About
Tim Horine. Mostly known as Hypno Tim.
Certified Consulting Hypnotist and meditation teacher, working online across the country and in person in Chicago. Here is who I am, what I am qualified to do, and — just as importantly — what I am not.
The story
How I ended up doing this
[Tim: how you found hypnosis. What you were doing before. The moment it stopped being a curiosity — a session you had, a book, a person you watched change. Three or four paragraphs, first person, concrete. Specific beats impressive: a real detail about a real Tuesday is worth more than a list of qualifications.]
[Tim: your training. Who you studied with, where, how long, what you were surprised by. Then why you chose Chicago, or why Chicago chose you.]
[Tim: the meditation half — how long you have been practicing, what tradition or teacher, and why you teach it alongside the hypnosis rather than as a separate business.]
What has stayed constant is a fairly unglamorous conviction: most people are not broken and do not need fixing. They are carrying a pattern they did not choose, and it is running quietly underneath everything, and the pattern is workable. That is the entire job.
Credentials
- Certified Consulting Hypnotist, National Guild of Hypnotists [confirm year]
- [Training school, total hours, graduation year]
- [Additional certifications — IMDHA, IACT, specialty trainings]
- [Meditation training or lineage, years teaching]
- [Professional liability insurance carrier]
The National Guild of Hypnotists is the oldest and largest hypnotism organization in the world, founded in 1951. Its code of ethics states plainly that members do not diagnose, treat, or prescribe — which is exactly how this practice runs.
The island thing, briefly
The palette is Caribbean blue calcite — a soft, milky, sea-glass blue that turns up in shallow water and in the stone itself. I picked it because it is the colour of the imagery people actually go to when they relax, and because almost nothing else in this field is anything but beige.
It is an aesthetic, and it is meant to be calming. It is deliberately not a claim to any island spiritual tradition. I do not teach Huna, I do not sell ho‘oponopono, and I do not present what I do as an indigenous healing lineage, because it is not mine to sell. Beach and water imagery is in guided relaxation for the same reason it is on everybody’s screensaver — the nervous system likes it. That is as deep as the claim goes.
How I work
Five things you can hold me to
- I will tell you if this is the wrong tool. Sometimes the honest answer at the free screening call is "you want a therapist" or "you want a doctor" or "you want six weeks and a different job." I would rather say it than take the booking.
- Every price is published. You will never discover a package at the end of your first session, and I will never sell you anything while you are in a trance.
- No success rates, ever. You will find hypnotists in this city advertising ninety-percent success. Ask them for the study. What I will tell you is what we are working on and roughly how long it usually takes.
- You keep the recording. From every session. It is yours, it is the reason the work continues between appointments, and it costs you nothing extra.
- I stay inside my scope, visibly. Not because a lawyer told me to, but because a practitioner who is clear about his edges is one you can actually trust inside them.
What I am not. I am not a physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, licensed therapist, or counselor. Hypnosis is not a licensed or regulated profession in Illinois, and nothing I do diagnoses, treats, cures, or prevents any disease, disorder, or condition.
Under Illinois law a person may practice hypnosis without a clinical license precisely because they stay out of clinical territory. I take that seriously. If what you are carrying belongs with a licensed provider, I will say so, and I keep a referral list of Chicago clinicians for exactly that conversation.
Outside the chair
[Tim: two or three genuinely human sentences. What you do on a Saturday, the thing you are unreasonably enthusiastic about, the pet, the band, the bad hobby. People book people.]
Asked a lot
About me, specifically
[Tim: the real origin story goes here — where the nickname came from and who started it. Two or three sentences, told the way you would tell it at a party. This is the single most-read paragraph on the site.]
It is borrowed, loosely, from Abraham Maslow — the idea that the top of the pyramid is not achievement but becoming the fullest version of what you already are. I liked it as a business name because it describes what actually happens in the chair. Nobody leaves as a different person. They leave with less in the way.
[Confirm: Certified Consulting Hypnotist, National Guild of Hypnotists, year certified, training school, hours. Add IMDHA or other memberships if held. Add certificate images and a verification link.] If a hypnotist will not tell you who certified them and when, that is worth noticing.
[Confirm professional liability carrier and coverage. NGH membership includes access to a policy.]
I do not diagnose anything, treat any disease or disorder, do trauma work, or touch anything that belongs to a licensed clinician. I do not do stage hypnosis. I do not sell packages to people in a trance, and I do not quote success rates, because nobody in this field can substantiate one honestly.