Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Fast Phobia Cure with NLP

Published in Agoraphobia, NLP and Phobias. 3 Comments Tags: Agoraphobia, Hypnosis, NLP, obsession, phobia.

phobia_fear A phobia is an extreme persistent irrational fear. Lesser fears can sometimes turn into a phobia, and some phobias take on the qualities of obsessions. So there is some overlap and ambiguity in the way these debilitating patterns play out.

There are amazingly long lists of phobias, all are very real for those who suffer from them:

Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces
Claustrophobia – fear of confined spaces
Anthropophobia- fear of other people
Fear of flying, fear of mice, fear of spiders, fear of driving, fear of public speaking, fear of such things as water, dust, bicycles, owls … the list is endless.

It used to be that back in the the dark ages of psychology (which may, unfortunately, still prevail in some quarters) it could take months to cure a phobia.

Then along came NLP and it became possible to cure phobias, even powerfully debilitating phobias, within minutes. How is this possible?

The first thing to understand is that delving into the original cause of WHY a phobia or fear exists may eventually help cure the phobia, but in a very long winded and roundabout way.

Discovering HOW the phobia opperates, how the pattern of thought and association plays itself out in sequence, is much more effective — because you can then learn to rapidly change it.

The way a phobia is evoked in the mind is usually fairly consistent… a sight, a sound, a memory, a feeling in the body, a strong emotion. Once that sequence is discovered it can be broken, scrambled, or even turned into a comedy routine.You will have blown its cover and it will never affect you again with quite the same power. It’s power will fade, perhaps even before your very eyes.

I say you will have “blown its cover” because that unconscious pattern had been hidden from you. When you make it fully visible, you are already half-way to resolving the phobia that depended on it.

Of course, you may not be able to do this on your own, but an experienced NLP practitioner can guide you through the process very easily.

Even people who are housebound due to extreme agoraphobia can be effectively treated over the telephone with amazing success.

Published on November 29, 2009

Anxiety and Stress

Published in Anxiety and Stress and NLP. 0 Comments Tags: anxiety, caitriona, Hypnosis, los angeles, NLP, solutions, stress.

I live in Los Angeles. I used to experience anxiety of one sort or another much of the time. It felt like a part of who I was. As I look back it seems strange. Most of my anxiety was about things that never happened, worst case scenarios, projections of my own insecurity and paranoia. I owe this change in my mindset to hypnosis, and all that I learned about the power of my imagination in a series of hypnotherapy sessions I did with Caitriona last year. M.E.E.

Anxiety is a misuse of your time. It’s something that comes about through choices you made about where you should focus your attention.

The Dark Clouds of Anxiety

This might be hard to accept when you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack, or when you’ve been officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder, or when your anxiety is complicated by depression.

Even so, anxiety comes about because of how you have learned to focus your attention, and how you choose to give certain meaning and weight to particular experience. This may indeed sound harsh if you have been trying in vain to find an effective treatment for anxiety, or have been given the run around by health-care professionals who are better at prescribing medications for anxiety than at helping you find lasting solutions.

But what you once learned you can unlearn. For example, although you may have learned long ago to process similar experiences in the same old ways, with the same old emotions — in this case stress and anxiety, how would it be if you learned new associations; so that when the pressure was on, instead of anxiety, you felt calm, focused, determined, and excited?

It is possible to learn to do this; and it’s easier than you think

The best solutions are often the simplest. Rather than complicated diagnoses and a lifetime of being condemned to live under a cloud called anxiety. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to a little bit of work to do.

But that work involves simply applying the mind-skills and mindset you will learn through hypnosis and NLP. Much of that learning is through the power of your unconscious mind. So it’s about as hard as learning to ride a bicycle. After a day or two you may wobble from time to time. Within a week you’ll be amazed, delighted, and thrilled that what once seemed almost impossible has become a natural skill.

Published on November 28, 2009

Time to quit smoking. Stop smoking with hypnosis.

Published in Addiction and Stop Smoking. 0 Comments

addiction_free Stopping 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

Hypnosis and your Unconscious Mind

Published in Hypnosis and Videos. 0 Comments Tags: association, focus, goals, hypnois, unconscious mind.

Everything you’re not conscious of is your unconscious mind. Everything you are not focusing on, everything you’re not aware of, all your habits ….

Because we have automatic associations with and responses to certain things, the unconscious mind can be a liability, or anally in helping you achieve your goals.

Hypnosis is learning to communicate directly with your unconscious mind.

