Since I was a child I was always very interested in hypnosis, what was it? It seemed to me like it was magic and now that I am a hypnotist I have come to find out that it is magic! After being a computer network professional for many years it dawned on me that I was a people person, I cared about people not machines. I created a weight loss product that incorporated self hypnosis and subliminal music tracks. A friend suggested that I should become a certified hypnotist and that it would add value to my product. After I accomplished this I literally threw away this project and started doing session work. I have now completed thousands of one on one hypnotherapy sessions, both in person and via telephone and videophone. I have conducted group hypnosis seminars throughout the United States and am currently working on my own courseware based on research I have been conducting for the last few years. After going to the finest hypnosis schools in the country I have modified all of the techniques I have learned and am doing hypnosis in a way that is different than anything else out there, I call it “Theta State Therapy.” It is based on hypnosis, NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming), and psychology.

The premise of this book is to finally give the general public the knowledge that there is a wonderful healing tool available to them. Hypnosis, from what I have seen, is possibly the most misunderstood topic and the most concealed healing tool we have. So many people are living inadequate lives, diminished lives… they don’t need to. I want to let everyone know that there is hope out there, there is another answer. Real and lasting healing, a connection with spirit – my goal is to spread the word. The mystery revealed to you now… Enjoy!

Before you read a word in this book become aware of your perceptions of hypnosis as they are now. Would it scare you if a hypnotist came into your room and wanted to hypnotize you this very moment? Would you let him? Do you think you could be hypnotized? Would you believe me if I told you that hypnosis could completely wipe away emotional and physical problems in your life? Do you think a hypnotist would be able to control you and make you act in ways that you would rather not? For you, is hypnosis something that goes against Gods word or your belief system? Do you think you could relive any event in your life right now, all the way back to your own birth? What about past lives, could that information be stored in there as well or could that even be real?

Think about your responses to these questions for a moment… better yet write them down on a piece of paper, you could use it as a bookmark. When you have finished the book, come back and reread the above paragraph and then open up that piece of paper and take a look. I think you’ll be surprised.

Imagine actually being a hypnotist for a moment. Most children don’t tell anyone, “I want to be a hypnotist when I grow up.” I don’t think that’s ever happened. But imagine that you are a hypnotist and you’re meeting some new people at a party, or speaking with business people inquiring about some service they provide. They happen to ask you what you do for a living. Your response, “I’m a hypnotist.” Think of the reaction! I doubt if you’ve ever even met a hypnotist in your life. Most people find it intriguing and very interesting but have no idea what it is or what I do. I have found that some people won’t want to talk to me. I had one person who would not look at me directly in the eyes as our short conversation came to a quick end. The old joke of making me cluck like a chicken has long been worn out for me as you might imagine. I’ve arrived at the point where I have developed something called Theta State Therapy, so I’ve been calling myself a “Theta State Therapist” instead of a hypnotist - no one knows what that is… Think of the hoops I have to jump through with new clients. When I first start working with a new client I first have to spend a considerable amount of time dispelling fears and misconceptions, and then I can tell them what hypnosis is. It’s kind of like a golfer who doesn’t take any lessons and then after ten years gets fed up their game and goes and takes lessons. They have to unlearn what they’ve learned and then start learning the proper way to swing a club from square one. That’s what I have had to do, over and over again... Then I got an idea. Why not write a book so people would actually know what hypnosis is?

Hypnosis, so what is it anyway? I can tell you this - it is not at all what you think it is. For a century we’ve seen swinging watches, pendulums, spiral disks, and maidens surrendering their virtue under hypnosis. Stage hypnotists making people cluck like chickens! Some people “Believe” in hypnosis and others do not. Some place hypnosis in the same category as the witch doctor or fortuneteller. Some religions associate it with the devil and are steadfast against it! Aside from all of this one can look up the definition in the dictionary and be misled. Hypnosis has nothing to do with sleep and the word trance implies mind control, which is also inaccurate.

So where does hypnosis then reside? Is it best suited for entertainment? Does it fall within psychology? Is it mind control? Is it in league with the devil? People do think of hypnosis from many different points of view mainly because they don’t understand what it is. Hypnosis can entail so many things that people’s points of view on the subject are usually misguided. These differences include entertainment, clinical therapy, the metaphysical, and the spiritual.

Let’s discuss the notion of hypnosis as entertainment, the stage hypnotist. Hypnosis in entertainment is based on the premise that a hypnotist can make people act out in ridiculous fashion. “On the count of three, run up to that microphone, drop your pants and sing us a song… one, two, and three!” After the show the participants had no idea what they were doing, right? The hypnotist had them under his spell! This is what most people think of when it comes to hypnosis. You can be made to do things that you normally wouldn’t do. But consider for a moment if it were possible to make people act as you command them to. Unethical hypnotists all over the world would be capitalizing on the ability to manipulate the mind in the realm of behavior, passion, and finance. Maybe they would convince people to send them monthly checks for the rest of their lives! Perhaps a hypnotist could get others to conduct a series of crimes that benefited the hypnotist alone. If this worked, hypnotists would be wealthy beyond belief by controlling others… that hasn’t happened. So how can the stage hypnotist get these people to do outlandish things right in front of a crowd? They aren’t out of control, actually they know what they’re doing and we’ll discuss how this works in greater detail. I personally love a good hypnosis show!

There is yet another side to hypnosis, the metaphysical - past lives. This point of view is fascinating to many people because it involves very deep questions that we have about ourselves. Have we lived before? Where do we come from, where are we going? Philosophically and mystically oriented individuals wonder if the mind can remember incarnations and spiritual memories. This particular line of thought is based on the premise that our inner mind remembers every moment and every event beyond our current incarnation. Other metaphysical thought ponders if the “Subconscious” mind is the conduit of collective consciousness to the universe. Others speculate whether going into the state of hypnosis enables our consciousness to tap into psychic powers. You may have heard the term “Regression” but most people are unaware of the term “Progression” as it relates to hypnosis. Where regression is going back in time and remembering long lost lifetimes and events, progression is moving into the future and seeing what lies ahead. We wonder if this explains how the great psychics like the Nostradamuses or Edgar Cases of the world accurately predicted the future or whether gifted children labeled as prodigies have retained the information and skills from a past life. Speculations such as these are abundant and add to the mystery, acceptance, and lack of acceptance of hypnosis and of those who practice hypnosis in a clinical way. You can see why some people may balk at the idea of seeking a hypnotherapist for a clinical issue.

Now, let’s talk about the therapy point of view, the clinical side of hypnosis. The clinical side of hypnosis deals with the manipulation of a natural state of mind. The point is to enhance that state of mind and to eliminate negative behaviors, feelings, perceptions, emotions, and greatly help or cure emotional and physical problems. This point of view maintains that the build up of negative perceptions and feelings greatly affects one’s emotional and physical health. Does negative unresolved emotion directly contribute to vast amounts of illnesses? Is hypnosis a lasting cure or only a temporary fix? Through the use of hypnosis is it possible to correct these problems permanently? How can hypnosis do any of this?

So you see, the word hypnosis conjures up all kinds of different thoughts and ideas doesn’t it? As a hypnotist, I want to state that you have stumbled upon something that is better than finding buried treasure. You hold in your hands a discovery of monumental proportions! Who are we? Where do we come from? How do our minds really work? Can we heal ourselves? Do I have to continue to live with so many emotional and physical problems? These are all very interesting questions to be sure and ones that you may be able to answer after reading this text. If you only knew what I know as a hypnotist. If you could see what I’ve seen, witnessed what I have witnessed… and by reading this book, you will! Let’s now explore the fascinating world of “Hypnosis.”

Before you can understand what hypnosis is and how it works you must really first understand how your mind works. We really have three separate and distinct minds, not one. You can think of it like having three heads on your shoulders or being one in a set of triplets. These minds do communicate and interrelate, but not well. Because of this we accumulate problems. It’s kind of like subconscious mind reality verses conscious mind reality. The conscious mind creates rationale for behavior but the truth of the matter is actually something completely different, the subconscious mind is hiding the root of the problem. The real answer lies in the subconscious mind.

Each part of the human mind has a set of jobs or tasks it does and we have identified the functions of each part. This separation of duties is important to understand because it ends up causing us all sorts of emotional and physical problems. If there weren’t this separation it would be easy for us to identify why we overeat, or become addicted or whatever… and then we could simply stop the behavior by thinking through it and correctly identifying where it actually originated. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen.

The conscious mind is where you are right now. When you are awake you are consciously aware and when you fall asleep it’s the conscious mind that sleeps or turns off. (Note* The subconscious and unconscious minds are always online) This is where your daily thoughts and opinions reside, it’s the rational you. This is the part that the hypnotist would love to just shut down because it gets in the way during session, your conscious mind doesn’t know the right answer whether you are in hypnosis or not. Here are the tasks of the conscious mind:

The conscious mind is analytical and problem solving. It is highly trained to be responsive, it’s a magnificent thinking, analyzing machine but… when in hypnosis this is the opposite of what I want. When I ask questions some people initially try and think through the answer, if I wanted this I wouldn’t have put them into hypnosis to begin with. I want the first thought or impression that comes to mind - don’t think about the answer please!

The conscious mind is also where your short-term memory resides such as: “Where did I leave my car keys?” It recalls phone numbers, people’s names, and other things stored on a temporary basis. I’ve worked with people who have had strokes and their short-term memory was terrible, interestingly their long-term memory was perfectly intact (subconscious mind).

Your conscious mind is also where willpower resides. Please note that willpower was never meant for long term change, its only function is to supply short-term mental adrenaline towards any goal. People rely on this for losing weight, to quit smoking, and habit breaking, but when it doesn’t work out it gives the person a great opportunity to feel like a failure. Willpower is a thought. As long as you can keep that thought front and center in your mind at all times it’ll work great for you… good luck!

The last thing we’ll talk about regarding the conscious mind is something called your critical factor, or your critical facilities. This is the part of the conscious mind the hypnotist needs to get around to induce the state of hypnosis. You can think of this part of your mind as a filter or a comparison mechanism. It filters what goes into your subconscious mind and what doesn’t. We develop this filter between the ages of five to six years old. Before this part of your mind developed everything that was told to you went directly into your subconscious mind and became you, absolutely no barriers. Everything was accepted as your reality. What your parents, your friends, and strangers said to you. What you watched on TV or heard on the radio. All of this went into your subconscious mind and became a part of you. Every child who has not developed this critical factor yet, is in effect in hypnosis at all times. The definition of hypnosis is: “Hypnosis is the bypass of this critical factor in the conscious mind and the establishment of acceptable selective thinking.”

Think of this filter or comparison mechanism as residing between your conscious and subconscious mind. The job it performs is to evaluate all incoming data and it either accepts these suggestions/ideas or rejects them based on the programming that is already running in the subconscious. The determination of what is accepted is not based on whether something is positive or negative, or good or bad for you. The determination is based on whether the suggestion matches what’s already been programmed. If someone says, “You’re smart”, and that’s consistent with your programming, the critical factor allows it to go in. If it’s not consistent because you’ve been programmed to feel that you are a stupid person, the critical factor rejects this statement and consequently keeps running on the past programming. For example if you feel as though you’re a stupid person and someone comes up and calls you stupid, then that’s easy to accept and that suggestion goes into the subconscious mind and becomes a part of you. If you were really feeling down because you do feel stupid about yourself and a friend calls you on the phone to boost you up and tells you all kinds of nice things, “Oh you’re so smart, look what you do for a living….” for an hour or so, you’ll hand up the phone feeling pretty good. In fact you might feel good for a few days after that conversation but track this person down in a week or so and you’ll find that they are back on their original programming - I’m a stupid person. So the power of hypnosis becomes evident at this point. Get around this filter and change the programming!

