In our relationships we touch each other to the quick. From moment to moment we change each other. Milton Erickson changed me before I even met him.

In 1978, I was working in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital. I was restless and discouraged. I saw little improvement in many of our patients, even with finely-trained staff and tremendous expenditures of energy and money. One Saturday morning I was reading in Central Park. Suddenly a paragraph jumped off the page into my head and into my heart. It was as if a lightening flash had hit me hard in that one moment. For the first time that I can remember I made an instant decision with fierce and absolute clarity. I did not care where he was or how long it would take me to find him, I vowed that I was going to learn from this man.

The book was Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley. The case was the suicidal girl with the space between her two front teeth. When I read how Erickson worked with this girl, I almost leaped into the air with joy. Erickson's way of thinking, which Haley communicated so superbly, was lasered into my brain. His mind was complex, yet the intervention seemed so simple. Something happened to me in that minute that redirected my life. My heart has never beaten the same way since.

As luck would have it, right after I made that momentous decision I met Steve Lankton who was bringing videotapes of Erickson to an ongoing group in New York. After absorbing the tapes for a number of months I found myself sitting with about ten other people in a tiny office in Phoenix. I felt like a kid on the first day of school. There we sat expectantly, our tape recorders ready.

The door opened and a lovely, bright-eyed, somewhat shy woman wheeled him in. I noticed how neatly his hair was combed. His face was open, kindly. Then I looked closely at him. Wherever he looked, his gaze was unwavering, yet the expression deep in those eyes was continuously changing -- flickering, smiling, sparkling, and darkening. When they were serious they were very serious. Later, I learned that what I experienced he called his "ocular fix."

I had watched him for hours on videotape, but was unprepared for the impact his presence had on that room. It was like the difference between looking at reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings and then standing before the actual canvas…and experiencing the vibration of this artist's perception of color - the texture, the depth, the luminosity. There right in front of me was the same awareness that I had sensed watching the videotapes -- the intelligence, impishness, humor, and rigor -- a vigorous and agile mind in a wearied body. He was all there.

I experienced the same bolt of consciousness as I had on that spring day in Central Park.

The two weeks went by in a very short time. I was often early -- an unusual experience for me. He talked, he told stories, often about his children. I was absorbed for hours at a time. Afterwards, I was so exhausted I sometimes skipped dinner. I had not a clue about what he was doing. Something was shifting in my internal world -- something glowing and powerful, a kind of quiet energy. I could not put words to it. I think I was beginning to hear my own drumbeat.

After those two weeks my life started to change. I returned to New York and without my usual catastrophising I made plans to go part-time at Mt. Sinai and increase my private practice. I gave up wanting to marry Arnold Fein, a widower who had announced loud and clear he would never remarry. Erickson had remarked that he would probably keep circling around me and never land, so I decided to enjoy what I had with Arnold and dedicate myself to my career. This decision improved our relationship. Now my name is Jane Parsons-Fein.

Another pattern broken: Always teased by my family about my ineptitude with mechanical equipment, when I returned to Phoenix I stubbornly carried all the necessary video equipment, including tripod and cassette player. I proudly came home with forty-eight wonderful hours of Dr. Erickson.

During the next years a group of us met continuously, absorbed the tapes, started the New York Milton H. Erickson Society for Psychotherapy and Hypnosis, began teaching classes, presenting at conferences and consulting. I edited our first newsletter, which came out in 1982, and continued as editor for the next fifteen years. NYSEPH grew and I learned and expanded a tremendous amount by teaching and direction its training program. NYSEPH continues to grow. In 1997 I left to start my own training institute.

Now, twenty-one years after I met him, I see how my relationship with Erickson moved me into parts of myself I hadn't even known were there. I went far beyond what I had thought were my capabilities. Now, twenty-one years later, I see how my response to his particular kind of awareness carried me into many areas I would never have tried -- taking risks that surprised and delighted even me, transforming my way of working, changing my relationships. His influence brought me to people I could not have conceived of working with and counting as my dear friends -- Virginia Satir, Moshe Feldenkrais, Kay Thompson. He was so at home with his own unconscious that I learned self- trust. Somehow I think his African Violet metaphor wove itself into my life.

I never had a sister. After I met Erickson, I found my sister. Her name was Kay Thompson. She was passionately committed to his work and she and I were on the same wavelength.

There is not one area of my life that has not been richly colored by Erickson's turn of mind, his agility with language and the awarenesses that have reverberated in me long after my first experience with him. And I am not alone. I know many eight-cylinder people who were going on two cylinders when thy met him who are now going on full power.

In 1983 NYSEPH dedicated fifteen smoke bushes to Dr. Erickson's memory in Central Park. In her dedication, Kay Thompson said: "All I can do is teach what I think he taught me….Then the second generation Ericksonians teach the third generation Ericksonians and then it goes on and it gets changed and it gets modified the same way that the trees get modified when there is too much wind…"

After she died we dedicated to Kay a flourishing young blue spruce that stands where she stood when she dedicated the smoke bushes sixteen years before.

As a result of travel, teaching and training I have beloved friends in Sweden, Germany, Poland. Italy, Denmark, Croatia, New York, and in many parts of the United States. I think we are connected by an invisible bond. Perhaps we self-selected because we were drawn to a man who said: "There are two things in life we can be sure of: change and suffering. Our job is to bring as much joy into life as we can." That is a vision worth evolving and teaching -- each in our own unique way.

Even though my work and life have been profoundly changed by my contact with Milton Erickson, it is hard for me to put into words the essence of his impact on me. His consciousness transmitted something that I still carry around with me. Recently I watched a moving presentation of vibrating fractals radiating brilliantly-colored designs, each one a powerful work of art. I am still resonating to it. I keep thinking about chaos theory and the strange attractor. I think Erickson was my strange attractor.