Published on November 24, 2009

Anxiety, Stress, and Hypnosis

Published in Anxiety and Stress. 0 Comments Tags: anxiety disorder, Hypnosis, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety.

Anxiety has taken on epidemic proportions and supports the thriving pharmaceutical industry. It has become a central theme in the work of many mental health care professionals. Chronic anxiety is more than a mental health issue, it is also potential killer.

Anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety – are all variations on a theme.

Anxiety occurs as a natural response to an unfamiliar or potentially dangerous situation. As human beings we are wired to experience some degree of tension in extreme situations. Anxiety disorders come about when that natural response becomes habitual and chronic. Hypnosis will help you learn new patterns of response, easily and quickly.

In fact, relaxation is one of the first things that people think of when they think of hypnosis, and in the presence of relaxation (as opposed to temporary sedation) anxiety fades away.

Using skills to develop mindfulness, focus in everyday situations so that you can recognize cues that would otherwise cause stress, and learn to trigger your own hypnotic response, is even more valuable.

Hypnosis is not intended to be a substitute for drugs prescribed for anxiety by a physician. With the collaboration of their physician I have helped many clients in my Los Angeles hypnotherapy practice to reduce and then to eliminate completely medications they had been using for anxiety disorders of different kinds.

Published on November 22, 2009

N L P

Published in NLP. 1 Comment Tags: Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Fritz Perls, gregory bateson, John Grinder, los angeles, milton erickson, NLP, Richard Bandler, virginia satir.

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is a synthesis of the work of Milton Erickson, and Virginia Satir. Add the work of Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, then add the synergistic skill of John Grinder, Richard Bandler, and several others who in the late nineteen-sixties created an explosion of creativity and innovation, and you have a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding!

Forty years after its creation, NLP still does not fit into any easily recognizable category, and continues to develop in new and exciting ways that are often misrepresented, and even more often misunderstood.

What distinguishes NLP from conventional forms of psychotherapy, (itself so diverse that it’s hardly possible to speak of it as a singular field) is that it begins by asking an unusual question.

Rather than asking why things happen or why people behave in certain ways, NLP asks, “How?” Knowing why you do certain things, or why you have a certain problem, can be very helpful in effecting change; or it might be of merely academic interest.

By ask how you arrive at questions such as:

How can I develop motivation, focus, clarity?
How can I loose weight and keep it off?
How can I become a non-smoker forever?
How you I act, think, feel differently to achieve better results?
How can I model excellence in others to achieve it in myself?
How can I fulfill my goals?
How can I communicate more effectively?

Simple enough! Why then are there so many misunderstandings about NLP?

Neurolinguistic programming explores and models

effective communication
optimimum internal representations and perceptions to achieve excellence.

It has become very effective at both. Which is why some people have come to see that NLP is nothing more than a way to help unscrupulous sale people sell to unwilling customers even more effectively. Or else it has come to be seen as a series of patterns and techniques that automatically produce magical results.

Unfortunately, NLP has been so impressive in achieving results, and so enthusiastically received by some, that it has come to be perceived as something of a cult. Also, because some of the patterns and techniques are relatively easy to learn, it is often practiced without the skill that is required for it to achieve the best results.

NLP is more than clever sales techniques, more than procedures and techniques learned by rote. It is more that a system for person change because it is infinitely adaptable, continually asking how certain results are achieved, drawing as few fixed conclusions as possible. Because is asks how and explores patterns you might call it a meta system, a lens to explore other systems, and to change the behaviors, attitudes, and emotions that have limited you from achieving the results you want.

Published on November 22, 2009

What Do You Desire?

Published in Videos. 0 Comments Tags: desire, focus, longing, video.

What happens when you open to your deepest longing; not the busy chatter of habitual wants and imagined needs, but something deeper?

Write a list of one hundred things you would like to do in your lifetime. Dare to make the list as bold as you can. You will a lot something if you take take the time to do this. I promise.

Published on November 21, 2009

Stop Smoking with Hypnosis

Published in Stop Smoking. 1 Comment Tags: Hypnosis, non, smoking cessation, smoking cure, Stop Smoking.

“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 now Near 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

Weight Loss through Hypnosis

Published in Weight Loss. 0 Comments Tags: diets don't work, Hypnosis, los angeles, mindfulness, weight control, Weight Loss.

Weight watchers may be focusing on the wrong thing. When you watch your weight going up and down, up and down, where is your focus? On not being overweight, on not being fat. Your unconscious mind doesn’t understand ‘not’. It’s very child-like in this respect, which is why using hypnosis may be ideal. because hypnosis is learning to talk to that child inside that we refer to as the unconscious mind. It’s the child-like part of us that is at the center of all our learning and habitual behaviors.

