MIND/BODY FITNESS BOOTCAMP, the flyer said. If I was interested in "achieving optimum mind/body performance" -- and who isn't?-- I could apply to the Sarasota Hypnosis Institute and Center for Lifestyle Change. Boot camp, though. Didn't much care for the sound of that --convicted felons, recalcitrant teenagers or draftees are sent to boot camps to instill fear and reinforce the importance of bullying and humiliation. Life already offers enough of those things, I thought. But the course featured material on self-hypnosis and meditation, interesting topics both, so in spite of some misgivings, I signed up for four sessions at $10 per session. Such a bargain and besides, to get "anything I want" I might even eat liver.

"These classes are a bargain," agrees Ms. Bohorquez. "Many people pay very high prices for this information. My purpose is to bring high-level functioning within the reach of people with low incomes."

But why a nice woman like Elizabeth Bohorquez calls her quite fascinating mental-imaging and self-hypnosis workshops "boot camps" I can't imagine.

When I arrive at her office on Monday evening, there is a group of 10 or so fellow boot campers, mostly women. Ms. Bohorquez radiates friendliness, charm, and a palpable desire to get started. There are no commands to do 40 pushups, and no barber is in evidence to shave our heads. Clearly, Ms. Bohorquez's idea about boot camps is very eccentric.

Noting that food intake is the one physical variable easiest to control, she leads us on an imaginary walk through the supermarket. Before long we begin to notice that Ms. Bohorquez views nearly every product on the supermarket shelf severely, particularly if it contains refined sugar, as nearly all seem to.

"Most people burn sugar, not fat," she tells us, "and if we want to function at the highest level, we want to burn fat because burning fat oxygenates the brain."

Oxygenating the brain is a well-known benefit of exercise, for example, greatly improving brain health and activity. And burning fat, for most of us, would be a definite plus. Alas, however, we learn that we are subject to all sorts of misapprehensions about diet and health. We eat ripe bananas, we drink cranberry juice, we drink beer, we are subject to damaging blood sugar surges which dramatically affect our levels of stress, and some of us, some of us, I am very sorry to say, are addicted to Captain Crunch cereal. Slow-cooked oatmeal, however, wins her approval, as do "good" carbohydrates like raw broccoli, bean sprouts, salsa and radishes. "Bad carbohydrates" (to be used in moderation) include squash, carrots, peas, potatoes. Ms. Bohorquez does not demand vegetarianism but suggests meat and fish in small quantities.

With the purely physical aspects of high-level functioning out of the way, our second session begins with "insight" meditation. "I was looking for some way to bring meditation into my day when I needed it," Ms. Bohorqeuz says. "Transcendental meditation was great, but it was very structured. You meditate in the morning and in the afternoon. We need a form of meditation we can use at any time."

In and out of meditation, utilizing it throughout the day. That was a worthy goal. I knew that meditation is a powerful tool -- my own limited experience with it had shown me that. Like all useful skills, though, it is difficult to learn and takes constant practice.

"Is the temperature OK for everybody?" she asks. "It's important to understand what happens in meditation. Our brain waves normally go at about 21 cycles per second. They go higher depending on our emotional state. Even when we are simply sitting still the brain waves can be going very fast. This is called the beta state.

"Our goal is to learn to slow the brain waves down to about seven to 14 cycles per second. That is called the alpha state. At alpha the right and left brain work best together." She goes on to extol the virtues of slowing them down much further, to a few cycles per second, the theta state. "If you were going to have gall bladder surgery using only hypnosis for anesthetic, then you would want to be able to get into theta." Right!

"One of the benefits of being at the alpha state is that we are also at the door of the subconscious mind. So if we are here why not use the subconscious mind?"

After a short discussion of breath "each breath is new, each breath is different from the one before" -- listening for silence in the intervals of noise, and being conducted on a tour of beta and alpha consciousness, including the dangers of being too involved with "judgment and righteousness," we are prepared for our first guided meditation session.

"Let's just loosen up the body a little bit. Let's just sit quietly and listen for silence. Allow the belly to swell, take a deep breath from the bottom of your feet. I like to pretend that I have nostrils on the bottom of my feet."

The room is dark, we are all concentrating on our breath. A phone is ringing somewhere. She talks to us quietly. "We can learn to control how deeply we can go. At the alpha state all systems of the body go into homeostasis, balance: the heart, the lungs, the blood pressure, the thought processes, the pancreas -- we are working with a lot of powerful chemicals here and when we do that the concentration opens, the memory functions better and our reaction time is increased, but the main work we are doing is changing the body chemistry.

