Archive for the 'Stop Smoking' Category

How You Change What’s Not Working

Published in Hypnosis, Stop Smoking and Weight Loss. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .


Transformational Change

Five questions about generative transformation

generative changeWhat is Transformational Change? Transformational change is generative change. Personal change comes about in many forms and for many reasons. Most change, most often, is to accommodate outward circumstances. It is remedial. We react rather than truly respond. We react automatically, based on what we already know, rather than looking for new, and possibly transformational solutions. So often we struggle just to extricate ourselves from present difficulties, rather than looking for new ways of doing things which will support us in an ongoing way to transform our sense of what is truly possible. Transformational change is regenerative change. You can even call it generative in that it allows you to come to entirely unprecedented perspectives, with unprecedented capacities for innovation and solution based responses to hitherto intractable problems.

Is Transformational Change permanent? By implication transformational change means a permanent shift. Transformational means never being the victim of circumstances again. It means using skills that allow you to recognize that everything you experience from this moment on can be taken as a lesson, a guide, and even a gift. When you make this perceptual shift, whenever you face a new challenge or a disappointment,  instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” you will ask “What can I learn here?”

What aspects of my life does Transformational change touch. Were does it fit in? Is this a spiritual practice? Is it psychology? Is it learning new communication skills? Is it learning to navigate relationships more skillfully ?  Is it business coaching? Is it personal development? The answer is yes. It is all and any of these. The more you live not just as the accumulated effect of everything that has touched you, but as a cause, as someone who lives at choice, the more you instinctually appreciate that everything is interconnected and part of single integrated whole. As you live by this systemic perspective, releasing old patterns of though, feeling, and behavior become second nature to you. Why would you need to entertain negative emotional states again?

Does Transformational change take long? Does this work of effecting transformational or generative change take a long time? Here’s a parallel question. If someone shows you a shortcut that will cup your daily commute in half how long will it take you before you use it  every day? When you’re ready to change, change happens very quickly.  The foundation for this work can be undertaken in a couple of days  of intense one-on-one focused process that will transform the way you think and feel, and in addition will give you the tools to maintain and deepen the transformation we co-create together.

Do I have to meet with you in person? You are welcome to do that, and I personal enjoy working face to face at out Los Angeles office, or at our retreat in the mountains, however we can meet equally well by telephone.

I hope this answers some of your questions about transformational change. If you would like to schedule a complimentary no-obligation conversation with me please contact me directly

Tel +1-310-339-1660
Email  info@caitrionareed.com

Published on February 7, 2010

Why New Year Resolutions Don’t Work

Published in Hypnosis and Stop Smoking. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions?
Join a gym on January 2nd?
Throw away cartons of cigarettes, candy, cookies and whatever else you might hope to remove from your life?

… and then around January 15th,
or March 1at (if you’re lucky) it’s all a memory?

Maybe not. But if you do, here are five possible reasons why.

  1. Because you’ve done it before, and have entirely negative associations with your January 1st resolutions. You’ve become used to failing at them, you may even expect to; at least on an unconscious level.
  2. You have no real strategy. You may join a gym but you have not sat down and worked out exactly when you’re going to get there, made an appointment with a trainer, set up a schedule, and developed a long term strategy.
  3. You have not made yourself accountable, or if you have it’s with people with whom you have shared your New Year’s Resolutions before, and who have come to expect you to fail at them. Of course, expectations like that are contagious.
  4. You’ve set yourself up using negative associations – lose weight, stop smoking, stop doing this or that, abstaining, ceasing, and desisting. It would be better to imagine your future year by using positive terms and associations.
  5. Deep changes can’t be accomplished by an act of will alone. Something inside must change too. My work as a hypnotherapist in Los Angeles – World capital of New Year Resolutions (just kidding, I have no idea!) -  tells me that people change when they start identifying internally with the new behavior, and with their new self. Then the steps to get there are simply a question of time and strategy.

The first few days of January are not necessarily the best time to implement new behaviors and habits. Then again, it’s never a bad time to make positive changes to your life, through hypnosis, or by whichever means you choose.

Published on January 2, 2010

Time to quit smoking. Stop smoking with hypnosis.

Published in Addiction and Stop Smoking. 1 Comment

addiction_freeStopping smoking is easier than you think. It’s all about your mindset. Instead of thinking about stopping smoking, think about being a non-smoker.

Let me explain. Assuming for a moment that you’re NOT addicted to heroin, how much energy do you put into NOT using heroin every day?

None, right? Because you KNOW yourself to be a non-user. If heroin happens to be a bad example for you, choose another one – cocaine, glue, chocolate, marijuana, meth amphetamine, valium, vicodin.

The point is that when you know yourself to be a NON-SMOKER you will have no need to put any energy into not smoking, or into quitting smoking.

How can you implement this simple change of attitude?

That’s where hypnosis comes in.

You may have seem hypnosis comedy shows where people are given the suggestion to forget their own name. With the right suggestions this is something that’s easily done. Maybe you think it’s just a trick of the mind. You’re right. That’s what it is. And that same trick can make it very easy for you to stop smoking too.

In combination with strategies to help you overcome the difficult withdrawal symptoms – which honestly don’t need to last more than a day or two, you’re ready to enjoy better health, keener senses (especially a keener sense of taste and smell), more energy, a better mental attitude, and a significantly greater life expectancy.

Of course, the same principle applies for any addiction, including those mentioned above – cocaine, glue, chocolate, marijuana, meth-amphetamine, valium, vicodin — though certain variations in treatment will apply.

Published on November 28, 2009

Stop Smoking with Hypnosis

Published in Stop Smoking. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

“Stopping smoking is easy, I do it every day.” Mark Twain

Then one day you actually stop smoking to become a non-smoker forever!!!  You put away the stop-smoking aids, the stop-smoking programs, the prescriptions, pills, nicotine patches, purges – when your throw your cigarettes into the trash only to buy another pack the next day. You quit tobacco forever. From that day on the very idea of smoking cigarettes becomes alien and strange.

stop smoking nowNear my Los Angeles hypnotherapy office the American Lung Association has a billboard with a digital count of the lives lost to smoking related illnesses so far this year. We are now in November and the number is in the hundreds of thousands.

There a multi-billion dollar smoking cessation industry telling you that it is hard to quit smoking and giving you the suggesting that it will indeed be so difficult for you that you will continue paying money for smoking cures that don’t work into the indefinite future.

But the real cost is not in the price of cigarettes or nicotine patches. It is in the things you’ll miss by the twenty-five to fifteen years by which you life could be shortened from smoking – never meeting your grandchildren, or never seeing them graduate, leaving goals unfulfilled, never actually enjoying your retirement, never going on those trips because it had  become too hard to breath.

It’s not that I don’t want to alarm you, I actually want to. But only because I have good news. You really can become a non-smoker forever through the simple use of hypnosis and hypnotic strategies.

I guarantee that when you’re ready to become a non-smoker for the rest of your life I will teach you how. It’s pain free, drug-free, and a whole lot easier than you think. Hypnosis is not a miracle, the miracle is within your own imagination and the capacity of your mind to change your perceptions.

Non-smokers don’t smoke. When you become a non-smoker you will need a cigarette about as much (to borrow a metaphor) as a fish needs a bicycle.

Published on November 20, 2009