I recall working with a woman regarding weight loss and her mind took her to a few very significant events in her life. In one of these events her mother was praising her for riding her bike so well but then added – “Especially with those chubby legs.” Another event that took place a while later was at a family get-together where her uncle had a few snide comments about her fat body, after which everyone laughed. It all went right into her mind, right there - into that subconscious computer and then the critical factor has been reinforcing that programmed “body shape” ever since. All these years she has been trying to lose weight and when she does the alert goes out, “Gain that weight back so I can successfully maintain the body shape that I know is correct for me!” (Conscious mind VS Subconscious mind)

So why can’t I just change this feeling about me? Why can’t I just recognize what the problem is? Why can’t I rationally make a decision to stop that behavior and go on with my life without it? Why do so many people need counselors, talk therapists, and psychologists? And why after seeing these mental health professionals are some people still having problems?

Talk therapy is useful and therapeutic. We need physiatrists, psychologists and social workers. My old office was located in a building where I became friendly with a licensed MSW (Master of Social Work). When speaking to her one day, describing my situation with my soon to be X she simply moved her hands in front of me. One went up, and one went down like a scale. This instantly registered a truth in my mind. I asked her excitedly, “What did you just do?” She said that my X has a personality disorder. When she meets someone new that person is placed upon a pedestal and the person that she’s with instantly falls away, thrown out like gum that has lost its flavor, no feelings involved. Through her words and this simple hand action she healed me more than she could have possibly known. Through this I found out that I had been with a person that has a narcissist personality disorder, fits her like a glove. Through conscious talk therapy I was greatly helped, I had a new understanding of what just happened to me, but… the feelings were still there, I was deeply hurt. How do I eliminate that? You guessed it - hypnosis, bypassing the critical factor.

Finding and eliminating a deep seeded problem boils down to getting around this critical factor. You can think of the critical factor as though it’s a watchdog. When you’re awake, he’s awake and on guard. He’s got his paw out saying, “Wow, I really like what I’m hearing but it doesn’t match with the current programming therefore I will reject it.” What this really means is that the person likes what they hear and it may help them for a brief period of time but ultimately it will not change them. Herein lies the power of hypnosis! You can think of hypnosis as putting that watchdog to sleep for a little while and then whispering in his ear new positive suggestions for change. When the hypnosis session is over, “On the count of three, eye’s wide open and fully alert, one, two, three” - that watch dog pops back up, back at his post - but something has changed. The new program is now online! This is a simplified example of hypnotherapy of course but gives you the premise of why hypnosis works.

You have placed a critical factor perception on everything in your world. On objects, feelings, people, situations, etc. Here’s a good example. I had a woman come into my office and tell me that she has had a life long problem with men and relationships. She isn’t interested in the “Nice guys.” She keeps finding the wrong men, men who always end up treating her poorly. She found herself in one turbulent relationship after the next. Why couldn’t she be interested in anyone who treated her nicely? We discovered that in her youth her parents argued a lot, it even became physical on some occasions. They would yell, swear, and even slap each other but in the end they always made up. So this woman’s critical factor became programmed as: Love = Conflict.

Can you now understand how this critical factor can keep you separated from your desired changes? Your conscious mind really wants to lose weight, quit smoking or end the depression, but it’s battling that inner program(s), that perception/feeling in the subconscious. “My father took me to McDonalds every time I got an A on my report card or when I would do my chores without him asking me to.” When this person became fat and desperately wanted to stop eating at fast food restaurants but couldn’t, why is that? Well, now you know…

The subconscious mind is the part of the mind with which the hypnotist wants to communicate. This is the real you, your true personality. It is literal and runs on patterns or programs. It is thousands of percent more powerful than your conscious mind. For example, if I asked you what your mother was wearing when she was first teaching you how to walk I just have the feeling you couldn’t tell me. Your subconscious mind could.

You can think of your subconscious mind in a few different ways. It’s a very powerful computer running on programming, and that programming could be good, bad, or “I’m going to kill you” programming. It doesn’t rationalize anything… remember that work is done in the conscious mind, your twin brother or sister does that. So if there is a program running in your subconscious that says something like, “Food equals comfort”, then you’re going to have a really hard time losing weight unless you find and disable that program! Side note here, for many people food does equal comfort and security. I build the feeling of overeating, regress on it and fix it. Then I take the person to just before they were born. When you were in your mothers womb your security and comfort level was as high as it will ever be, then when you are born it crashes to as low as it will ever be… and then what do they do right after birth? They put something in your mouth! Actually that’s what we do with our children, which reinforces this behavior. If they are scared, tired, cranky or just plain bugging us we put something in their mouth like food or a pacifier! Hence the program is born and reinforced (Food = Comfort) putting something in my mouth comforts me.

You can also think of your subconscious mind as your twin brother or sister and your twin has been with you every moment of your life. Let’s say something terrible happens and your father was killed in an auto accident when you were eight years old. Of course this event would be devastating, but you’d get over it after a few years, “Time heals all wounds” - consciously that is. Subconsciously that feeling grows, it gets worse. Your twin may still be in shock over this event and that negative feeling tends to grow bigger and bigger in the inner mind, it magnifies through the years. Also note that you had a reaction to every feeling you ever felt for the first time. New feelings never before felt but now discovered for the first time such as: abandonment (happens in cribs a LOT), lonely, scared, confused… If you never knew what a hard pinch felt like and your brother came over to you when you were just a baby and pinched you, that trivial little introduction to what a pinch is may be the start of a negative program. (This was a real case of mine) It may seem so trivial to the conscious mind but feeling that pinch for the first time was scary business for that little kid and that unsettling feeling may be growing in the subconscious mind. Actually all of us have these emotions building in us, small or large and unfortunately all of this is hidden from the conscious mind.

A very interesting part of the subconscious mind is the fact that this is where your permanent memory resides. It has stored every moment, every event of your life and this goes all the way back to five months old - in the womb before birth! It has stored everything you’ve ever seen, touched, smelled, heard and experienced in your entire life. As a hypnotist I can take you back to any event you ever lived through. While you are there it feels as though you are there for the first time. It’s more than just remembering - it’s more like reliving the event if the state of hypnosis is deepened enough.

A funny story here… I had a woman come to me a while back who had strong feelings for this guy she had just started dating. In a very bashful way she told me that she got absolutely wasted drunk with him and did certain things with him, if you know what I mean. She couldn’t remember certain parts of the evening at all and came to me to retrieve these memories. I stepped her through the entire night moving in increments of fifteen minutes and then asking her if she had an awareness of what took place at each stop. Several times, with a big smile, she said she did. I spared her the embarrassment of actually telling me what was transpiring. Another interesting fact about regression is once a person has “Regressed”, you can move them ahead or back by seconds, minutes, hours, or days and the subconscious will go there accurately. This is quite amazing if you think about it.

As previously mentioned the subconscious mind filters emotions and it also filters information. The conscious mind can only handle so much information. There are thousands of bits of information hitting you all the time. Information like sound, lighting, temperature, movement, all hitting and reflecting off of different surfaces around you constantly, just a barrage of information. The subconscious paints a picture for you and only presents what it feels is relevant to your conscious mind. If presented with too much information we tend to lose focus or become confused.

The subconscious mind is where all of your emotions reside. It generates and stores these emotions. I help people work through emotions quite a lot in my regression work. I target an emotion that is directly related to a problem and have the subconscious take the person back to the cause. Once there we change the perception of that event. These feelings and emotions are the things that get us into lots of trouble. We tend to hide, run from, or ignore our emotions. The two things we do are to distract ourselves from them or comfort ourselves from them. Generally we don’t express them as they should be expressed. We have limited or destructive ways to release emotion. We tell our kids not to cry or express anger or else! We are taught that it isn’t good to feel sad, guilty, or afraid but these feelings do get generated and do need a place to go. What then happens to these emotions? If they are not released at the time they are generated, the subconscious and unconscious mind finds a place to put them, they will be expressed. They might end up in your legs, as in Restless Leg Syndrome. Eighteen million Americans have generated unresolved emotions into pains in their neck, shoulders, back and arms labeled as Fibromyalgia. Maybe they will get placed in the head region and become Migraines. A good place for these pent up emotions to affect us is the stomach and intestine areas such as in the case of, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. These bottled up emotions could form holes in the lining of your stomach known as Ulcers, or result in High Blood Pressure.

Notice I have just mentioned a lot of physical problems associated with emotions? Generally when people think of a clinical hypnotist they think of emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, panic attacks, fears, etc. But the list is just as long with physical problems created by emotions. How this happens is that an emotion is building in the subconscious mind and needs to be expressed. What is also happening is that there is a reaction in the unconscious mind. Remember this is the part of the mind that governs you physically. This is where a feeling is generated. The unconscious mind is a slave to the emotions that are building in the subconscious mind so a physical reaction occurs. The emotion of being stressed out for a long period of time triggers a bodily feeling in the unconscious mind that produces larger amounts of acids in the stomach which in turn creates an ulcer, or high blood pressure. The emotion of surprise or panic triggers the feeling in the body as shock due to the unconscious mind producing and releasing adrenalin in the blood. If you have the emotion of sadness a tear is produced. So emotions are in the subconscious and feelings are in the unconscious. During a hypnosis session I will ask my client where they feel the problem in their body, is it in their head, their heart, their gut, etc. This is good to know because when I circle back around at the end of the session after I believe we have resolved the emotion, I ask them if they still have the feeling in their gut, or wherever. If they say it’s gone then I am assured that we have in fact solved the problem. Make no mistake about it, unresolved emotion causes these very real symptomatic bodily problems, I’ve seen it time and time again. Ever hear of the mind body connection? Well now you know what it is.

The subconscious also tries to protect you against things both real and imagined. This is possibly its biggest job. Way back when people lived in the forests hunting and gathering this protection was extremely important. Hearing brush rustling in the woods nearby may kick in your fight or flight response. This is a survival instinct but sometimes the reaction can trip us up.

A woman came to me to rid herself of an intense fear of snakes (fears are generally very easy to fix). I asked her if she has ever been bitten by a snake, found a snake in her bed, or known anyone harmed by a snake. She answered no to all three questions. Even though she and her husband loved their home, she wanted to move from the five-acre estate because she had seen a snake in the grass one morning. Through hypnotherapy we discovered that the initial event that triggered this intense fear was a nightmare she had when she was six years old. A dream! It wasn’t even a real event.

Another example that I can relate to you was a session a colleague of mine had. He had a man come in to rid himself of an intense fear of heights. The hypnotist asked this person if the fear occurred when he was flying, he said no. What about tall bridges? Again he answered no. Well when do you get this fear? He said when standing on high balconies of tall buildings. The session continued and the hypnotist discovered that this man actually wanted to commit suicide and was planning to throw himself off of a tall building. His subconscious mind created a fear of balconies to try and protect him so he wouldn’t do it.

