The young woman in my hypnosis office had a burning question that needed answering
before she would sit down: "Ever hypnotize someone to be a vegetarian?""No," I said. I had told her a month earlier by phone, but she was optimistic.I wished a troop of vegetarian hopefuls had flocked to my office recently, but it hadn't happened."You've helped smokers become nonsmokers, right?" she asked."Many," I admitted."It's pretty much the same, I think," she said, looking me straight in the eye with her clear blue ones."Why do you say so?" I asked.What followed was an insightful, well-thought-out answer crystallizing in "For me it's not just eating differently. It's a change of thinking and living, and taking on a new identity all at once, a new way of being."Bull's-eye, I thought."It's what happens when a smoker becomes a nonsmoker," she said. Then "will you help?"The smoking comparison seemed apt, but this was bigger, deeper, more global, and possibly even more strongly linked to identity.I thought for a moment. "Tell me more."She talked about her growing horror of eating flesh, being an agent in killing, about how the taste of meat had changed in her mouth, but how she still loved chicken."Do you really need to give up chicken, too, right now?" I asked, thinking of gradual vegetarians I have encountered. But I knew her answer."Yes!" she barked.It made her life as a good person a lie, she explained. It was unethical-worse than stealing, or adultery. It was murder.But while her morals abhorred it,