Welcome to Driving Manual in an Automatic World

(Whichever transmission type you happen to be adventuring with)

I’m Cyrilla - Cyrilla Baer Pond, though you’ll see me split across two names depending on which life I’m talking about. As Cyrilla Pond I’m a Certified Hypnotist and Member of the National Guild of Hypnotists since 2001. I was trained by groundbreaking hypnotist Jerry Kein at OmniHypnosis.

I became interested in hypnosis when I was in elementary school - my father was working on his Masters Degree at Emory and was practicing hypnosis on family members. I would listen, fascinated, outside his study door, taking mental notes I didn’t know I was taking. Soon, I’d worked out enough to try it myself. I even hypnotized a classmate - I thought he’d be proud, but I got a well-deserved lecture instead. He tried to hypnotize me too, but I was so interested in the process that I couldn’t disengage my brain enough to relax into the trance state (but that’s another story).

In the beginning, I primarily focused on helping actors and other creative types because that was my main profession. As Cyrilla Baer, I began a professional theatre career at age 16 (and eventually I’ll probably write about why that career ended).

Anyway, I have a new hypnotic focus now: born out of circumstance, realization, and need, I create what I call Neurodivergent-Built Hypnosis.

Not Neurodivergent-Affirming Hypnosis - Neurodivergent-Built. I now understand (quite late!) that I am AuDHD. I am building it. My neurodivergent friends are helping to build it, too, as they give me input and suggestions and requests for tools for coping with different challenges. And it is being built for other neurodivergents, in as many permutations as we can all think of!

So that excites me and I’m going to write about that. About how what I’m doing works. A bit about discovering I’m neurodivergent really late in life. Maybe a bit about how much I miss my special interest career (the one hEDS quietly took from me), the challenges of looking for answers that don’t quite exist yet, but also the joy of discovery in something simultaneously old and new that I am incredibly enthusiastic about in Neurodivergent-Built Hypnosis!

And, quite likely, some of the detours my AuDHD brain takes me down - prepare to shift gears!

I do hope my prattling on about my new special interest might interest you, too.