I had also worked with a woman who was so mortified of thunderstorms. They sent her running into the closet where she literally curled up on the floor until they passed. She initially called me from her closet while lying on the floor. When she found herself in public during a thunderstorm, a grocery store for example, she would hide in the bathroom until all the noise had diminished. Again, she had never had a close call with a lightning strike nor did she know anyone who had ever been injured in a storm. I had her follow that feeling back to the first time she ever felt it. She was seven years old, under her bed during a storm. She told me that it was the first time she had ever felt that feeling. When I cleared up that event and brought her back to the current time and place she uttered one word - Fire. Fire, huh? I asked her what was up with fire, she had no response so I lifted her arm and told her that when her arm plopped on down she would go to the first time, situation or event that had everything to do with fire. She then became very frightened. She perceived it to be very late at night. She was seven years old and standing outside in front of a house that was burning down, the whole neighborhood was there watching. She knew the kids who lived in the house and even though no one was hurt, can you guess what her subconscious mind did for her? It linked the sound of thunder with fire to protect her. This fire wasn’t caused by a lightning strike but that little seven year old mind put the two together. Good thing we solved this because she lives in Florida and Florida is the lightning capital of the US.

The subconscious mind is also where all of your habits reside. Habits are programs or patterns of behavior which are governed by emotion. Habits are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously, without directly thinking consciously about the action or behavior. Using hypnotherapy a habit is always connected to an emotion. When working with smokers I build the urge to smoke and regress on the feeling. This feeling can be anything, anxiety, fear, a need to fit in with peers, and of course comfort and distraction are a part of the equation as well.

It is also lazy, meaning it’s easier to just let things stay the way they are than to make the needed changes - sort of how you might feel waking up on Saturday morning in a dirty house. It’s just easier to let it stay the way it is than to run around and pick everything up.

Your subconscious knows what the problem is, emotionally and physically. That’s why hypnosis is so powerful. Change habits in a blink of an eye. Go back in time and deal with things that your inner mind is struggling with even though consciously you may be okay with it or may not even remember the event even took place! There are even ways during hypnosis to scan your body for physical problems. People have reported physical ills while under hypnosis that had been missed by their last physical exam. Maybe you’ve heard of world-renowned athletes who put themselves in “The Zone.” This is where the conscious mind is lessoned, where they can focus and rely on their senses and instincts. “The Zone” is mind clear focused and alert, while the body is in a reactive state, which is perfect for sports. That sounds a lot like hypnosis doesn’t it? In fact I’ve helped many athletes acquire this frame of mind at will with the use of post-hypnotic suggestion. The subconscious mind is a very powerful entity indeed.

Let’s talk briefly about the unconscious mind. This is the part of the mind that takes care of bodily functions such as your eyes blinking, your respiration, your heart beating, and your immune system. The unconscious mind reacts off of emotions in the subconscious mind and adjusts the body accordingly. This is why it is important to express your emotions because they will be expressed, either by you or a bodily reaction. IBS, RLS, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraine headache, high blood pressure, cancer, skin problems such as eczema, and many more disorders are expressions of unresolved emotion in the subconscious mind and a reactive response from the unconscious mind. This psychogenic list of physical disorders can be treated with hypnotherapy amazing well and very quickly.

There have been many clinical studies done that have affected this part of us. One of these studies, noted from the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, was run on fifteen AIDS patients. They individually drew the blood of this test group and documented the T-Cell count, which was very low and abnormal. Individually they were all put through hypnosis regarding their T-Cell count and given suggestions of normalcy with this regard. Afterwards their blood was drawn again and tested. All fifteen people in the test group tested at normal blood counts. With this study and hundreds of other clinical testing scenarios we cannot discount the affect that hypnosis can have on the body in relation to the unconscious mind.

I had worked with a crack cocaine user who had HIV. By clearing away most of the negativity stored in her subconscious mind her CD4 cell count has raised from 200 to 426! CD4 cells are white blood cells that help coordinate the various activities of your immune system. HIV targets CD4 cells more than any other kind of cell in your body. A normal CD4 cell count is about 600-1,200 cells per cubic millimeter of blood. CD4 cell counts usually fall as the HIV disease progresses. There is yet another test implemented on HIV carriers. This test is called the Viral Load test. Evidence shows that keeping the viral load levels as low as possible for as long as possible decreases the complications of HIV disease and prolongs life. After many months of HIV treatment my client’s viral load tested at 35,000 and climbing. Public health guidelines state that treatment should be considered for HIV-infected people who have a viral load higher than 30,000. When this reading gets around 40,000 the person is considered to have AIDS, the immune system is not functioning and the patient is successible to just about everything. After working with my subject which was not targeted towards her HIV whatsoever, her viral load was tested at “Undetectable.” She came skipping into my office so incredibly happy with this news. I spoke with her on the phone nearly two years after our sessions together and the doctors cannot detect that she has HIV. She told me that they’re completely stumped.

We can consciously dictate over some unconscious bodily activities if we want to. With thought we can slow our heart rate down. What about breathing? Your unconscious mind controls this system. It knows exactly how deeply to inhale and exhale to supply your body with the exact amount of oxygen. Take a moment now and concentrate on your breathing, you’ll find that if you do you’ll mess it up. This is also true with male erection disorder. If a man has performance anxiety about his erection he will encounter problems. The moment he stops thinking about it and pays attention only to his partners feel, taste, smell and look, he will have allowed his unconscious mind to control this system and things will work normally. (Note to women here, do NOT make any big deal about this if your husband is dealing with this, it will only make it worse)

Conscious Mind

Subconscious Mind

Unconscious Mind

- Critical Facilities

- Short Term Memory

- Problem Solving
- Analytical
- Rational

- Willpower

- (Personality) The Real You

- Permanent Memory

- Self Preservation

- Habits

- Lazy

- Emotions

- (Bodily Functions)

- Immune System
- Eyes Blinking
- Heart Beating
- Respiration

- Feelings

Hypnosis is the bypass of the critical factor in the conscious mind and the establishment of acceptable selective thinking. Notice the definition doesn’t say anything about relaxation or surrendering your control? Hypnosis is a natural state, Alpha/Theta brain wave states. We naturally go into hypnosis about a dozen times a day. Have you ever been driving your car down the interstate and right at the last minute you come back from wherever you were and get off at your exit just in the nick of time? Remember being in high school with your teacher rambling on and on in a monotone voice and then all of a sudden you came back from wherever you were hoping that you hadn’t drooled all over your desk? Ever read a book and kind of slip off somewhere else in your mind? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you’ve been hypnotized before. People often say it’s like daydreaming but I tend to disagree. Daydreaming is more when your mind is thinking of something, thinking about being on a boat or in some other specific situation or scene, this is more the Alpha state of mind. I know when I’m driving my car and I slip into that “Zone” my mind is pretty much blank, I’m not really thinking of anything. You can go into hypnosis by staring at a dot on the wall. The act of meditation will put your mind into the “Alpha or Theta Brainwave State” which is hypnosis. If you prey for several minutes you can go into hypnosis. Focused attention on anything will bring on the state of hypnosis.

So you now understand that hypnosis is a natural state of mind, our minds go there with or without a formal induction. In my pre-talk with clients, before we begin the session, I will tell them what it feels like to be hypnotized and cover the fears and misconceptions they may have. Some of my clients are so fearful that while they are filling out my intake form their hands are shaking. When they arrive for their second session they are always very relaxed because in the first session they didn’t even think they were in hypnosis, it was no big deal. (Interestingly enough, most of the time somehow the problem we worked on has greatly improved or vanished, hum?)

In regard to the unwarranted fear that some people have just before going into hypnosis, if you think about it, hypnosis is really nothing… let’s talk about something that is really frightening in comparison. Have you ever described the state of sleep to someone? “Okay in a moment you will fall fast asleep. During this time you will have no control of your mind or body. If I were to set the room on fire you may or may not be aware of it and it’s possible you could burn up in the flames.” Talk about scary! Hypnosis is nothing like that. You actually become more aware. One of my teachers actually had a client in deep hypnosis when he then fell over and died of a heart attack – in session! The hypnotized subject instantly popped up and ran next door for help. Luckily the hypnosis office was right next door to a doctor’s office and they were able to resuscitate him. So you can see that you are very aware of what’s going on around you while in hypnosis, even more aware.

People seem to always have at least a few fears and misconceptions regarding hypnosis. First of all, the hypnotist cannot control you and cannot make you do anything you wouldn’t normally do or take advantage of you. If you are given a suggestion that is at all uncomfortable to you, you will reject it. The stage hypnotist comes to mind on this one doesn’t it? We’ll discuss that shortly.

You are not asleep while in hypnosis. The state of sleep and the state of hypnosis are two different states of mind (Delta brain wave activity when sleeping and Alpha/Theta brain wave activity when in hypnosis). If you ever use a self-hypnosis CD and fall asleep while listening to it the suggestions become ineffective once you enter the sleep state. There are actually CDs out there that will relax you into hypnosis, then into sleep, and then will give you suggestions after you are sleeping. This is incorrect and will not work. In order for those suggestions to work you must be in a waking state such as hypnosis, not sleep.

You will remember everything that was said while in hypnosis. This is true although I give the suggestion that my client will remember everything their conscious mind feels they’re able to handle. I do this just in case we run across an event that has been repressed by the conscious mind. If someone had been raped and they don’t remember it consciously, is it really a good idea to allow that memory to surface in the conscious mind unless their conscious mind can handle it? That’s why I leave it up to their mind to determine this. Repressing a memory is exactly like smelly garbage. If the garbage is stinking up the kitchen you move it into the garage. If you can still smell it once it’s placed out in the garage you move it outside. If there is a negative memory in there some of us like to move it as far away as possible. This same thing holds true for negative emotions. Our subconscious mind generates emotions and they need to be dealt with, they need a place to go. As children most of us learn to hide our emotions, to bottle them up. The subconscious mind then may displace them into you resulting in emotional or physical illness as I have stated before. Another technique that can be of use (if you highly respect the hypnotist and if this person is of an “Authority” figure to you) is the acceptance of the suggestion of amnesia. Even if you did accept that suggestion during the session usually you will remember what was said within seventy two hours afterwards regardless.

Some people have the fear that they will get stuck in hypnosis. This couldn’t be further from the truth. No one has ever become stuck in hypnosis or unable to emerge from the state, (except that one guy I put in the closet at my office, tell no one). If the hypnotist were to leave the room and not return you would know it. After a while you would wonder if he or she is coming back and if they didn’t return you would then simply emerge all by yourself wondering where the heck they went.

And yet another concern for some people is that they will give up some deep dark secret while under hypnosis. This also is untrue. If the hypnotist wanted to get you to divulge something it would be much easier while you weren’t hypnotized. Remember, your conscious mind is dull compared to your subconscious mind. They used to try and get criminals to confess using hypnosis but quickly found out that the criminal made up such a great story under hypnosis that they would let him go, only to find out later that he actually was the one who committed the crime.

However… there is one type of hypnosis where you can actually be manipulated. This isn’t regular hypnosis as you would undergo in someone’s office or in a stage act. This is something called “Sleep Hypnosis.” It is possible to turn the state of sleep into the state of hypnosis and then back again without the subject remembering any of it. The subject must be in deep sleep, REM sleep, in order for this to work. You can tell if someone is in REM sleep by watching their eyes to see if they are moving, hence the name, Rapid Eye Movement or (REM). You could also count the breaths they take which slow down considerably from lighter sleep patterns.

