Tag Archive for 'Hypnosis'

Hypnosis Mindset and Leadership

Dalai Lama embodies leadershipPeople associate hypnosis with weight-loss, quitting smoking, and overcoming fears, phobias, and other addictive patterns. But Hypnosis is part of everyday life. Hypnosis is a natural state of mind.You use it to make many of your decisions on a regular basis.

Your attitudes and mindset,
your ability to be effective as a leader,
your ability to lead yourself,
your ability to live ‘at choice’

… all this depends on your unconscious programming. In other words it depends on the beliefs that have been instilled in you by a process that is very much like hypnosis. Fortunately, mindset and attitudes can be transformed through the use of hypnosis far more rapidly, and with far greater ease, than is often understood or appreciated.

The hypnotic state is a doorway to your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is everything you are not currently aware of: for example, that meeting you are nervous about, your love of going to the beach, the excitement you felt on your eleventh birthday, an unkind neighbor, a tune that pops into your mind inexplicably. The unconscious mind is the ten-trillion things that you couldn’t possibly hold in conscious awareness at any moment, but which together make up the climate of your experience.

However, the unconscious mind is more than a memory-bank. Experience is determined by emotions. One person may love going to the beach, another person may detest it. Everything you experience is filtered through emotions and perceptions, and the subtleties of associations through which you make meanings from your life.

Imagine a child being told by his mother to clean his room. Perhaps his mother was having a difficult day and speaks sharply, “Can’t you tidy your room, what’s the matter with you?”

Somehow the child hears that there’s something the matter with him, and years later, on an unconscious level, he carries that message everywhere he goes.  He carries it to social gatherings, and job interviews. He may even carry it to bed. He may have conscious recollection of that day, long ago, when his mother was impatient with him. He may have discussed it in therapy. He may have learned that it wasn’t about him. But still the pervasive belief persists. It will continue until he registers a new truth about himself on an unconscious level as completely as he absorbed that first message long ago.

The amazing truth about your mind is that it can learn and change very quickly. How long did it take for that child to learn ‘there’s something wrong with me?’  He learned it in an instant, and a new truth can be learned at the same speed, but only if it is absorbed on the deepest level, deeply enough to supersede the old patterns.

People often say that hypnosis performs miracles. If you imagine that the attitudes that inform your behavior have to take a long time in order to change, then hypnotherapy is indeed miraculous. The power of hypnosis is the power to access your unconscious mind. Perhaps you have been disempowered by repeated vain attempts to effect change through willpower, conscious strategy, and reason. You may feel that you have a long way to go before you can truly transform old limiting beliefs, but you do not need more information or skills. When you’re ready to effect change, the last thing you need is more time! What you require is very simple. When you can access the same open mind you had as a child at the moment when you heard those fateful words, then you can learn your new truth, “there’s something right with me.”

A skilled hypnotherapist will guide you towards your own natural ability to remember deeper truths about yourself. She will help you access your capacity to write your own scripts, reprogram those old programs.  The truths you recover predate the time when trauma hijacked your original innocence, capabilities, and joy.

Hypnosis is like finding the light switch after fumbling around in a dark room for years.

Sometimes all you need to find that switch is permission from your own unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a miraculously effective way to gain permission from, and access the power of, your unconscious mind, to bring about radical positive permanent change.

Hypnotherapy Hypnosis in Los Angeles ‘when you’re ready for change’

Depression and Hypnosis

Using Hypnosis with depression.
Three things you should know.

Diagnosis Kills

Hypnosis and Depression

Hypnosis has been around for as long as consciousness itself, much longer than depression, which is relatively new on the scene. If we are stuck in a mood it is as if we have been hypnotized. When we absorb information, whatever it might be, it is because we have taken it in through a process that is effectively hypnotic. As young children we are in a state akin to hypnosis all the time. We learn to make rapid associations unconsciously, and we become adept at responding to life, based on those associations. We have learned unconsciously to do what we do, to feel as we feel. Hypnosis is that function of the mind that allows us to absorb information unconsciously. Sometimes, when the information we absorb is intrinsically contradictory, we respond by feeling depressed.

Let me ask you: what is the capital of France? I assume you know. I would like to ask you to reflect for a moment on how amazing it is that you can access the name so quickly, instantaneously, from all the countless other pieces of information that are available to you. The access you have, as well as all the various possible choices you have in how you respond to whatever comes your way, such as that question, for example, is anchored within functions that are also effectively hypnotic.  

You may have heard how in certain cultures a curse, or a hex, a 'magic' spell, can actually cause someone to die. It has been well documented, and although we may not succumb to such magic, we are equally susceptible to the effects of our own, often equally inexplicably irrational, belief systems.

