Hypnosis

Tad James

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781845903251
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

This practical resource makes three radically different types of hypnosis easy to use in daily hypnotic work, exploring the methods of Milton H. Erickson, George Estabrooks and David Elman. "A gem. Well-written, well-paced and packed with information." Andrew Bradbury, author of Successful Presentation Skills and Develop Your NLP Skills

Chapter 1

Introduction–The Mind/Body Connection

 

You are about to delve into the art of hypnosis, surveying the techniques of several masters, from Milton Erickson’s indirect, permissive style to the direct, authoritarian style of George Estabrooks. The power of all these techniques lies in the connection that you build with the Unconscious Mind—your own and your client’s. The secrets and benefits of hypnosis lie in the trance state, and we will highlight the ability to produce deep trance phenomena. Your ability to move from the state you are in right now to deep trance depends on the rapport you have with your Unconscious Mind. This book focuses on teaching you how to work at deeper levels with your own Unconscious Mind and with the Unconscious Mind of each of your clients.

The Connection Between the Unconscious Mind and the Body

The doorway to success in hypnosis is the Unconscious Mind. Your Unconscious Mind not only holds information that is outside your consciousness, but it also manages sensations and body functions. A moment before reading this sentence, you probably were not aware of the feeling of your feet against the floor, or your back against the chair. You have sensations coming to your body all the time, but you remain unaware of most of them. In addition to managing all these sensations, your Unconscious Mind keeps your heart beating, your blood circulating, your digestion working, and your lymph system operating… and makes your eyes blink without your conscious awareness. It is exciting to know that your Unconscious Mind manages all of that with perfect precision.

A prime concept that we are going to explore is that your Unconscious Mind can communicate with every cell in the body. Until the mid-1980s, people could plausibly say, “Hypnosis is just in your Mind! It’s not real.” But recently, due to the pioneering work of Dr Deepak Chopra, scientists have begun to realize 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 behaviors affect all the cells in your body all the time.

Information is carried within the body in the form of electrical impulses that pass through nerve cells, or neurons. Between any two neurons, there is a gap, or synapse. In order for impulses to travel along a continuous path of nerve cells, something has to carry the impulses across the gaps. This essential task is performed by neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that conduct electrical impulses across the synapses between nerve cells.

When neuro-transmitters were first discovered, scientists thought they were found only in the brain. Later, it was discovered that neuro-transmitters actually connect all neurons in the body, forming vast networks of ‘electrical circuits’. More recently, quantum physics and quantum biology tell us that neuro-transmitters bathe every cell in the human body. This new knowledge is the key to the Mind/Body connection.

The Unconscious Mind not only manages sensations, movements and body functions, but it also actually sends information that travels to and affects billions of individual cells throughout the body, giving us health or dis-ease according to our Unconscious beliefs. Chopra describes this as your immune system constantly eavesdropping on your internal dialogue.

From the point of view of hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, your immune system is also eavesdropping on the pictures that you hold in your head… the sounds that you remember or pay attention to… the feelings that you have… and the concepts that your mind considers. Through the conductivity of the neuro-transmitters that surround all cells, your immune system is constantly affected by the activity of your Unconscious Mind.

There are many things we are conscious of, but the operation—and health—of the body is optimally a function of our Unconscious. Hypnosis allows us to begin reaching the Unconscious Mind and utilizing the Mind/Body connection. This is the beginning of our ability to manifest a number of wonderful things.

What is Real?

In considering the wonders of how the Unconscious Mind works, we continually bump up against the question of What is real? This is strictly a question of the Conscious Mind, because at the Unconscious level, nothing is ‘real.’

We might also ask, “Is the Unconscious Mind real?” Because the word real means ‘having substance,’ the Unconscious Mind cannot be real! The next big question is, what is ‘real’ about hypnosis and the connection between the Unconscious Mind and the Body? The answer lies in the fact that the bridge that connects the Body and the Mind is the same bridge that moves us from ‘real’ to ‘unreal.’ If the Real is the ‘physical,’ we must consider the ‘unreality’ of the Mind. You are now going to be able to enable fluid change in people by knowing that All is Mind.