Once the person is in REM sleep you can evenly and quietly say to them something like, “Barb, you can hear me but you won’t wake up.” You say this to them about five or six times and at the end of the sixth time say, “Raise your index finger when you can hear me.” They then raise their index finger and now they are in hypnosis! Now you can conduct a full-blown hypnosis session. This means you can regress them, have them open their eyes, have them talk to you, have them get up and walk around or whatever. When you’re done and want them to go back to sleep, to change the state of hypnosis back into the state of sleep, you say the following, “You now go back to sleep and won’t remember we spoke”, and again repeat this several times. By doing this they will not remember a thing… hum, I wonder if I should have told you that? Maybe I should get a part time job at a sleep clinic somewhere? After a while I could be receiving multiple checks in the mail on a daily basis!

There is one more very interesting account with regard to sleep hypnosis. There have been hundreds of studies conducted on people who have previously undergone surgery. These people were later placed in the state of sleep hypnosis and they could recall, word for word, everything that was said in the operating theater while the surgery was being performed! They recalled every word, what the surgeons were saying and what the nurses were saying during their surgery, all while they were deeply anesthetized. This is where waking suggestions come into play big time. Even though the patient isn’t awake their subconscious mind is still listening and recording everything. Hopefully the surgeon or the nurses weren’t saying anything like, “This doesn’t look good - I hope she doesn’t die.” You can see how these suggestions later could alter a person’s recovery rate or lack thereof! And for some reason trying to uncover what the subconscious mind hears during surgery will only work with the use of sleep hypnosis, regular hypnosis doesn’t yield memories from the anesthetized mind.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, what about the stage hypnotist? I’ve seen those shows on TV. I’ve seen what they do in comedy clubs and he was making those people do all kinds of crazy things! Well… not exactly, let me explain what’s happening.

The stage hypnotist is looking for two kinds of people, the extrovert or the person that hasn’t been to a nightclub in ten years and is feeling like, “This is my night and I’m going to let loose!” It’s kind of like getting drunk in a way. When we drink our inhibitions lesson, but even so not everyone goes crazy when drunk. If you had a room full of fifty drunken people and you went around with a lamp shade and asked everyone to put it on their head and dance around, most wouldn’t do it, but some would. I personally have never worn a lampshade on my head but others have, and those are the ones that the stage hypnotist is looking for. Also, a stage hypnotist wants an audience of at least seventy five people or more otherwise his odds decline greatly. Out of one hundred people, thirty of them will be great in a hypnosis show. They drop like a rock, go very deep and are animated. Another thirty will be good but will require more deepening. Yet another thirty percent will go into hypnosis but will need a lot of deepening and will not be very animated at all. The last ten percent will not allow themselves to be hypnotized - so it’s a numbers game.

Some stage hypnotists will conduct suggestibility tests on the entire audience and pick out the ones who seem to be the most suggestible. Other stage hypnotists will conduct one on one tests. He will call the volunteers to the side of the stage one at a time to do some evaluations. First he wants to make sure they’re not drunk, after all it is a night club right? He also is looking for the most suggestible people and people who can follow directions. He’ll say to them, “Take a nice deep breath in - really fill up your lungs with air.” If they take a shallow breath he politely sends them back to their seat and calls for the next volunteer. He’ll also run some suggestibility tests on them. If they pass these tests and he feels they will be a good hypnosis subject then they are picked to participate in the show. The last thing he’ll say to them is something like this, (leaning in, invading their personal space a bit), “Know that this is a show, it’s entertainment, so get into it, be animated, have fun, be an actor! Okay… you’ve been selected – now take your seat on the stage!” He has interjected some mental expectancy here for sure.

Most stage hypnotists will also pick ten to fifteen subjects for the show. He will line them up on stage. The main reason for this is because if he only picked two or three, the odds of the show failing increase quite a bit. If you’ve seen one of these shows you’ve noticed that by about half way through the show usually several of the people are just slumped over in their chair and they appear as though they are sleeping. The hypnotist appears as though he is completely ignoring them or they have been removed from the stage altogether. What happens is he’ll approach one of the hypnotized subjects, tap them on the shoulder and say something like, “In a moment I’m going to count to three and when I do I want you to run up to that microphone, drop your pants and sing us a song. Here we go, one, two, and three!” And they do nothing… Why is this? Well, they have rejected his suggestion! They don’t want to do it! So he leaves them and goes to the next subject and gives the same suggestion. This person complies and the show continues. While the show progresses the stage hypnotist starts with very light suggestions, ones that anyone would do. He watches his subjects very closely to pick out the ones that are the most animated. These are the ones that he will select for the final crazy antics. A lot of stage hypnotists will also suggest that their subject “Forget.” Forget about you worries, forget about everything, we are just going to have fun here tonight, so forget about everything. If this suggestion is accepted the subjects will not initially recall what they did on stage adding to the enjoyment and mystery of the night.

So you see, even the stage hypnotist cannot make you do anything! This is one of the biggest myths with regard to hypnosis. Those people know what they are doing. It’s just so much easier to “Get into it” when in the state of hypnosis. I tell all of my clients that I can’t make them lose weight or make them quit smoking. All I can do is assist them in something that they want to accomplish. If hypnotists could make people do what they wanted, then we’d all be hypnotists! “Hay, why am I writing Tim Bartley another check for one hundred dollars? Ooh well…”

Hypnosis feels a bit different in my office than just naturally going into it. After I induce the state of hypnosis, which most of the time is instantly, the person starts thinking even though my instructions were to not think. First they are thinking, “Am I hypnotized? I don’t think I’m hypnotized, is this working? I don’t feel any different.” You see, most people have a preconceived idea about what hypnosis is going to feel like. They expect that they will be out of control, sleeping, or expect to feel something - but it’s just not like that.

After these thoughts die down then people generally start thinking about moving or adjusting their body. “I’m uncomfortable, is it okay to move?” “I have an itch, can I scratch it?” Of course it’s okay to move around. I remember I had two clients in my office, one after the other, on two consecutive days for smoking cessation. Both of them were squirmers. They squirmed around so much that I actually swiveled my chair around and was kind of looking the other direction because they were bothering me! So yes, it’s okay to move while in hypnosis, actually the definition of hypnosis says nothing about relaxation. I could hypnotize you standing up, with your eyes open.

After the person gets by these sets of thoughts they all pretty much say the following after the session has been completed. “Well… I was listening to you and heard most of what you said but I kind of tuned you out here and there, I stopped listening to you after a while but then I came back and started paying attention again.” This happens much more when I’m doing most of the talking, if I’m doing a direct suggestion kind of session then yes, the person tends to tune me out here and there. This tuning out does not mean that they aren’t “getting it” though, in fact I believe my suggestions are getting in there even better during this time because they are so deep. Hypnosis is similar to a sleep pattern in a way. When you sleep at night you go through cycles of sleep where you shallow out for a while, meaning you are in light sleep, and then go into REM sleep, rapid eye movement where you are in deep sleep. The same holds true for the state of hypnosis. That’s why it’s important to deepen your subject so when they “shallow out” they aren’t “coming out” of hypnosis.

Interestingly enough most people don’t even think they were hypnotized when we have concluded our session no matter what took place. I was taught that it’s very important your client knows that something was going on. Maybe that is important but I focus more on results. Nonetheless I use to do all kinds of things to prove they were hypnotized such as: “In a moment I will count from fifteen down to one. At the count of one or before, your right arm will be so light that it will just float up to the ceiling.” I won’t bore you with the patter, (patter is the term used by hypnotists, it’s what they say during a session), but their arm would be floating on up, waving around in the air. Sometimes I would have them open their eyes and look at their arm floating around, they generally laugh and think it’s funny. Then I might tell them that when I snap my fingers the sensation in their arm goes from very light to extremely heavy and that arm will just plop on down at the snap of my fingers and, Snap! Their arm falls as if it’s filled with led, I then have them close their eyes and go much deeper.

After the session when I ask them what they thought about their arm floating up like it did they say that it was pretty neat but they still don’t think they were hypnotized! I would do things like the floating arm or just regress them back to being two or three years old. After the session they were amazed, “Wow, my mom looked so young!” Of course they still didn’t think they were hypnotized. You see that’s the thing, people expect hypnosis to be this wild out of control kind of feeling, it just isn’t. Once in a while I get the metaphysical types coming in wanting an “experience” so if I take my usual approach they won’t think they were hypnotized either. Here’s the thing though, if you want someone to absolutely know they were hypnotized then you must deepen them quiet a bit. We’ll discuss deepening later in chapter three. Extreme deepening of trance isn’t generally necessary for most clinical hypnosis sessions, however I know deepen for about twenty minutes so the conscious thinking mind doesn’t interfere as much.

The biggest convincer that you were in hypnosis is that time is very skewed. If a person is in hypnosis for an hour or ten hours, it pretty much feels like around twenty minutes or so. But again, the more they are talking the longer the session feels. The more you deepen the person, the more this feeling of being hypnotized increases. By counting, breathing, suggestions of letting go and imagery, it is possible to have an “experience” while in hypnosis, most definitely, and that experience is always a pleasant one.

Another huge aspect of hypnosis is that you cannot induce hypnosis without someone’s knowledge or consent. Most of the time I use an instant induction to place a person into hypnosis. We will talk about inductions later but if I were to just walk up to you and snap my fingers in front of your eyes and command “Sleep”, you’d look at me funny! If you knew I was a hypnotist and you wanted to be hypnotized and I did that same thing, you would then be placed in a wonderful state of hypnosis. Mental expectancy is key here.

Mental expectancy is another gigantic part of hypnosis. “What the mind expects to happen tends to be realized” - “Thought becomes reality.” I’m sure you have heard the expression of a “Self fulfilling prophecy.” I cannot tell you how many times people have come to see me for physical problems and they’ve already tried everything else. They have had multiple MRI scans, been through a whole host of doctors and drugs. Actually here is the progression of what people typically do… They go to a doctor, then another doctor, and then to a specialist. Then they go to a counselor or a psychologist and they still don’t find relief. Then they go to an acupuncturist, a tarot card reader and they still haven’t found relief. Then they’ll try hypnosis and guess what? They get fixed! (If they find the right one that is.)

When these people walk in my door I tell them, I move into their personal space a bit to make my point, “You will be healed of this problem you have if you do what I tell you to do. I’ve done this so many times in the past and we can easily get rid of this for good.” I also tell them not to “Try” or “Hope” because these are actually failure words. Anytime you’ve ever tried to do something or hoped that it would work, you probably failed at it. We will achieve this change right now, today… and many times we do.

Mental expectancy works in other parts of our lives as well. When you were a teenager did you ever go to a concert? You buy the tickets months ahead of time and then you count down the days on the calendar. You play that bands music more and more as the date of the show approaches. Now it’s finally the day of the concert and you get in your car with your friends, how exciting! This is going to be great! Well of course it will be great. You just spent several months anticipating this night and building mental expectancy towards it.

Another interesting example of mental expectancy is the preacher you see on TV, you know the ones I’m talking about. It’s a huge stadium with twenty thousand people and he’s up there with the microphone talking excitedly through a million watt PA system. There’s a single file line of people coming up to him and he’s healing one person after the next, they’re falling to the floor. He speaks to them as if he is God. His voice just blaring loud, he grabs their forehead with his hand, shakes their head back and forth, and then smacks them on the head with his bible. They fall down and when they stand up, they are healed! And you know what? A lot of them are… but why? Mental expectancy and… are you ready for this? Hypnosis!