Weight loss and weight control is a concern for just under one third of the population of the US. That’s how many people are officially obese, give or take a few million.

your ideal weight

Since special weight-loss and diet programs are a 40 billion dollar a year industry you might conclude, as many have, that diets don’t work.

Watching your weight is like my asking you to not remember the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. You’ll think of it anyway and it will probably put your teeth on edge. And even if you are now thinking of a hot fudge sundae instead, you had to first think of the sound of the blackboard in order to not think of it. Now if I ask you to stop thinking of that hot fudge sundae, you may start to think about the fingernails on the blackboard again.

Focusing on your weight, your diet, or on not going to the refrigerator between meals works in the same sort of way. You go round and round inside your head and rarely achieve any results.

Weight control programs, short-term intensive weight loss boot camps, fat farms, will power, fasting … you name it, none of them have permanent lasting success for most people; and the reason is simple when you understand what does work.

What works? It’s the combination of simultaneously changing:

your attitude
the underlying emotional issues
your diet
your lifestyle, and how you exercise i.e. doing exercise that’s fun
and the way you bring awareness and mindfulness into how you live

Easy, you say? Yeah right!

Actually, if you learn to live with a positive mindset and bring focus to what you do – especially eating – it is a lot easier than you might think.

Mindfulness and focus are important. When you learn a few simple hypnotic techniques you will learn to get out of your own way, and trust your unconscious mind to help you on the road to good health. A balanced diet, comes from balance life. A balanced life comes from congruent values, confidence, and a positive attitude. Obsessing about what you can or cannot eat, chronic anxiety and habitual stress won’t help you. By learning simple steps towards maintaining clearer focus you will make more deliberate, conscious choices day by day, and moment by moment. Mindfulness helps the hypnotic process, and the hypnotic process makes it easier to be mindful.

Thinking, controlling, depriving yourself doesn’t work. Hypnosis can help you find an alternative because it gives you new inner strategies, and an unconscious impetus that moves you towards effortless awareness and inner congruence.

When you are nourished by your life as a whole, and feel satisfied, fulfilled, and safe, why would you need to abuse your body with excess weight and unhealthy food? When you work with your unconscious mind, and when you realize that it wants you to be healthy, there’s no stopping you.

That’s why hypnosis has been the most effective path for anyone who is ready to stop watching their weight, and minding their diet once and for all. When you’re ready to live your life fully and joyfully, effortlessly maintaining your appropriate ideal weight, you will discover that hypnosis can bring you the simple permanent ongoing solution to eating-disorders, losing those few pounds, or obesity that you’ve been looking for.

Published on November 19, 2009

Hypnosis is Dangerous?

Published in Hypnosis. 0 Comments Tags: Hypnosis, Meditation, NLP, spiritual, zen.

Hypnosis From an interview with Caitriona Reed by Sweeping Zen

Question: There are many critics out there of hypnotherapy, a practice you are clinically licensed to facilitate. Much of the criticism surrounds the very real danger of the hypnotist planting “hidden suggestions” in a client’s mind or the possibility of false memories arising. I wonder if you would agree that these are real dangers and if you could describe how a competent hypnotist can steer clear from these entrapments? In addition, what are the benefits of hypnotherapy as you see it?

Caitriona Reed: I have found that those who criticize hypnotherapy usually have very little exposure to, or practical understanding of, what hypnosis is. In my experience “”hidden suggestions” are just as likely to be planted by a charismatic religious teacher (Buddhist or otherwise) as by a hypnotherapist. More so in fact, as the hypnotherapist is likely to have more specific understanding of what they are doing in this context.

My understanding is that both the teaching and practice of the Dharma, as well as the use of trance in a clinical setting, both have as their goals the awakening of personal accountability, personal empowerment, and healing for the student/client. In the words of Milton Erikson, our work is to “transform the trance of disempowerment into a trance of empowerment.”

It may be helpful to understand that both hypnosis and meditation are inductive rather than deductive processes. In other words, they seek to use capacities of the mind that are beyond the reach of the merely rational.

There are of course differences between hypnosis and meditation, though many of those differences may be merely contextual. Without question, for hypnotists, as for Dharma teachers, integrity is an essential requirement. In addition, it is important to understand that “there are many roads to the ocean.”

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For the text of the complete interview Please go to Sweeping Zen

Published on November 18, 2009