Dolores Cannon, QHHT and Mark Johnson's 2008 Training

Mark Johnson with Dolores Cannon.

Before I Ever Met Dolores Cannon

In 2007 I was working toward Life Between Lives certification. I needed to complete five written cases and one recorded session, so I was talking with people wherever I could, explaining LBL, answering questions, and looking for clients who were open to the experience.

Then something unusual happened.

At a party in the office of my first hypnosis teacher, a woman overheard me explaining Life Between Lives and said, “That sounds like Dolores Cannon.” I had never heard the name before.

Not long afterward I was in Denton, Texas, preparing to guide an LBL session. The woman I was meeting with said almost the same thing. She told me my work sounded like Dolores Cannon's and showed me one of Dolores's books.

Then a friend told me about someone in eastern Oklahoma who knew Dolores personally.

Three people. Three separate conversations. The same name.

I wrote to the class organizer on June 5, 2008, asking about the July training. In that email I explained exactly how I felt at the time.

“With all these people talking about her, I have the feeling I am supposed to meet her and work with her.”

That sentence tells the story better than I could tell it now. I did not have a polished plan. I simply had the sense that I needed to go.

Fayetteville, July 2008

The original class flyer still has the details. Friday, July 11 through Sunday, July 13, 2008, at the Clarion Inn in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The program was called the Dolores Cannon Past Life Regression Technique. It was a three day course with instruction, discussion, a demonstration, feedback, and question and answer time.

I went with my friend Toni. She had told me that Dolores was the reason she had first become involved in spiritual work, and when she heard about the class she immediately said, “We have to go.”

There were around twenty five or thirty people in that first class. I was already interested in past life work and had been studying LBL, but Dolores introduced another dimension of the work. Her approach began with a past life experience and then made space for a deeper conversation with what she called The Subconscious, a term she used for a level of awareness beyond ordinary conscious thought.

Dolores had spent decades developing the approach later known as Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, or QHHT. What impressed me was not only the structure of the process. It was the depth of her experience. She had guided so many sessions, listened to so many stories, and was willing to share what she had learned.

Going Back to Learn More

The next year I returned for an advanced class. This time there were maybe ten people in a small conference room around a large table. It was a very different experience from the first class.

The class was scheduled to end at lunch, but Dolores asked, “Why don't y'all come back after?” It turned into a full day. With such a small group there was more time to ask questions, hear stories, and simply be around the work in a personal way.

I went back again after that. When I called to register for the advanced class another time, they reminded me that I had already taken it.

“I know,” I said. “I want to take it again.”

Because I was repeating the class it was half price. I remember thinking, seventy five dollars to spend a day with Dolores Cannon is a pretty good deal.

For several years after that first 2008 class I returned to Arkansas. Some trips were for training, some were simply opportunities to reconnect with the community and keep learning. The experience mattered because I was not just reading about the work. I was seeing how a long time practitioner thought, asked questions, and made sense of what came up in sessions.

Bringing the Work Into My Own Practice

As I continued going back to Arkansas I began offering past life sessions there during my trips. I put a page on my own website and another on the Newton Institute site saying that I traveled to Fayetteville to work with clients.

I started booking sessions while I was in town for class. Those sessions often helped pay for the trip, the training, and sometimes my wife's class too.

That was practical, but it was also important professionally. I was learning in the classroom and then putting the work into practice with real people. Every session showed me something new.

During my early training I sometimes struggled to help clients reach the depth of experience I was looking for. Dolores's advice was simple. “Just read the script.”

So I did.

The structure taught me a great deal. I could see the value of helping someone explore a past life experience and then opening a deeper conversation about the questions they carried. But I also learned that I needed to work in a way that fit me.

Over time I combined what I had learned from Dolores with my own induction and the skills I had developed through other hypnosis training and real client sessions. That became part of my approach. Respect the framework, but stay responsive to the person in front of you.

The Thread I Carried Forward

The central insight I took from Dolores's work was not a script. It was a way of seeing what might be possible in a session.

A person may begin by exploring a past life. From there they may connect with a deeper perspective, what someone might call a guide, Higher Self, group in spirit, or collective. In that conversation clients may find context for a question, a relationship, a fear, or a turning point in their life.

The exact order is not always the same.

In the work I do today we may begin with childhood memories, then the womb, then a past life. We may connect with a deeper spiritual perspective after that. Or the session may unfold in another order entirely. I have learned not to force an experience into a rigid sequence.

The structure gives us a doorway. The client's own inner experience tells us where to go next.

A Connection I Understood Later

I studied with Brian Weiss in 2005. I studied with Dolores Cannon in 2008. It took many years for me to recognize a connection between what I had learned from each of them.

In Many Lives, Many Masters, Brian Weiss describes past life regression work that later opens into messages from what he called the space between lives. In Dolores's work a past life experience can lead into a conversation with what she called The Subconscious.

I am not saying that Brian Weiss and Dolores Cannon used the same method. They did not.

But I do see a meaningful shared thread. Both approaches make room for a person to move beyond the surface story of a problem and explore a deeper source of insight, perspective, and meaning.

That realization helped me understand why both teachers had been so important to my path.

A Teacher Who Kept Sharing

Dolores was a great teacher. She had done a tremendous amount of work, and she was generous about sharing what she had learned from it.

Her official QHHT materials describe a career that spanned decades, a method developed through extensive session work, and a body of writing that covered past life regression, consciousness, and many spiritual questions.

For me, though, the most important part was more personal. I got to return year after year, sit in those rooms, ask questions, hear stories, and keep learning.

And that is still what I do now.

I learn from my teachers. I learn from clients. I learn from students. I learn from the sessions that go in directions I did not expect.

You never stop learning. That may be the greatest lesson of all.

Dolores Cannon, the Teacher I Kept Hearing About