Your belief system determines how you operate. Your belief system can even make you do things against your own best interests. It can trigger strong emotions based on the way it forces you to interpret the world. Based on your interpretations, your beliefs ever more solidified. Hypnosis can be used to address the limitations that come from that solidification, it can help you melt rigid beliefs, such as "I am  depressed."

I often work with clients who have been diagnosed as 'clinically' depressed, or bipolar, or with a 'chemical' imbalance. The diagnosis often serves the clinician who gave it, and the drug company who provides the drug prescribed for it, more than it does the client. In the short term. that prescription may be a lifesaver. In the long term it may become part of a debilitating life sentence.

My issue is that individuals are sometimes forced to live for years with a diagnosis that traps them, reinforcing the behaviors that caused depression in the first place. Depression is something you learn to DO. Diagnosis tells you that it is who you ARE.

If it is who you ARE you are doomed. If it's something you DO, then you can stop doing it as soon as you know HOW.

EVERYTHING is chemical in one way or another. EVERYTHING is behavioral too. Many things respond exactly the way you expect them to. The filters your expectations impose on your perceptions make sure of it. A chemist looks at chemistry, a behaviorist looks at behavior. A hypnotist asks HOW you can do something different from what you have been doing, so that your life can work better.

Hypnosis can change a lifelong pattern of depression because it addresses the deep underlying and often unconscious behaviors and beliefs that have supported it.

 

Living in the Light

Humans are diurnal. That means we live our lives by day, unlike owls, bats, badgers, (as well as a few musicians I know). Most of us need light to feel at our best. Even if it's only a few hours a day. Along with light comes physical activity, looking our towards the horizon, looking upwards with your eyes; a few simple physiological actions that engage you with the external world.

Take a comfortable deep breath or two. Look upwards, relax your body. Be aware of everything that's around you. It should take no more than a few seconds to do this, to reconnect with where you are.

Depression is a withdrawal. Reconnecting with people and things; moving; engaging creatively with the world, even when you don't feel inclined to do so, will change your mood. This is only a beginning; but explore how easy it is to begin. You might be surprised to lean that you really CAN change your mood.
 

Honesty is the Best Policy

I do not want to diminish the debilitating effect of depression. It's something I suffered from myself for many years; and during that time the depression felt entirely non-negotiable, impervious to anything I might do to shake it. Then something changed. I learned that the depression was a choice, and that it was something I DID, rather than something I WAS.

I learned that there were moments of choice, when I could choose how to interpret my experience. My interpretation could affirm whatever I wanted. If I wanted to believe that my life was not worth living, the evidence was certainly there; and if I wanted to believe that my life was full of promise, I discovered that I could choose to believe that instead.

I also learned that my depression had a lot to do with living in a way that was not entirely truthful and open. When I was not in full congruence with myself, when I was not 'walking my talk', I tended to become isolated and depressed. What that means exactly might be different for each of is.

Suffice to say, we can all benefit from coming out of whatever closets we hide in to prevent ourselves from being who we truly are, and from expressing the fullness of our creative capacity.

In my Los Angeles hypnotherapy practice, I have used hypnosis for depression with countless clients. I would say that a majority of the people who come to me for hypnotherapy, regardless of what else is going on in their lives, suffer from some degree of depression, mild or otherwise.

I am not suggesting that hypnosis is a universal cure for depression, but in my experience hypnosis works with depression to help you recognize that you are not just a victim of your emotions.

You do have a choice about how you deal with depression; just as you have a choice in how you deal with everything life sends your way.

Is NLP weird?

NLP means neurolinguistic programming. Neurolinguistic Programming means transformational change. It consists of an array of powerful perspectives, tools, and processes developed over four marvelously creative and fertile decades. However, when the subject of NLP comes up with some of my friends who are not involved in the field, they often express misgivings.

  • A friend in Los Angeles told me today, "I met someone who does NLP. They were really weird. They kept looking at me in a way that was really intense and off-putting."
  • Other people tell me that NLP feels like a cult. Apparently they have encountered newly-certified practitioners of NLP who were so excited about the tools they had learned that they couldn't curb their enthusiasm.
  • Some people have experienced NLP as inappropriately applied sales techniques, used by unscrupulous sales people, to persuade customers to buy things they didn't need, or want.

No doubt there's truth in all of this. Anything that works well is going to have a downside.

For many of us, life is almost unthinkable without the convenience of cars and airplanes; yet both cause incalculable damage as pollutants, and kill people whenever they crash. Name anything you like, and you can discover ways in which it is misused, or causes harm – language, love, religion, food. At one time or another, everything has been used to gain power over others.