These people have been waiting months for this big healing event. They’ve had that card on their refrigerator and have looked at it for weeks and weeks. On September 27th I am going to get this bum leg healed! When they arrive at the stadium, the grandeur of it all, so many people, the lights! They get in that single file line and advance one by one to the podium where the preacher is. They are seeing the people ahead of them falling to the floor and then getting up healed. Talk about critical bypass factor of the conscious mind, man that’s it! They finally get right in front of him and he hits them with his bible which causes their nervous system to spike way up, then way down into hypnosis, (I do this same thing every day in my office, it’s an instant induction), and they fall to the floor and don’t know what hit them! They are assisted to their feet and yes, it’s a… it’s a miracle! And I would agree with that, it is a miracle, a hypnosis miracle.

So how far back does all of this hypnosis stuff go anyway? It actually goes way back to ancient Egypt where they used something known as “Sleep Temples.” This method was associated with Imhotep, the earliest known physician in history. Imhotep, (his name meaning “He comes in peace”), temples were busy centers for incubation used for sleep therapy. Through specific rituals people who were ill were psychologically prepared for therapeutic procedures in these temples. Later in history Romans also borrowed trance healing from the Egyptians and Greeks.

Prior to the fifteenth century physical and emotional problems were considered to be punishment from the Gods. Healers of the time would use chanting, drums, and dancing while speaking suggestions of healing. The subject was placed in hypnosis by the means of these rituals and the mental expectancy of their “Great Tribal Healer” enabled the healing to actually succeed.

In the eighteenth century in Europe, magnets were used in the treatment of many illnesses, which became known as “Animal Magnetism.” The leading healer of this period was Franz Anton Mesmer, 1775, who treated patients with these magnets and suggestions. This is where the term “Mesmerized” comes from. Mesmer believed that when the ebb and flow of fluid within the body was disturbed or out of harmony with the universal rhythm that mental or nervous illness could result. He waved magnets that were attached to a wooden device over his subjects giving suggestions of healing.

In 1784, Marquis de Puysegur, coined the term “Somnambulism” the literal definition means sleepwalking. This is known as the third level of hypnotic trance. If I cannot achieve this level with my clients, we then reschedule for another day. At somnambulism the hypnotist’s entire tool belt is available for use, so to speak. Regressing a person to an earlier event will not work unless the person is first in “Somnambulism.”

In 1815, Abbe Jose Faria, develops the “Fixed Gaze” method of hypnotic induction. Later in history in the 1840’s the Scottish surgeon, James Braid, coined the term “Hypnosis” after the Greek word “Hypnos” which means “To Sleep.” In 1846 Scottish doctor, James Esdaile, performed thousands of painless operations which included nineteen amputations, removal of tumors, and three hundred major deep operations. His success rate and mortality rate were astonishingly positive.

James Braid, 1795-1860, gave the phenomena associated with mesmerism a respectable scientific angle. He coined the words, hypnotism, hypnotic and hypnotize. Braid’s scientific approach to hypnotism with his terminology made it possible for people to embrace the subject and his assertion that hypnotic effects were subjective, and not produced by the hypnotist. This was very important in the advancement of hypnosis as a therapy.

Hippolyte Bernheim, 1886, publishes the book “Suggestive Therapeutics”, which is still considered a classic hypnosis text. Bernheim made a practice of hypnotizing all hospital patients for which he cared for. Within four years he had hypnotized around five thousand people, which yielded a seventy five percent success rate in his healing stats. Years later this number grew to ten thousand with a healing success rate of eighty five percent.

In 1885, Sigmund Freud, and friend, Joseph Breuer, used hypnosis successfully in psychotherapy and produced their classic, “Studies in Hysteria.” Freud was convinced that powerful mental processes remain hidden from the consciousness of men. (So very true)

During WWI, 1914-1918, Germans used hypnosis to treat shell shock, which allowed soldiers to return to the fighting almost immediately. After the second world war, Milton Erickson, theorized that hypnosis is a state of mind that all of us enter normally, spontaneously, and frequently. In 1933, Erickson and Hull published, “Hypnotism and Suggestibility”, which is arguably the most scientific treatment of hypnotism available.

Through the 1930’s–1960’s, Dave Elman teaches hypnosis techniques to hundreds of physicians and dentists all over the United States for the use of pain elimination. His techniques of “Regression to Cause” are still used widely. I use his techniques in my office on a regular basis. His book, “Hypnotherapy”, is a must red for any aspiring hypnotist.

The British Medical Society recognized hypnosis as a legitimate medical tool in 1955 and was also recognized by the American Medical Association in 1958. Today hypnotherapy continues to gain popularity and is considered a hugely significant contribution in the treatment of emotional, psychological, physical, and habitual problems. It is my aim, by the writing of this book and the production of other materials, to educate the masses as to this buried treasure of healing - 2008.

Let’s discuss the different areas of hypnosis to better understand what they are. One part, which is used in advertisements and very common is something called “Waking hypnosis.” Waking hypnosis is an action that causes a reaction. This is not formal hypnosis but it does produce a response.

If you see someone yawn or imagine someone yawning, you probably will yawn. Lets say you’re sitting at a ball game and you’re really into it and feeling comfortable, then someone makes a comment like, “Boy, it is hot out here.” Right at that moment you feel the heat, “Wow it is hot!” You begin to sweat. Here’s one for the medical community. Imagine the guy who just had a heart attack and they’re wheeling him into the hospital, he then looks up to the doctor and asks, “Doc, am I going to make it?” The doctor looks down and says, “We’ll do the best we can.” The patient then thinks to himself, “Oh no, I’m going to die.” Why didn’t that doctor just say, “Your fine, this same thing happens in here every single day, you’ll be out of here by tomorrow or the next day, no worries.”

Even words can be waking hypnosis. A nurse asks you, “How is your pain today?” The word pain brings on pain. It’s a “Painted” word. Wouldn’t it be better to use the word discomfort? What if a person is unconscious and pulled out of a wrecked car then placed into the ambulance, “Oh, we’ve got a bleeder, this doesn’t look good, I hope we can save him.” Even if that person is unconscious it still goes into the subconscious and is interpreted by the inner mind. Waking hypnosis is a form of disguised hypnosis.

What about advertisements? Ever see pictures of models with shiny white teeth selling cigarettes? Skinny pretty young people eating a mound of fattening food. Commercials where there is a split screen and on one side there is a dancing chicken and on the other side someone is talking to you, selling you something – your mind distracted on the dancing chicken while they fire in suggestions. The subconscious mind deals with emotions, how about the “Ask you doctor” drug commercials. The first sentence makes you worry about something going wrong with you and then they pipe in the soothing music at the exact time they prompt you to ask your doctor about their drug. It goes on and on and on with advertising…

Suggestibility and suggestibility tests, what is this? These are tests given to people in order to “Size them up” before hypnosis. What the hypnotist wants to determine is whether the person can pretend or imagine. Can they follow simple directions? There are many of these types of tests so we’ll only go through a few of them. Hypnotists sometimes use these before a formal induction into hypnosis to see how the person will respond. He might use them in group settings to pick out the best candidate, the most suggestible, to come up to the stage for a demonstration. Suggestibility is simply imagining something to the point where it is real, it’s a good imagination.

Let’s say you are the hypnotist, you’re up in front of a group of people and you will later be picking out a person or two to hypnotize. You want to get the best subjects for the demonstration right? So you want to use a suggestibility test and here’s a good one… “Okay, everyone stand up. Place both of your arms out in front of you, palms up. Close your eyes and now imagine that you are holding two buckets, one in each hand. Imagine that the bucket in your right hand is very heavy, its filled half way with sand. The bucket in your left hand, however, is so light as if it is filled half way with feathers. Your right arm is getting so heavy – even heavier now as I pour water into that bucket. Imagine now that bucket is filled half way up with wet sand. Your left hand bucket is lighter though, it’s a breezy day and most of the feathers have blown out, it even feels as though the feathers are actually helping lift that bucket higher and higher. The bucket on the right is now extremely heavy as I pour even more sand in, all the way to the top, you can barely hold it up now…”

You get the idea. As you look out into the crowd you’ll get a mix of positions. Some people will have barely moved either arm at all while others will have one arm lifted way up towards the sky and the other down below their waist. So later when it’s time to pick a person to hypnotize, of course, you’ll pick out the people whose arms are high and low because they are the most suggestible and the most imaginative. Notice I used the word imaginative, or imagine. Everyone can imagine something but only around eighteen percent of the population can “Picture” something in their mind. This is crucial when you are talking to a hypnotized person because if you say something like, “Now I want you to picture yourself at the beach”, most will be like – “Ah, sorry, no can do…”

Another popular test is the hands clasped test. This one works much the same way as any other. You have the subject clasp their hands together with their fingers interlocking and give many suggestions that their hands are so tight, their hands are just made from one solid block of wood. The hypnotist gives several suggestions that the hands are indeed one. Now the harder they try to pull them apart the more locked down they become! Of course some people will easily pull their hands apart and others will not be able to.

So if someone fails a suggestibility test does that make them un-hypnotizable? No it doesn’t. In fact I really don’t use these even when I am a guest speaker or conducting a seminar and will later be hypnotizing someone out of the crowd. Maybe that’s an error on my part but I’ve hypnotized so many people and very rarely have I failed at it. The people that fail at becoming hypnotized are the ones that are thinking too much or have fears about going into the state of hypnosis. I always dispel the fears before working with anyone but I occasionally run into someone who just won’t stop thinking. I dub these people with having the, “Mile-a-Minute Syndrome” people. Most of these mile-a-minute subjects I can hypnotize but when I try to take them back in time, to regress them, it doesn’t work because they are thinking too much. Let’s face it, all I’m doing is talking and if someone is mentally already talking over me there’s not much I can do. I don’t keep a mallet under the chair to knock them in the head even though sometimes I wish I did. My goal is to speak to the feeling level mind not the analytical mind. These analytical types comprise around five percent of the population.

Inductions are used to induce the state of hypnosis. This is the bypass of the critical factor in the conscious mind. Historically hypnotists have used something called the “Progressive Relaxation” induction. This is a long-winded way to induce hypnosis. Typically you go through all the body parts, all the muscles of the body and suggest relaxation in each muscle group. This relaxation coupled with counting and deep breathing induces hypnosis. I have used this occasionally, more as a deepener really, but I do so very seldom. This induction is usually between fifteen to thirty minutes long and that equates to a lot of time wasted in a busy hypnosis office.

One other famous way of inducing hypnosis is eye fixation, which is done by using a pendulum or spiral disk. You have the subject stare at something and use suggestions of relaxation. You could have a person point at a spot on the ceiling and tell them that their arm will start to come down at it’s own pace, when it gets half way down you tell your subject that their arm will then become very heavy, fall down, and when it hits something their eyes will close and they will be in a deep state of hypnosis. I have used this on a few occasions but one time it didn’t work. The person just kept the arm at the same level so I slapped the arm, fired in the word “Sleep” and she dropped into hypnosis like a rock. That’s an instant induction.

Another very popular induction is called the “Elman” induction. This is about four minutes and works very well. I used to use this in almost every session. This relaxes the mind and body and has tests built right in so you’ll know if the person is at the proper level of hypnosis. The hypnotist who created this was, Dave Elman, hence the name. In this induction you have the person close their eyes and imagine that they cannot open them, deepen the state physically then mentally and then test. By just having someone imagine or pretend that they can’t open their eyes and then testing for that eye relaxation induces hypnosis.

