Alfie, Chief Calming Officer

Every practice needs someone in charge of calm. In mine it is Alfie, my ex-rescue dog and therapy dog, who appointed himself Chief Calming Officer and has never once been challenged for the job.

Watch him for ten minutes and you will see the thing I spend sessions on. He does not go through the day braced for the next bad thing. He eats, he rests, he settles, and his body believes it is safe. If you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), your body has got out of the habit of that. The settled, unguarded state is what we work towards in gut-directed hypnotherapy, one session at a time.

He turns up in my videos, mostly to make a point about slowing down that would take me four paragraphs. He has also been known to appear on video calls, uninvited.

There is more of him on his YouTube channel, Alfie Talks IBS, and he has a page of his own over at HypnoGirl.

If you would like a bit of Alfie's calm for yourself, Twelve Minutes of Calm is a free general relaxation recording, and it comes with Gut Feelings, one short email a week.