To put it another way, the lesson of the Shaman is that none of the world around us is real. When this statement becomes meaningful for you, you have grasped the ‘unreality’ of what we call reality. That is a high state of awareness. Zen Buddhists meditate on paradoxical koans for tens of years to get to the realization that all reality begins with the perception and intention of the mind.

An understanding of ‘the unreality of reality’ will assist you in working with hypnosis, because you will realize that the body is just as ‘unreal’ as anything else. It can be changed very quickly, if not instantly. You can therefore heal your mind and body at any time, relieving yourself of anything from high blood pressure to low metabolism.

Highlighting the question of what is real, one of the most intriguing instances on record is the story of a diabetic woman with multiple personalities. When the woman was tested in her diabetic personality, her blood sugar was dangerously high. When she flipped into another personality, which was not diabetic, an attendant drew her blood immediately, and her blood sugar was normal, without enough time passing for her blood to be filtered by the liver and kidneys. The question is, “What is the cause of the diabetes? What is real?”

Metaphysically speaking, the mind is one, but since most people don’t experience it that way, the division into Conscious and Unconscious Mind is a useful distinction. In spite of some behaviorists’ assertion that we do not have an Unconscious Mind, the distinction can allow us to more clearly understand the operation of the mind.

Why do we Want to Learn Hypnosis?

The value of experiencing trance and learning hypnosis lies in attaining power to heal our own bodies and guide clients in healing theirs… power to learn… and power to create changes in our lives.

If you can produce hypnotic phenomena in yourself, such as arm catalepsy (rigidity), major muscle group relaxation, full body catalepsy, or somnambulistic behavior, then you have the power to produce healing changes in yourself. If you can hallucinate a tennis ball, you can hallucinate a little PAC-man travelling through your body gobbling up cells or substances that have been causing dis-ease. If you had severe muscle pain in your back, think what a relief it would be just to sit down and go into trance, or work with a Hypnotherapist, and say, “Unconscious Mind, go ahead and heal the muscles in my back.” If you have clear communication with your Unconscious Mind, you can do that. There is now a groundswell of support for the healing powers of hyp-nosis from the traditional allopathic medical community.

In addition to healing, the Unconscious Mind opens new doors to learning. If there is something you want to learn easily, you can say to your Unconscious Mind, “Let’s learn this,” and it will support you. If you are concerned about a presentation you are making, you can say to your Unconscious Mind, “Let’s organize all of this to flow easily and effortlessly.” Your Unconscious Mind will do all of this for you.

In trance, we can also tap into real power to create changes in our lives, healing what needs to be healed, preserving learnings from the past, and making new neurological connections to manifest our dreams. For these purposes, I teach Time-Line Therapy^® to thousands of people each year. If we have rapport with our Unconscious Minds, we will have all the resources we need to create the future of our dreams.

Milton Erickson once said, “Patients are patients because they are out of rapport with their own Unconscious.” Hypnotherapy patients are people who have had too much programming—so much outside programming that they have lost touch with their inner selves. People who are in rapport with their Unconscious Minds are also in control of their destiny.

We are exploring hypnosis for two purposes. On the one hand, we are learning how to be superb Hypnotherapists, able to lead others to the rich benefits of trance. On the other hand, we are learning how to be very good hypnotic subjects, so that we can access those benefits by entering trance ourselves.

Chapter 2

A Brief History of Hypnosis

Before we discuss how hypnosis works, I want to give you a short history of hypnosis, so you will have a better appreciation of the art behind the techniques. As early as the 1860s, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet and Charles Fere began using deep trance to produce hypnotic phenomena. The early experiments succeeded dramatically. For example, hypnosis was used to create a lesion on a subject’s hand and then cause it to disappear. These early studies had tremendous implications for healing our own bodies. Since the Unconscious Mind runs the body, hypnosis leads us to amazing possibilities for physical healing.