"Now let us hunt for body sensations." This is called the body scan, and Ms. Bohorquez leads us from the tops of our heads to the soles of our feet, bringing to our conscious minds all the physical sensations of our bodies. My mind is quite active during this process -- I'm sure that I am not in any kind of alpha state at all. I am too busy listening and concentrating on what she has to say. I remember being impressed by the number of purely visual images that she is able to make happen in my mind, however, and I begin to realize how much her technique relies on visualization.

As she softly guides us into meditation, my mind pursues a journey of its own ...

Gaining control of the conscious mind to increase its capacity and efficiency has been a goal of humans from ancient times. In the opening chapter of "The Art of Memory," Frances Yates tells the story of Simonides of Ceos, a sixth-century Greek poet. Simonides was attending a banquet at the home of Scopas, a Thessalonian noble, where he delivered a poem in his host's honor. After he was finished, he was informed by a servant that two young gentlemen wished to see him outside. Simonides made his way to the courtyard, but found no one waiting. However, in his absence, the roof of Scopas' house fell in, crushing all within. The bodies were unrecognizable, and grieving relatives were unable to identify them for burial. Simonides, however, envisioning the table in his mind, was able to identify where each guest had sat, making possible identification.

Cicero cites this story in "De oratore" as an example of the importance of an ordered mind, and uses Simonides' visualization of the table of Scopas as an example of the importance of the organizational model for the creation of a theater of memory.

In ancient days, many learned men began their careers with the creation of a memory theater. Typically, it was architectural, a building well-known to the scholar, and memorized completely down to the smallest detail. For the rest of their lives, it would serve as a basis for mentally organizing thought. Speeches, arguments, histories, sciences --all their details and organizing principles -- could be assigned to the architectural details of the theater and thus never forgotten. Memory was a faculty greatly exercised in the past, and elements of this method persisted until the Renaissance, when the publishing of books lessened the need for memory.

"... OK, very slowly open your eyes, and acclimate yourselves to the room." Lights on.

Ms. Bohorquez's maps of consciousness continued on for two more sessions. She led us, step by step, into the corners of the conscious mind, guiding us along the pathways to the alpha state, giving us tips on dealing with stress at home and in the workplace. Much of her advice is work-oriented, survival at work being a high priority for many of her clients, many of them young working women. Self-hypnosis is presented as a method of going deeper into the mind, accessing the theta state and making programmatic changes in consciousness. For this, Ms. Bohorquez uses visualizing techniques very similar to the architectural visualizing techniques of the ancients, though they have undergone a serious cultural update. Her imaginary workshops include wide-screen TVs, VCRs, tapes, computers, and boardrooms, and detailed instructions for their use.

At a certain point, perhaps as a result of my own inchoate meditations, I felt that I was witnessing an important part of the future. These are very powerful tools for self-change. I believe this because I know people who have spent large parts of their lives learning to use them --Zen Buddhists, yoga practitioners, and many others seeking ways out of the consciousness assigned them by the industrial era -- frequently to their own betterment, it seems to me.

But they were mostly well-educated people, motivated by curiosity and a desire to change, improve their health, fulfill some spiritual call, and they had pursued these things at a time when to do so was certainly not in any sense "normal." A lot of it was also connected to an increased consciousness of life's inequities and injustices, and a desire to promote widespread change in our culture and our society.

Now I was seeing a room of people, "normal" in every sense -- working women, young mothers, a few young men -- all applying themselves to this previously arcane body of knowledge, all in pursuit of "high-level functioning" at 10 dollars a class.

What future does Elizabeth Bohorquez plan for them? She offers to show them "how you can get anything and everything you want." I can't say I've experienced that yet. But in recent days, I have worked on acquiring a taste for slow-cooked oatmeal. Actually, it's pretty good. I wonder if it's my Celtic blood -- didn't Robert Burns rhapsodize about "porridge, chief of Scotia's food"? Or maybe it's the butter and cream I put on it.

Meditation takes more practice, but I know it can have life-changing properties. Change is necessary for growth, and I'm still working on that one. Sometimes I fall asleep, though.

"Listen up, weak-willed execs! To succeed in today's tough business environment, you need to get your body and mind in shape. Now drop to the floor and give me 15 minutes of mediation and visualization!" -- David Gigliotti signs on for the course.