The induction of choice for me is the instant induction. This takes a person from the normal waking state into the state of hypnosis, instantly. It’s simple and very affective and can be modified a million different ways. Anytime you have ever been startled in your life you were deeply hypnotized for a fraction of a second. When your brother or sister jumped out at you and yelled “Boo!” you went into somnambulism, deep hypnosis, but came out of it just as fast. This instant induction is basically spiking the nervous system. The startled person’s nervous system instantly spikes way up and then drops way down into hypnosis and then recovers to a normal conscious level all very quickly. If you spike that nervous system, command the word “SLEEP” and keep talking for about thirty seconds the subject does not recover and stays in very deep state of hypnosis. The first twenty times I did this I was more than nervous, it’s just hard to wrap your mind around it because it is so simple. You don’t think it will work on everyone, but it does.

The possibilities to modify the instant induction are endless. You can snap your fingers in front of the eyes, clap your hands in front of their face, smack their forehead… right after the physical shock, and to the bystander it appears as if you are doing the physical shock and the command at the same time, shout or command the word “SLEEP!” then keep talking. It doesn’t matter what you say for the most part. You could even recite your grocery list if you wanted to, very simple and effective. Of course it’s important to pick the right induction for the right person. I live in Florida and get a number of older clientele. I don’t shock little old ladies who appear to be a hundred and seventy years old. (Well honestly, sometimes I do… tell no one)

“Place your hand in mine.” (Your hand on bottom, theirs on top, their elbow back, their hand hovering just over the chair or for more of a shock over their own leg.) “Look at me right here.” (Point to the bridge of your nose – conscious mind confusion.) “In a moment I’m going to count from one to three, at the count of three press down against my hand and I’ll be pressing back up against your pressure, then follow my instructions, got it?” (Conscious mind confusion again - “Why am I doing this?”)

“One, two, and three. Press, press… good. Now close your eyes and take a deep breath.” On the exhale remove your hand quickly. This action makes the person slap their hand down creating the nervous system spike, just a fraction of a second later command the word, “Sleep!” You only have a fraction of a second to give a suggestion and of course they are not going into the state of sleep but then again you don’t have enough time to say much else, and the mind interprets this as to relax.

A very important point now is to - KEEP TALKING! “Now you listen to my voice and relax your body…” Here you can say anything you’d like but I generally give suggestions of relaxation and comfort. After the command of sleep you’ll want to talk continuously for about thirty seconds or so. A very interesting and startling response to the hypnotist here can be that if you don’t close your subject’s eyes they may stick in the open position. Sometimes you fire in that word, “Sleep!” and their eyes become stuck wide open. If this happens gently rake your thumb and index finger over them to close them. The first time that happens to you is usually a bit unsettling, but interesting as well.

No doubt that some of you reading the above paragraph will want to try and hypnotize someone. There is something you should be aware of before doing so. There is something called an “Abreaction” that can occur. Without warning in the first moments of the hypnotic trance a person can have an abreaction. An abreaction can be profuse crying or in extreme cases the person can immediately become physically agitated to the point where their arms may be flailing about. (Out of the thousands of session I have done so far I have only encountered two crying abreactions and one physical one, it is a very rare occurance.)

What has happened is that their subconscious mind has instantly taken them back to a nasty situation that needs resolution, it’s a release from the subconscious mind. All of a sudden a man might be storming Normandy Beach in a horrific battle, dodging bullets, and/or possibly yelling. These are on the rare side but possible, most of the time the person will just begin to cry. If this happens it’s very important to NOT get excited by it. If this happens state the following, “The scene fades and tend to your breathing”, saying this several times. The person having the abreaction will not instantly come out of it though. If the person is being loud you must talk over the person by raising the volume of your voice but not allowing the abreacting person to know that this event has shaken you. On the flip side I love it when this happens because I then can have the person follow this feeling back to the first time they ever felt it and clean up. This is referred to as age regression through building the affect bridge, which we will talk about in later chapters.

So you’ve done the instant induction and talked for thirty seconds continuously and relaxed your subject. How do you know that they are in hypnosis? First, there are physical signs given off by the hypnotized person. Some people show all of these physical signs, some show a few of them and some show none of them. The most prevalent one is noticed by looking at the person’s eyes. Their eyes are closed but you can notice a fluttering of the eyelids or the eyes are moving back and forth under the closed lids (windshield wiper under the eye affect), or both. Try that same thing right now, close your eyes and move them back and forth as if you’re looking to the right and left. You’ll find that it becomes very uncomfortable almost immediately. This is the sign I usually look for, if this is pronounced I generally skip testing for trance depth because I know they are in somnambulism. The other, less noticeable signs are that they may become warmer. The body tends to swell a bit during hypnosis. Some people swallow more because their sinuses are relaxed and draining. Their tear ducts may open up and release a tear. You could have them open their eyes and would notice a red tint. This is also a sign of deep hypnosis. Above and beyond the physical signs I generally regress all of my clients to a happy time in their childhood. If this works then they are at the proper depth. If the regression fails I will deepen the state for a while and then retest with another regression test. If they regress they are in somnambulism. There are other tests BUT even if they pass those they may not regress so I always regress them to make sure they are at the right depth.

There are five levels of hypnosis or hypnotic trance and they are as follows: Light, Medium, Somnambulism, Coma, and Ultra-Depth. Light and medium levels are self-explanatory. Somnambulism is the third level and is the trance level where age regression work is successful. Below somnambulism is the “Coma” state. Being in the hypnotic coma state is not the same as a person in a hospital that is in a coma. It’s actually a state of euphoria, a wonderful place to be. In this state, without suggestion, the subject has no pain. This is where surgery or painless child birth can take place and it is also a great place to work to rid someone of pain forever. This is accomplished by bringing on the pain hard and heavy about fifteen times in a row, then with a post-hypnotic suggestion, like a finger pinch or word the pain vanishes or is turned into warmth instead of pain. The hypnotist suggests that the discomfort will subside completely. The hypnotist emerges the person in a special way that will keep their muscles loose and limp so they are pain free. If the discomfort ever comes back they can use the post hypnotic suggestion of the finger pinch or word and the discomfort goes away and stays away even longer.

The coma state is achieved by deepening the mind and the body much more than usual. Some people go into this state naturally without the deepening. So how do you know that they are in the coma state? I usually test to see if they are there by first simply giving the suggestion that they will open their eyes on the count of three. If they are in the coma state they are pretty much ignoring me so at the count of three they do nothing. A second test would be to get right in their face and loudly speak, “Open your eyes!” and again, if no response they are there. You could then pick up their arm and give them a really good pinch, and again nothing. The best and most interesting test is that you can position their limbs in any position and they stick there. They can maintain this seemingly awkward position for hours and will have no ill effects from it.

To the person in the coma state they are actually having such a good time that they want to ignore you completely. Sometimes a person will dive into this state naturally without a lot of deepening and the hypnotist has to determine if they fell asleep or if they entered the coma state. The person really does hear you but they choose to ignore you. Later, to emerge the person you have to give them the coma threat. “At the count of three you will become fully alert and if you don’t… I’ll never put you in this state again!” And now they emerge perfectly.

There has been another level found below the coma state called Ultra-Depth. Walter Sichort, created an induction that is similar to a progressive relaxation induction that can place people in this state. It’s very difficult to get people in this state but once done it seems to be a place of instant miracle healing. To my knowledge he worked on the induction for around twenty-five years changing a word or phrase here and there and then he would test it once again. I haven’t learned of any recent advancement in this work as of this writing.

There are other ways to categorize trance levels and I will explain each here briefly. Stage one is called the “Hypnoidal” stage, demonstrated via eyelid catalepsy. Stage two is called “Light Hypnosis” demonstrated via arm catalepsy. Stage three is “Medium Hypnosis” demonstrated via aphasia and body catalepsy. Stage four is labeled the “Threshold of Somnambulism” demonstrated via amnesia and analgesia (bodily sensation without pain). Stage five is “Full Somnambulism” demonstrated via anesthesia and positive hallucinations (having something appear that isn’t there). And finally stage six, “Profound Somnambulism” which is demonstrated via negative hallucinations (I’m here talking to you but you don’t see me). Of course, these stages are our attempt to map out the human mind, which can be viewed and categorized differently depending on who is doing the mapping.

Your brain is always producing electromagnetic brainwaves that have a measurable frequency and magnitude. The characteristics of your brainwaves at any given moment determine your mood and state of mind. The frequency range and magnitude identify whether you are alert, aroused, asleep, or anywhere in between these states. People are looking into ways of expanding our knowledge of how our brainwaves can be harnessed to create peak states of consciousness. For example, the best moments of creativity, those Eureka flashes, occur mostly when theta waves are predominant. The hypnagogic state verging between waking and sleeping is characterized by theta brainwave activity (hypnosis). This explains why we have such great ideas before falling asleep or when first waking. This “border-zone” time period has been utilized by many scientists and other great thinkers who have had flashes of insight while experiencing this holistic state of mind. Thomas Edison used to sit on his porch in a rocking chair clutching ball bearings in his hand, palm down, over a metal bucket. He would close his eyes and drift down into Theta. If he fell asleep his hand would open and the ball bearings would fall into the bucket and wake him. He would then grab them up again and start all over again, this is how he trained himself to go into the state at will.

There are also four different stages of brain wave activity. The first stage of activity is the BETA stage. Beta is upper level thinking, that’s where you are right now. You are aware, rationally thinking and awake, it’s the analytical state. Beta waves are 13 to 30Hz and are the fastest waves, most commonly found during our waking state. It is associated with outward awareness, engaged mind, arousal, actively perceiving and evaluating forms of data through the senses; also present with fear, anger, worry, hunger, and surprise.

ALPHA is the next stage. This is a relaxed, daydream state. Alpha waves are 7 to 13Hz and associated with non-drowsy but relaxed, tranquil state of consciousness. Here there is less engagement and arousal, pleasant inward awareness, body/mind integration, present during meditation and states of relaxation.

The THETA state is a dream like state where we are not completely asleep or unconscious but almost, consciousness just above sleep. THETA waves are 3 to 7Hz and are associated with increased recall, creativity, imagery and visualization. Free-flowing thought, future planning, inspiration, drowsiness, present during dreaming and REM states. You could also call this awareness hypnosis.

And finally there is the DELTA state, where we are unconscious and sleeping. DELTA waves reside in the .1 to 3Hz range and are associated with deep dreamless sleep. Deep trance state pituitary release of growth hormone, self-healing, present during deep levels of non-REM sleep.

Levels of Trance I

Levels of Trance II

Brain Wave Activity

- Light

- Medium

- Somnambulism

- Coma

- Ultra-Depth

- Hypnoidal

- Light Hypnosis

- Medium Hypnosis

- Threshold of Somnambulism

- Full Somnambulism

- Profound Somnambulism

- Beta

- Alpha

- Theta

- Delta

It’s a good idea to test to see what level of hypnosis your subject is in because your regressions, taking people back in time, will not work unless they are at the third level of hypnosis called somnambulism. At this level you have all the necessary tools to do your job. You’ve most certainly heard the word “Trance” when you hear people speaking of hypnosis or the phrase “Depth of Trance.” I don’t really like the word trance because it stirs up all kinds of images of someone being controlled or out of control and that most certainly is not the case. Trance to me is just someone with his or her eyes closed and relaxed, I don’t put any more on it than that. Actually we are always in some state of trance anyway…

Okay, so they appear to be in hypnosis, now is a good time to test for depth. There’s a million ways to do this. One of the ways I test is to give a suggestion of amnesia. “In a moment you’ll count out loud from one to ten but this time there just isn’t anything between four and eight.” I have modified this lately as some people just skipped the numbers because I told them to. Now I tell them that the numbers between four and eight will be there in their mind possibly but they’ll be unable to speak them, “You will be unable to articulate the numbers between four and eight, they are just unspeakable numbers.” They smile and continue counting at nine or get confused because they can’t understand why they can’t say the numbers. Most of the time I’ll just regress them back to being six years old or some other very low age. I think regressing a person is the best way to test because I’m about to build the affect bridge, or in more technical terms I’m about to rattle their cage, and I don’t want to do that unless I know they will be able to move back in time so we can clear the negativity away.

