What is self-hypnosis? Is it hard to learn? Can anybody do it? What are the benefits? The answers to these questions might surprise you!
Okay, so I want to talk about trance a little bit before we get into the actual practice of self-hypnosis because there's so much mystery and myth around trance and what it is.
We all go into a trance many times every day. If you've ever driven home intending to stop at the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread and then found yourself in your driveway without the bread, you have experienced a driving trance [automaticity].
If you're watching a movie and time seems to whiz by, time distortion is a hypnotic phenomenon that comes with being in a trance.
And so there's a lot of naturalistic trances that we get into each day. We do most of our learning in a trance. When we're five years old, we're in a hypnotic state most of the time called theta brainwave activity, and that's so that we can soak in everything around us, integrate it into our neural circuitry, and learn something as complicated as the English language without any formal training.
Okay, so really what trance is for and what we want to do with self-hypnosis is to go inside and do some inside work.
Many of us have been working very hard not to go inside because there are some uncomfortable feelings in there, maybe some unfinished business, and we've trained ourselves to have an external focus.
Well for real change to take place, it has to be internal.
Many of us have probably tried changing people in our lives and reducing the stimuli that trigger us so that we can feel better - but you can't trigger something that's not there. So with therapy, we want to be able to update our programming if you will, so that the triggerable programming gets healed or taken care of.
And one of the best ways to do that is to create new habits. Rather than trying NOT to do the old habit, we want to do a new habit. The new habit must be good for us. As we have talked about many times, the way to create these new habits is with intensity and repetition.
That brings me to why we want to learn self-hypnosis.
Self-hypnosis puts us in a position of meditation into a deeply absorbed inner state that can increase the intensity of anything we imagine. Now, most of us also know that imagination is the power of creativity. You can look around any room you're in right now and you will not be able to find anything that did not begin with a thought in someone's mind.
That is the creative power of imagination. Remember that neurons that fire together, wire together. The more often the firing, the stronger the neuronal connections become.
And so imagination is something that MUST occur before we can manifest or demonstrate whatever it is that we're trying to learn to do. But the converse is also true! We must NOT use our imagination to dwell on what we do not want (rumination) or we may become the authors of our own pain as the creative power of imagination eventually brings more of it into our experience.
Some people come to my office expecting that I want to put them into a trance. In reality, I want to help them come out of a trance! You could say the appropriate use of self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy is to fight fire with fire.
What are some other benefits? Practicing self-hypnosis will increase the intensity of your visualizations and affirmations, reducing the need for repetition in building these new habits. At the very minimum, practicing self-hypnosis will recondition your nervous system over time by enhancing your ability for a healthy parasympathetic reset.
Okay, so without further ado, we want to go through how to get into this meditative state that we call self-hypnosis. (Listen to the Podcast above for the training, click the button below to practice the procedure)
Episode 7: Self-Hypnosis Training