What exactly is hypnosis?
The doorway to success in hypnosis is the Subconscious Mind.
Your subconscious mind not only holds information that is outside your consciousness, but it also manages sensations and body functions. It keeps your heart beating, your blood circulating, your digestion working and your lymph system operating, and makes your eyes blink without your conscious awareness.
Pioneering work from people like Dr. Deepak Chopra, and scientists, now realise the full extent of the Mind/Body connection. Not only does information from the Mind affect the body, but there is now scientific evidence that your mental processes, mental states, and mental behaviours affect all the cells in your body, all the time.
TRANCE is the state in which hypnosis takes place. It is also a state we frequently enter, in the normal course of a day.
Hypnosis allows us to begin reaching the subconscious mind and utilising the mind/body connection.
How Does Hypnosis Work?
While hypnosis is often described as a sleep-like trance state, it is better described as a state characterized by focused attention and heightened imagination.
The value of experiencing trance and being hypnotised lies in the power to heal our own bodies and the power to create changes in our lives.
It is most often compared to daydreaming, or the feeling of “losing yourself” in a book or movie. You are fully conscious, but you tune out most of the stimuli around you. You focus intently on the subject at hand, to the near exclusion of any other thought.
In this special mental state, people feel very relaxed. This is because they tune out the worries and doubts that normally keep their actions in check. You might experience the same feeling while watching a movie: As you get engrossed in the plot, worries about your job, family, etc. fade away, until all you’re thinking about is what’s up on the screen.
In this state, you are also highly suggestible.
What Effects Does Hypnosis Have?
The experience of hypnosis can vary dramatically from one person to another. Some hypnotised individuals report feeling a sense of detachment or extreme relaxation during the hypnotic state, while others even feel that their actions seem to occur outside of their consciousness
Other individuals may remain fully aware and able to carry out conversations while under hypnosis.
Experiments by researcher Ernest Hilgard demonstrated how hypnosis can be used to dramatically alter perceptions. After instructing a hypnotised individual to not feel pain in his or her arm, the participant’s arm was then placed in ice water. While non-hypnotised individuals had to remove their arm from the water after a few seconds due to the pain, the hypnotised individuals were able to leave their arms in the ice water for several minutes without experiencing pain.
What Can Hypnosis Be Used For?
Hypnosis can be used for many different conditions, where there is pain, anxiety, stress, addictions and fears.
In particular, I specialise in preconception, infertility, pregnancy, labour, birthing and early parenting. I use hypnosis very successfully in debriefing a traumatic birthing experience, allowing women and their babies to heal the trauma and an often difficult mother/child relationship. There are many, many fears and anxieties associated with pregnancy and birthing and our Inside Birth® prenatal program is extremely effective in deleting fears and replacing with beautiful and positive imagery.
Can You Be Hypnotised?
While many people think that they cannot be hypnotised, research has shown that a large number of people are more hypnotisable than they believe.
Majority of people are very responsive to hypnosis.
Children tend to be more responsive to hypnosis.
Approximately ten percent of adults are considered difficult or impossible to hypnotise.
People who can become easily absorbed in fantasies are much more responsive to hypnosis.
Hypnosis Myths
Myth 1: When you wake up from hypnosis, you won’t remember anything that happened when you were hypnotised.
While amnesia may occur in very rare cases, people generally remember everything that occurred while they were hypnotised.
Myth 2: You can be hypnotised against your will.
Despite stories about people being hypnotised without their consent, hypnosis requires voluntary participation on the part of the patient.
Myth 3: The hypnotist has complete control of your actions while you’re under hypnosis.
While people often feel that their actions under hypnosis seem to occur without the influence of their will, a hypnotist cannot make you perform actions that are against your values or morals.
Myth 4: Hypnosis can make you super-strong, fast or athletically talented.
While hypnosis can be used to enhance performance, it cannot make people stronger or more athletic than their existing physical capabilities
What Lies Underneath
Hypnosis is a way to access a person’s subconscious mind directly. Normally, you are only aware of the thought processes in your conscious mind.
But in doing all these things, your conscious mind is working hand-in-hand with your subconscious mind, the unconscious part of your mind that does your “behind the scenes” thinking. Your subconscious mind accesses the vast reservoir of information that lets you solve problems, construct sentences or locate your keys. It puts together plans and ideas and runs them by your conscious mind. When a new idea comes to you out of the blue, it’s because you already thought through the process unconsciously.
Your subconscious also takes care of all the stuff you do automatically. You don’t actively work through the steps of breathing minute to minute — your subconscious mind does that. You don’t think through every little thing you do while driving a car — a lot of the small stuff is thought out in your subconscious mind. Your subconscious also processes the physical information your body receives.
In short, your subconscious mind is the real brains behind the operation — it does most of your thinking, and it decides a lot of what you do. When you’re awake, your conscious mind works to evaluate a lot of these thoughts, make decisions and put certain ideas into action. It also processes new information and relays it to the subconscious mind. But when you’re asleep, the conscious mind gets out of the way, and your subconscious has free reign.
Pregnancy and Birthing
The subconscious mind has absorbed and imprinted all the information a woman has received, throughout her life, about pregnancy and birthing. Unfortunately, the majority of that information is very negative. This is why so many women have so many fears about birthing. Through hypnosis we can easily turn this around into an enjoyable, positive and empowering experience for a woman and her baby just as nature intended.