This testing for depth is important. When I was a newbie hypnotist I would sometimes spend a lot of time deepening the trance state before I was certain the person was actually hypnotized. I would then launch into some sort of therapy and it wouldn’t work. When it didn’t work I would then have to launch into yet another induction (using multiple inductions without the subject knowing is referred to as “Pyramiding”) then test, and then deepen. This is a gigantic time waster!

Now I deepen for a few minutes, then test to make sure my subject is indeed in hypnosis, then deepen much more. I can usually tell if the person is hypnotized by just looking at them, so about half the time I don’t even test anymore. Getting to this point just takes experience. Also some people fail the “Losing the Numbers” test but are hypnotized. This used to shake me up but I now just continue because I know they are hypnotized just by looking at them, they just don’t want to lose the numbers.

Deepening, “Going Deeper”, you’ve heard this word used all over the place with hypnosis. “And now you go deeper, deeper, and deeper relaxed...” This is used to relax a person but it also does something else, the word deeper also makes your subject more suggestible and that’s what we want. Deepening is the process of suggesting to a person that their mind is clear and focused and their body is completely, heavily relaxed. If you do this successfully it’s as if the body is parked in another place and the mind is focused. It’s my belief that deepening is creating greater separation between the thinking conscious mind and the feeling subconscious mind.

Generally when I’m working and have multiple sessions in a day I like to work fast. An instant induction, test for somnambulism or just see if their eyes are moving around, deepen for ten minutes or so and then get to work. Depending on the person you may have to deepen the state more, or less. If you deepen a lot, let’s say for a half hour or more, believe me, they will know that they were hypnotized! After that much deepening when you emerge from hypnosis you feel as though you’ve just come back from another world, it’s a nice experience.

To deepen a person you can use counting with suggestions of relaxation. You can go through their body and describe each muscle letting go. You can use a period of silence, “And in this period of silence each breath just takes you so much deeper than the previous and that period of silence begins now.” You can also use imagery. Have them imagine they are flying over a forest or feeling the warm sand under their feet while walking along a beach. I sometimes use a little stereo in my office and tell them, “I am now going to give you a moment of silence so you can enjoy this relaxation. In this moment of silence every breath takes you deeper than the previous and I will turn up the relaxing music that will allow this relaxation to become even deeper.”

I have been working under the context of doing things quickly, not spending much time to deepen the state - wanting the subject to quickly respond to me when I ask questions so they don’t engage their conscious mind. I’ve now gone the other way and deepen much more. If the subject is very deep in hypnosis the answers are just there, very quickly and easily. If you deepen enough with the right suggestions they will enter the “Superconscious” state where they will be able to answer questions regarding detailed spirit world memories. We will discuss these topics later in chapter six. The act of deepening is pushing the thinking conscious mind to the side and allowing the powerful subconscious to become dominate. I like to take my subjects into the Theta state.

After they are hypnotized and deepened it’s time to get to work. The whole part of hypnotizing and deepening, testing for depth is mostly a sidebar. It’s what you do when they are in this state that is the important part. The hypnotist has many options at this point. He or she can read from a script, such as a smoking cessation script. You can build the negative emotion (Affect Bridge) and regress to a cause and fix the root of the problem. You can use something called parts therapy, where you call out different parts of the persons psyche and act as a moderator between the parts. There is also a phase where you talk about guilt and call out the persons “Offenders”, the people who have hurt them and get forgiveness - this includes dead people and aborted babies. This is based off of Fritz Perls Gestalt chair therapy from traditional psychotherapy. It can also become a spiritual session where you take the person back to before life and find out why they chose bad parents or a crippled body and discover what they are suppose to learn during this incarnation. You can use various tried and true methods to correct whatever the problem is that you’re dealing with.

Finally when you’re nearing the end of your session you have to emerge your subject. I didn’t say you have to wake them up because they aren’t sleeping to begin with. Before emerging the person you have the opportunity to do a few things if you want. To prove to them that they were indeed in hypnosis you can give them post-hypnotic suggestions such as their arm is glued to the chair and they’ll find they will be unable to lift their arm until you snap your fingers. You could tell them that the color red will stand out to them for a few days, that they’ll just notice the color red, and when they do they will be reminded of the good work we did here today (or it will reinforce that you are now a non-smoker, or that you are just as good as anyone else…) I’ve suggested that they will forget their name and when I ask them their name the name Rumpelstiltskin pops into their mind until I snap my fingers. Not only are these fun but you point out to your client how well they did and how powerful the suggestions for change have been ingrained in their mind. These do not work every single time however, it depends on the person.

There are a number of ways to emerge a person from hypnosis but it is important to give the person the following two suggestions no matter what you do. I think it’s important to give a suggestion of them “Coming back to their normal waking state” and the other suggestion of having “A lot of energy.” Again, when I had just started as a hypnotist I encountered a few of my clients coming in for their second session telling me that they were tired the rest of the day after our first session. My goal is to help people feel better and achieve their goals, not to create a legion of zombies after they walk out of my office. Generally you want to give them suggestions of feeling good. “In a moment I’m going to count from one to three. At the count of three and not before, you’re eyes will open, you’ll become fully alert and feeling better in every way with lots and lots of energy. One - feel yourself rising up, coming back up, because you were able to relax so deeply you were able to heal deeply. And two, just under your normal waking state now, the blood flowing, breathing in and out, all sounds returning. And now, three - eye’s open, fully alert, lots of energy and feeling good in every way.”

At this point you usually will notice that their eyes are very red however this redness in the eyes is not uncomfortable for them. This is a sign of profound deep hypnosis. It’s kind of funny because this is when I will ask them, “So, do you think you were hypnotized?” As they rotate their head towards me (imagine this in slow motion) with their eyes beaming red, they say, “No, I wasn’t hypnotized.”

It will take a few minutes for them to fully become normally aware. If they were in deep hypnosis for two or three hours then this feeling is more pronounced and I will count from one to five instead of one to three to emerge them. Right after they open their eyes and are emerging I will have them look at me and then I will go over the main points of what we were working on in that session. This is a compounding technique, just getting it in there even more.

The last part of hypnosis to talk about is Self-Hypnosis. Actually all hypnosis is self-hypnosis because you are allowing the process to happen, be it by a live person or a recording of some type. Self-hypnosis is powerful to a certain degree but it is limited mainly to direct suggestion. Direct suggestion is just patter you listen to while you are hypnotized, no regression, no parts therapy, just talk - although you can modify this and I have created self hypnosis CDs that do regress you and employ a modified parts therapy. There is no interaction with a trained professional but the compounding of desired suggestions will yield good results if done enough.

It is important to note that when you are in deep hypnosis the subconscious mind tends to become very positive. Negative words such as not or don’t can become blanked out of a sentence in the subconscious mind. If you were listening to a self-hypnosis recording and it kept repeating, or compounding the suggestion of, “You will not eat past eight o’clock at night.” Your subconscious mind very well may take out the word not and you will be hearing: “You will eat past eight o’clock at night” omitting the negative word “Not.” “Yikes! That’s no good, why am I eating more after eight o’clock now?”

It’s good to again point out that some self-hypnosis recordings are designed incorrectly, they take you into a deep, deep sleep. If you fall asleep while listening to it or it’s designed to put you to sleep and continue with life changing suggestions after you’re sleeping it won’t work. The state of hypnosis and the state of sleep are two different states, two different mental stages (Alpha/Theta for hypnosis and Delta for sleep). If you find yourself falling asleep while listening to self-hypnosis recordings then sit up next time, turn on a light, or listen to it at a different time of the day when you’re not so tired. In the state of sleep, the Delta state, the suggestions are falling on deaf ears.

At times, even though I was trained otherwise, people do go from the state of hypnosis down and into the state of sleep. Of course some people while deeply relaxed will snore and not be asleep. It’s an easy test to see where they are. Using the same tone I simply give the suggestion of taking a deep breath or do a count up to where their eyes will open. If they ignore these instructions they are in fact, sleeping. If they have dropped down into sleep, by tapping their arm or forehead and giving suggestions to pay attention to me and focus on the sound of my voice, I have found that I can then change the state of sleep back to the state of hypnosis and continue with the session without problems. Of course I have to remember that they may have gone into the coma state so coma state testing may be in order.

I’ll be honest with you. If you’re interested in becoming a certified hypnotist the process is not a long or difficult one at this point in time, but… learning and testing out is one thing and doing the work is another, and doing it well is yet another! I purchased a home study course that was thirty-three hours of video. To become certified I had to pass a test, it wasn’t difficult. I actually went through the course four times, back-to-back, so that would be like one hundred and thirty two hours of training or so. I then began my practice immediately. I felt as though I was on an island all by myself. I cannot tell you how many things tripped me up (I owe my first forty clients or so a free remedial session or two, tell no one). In the training all the examples worked perfectly, everyone became hypnotized easily and all the therapies worked every single time. It’s much different in the real world when you start seeing stranger after stranger with all these different problems - wow. When I first started I would spend hours before each session thinking through what I was supposed to do and making sure I had patter to read for whatever they were coming to me for. Things sure have changed since those beginning days, thank goodness.

My approach is now very simple and it’s the same for everyone and every problem. First I want to understand their problem. I want to take the time to listen to them because if you allow your client to tell their stories they will repeat certain words and phrases. These are key words that give you insight into what’s really going on and how they are really feeling. Also in session I use their words, this makes it easier to evoke emotion because they can relate to what you are saying by using their words. Then I want to answer one question, and that question is “Why?” I’m fat, well why is that? I’m depressed, why? I have Fibromyalgia, again… why? Once you find out the why and fix it you can then use other needed therapies and put the icing on the cake using direct suggestion. I rarely read patter to anyone except sometimes for smoking or doing multiple weight loss sessions. Actually I stopped reading patter altogether for a while but found that I ended up omitting words or forgetting to go through certain parts, so I think it’s better to be thorough.

After you’ve been out there a while as a practicing hypnotist and not making much money it hits you, or it should. The problem with hypnosis is not that it doesn’t work. The problem with hypnosis is the word “Hypnosis.” Fears and misconceptions that a lot of people have, some people are so nervous before their first session they can barely even listen to what I’m saying to them. I find that I am a broken record, just saying the same thing over and over, looking at the face of one person after the next telling them I cannot control them, they will remember everything from the session, they won’t be out of control or sleeping... After they work with me, the one thing I hear over and over again is, “Why doesn’t everyone know about this?”

