Recently I read an article about a woman named Veronica Noone who had struggled for years to lose weight and finally was able to do it because her goal changed.
Author Archives: Jack Elias
In my last hypnosis training, as usual, I was speaking to a group of students working to gain hypnotherapy certification. At a certain point I ended up going into some detail about how the process of our everyday thinking is inherently hypnotic.
By the time I encountered Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy, I had been studying Buddhism for 14 years. It was fascinating to discover that the most valuable insights and techniques presented by hypnotherapy and NLP were fragments of the Buddhist wisdom teachings that I had already encountered in a much more comprehensive form.
The teachings of Buddhism add crucial insights to psychotherapeutic work. Primarily, Buddhism holds an exalted view of our human consciousness and being. A therapist's basic assumptions and attitude about the nature of a human being profoundly affect the outcomes of his work with clients.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to access your own inner power anytime, anywhere? Self Hypnosis is a key to the treasure chest of that inner power. The techniques of self hypnosis help you gain ready access to the extremely powerful healing abilities of your subconscious mind. BBC News recently revealed a "best kept secret" -- that it's possible to overcome the effects of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) with hypnosis. The effectiveness of hypnosis also has been touted in Newsweek ("Altered States") and in Discover Magazine ("Hypnosis Works") as being effective in overcoming anxiety, chronic pain, diarrhea, and a host of other health problems.
What is the difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy? First of all, it helps to understand that the subconscious mind is like a machine in some respects. Using the techniques of hypnosis, you can deliver an instruction to your subconscious such as "Don't smoke," and for a time you will stop smoking. However, we're not just machines: we're living beings motivated by needs.
Healthy grief also bestows on us a tender heart of compassion for all beings, because our loss makes us vividly aware of their (and our own) fragility. There is another mental process that is also mistakenly labeled as grief. This kind of grief, however, hardens our hearts and makes us bitter. This is not true grief, and it is not healthy. When we experience such "bitter grief" we suffer unnecessarily.
When we say we are traumatized, we are speaking of this tendency of our subconscious to keep reproducing a traumatic event in the sophisticated virtual reality theater of our mind. Therefore, the cause of ongoing (chronic) trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not the traumatic event itself. If it were, there would be no hope of healing that trauma. The true cause of ongoing trauma, or PTSD, lies within the activity of our subconscious mind.
The energy we access when we're angry has tremendous creative potential. The problem occurs when we channel this energy into toxic thought forms and destructive behaviors. The basic capacity to access such powerful energy, however, is potentially a great gift.
With hypnotherapy it is possible to expose the root causes of most forms of depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. The root cause may be an unresolved, emotionally traumatic experience and/or an unfortunate habit of destructive thinking. In either case, once the nature of the problem is revealed in trance, it can be corrected through hypnotic communication with the subconscious mind.