As for NLP, one of the misunderstanding common among beginning practitioners and clients alike, is that it consists of a series of techniques or patterns. There are certainly a lot of them. There are even books available with compilations of hundreds of such patterns. But this misses the main point. NLP is not primarily about techniques or patterns. If you imagine that this is what it consists of, then it's certainly going to be weird, and somewhat unsatisfying, a never-ending accumulation of strange exercises. So what is NLP?

More than anything else, NLP is – the mindset that recognizes that any behavior or internal mental state can be changed.

To be effective, an NLP practitioner must believe this in their bones, and they must then communicate it to their client, by whatever means are available to them. Only then can the tools and patterns be used effectively to cement the transformation that has already begun.

Are those patterns and tools necessary? Absolutely! But the initial acceptance of the possibility of unprecedented transformational is a prerequisite. Otherwise the tools are mere tricks; and the client will end up with yet another reason to believe that nothing can help them overcome the problems for which they came to see you.

As a hypnotherapist, my practice changed completely as soon as I recognized the vital importance of my explanation, and demonstration, of the power of the mind to effect previously unimaginable transformation.

Once the client has truly absorbed this, then the work begins. Once the reality of the possibility for almost unlimited transformation is understood by the client, then they can imagine a new destination for themselves. The rest of the work has to do with planning the journey, removing the roadblocks, negotiating the inevitable diversions, and undertaking the journey itself. Is it always as simple of that? Actually, yes.

There are, of course,  many different sorts of roadblocks, and many ways of approaching the journey, many possible roads to take; as many roads, in fact, as there are individuals taking that journey towards congruence and fulfillment.

And yes, it is that simple!

In the presence of an experienced hypnotherapist, or practitioner of NLP, you will not experience the weird feeling of being scrutinized. Instead, you will feel like you are having a conversation with a good friend who has your best interest at heart, and who also happens to have the skills to help you to embody those changes you are seeking. You will experience a feeling of being seen, and heard, and understood, and appreciated, and supported.

If not, look elsewhere.

It's as simple as that

. arrow April 2010 NLP certification program

Can I be hypnotized?

Three common objections to hypnosis

Even in Los Angeles – original  home of the “hip hypnotist” – people seek hypnotherapy solutions as a last resort. Pain management, phobias, addictions, weight loss … there is a long list of problems for which hypnosis is typically very effective.

Sigmund Freud hypnotist

Sigmund Freud - hypnotist

People are afraid of failure.

  • “I can’t be hypnotized.”
  • “Will you make me behave like a chicken?”
  • “I tried it. It didn’t work?”

Hypnosis is a natural state of mind. We are all in a trance of one sort or another much of the time. The trick is to use the state of hypnosis, or trance, to your best advantage. Anyone can experience the pleasant state of hypnotic relaxation, and everyone can benefit from it when it is used by a skilled practitioner.

Stage hypnosis is usually performed as comedy. While it demystifies hypnosis, it also inevitably misrepresents the power of the hypnotic process. Your choice to volunteer as a hypnotic subject for a stage show may indicate a certain willingness to goof around. When you approach a hypnotherapist to help you effect change in your life, you have something very different in mind.

Unfortunately, as in all professions, there are some poorly trained or ineffective practitioners of hypnosis who advertise themselves as hypnotherapists. Hypnosis is an art, and hypnotherapy is a collaboration between artist and patient/client. It is not a question of it (hypnosis) working. It always works. The question is whether the power of that work is communicated, prepared for, executed, followed up etc. in a way that fully addressees your issues and needs.

Pat Collins the Hip Hypnotist (with Lloyd Bridges)

Pat Collins, the 'Hip Hypnotist' (with Lloyd Bridges)

There is a lot of misunderstanding about hypnosis. Hypnosis. or trance is a natural state of mind. To paraphrase one of the greatest hypnotists of all time, Milton Erickson, “Everyone walks around in a trance of disempowerment. The work is to change that to a trance of personal empowerment.”

There are very few things that produce rapid permanent positive change as effectively as hypnosis, and those that do usually have elements of hypnotic trance built into them. Even Sigmund Freud, who began his career as hypnotist, acknowledged that hypnosis was the single most effective modality to help bring about permanent positive transformation.

Sigmund Freud hypnotist

Fast Phobia Cure with NLP

phobia_fearA 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.

Anxiety and 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.

dark_cloud_anxiety

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.

dark_cloud_anxiety

Anxiety, Stress, and Hypnosis

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.

hypnosis for anxietyAnxiety 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.

Stop Smoking with Hypnosis

“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.

Weight Loss through Hypnosis

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.

Hypnosis is Dangerous?

HypnosisFrom 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
Click Here

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