Biography of the Hypnotist
Name: Jonathan Chase [Born John Shaw - adopted stage name 1989 to join Equity]
Birthday: March 5th Pisces
Favorite Color: Black
Favorite Authors: Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Ben Elton, Jeremy Clarkson
Favorite Movies: Big Fish, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and anything with Robin Williams in it.
Favorite Food: Cooked
Heroes: The Amazing Kreskin, Tommy Cooper, Spike Milligan, Derek Doogan, Eric Morecambe
Favorite Quote: Everything should be made as simple as possible – Einstein
More than half a century in less than a page
Born in the middle of the last century in the south Staffordshire coal mining town of Cannock. My fairly unremarkable childhood was highlighted by my being ‘clumsy’ falling over and ‘funny walk’ as the neuromuscular condition I was born with began to show itself.
Besides more than my fair share of scuffed knees my other main memory is of the local working men’s club stage and the pretend ‘shows’ I would put on with my best friend and now internationally famous magician Jimmy Carlo. So even at a very early age my predilection for entertaining was there.
It was during my mid teenage years I happily left my hated school and went on to lose jobs regularly, ‘real’ jobs as my Dad called them, in several factories, a second hand furniture shop and van, a wood mill, a land surveyor’s ‘chain man’, building site and of course a coal mine.
Most of the reason for getting fired was absenteeism due to a lack of sleep thanks to following the Wolves, that is of course the glorious Wolverhampton Wanderers and on what I thought was my real job as a roadie for local bands handling sound, lights and being a drum ‘tec’, the drummer used to say, “Tec them drums out to the van.”
During all this and possibly as a rebellion against my early Methodist Sunday school Grandmother driven guilt, I developed a wonderment for showbiz, seances and the spiritual. Regularly enticing my terrified friends to experiment with Ouija boards made from torn scraps of paper or hand holding seances in the local forest. And thanks to my natural ability for tuning in to things and a lack of anyone to mentor or show me that not everything was going to harm me, I slept mostly with the light on until I was 18 being petrified of the dark.
Much of my late teenage spurt was taken up with over a dozen orthopaedic operations and over that many months in hospital, which gave me time to read too much and to develop a healthy distrust of organised religions and a fascination for the psyche and the mind. Especially in the world of the metaphysical, mentalism and hypnosis.
Leaving hospital I then left home and entered the foetid world of further education for a while in a college for the ‘disabled’ where I confirmed my inability to find any academic prowess whatever. At college I met my first wife and moved to her Glasgow home where by sheer chance I started work in a hospital – couldn’t get away from the places – and where I stayed in nursing for the better part of a decade.
At the end of my 20’s my career was cut short thanks to the worsening of the now diagnosed Charcott Marie Tooth syndrome and my marriage was cut short by divorce. I returned home to Staffordshire for a while.
The second half of the 80’s saw me being involved in a fatal car accident, not mine you understand, and getting back involved in showbiz and hypnosis, summer seasoning in Jersey when it was flattened by a hurricane and meeting my psychic and hypnotic mentor Jay Ruffley, who at the time was performing his knife throwing act.
Starting to produce and perform my theatre shows at the Theatre Royal in Stoke on Trent where I met the woman who was to become my second wife and the mother of my two sons, and appearing on Television for the first time on Central TV’s Weekend Live show. Besides that the decade was fairly uneventful.
In 1990 I became the first British hypnotist to air live past life regressions, still using hypnosis at the time to regress rather than recall, on Wolverhampton’s Beacon303 Midnight Line with DJ Ian Perry and it was on the MidnightLine that I did the first Comedy Hypnosis radio show using real live volunteers from the shows listners in the studio. It was 4 hours of chaos. I enjoyed it so much we did it again 6 months later and James Stannage invited me to do his late night show on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester.
Around that time I started to present Past Life Parties in people’s homes and for gatherings such as Stafford Mensa Group and at Round Table meetings. I even hired function rooms in local pubs and found the energy that came from an audience helped both me and my volunteers really get ‘in to’ the experience. These were often conducted during the day while in the evenings my stage show paid the bills and allowed me to travel extensively around Europe.
Time went, and while it did I produced a stage presentation for a Scottish psychic called Stephen Andrew who taught me to read Tarot. Did some other Television, Radio a couple of record breaking summer seasons, a second divorce, some more broadcasting, co-writing producing and directing a musical for Rollers disabled / able-bodied theatre company, and becoming an author and “Britain’s leading hypnotist”, according to the Mail on Sunday.
At the turn of the century and thanks to the encouragement of my wonderful life and business partner Jane Bregazzi, I co founded the Academy of Hypnotic Arts. Now recognised as one of the worlds leading schools of fast fun effective direct suggestion hypnosis. Teaching hypnosis as the art it is rather than the science it could never be.
The event that pulled me back towards my psychic roots was experiencing ‘death’ during a heart attack and going through the subsequent quadruple arterial bypass graft. Much to my disgust I did not have an out of body experience. But this and the fact I was now teaching others to do past lives, rekindled my desire to find a way to facilitate the recall of past lives easily and without the swinging watch which has led me to develop a technique which I’m calling
I still do the odd show, both comedy and past-life and present my Stop & Start Success Seminar – and spend a deal of time on the InterWeb being social and giving and getting mentoring, teaching and sore fingers. My inbox on forums and Facebook are filling everyday with more and more questions about Hypnosis to the point where I have now got a fan page in the hope that it will answer most questions. However if you have one it doesn’t, please, feel free to ask me.
I hope you have a great life, this one of course 
