with their own clients, in their own tradition, with their own integrity. Take what fits. Set down what does not. Add what is yours. The Divine State of Mind® is bigger than any one teacher. By the end of this course, it will be yours, too.
Practice
Write a one-paragraph version of your own practitioner story — why you, why this work, why now. You do not have to share it with anyone yet. You are practicing telling the truth about who you are to a client who has not yet decided whether to trust you. That is a skill in itself.