Hypnosis has been practised for thousands of years. There is evidence in ancient Sanskrit writings of the use of healing trances and healing temples in India. Ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls tell of the use of sleeping temples and the use of trance inductions for healing.

In the 1500s, Paracelsus, the Swiss medical doctor who discovered the mercury cure for syphilis, was also the first physician known to use magnets for healing. He passed a magnet or lodestone over a person’s body to initiate the healing process. People were cured of many diseases by Paracelsus’s work with magnets.

In the 1600s, an Irishman named Valentine Greatrakes healed people by laying his hands on them and passing magnets over their bodies. They called Greatrakes ‘the Great Irish Stroker’ and he was famous for stroking or massaging problems out of the body.

In 1725 a Jesuit priest named Maximilian Hehl was using magnets to heal people. He might have remained unnoticed if it had not been for one of his students, a young medical doctor from Vienna named Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer took magnets back to Vienna for use in his practice. In those days, one of the major interventions in medicine was bloodletting. Mesmer would open a patient’s vein and let the patient bleed for a while. When the procedure was finished, he would make passes over the cut with a magnet, and the bleeding would stop. One day as Mesmer was bleeding a patient, he reached for one of his magnets and they were nowhere to be found. So he picked up a stick and passed it over the patient’s cut and the bleeding stopped! What we would say today in terms of hypnosis is that passing the magnet or stick was simply a non-verbal suggestion causing trance to occur and thus causing the bleeding to stop.

After his early successes, Mesmer made a claim that would later spark a great controversy, saying that it was not the energy of the magnet that caused the bleeding to stop, but the magnetic energy that came from the patient. He called this energy Animal Magnetism. The levels of energy transmitted in mesmerism were not detectable by instruments of the time used to measure conventional magnetism, and the name Animal Magnetism would eventually discredit Mesmer.

At the height of his fame in Vienna, Mesmer moved to Paris and became a favourite of the French aristocracy. In the late 1700s everyone who was anyone went to Dr Mesmer for one of his magnetic cures. Mesmer became very successful… so much so that the medical community of the time challenged his methods and claimed he was a fraud.

Mesmer then blundered badly by asking the French king for a Board of Inquiry. The Board appointed to investigate whether Animal Magnetism existed included three people notable today: the pioneering chemist Lavoisier; the famous American Benjamin Franklin; and a medical doctor who was an expert in pain control named Guillotin. In writing the majority opinion, Franklin said, “This fellow Mesmer is not flowing anything from his hands that I can see. Therefore, this mesmerism must be a fraud.”

Mesmer, thus discredited, left Paris and went back to Vienna to practise mesmerism or Animal Magnetism. From 1795 until 1985, the notion of Energy as a healing art form was left out of mainstream western medicine and psychology.

However, to some extent, mesmerism was still practised. The Marquis de Pusseguyr in France coined the term somnambulist, meaning ‘sleepwalker,’ which we still use today to describe the deepest state of hypnosis. De Pusseguyr chose that term after he noticed that subjects in a very deep state of trance were, in essence, somnambulistic. Dr. Elliottson at London College adopted mesmerism into his practice and was almost expelled from the medical community.

Around 1840, a young surgeon in London named James Braid went to see a demonstration by a mesmerist named La Fontaine. In those days the mesmerist used to stand near the head of the patient and make downward hand passes over the body. What intrigued Braid was that the subject’s eyes would remain in an upward locked stare, looking at the mesmerist. Braid realized the importance of the eyes being fixated in causing trance. He coined a new term to describe the fixated state, which was neuro-hypnosis. Braid decided that mesmerism did not involve energy transfer. He surmised that mesmerism worked simply because suggestion caused the patient to go into trance.

James Braid wrote the ...