Hypnotherapy, NLP in Los Angeles CA with Life and Mindset Coach Caitriona Reed
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.
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.
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:
Simple enough! Why then are there so many misunderstandings about NLP?
Neurolinguistic programming explores and models
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.”
For information on our training in cutting-edge Hypnosis and NLP techniques
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For the text of the complete interview Please go to Sweeping Zen
I am astonished by the countless number of creative people I meet with powerful innovative ideas.
I’ve been meeting lots of people with solid integrity and a wealth of creative potential who still feel blocked from contributing on the scale they would like.
Perhaps you are one of them? Are you someone with creative solutions that you are not yet implementing or using to full advantage? Are you frustrated at not getting the full power of your work-message-solution out there where it belongs?
If so, there may a couple of missing pieces that you can add fairly easily.
Two missing elements. An integrated approach to successful marketing.
Number one - how to create a fully functioning website, give it visibility, promote it using the array of means that are available, and gather a list of people interested in what you have to offer. Also, how you can use social media to it’s best advantage, and how you can make use of press releases, blogs, videos etc.
Number two – how to create and refine your vision, get out of your own way, develop a viable plan. and obliterate any emotional or logistical obstacles that are in your way. In other words, how to create the mindset to utilize these tools and make it all work. And then to GET DOWN and make it happen!
Regardless of where you are in your career, if your work and skills are as important as you know them to be, how much longer can you afford wait before getting it out there on the scale you know it deserves? Don’t you owe it to yourself and others to make your best talents and perspectives accessible?
Conscious Leadership Training Global looks forward with excitement to the trainings we will be kicking off in Sydney in April and May of 2010 that will specifically address your ability to make your important work available in ways that allow others to take full advantage of it.
Stay tuned for more. Click here
Two basic truths for
Do you ever forget that what now seems obvious was once a revelation? Or that some of the most basic things in life are things you most easily take for granted, then forget about, then remember, then forget again, over and over again.
Ideas and principles that have been around forever are still brand new when you get them for the first time; or when you get them again in a new and deeper way. Like peeling away layers to rediscover something new about what you thought you had understood. This is the nature of the two basic principles here.
Basic Truth~Principle Number One. Hamlet said it, in a moment of desperation, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Alfred Korzybski also said it so clearly that it is now an axiom, “the map is not the territory.”
We each live with different models of the world. You could say that we live in different worlds, with different maps, and often with entirely different ways of thinking.
One of the wonders of the world is that despite our different models of the world, and our different points of view, we still manage communicate with each other at all!
If you want to be a good parent, friend, salesperson, communicator, teacher (and you’re not a member of a cult where people are encouraged to hold the same basic model of the world) then respecting others’ values, point of view, assumptions, predisposition, and taste will stand you in good stead.
In short, respect the way other people view the world, however different from your own point of view that may be.
Basic Truth~Principle Number Two. Everything we experience is filtered through our emotions. and our attitudes that both inform and are informed by them. This includes the expectations we have of the world and of ourselves. It includes how we respond in times of difficulty.
It means that children learn best when they are happy, safe, and held in high regard. And of course, the same is true for adults.
We tend to fulfill what is expected of us, including and especially what we have learned to expect of ourselves. The world and the people around us also tend to respond to us according to our expectation of them.
When things go wrong it is better to treat the experience as a lesson, to pick yourself up, and move on.
Blaming yourself or others won’t help. Asking “what can I learn from this?’ will!
Explaining and justifying the situation won’t help. Asking what you can do differently next time will.
Indulging in self-pity, anger, resentment won’t help. Evoking a sense of gratitude for what you still have will!
In short, maintaining a positive attitude and a positive emotional state will always work to your advantage. And it will benefit everyone you come into contact with.
Two basic truths to live by:
The answer: at Manzanita VillageIf it seems strange to you that such things can coexist it may be because you hold certain limiting beliefs about what any of those three things really are. After the retreat that finished today (we are asking for it to an 'Advance' rather than a Retreat) it seems clear that to effect change in the world we must collectively move beyond divisiveness, and learn all we can from each other. What Doesn't Work - activism that holds to a singular social analysis,
. . . all of these come from world-views and patterns of behavior we can no longer afford.
What Does Work "Unless everyone wins, no one wins!" Retreat at Manzanita Village today continually demonstrate that this unlikely combination of elements is not only possible, but that the various lessons these elements foster in each other are essential for us all to open to our full potential, individually and collectively.
