Hypnosis is probably the most misunderstood tool in the wellness space. I've spent twenty-five years utilizing it anyway.
In general, my Office Hours are 1:30 - 5:00pm, Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays for Calls, Pre-Session Appointments and Private Hypnosis Sessions. Saturdays and Sundays are reserved for Group Sessions. But I try to be flexible, and work with schedule limitations.
Theatre. Working with animals. Hypnosis. For most of my life these felt like separate things I happened to do. The through-line took me decades to see clearly, but once I saw it I couldn't unsee it: everything I've done that mattered has been about learning to be fully present with another — without imposing my own agenda on what I find there.
The theatre was genuinely my home for decades. I had a real career — Off-Broadway, regional work, some opera training, voiceover, the occasional film (www.cyrillabaer.com) — and the life that goes with it: the joy, the grind, the financial uncertainty, the particular exhaustion of putting yourself on the line professionally and personally, over and over again. Like most working performers I needed a side profession to make it sustainable. I'd been drawn to hypnosis since childhood — my father was getting his Masters in Psychology and I used to listen outside his study door, which led to a 4th grade incident I'm not entirely proud of — and becoming certified in 2001 made sense. Not as a departure from theatre, but as a direct response to what theatre demands.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that I also became a certified animal trainer — wrangling on film sets, working exotic animals for the Discovery Channel, assisting with trained cat shows. What animals taught me that theatre hadn't was something I couldn't have named at the time: when words aren't available, you learn to be completely present with another's inner state. You read what they can offer rather than imposing what you want from them. Positive reinforcement — meeting a another exactly where they are and working with their nature rather than against it — turns out to be the foundation of everything I do. I didn't know I was AuDHD then either. I just knew that animals made sense to me in the same way the stage did — the rules were honest, the communication was direct, and nobody was asking me to mask.
My training came through the OMNI Hypnosis Training Center under Gerald F. Kein — one of the most influential figures in modern hypnosis practice, whose methodology was built on a simple principle: the client's own capacity is the most powerful tool in the room. That approach shaped everything. My sessions are most often a single visit — not because the work is shallow, but because when you work at the level where automatic responses actually live, one well-placed session can move what years of conscious effort couldn't. In my early sixties I received my AuDHD diagnosis, and what had always been an instinct became a mission — developing hypnosis techniques that work specifically for neurodivergent brains, built from the inside, with the help of fellow ND volunteers in my community. Not adapted from somewhere else. Built for us.
I'm still here. Still in the work, still learning from my community, still finding that the three threads keep weaving into each other in ways I didn't expect. The practice is what it is because of everything that came before it — the stage, the animals, the diagnosis that named what I'd always been. If there's a through-line to all of it, it's this: I've never been interested in fixing anyone. Just in making space for what's already there to become accessible.