Dear Colleague
Recently I wrote a letter to all ISH members describing in detail the activities of the ISH Board in 2019.
You can find this letter here.
In this letter a first short report on the 1st Asian Hypnosis Congress was given in Mashhad, Iran.
The conference was a great success – in terms of both content and atmosphere. At this conference in the new Congress Center of the Medical Faculty of the University of Mashhad there were more than 1000 participants. Among them were 106 international speakers and participants from 24 countries. With the host country we had 25 countries in total.
At this conference the foundation of the Asian Society of Hypnosis was announced. For us as Europeans it was once again clear at this conference what an important role this new society can play. Over the last 150 years we Europeans have learned painfully that it is better to get to know other cultures, to cooperate rather than to wage war against each other. It has not yet been quite clear to me how many positive things have been achieved through town twinning, pupil exchange programmes and encounters between young people in Europe.
There were several misunderstandings and problems at this conference between the Asian colleagues, which required the mediated deployment of ISH Executive Board members with diplomatic tact. In an animated film, for example, in which the Asian countries were put together piece by piece on a map, a misrepresentation of China was shown. A large province was missing. This led to hectic phone calls from Chinese colleagues and I myself was called from China. Conversely, the lecture of an Asian speaker in the plenary hall almost led to a cardiac arrest of the Iranian organizers of the conference. In this lecture excerpts from feature films were shown, which were supposed to illustrate the negative image of hypnosis in some films. Unfortunately, a naked couple was briefly seen in a film clip. In a strictly Muslim country like Iran, this is very dangerous for the organiser of the conference because he is responsible for ensuring that the official rules are observed. The speaker was not at all aware of this and had no knowledge of the social situation in Iran. For me it was interesting to see that we Europeans usually inform ourselves beforehand or even read books before we become active in other cultures. Many of the Asian countries seem to be more or exclusively centered to themselves.
At times the cooperation and the start of the planned Asian society was somewhat in danger. Our Polish board colleague Kris Klajs is very experienced in coaching top politicians in his home country. His know-how was very valuable in this situation. He was able to convey to his Asian colleagues that an Asian society is so important for them to better understand the countries and cultures.
In the end, we were successful and that was a very good example of the ISH motto: Building Bridges of Understanding. And perhaps a good example of how online conferences can’t replace real encounters.
There were many other good moments for Building Bridges of Understanding. Part of the ISH Executive Board (Kris Klajs, Enayat Shahidi, Nicole Ruysschaert, Bernhard Trenkle) plus other speakers plus their family members travelled together for 10 days through Iran. In our travel group was a Jewish colleague from Germany. The Iranian tour guide showed us in her hometown Isfahan that Muslims, Jews and Christians have been living peacefully together there for centuries. We visited a large magnificent Christian cathedral and a Jewish synagogue. The visit to the synagogue happened to be on the high Yom Kippur holiday. The Iranian Jews asked our German colleagues to pray with them. The whole travel group then went into a café house and waited for our Jewish travel member. This was an enormously intense emotional roller-coaster ride, especially for us German travelers. On the one hand, we were deeply touched and surprised by this situation, which did not correspond to our image of Iran. On the other hand we got the news via internet that there was an attack on a German synagogue in Germany exactly on this Jewish holiday and that the synagogues were under police protection all over Germany.
Since 2016 we had also tried to invite colleagues from Israel. Because of the heated atmosphere we had to postpone this for the safety of these colleagues as well as the Iranian organizers. I still think that a medical conference is a good context to convince even fundamentalist zealots on all sides of the possibilities of cooperation.
The great organizational challenge was that there was no possibility to transfer money to Iran – neither conference fees, nor down payments for the hotels, the travel guides, the buses, etc.. The Iranian colleagues had to trust that we really are coming and we had to trust that when we come there we really are travel guides with buses and we also have the hotel rooms. Through many contacts the mutual trust has grown. A few months before the conference I was on holiday in Poland with a lot of nature but without internet in my holiday home. I went to a hotel to rent a room. There I negotiated via video conference with the Iranian travel agency and the Iranian team members. The traditional great hospitality of the Iranians was also helpful. In fact, the Iranian agency has pre-financed everything for a total of 7 tours without having even one cent of us in their hands. On our board tour we were with 21 persons 10 days on the road and partly in the best hotels of the country. We all had the money for congress fees, hotels, etc. in different envelopes with counted cash amounts. Only 2 weeks after the tour the money was in cash at the agency in Isfahan. Our tour alone was about 20.000 Euro. We officially thanked the head of the travel agency for this support in the plenary hall of the conference and brought him on stage.
If you look at the political developments of the international Iran policy of the year 2019, then we were very lucky that this conference could take place so successfully. Personally, I am very grateful to the 100 international colleagues that they supported this project despite the not 100% secure situation. All those who took part were rewarded with a great congress in terms of both content and atmosphere.
If the political unrest in Iran in November had been only 6 weeks earlier, it would have been the end of this project which had been prepared since 2015 and we would have had to cancel everything at the last moment.
So we really can be grateful. The 2nd Asian Congress is planned for mid July 2022 in Beijing.