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First of all the place is important. You need to be in a relatively quiet, comfortable place, free of telephone interruptions. Mild, ambient background noise is of no consequence. Next, you need to be able to physically relax. You need to be able to relax your body. Some people actually say, “I can’t relax.” Everyone can be taught to relax. I begin by telling you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and focus on my voice. Then I ‘talk’ you through muscle relaxation, from head to toe, all the while reminding you to continue with the deep, slow breathing. You will then stay in that deep relaxation for a few moments, then I bring you back up to awareness again, and ask a few questions about your level of relaxation. Was there any part of your body you weren’t able to relax? If there is, I’ll give you more suggestions the next time to relax the muscles around your eyes, for example, or your shoulder muscles. We ‘carry’ a lot of responsibility on our shoulders, and our shoulders, in turn, hold onto this stress. I then have you relax a second time.
At this point, you haven’t been hypnotized yet, but you have experienced the simple, reliable, effective, learnable technique of relaxing your body. You reinforce your relaxation with deep, slow breathing. This technique itself is a great stress-reducer: just relax your muscles and breathe deeply and slowly. When your body is completely relaxed, the critical aspects of your conscious mind will also relax because you are extremely focused, and therefore your subconscious mind is open to suggestions. You are at the doorway of your subconscious mind.
You are now ready to be hypnotized, which is a very relaxing, peaceful experience. You have experienced physical and mental relaxation (at least you have been introduced to it). The remainder of the session will prepare you for the actual, traditional hypnosis. You will learn how hypnotism communicates with your subconscious mind by a variety of suggestion techniques, including visualizations, affirmations, and post-hypnotic ideas. If you want to change something about yourself, then you must learn to take advantage of your power of imagining what you will look like, feel like, be like after the change has been accomplished. As powerful as your subconscious mind is, it can be reprogrammed through hypnosis to accomplish specific personal goals: changing from being a smoker to becoming a non-smoker, from being overweight to becoming a new, thinner you, from being a stressed-out person to becoming a new, relaxed person. The hypnotic trance, a state of concentrated self-focus, works on this reprogramming of your powerful subconscious mind.
You do not lose control in hypnosis. Instead, hypnosis empowers you, the client, to effect the important lifestyle changes that mean so very much to you. Hypnosis makes the changes, then turns over to you the reinforcement techniques through self-hypnosis to make permanent those changes. Think of it this way: we weren’t born with bad habits. We learned them, and they were reinforced and thus became strong. However, unhealthy habits can be changed through hypnosis, and these new, learned habits also have to be reinforced, strengthened to become a permanent part of your new lifestyle. This change and empowerment is the legacy of hypnosis!
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