The word hypnosis is probably keeping this profession in the dark ages more than anything. It’s kind of like when they use the last names of scientists who discover something as a cure or method. “Joe Nazi has now cured all genetic diseases… Go to Nazi Genetics today and get healed.” Yea right! Even if the guy did have the cure, who would go see him with a name like that? I was discussing this with my mother on the phone a while back and she said I know what you mean, try telling people that you are a Mormon! That stigma has been applied to hypnosis as well, largely due to the stage hypnotists who will make you cluck like a chicken and make you do other outrageous things. I also use Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), but when I tell people I use that they don’t seem to care because most of them have no idea what it is. I actually changed the name of my business to Renaissance Alternative Health Center from Renaissance Hypnosis because I helped a high ranking marketing executive and even though people at his work could notice a huge difference in him, he told me he didn’t tell anyone because he didn’t want people to know that he went to a “hypnotist.”

I've developed a new ways to regress and use parts therapy and combine them so I’ve been calling myself a "Theta State Therapist" lately, I like it a lot. If you go out and ask 50 people - "What do you think hypnosis is?" You'll get 50 different answers, none of which has anything to do with what I do. When you get away from the term hypnosis you don't have to dispel fears and misconceptions, they don't know what Theta State Therapy is, right? You do NLP, no one knows what that is, so there is no fear. Hypnosis literally means the “God of sleep”, somnambulism means “Sleep walking”, and the word trance is down right scary! Hypnosis is the Theta brain wave state if the state is deepened. Delta is sleep, so all of these old terms are incorrect. I was trained to test to see if my subject is in somnambulism. What this literally says is that I am going to test to see if you are in sleep walking. That doesn’t make any sense.

Spinning disks, swaying watches, pendulums, mind control… what I do has nothing to do with those things. It’s like a golfer who never takes lessons, plays for ten years and then finally gets fed up and takes lessons – they have to unlearn what they’ve learned before they can learn how to swing the golf club correctly. That’s what I deal with every time a new client calls. No, no, no, hypnosis isn’t that, it’s this…. I’ve been taught that I need to prove to my client they are indeed in hypnosis. I don’t want to prove anything, I just want to help the person. Wouldn’t it be better to start from zero and then simply tell them what it is without having to tell them what it isn’t? Okay, I’ll step off of my soap box now… there I’m down.

Hypnosis is extremely powerful in healing emotional, habitual, and physical problems. Emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, anger, panic, grief, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and self worth issues can be resolved. Habitual problems such as alcohol, smoking, drugs, weight loss, pornography, gambling can be eliminated – these can be classified under the “too much” issue’s. Drink too much, smoke too much, eat too much, etc. Then there is a whole host of physical problems, I will not mention them all here because I do believe all physical problems can at least be helped with the use of hypnosis. Physical problems include fibromyalgia, restless leg syndrome (RLS), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), migraine headache, high blood pressure, many skin problems, sleep disorders, allergies, sinus problems, and even cancer (Answer Cancer, by Steve Parkhill). Pain can also either be removed completely or can be turned into the sensation of warmth instead of pain. Painless childbirth is widely used.

Hypnosis works so well with these problems because we are dealing with the subconscious mind, the feeling level mind. If you go to a talk therapist you are dealing with the conscious rational mind, it doesn’t know the answer. It thinks it knows the answer, but it doesn’t. You have to work with people on the emotional level because we are emotional creatures. Think about it. What is your favorite movie? What is your favorite song or band? What is your favorite book? What about your husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend – why are you hanging out with them? I’ll tell you why, because they make you feel a certain way. If they didn’t make you feel good you wouldn’t want to hang around them. With regard to movies, your favorite book or your favorite song it has to move you. It has to make you happy, horny, sad, or mad - it has to move you emotionally. If you’re not moved emotionally you won’t like something. If you walk out of a movie theater and it didn’t move you, you won’t recommend it to anyone. That’s the human animal right there.

You are an emotional creature and every emotion equals a behavior whether you recognize it or not. If you’re angry that’s an emotion, what is the behavior associated with that? You might yell, you might break something, right? What if you’re depressed, that’s an emotion. What might you do? You might lock yourself away from the world, or you may drink that emotion away with alcohol. There are bodily behaviors to emotion as well. If you live a stressed out life for a long period of time, well that’s an emotion. If that emotion isn’t released, if it isn’t expressed it will be expressed through your body. You might develop holes in the lining of your stomach (ulcer) or develop high blood pressure. If the emotion of anger is welling up inside your subconscious mind you may develop restless leg syndrome (RLS). With many of my fibromyalgia clients I have discovered that dad or mom physically or emotionally left the family at a young age. This develops into a strong emotion of negativity, and then it causes very real bodily pain later in life. The moment that you find the cause of the emotion and clear it is the same moment that the problem vanishes. This is known as reframing. This is the core of hypnotherapy. Everyone needs to go through this process. What we do as human animals is we distract from our negative emotions or we comfort them, or both. If the negative emotion in you is lonely, if you are feeling lonely what might you do? You may sit down with a bowl of ice cream right? While eating that ice cream you are comforting yourself and distracting from the emotion of lonely. The real problem isn’t the excess weight gain. The real problem is feeling lonely. Eating that whole half gallon of ice cream or any other type of food or quantity of food will never change the feeling of lonely. Make sense? Correct the underlying emotion and the behavior or problem goes away.

Disease, either mental disease or physical disease is caused by dis-ease (DIS-EASE = DISEASE) - plain and simple. If you are at ease in your mind your body and mind will be healthy. Disease cannot grow in a body that has a healthy mind. As we progress through life we go through good times and bad times. These are learning experiences and unfortunately we not only learn lessons going through these events but we also collect negative emotion. You can think about it like we are going on a trip, along the way we learn lessons and become smarter and wiser but we also collect negative emotional energy. It’s like picking up suitcase after suitcase, piling them up on our backs. We learn but we swing another bag on up and after a while we have accumulated so much baggage we can barely walk. Going through hypnotherapy cleans the slate. It identifies where and when the emotional baggage was placed and gets rid of it. We all perceive ourselves a certain way. We perceive our past, our present, and our future a certain way. People who have hurt us are still controlling us and it doesn’t matter if they are living or dead. If you identify these areas and people and clear them away, you will have no choice but to live inside a healthy body.

Interestingly enough all of the labels I mentioned above, the things that hypnosis can fix, they are all the same thing! They are all unresolved emotion in the subconscious mind but are being expressed differently in different people. The doctors evaluate you on your symptoms. Once they know your symptoms they prescribe drugs for those symptoms and then see how you do. This works great if you need an antibiotic but a lot of the drugs that are dispensed (Psychotropic Drugs) will never cure your shaking legs, the migraine you deal with, fibromyalgia, or whatever your “Symptoms” happen to be. If I took a test group of fifty people and their father walked into a room when the test group subjects were all five years old, and the father beat up the mother and left the family a few things would happen. Some of the test group subjects would not have any long term lasting affects. Some would develop fibromyalgia, some would become clinically depressed later in life. The symptoms would be different but the cause would be the same. So when someone comes to me for IBS or depression I treat it the same way and I get the same results because I know what it really is. The medical community is out in left field on labeling people the way that they do. It’s big business for the drug companies to have so many identifiable disorders. It is really all the same, unresolved emotion in the subconscious mind. I use the same approach, more or less, whether someone is coming to me for depression or restless leg syndrome. It cures both, so I can assume I am right.

Take a moment and grab a pencil and a piece of paper and think of the things you would like to change in your life. Think about the physical and emotional things that may be troubling you as well as past events that were difficult. Think of people who have hurt you. Perhaps you become scared at night or are uncomfortable in certain situations. Look for patterns of behavior in yourself. If you’re honest with yourself you should have a list of at least four or five issues when you have finished your list. Fears, jealousy, lack of energy or motivation, feeling tired all the time possibly. This list could be eliminated quickly using hypnosis and if you think you know what is causing these issues, the conclusion that you have formulated is most likely incorrect. These feelings go way back, believe me they do. Your conscious mind does not know the real reason for them, your subconscious mind does.

Hypnosis Therapies
Direct Suggestion / Age Regression / Parts Therapy / Gestalt Empty Chair Therapy

A hypnotist has a few choices and approaches he or she can choose from depending on what they feel will help their subject the most. Every hypnotist has their own style to incorporate these therapies. The best hypnotherapists use a tool belt that has many therapies and approaches depending on the person they are working with. Also many go through the same cycle of therapies in the same order for every person they work with, sometimes omitting some therapies they feel are not needed. Let’s go through these to get some insight.

Traditionally a hypnotist would only use direct suggestion. They would place the subject in hypnosis and simply talk to them directly about their problem. Direct suggestion uses imagery and compounding of suggestions, which is repeating suggestions to the person such as: “I am now a non-smoker and will remain a non-smoker for the rest of my life.” With a direct suggestion session the subject doesn’t communicate, the session isn’t a conversation but simply the hypnotist reprogramming the client. Many hypnotists today still use direct suggestion only.

Direct suggestion is very powerful but not always long lasting unless the suggestions are repeated enough to elicit change and even when this occurs sometimes the results are not sufficient. Self hypnosis products work wonders if the person actually spends enough time listening but going to a hypnotist and doing a limited number of sessions when only using direct suggestion generally will not permanently heal the person. They will walk away from the therapy in amazement but many times later realize that the problem has returned.

When using any other modality of hypnotherapy direct suggestion is always used in at least part of the transformational techniques. Direct suggestion is best suited for reprogramming and reframing but I always want to find out why the person has the problem first, fix that, then use direct suggestion. For instance, if you have low self esteem and come in to work with me, we will spend a session or two tracking down when and why you became programmed this way. Let’s say we discover that it is an event when you were six years old where an authority figure made you feel inadequate in front of your entire family, and then that feeling was compounded through a few other childhood events. You could reprogram your mind using direct suggestion but the perception of the initial cause of the problem is still in your psyche. We didn’t go to the cause and change the perception of the initial event where the problem of lack of self esteem started, so when I work with people I always want to do this. This is a major advancement in the way we heal people using modern hypnosis techniques.

Age regression is taking a person back to an event in the past to clear away negative emotion or to change a perception or both. Traditionally you would regress the subject back to an earlier time as a child. Dave Elman used to take all of his subjects back to kindergarten. Once there you ask them if the problem exists. If it doesn’t you know you are before the initial sensitizing event and then you progress to the first time they felt it, if they have the problem (emotion) in kindergarten you need to continue back. You move them backwards and forwards until you reach the point where the problem first started and clear it there. A newer, better way to do this is something called building the “Affect Bridge.” In less technical terms this is rattling your client’s cage emotionally. If they are coming to you for fear of heights you place them in a situation where the fear of heights would rear its ugly head, you build the feeling and have them follow it back. Before doing this I employ techniques so they will not have any anxiety, panic, or physical problems. Heart rate normal, breathing normal, etc.

“Imagine you’re in the plane and you have just fastened your seatbelt. The plane begins to taxi out onto the runway and that feeling you don’t like has crept in. The plane spins around and you start moving, moving quickly down the runway. Faster and faster now, you’re about to take flight! You have a window seat and for some reason you cannot stop looking out the window. The plane takes off. You’re at a forty five degree angle now - you’re getting higher and higher. Looking out the window you’re almost up to the clouds and that feeling is building and building inside of you. That feeling that has so much to do with heights. You’re feeling it now like a volcano about to explode! Nod your head when you’re feeling that feelings. Good. I now count back from ten down to one. You are going to follow that feeling back to the very first time, situation, or event that you ever felt that feeling. Here we go, ten…”

Your client is now feeling the emotion very powerfully, their subconscious mind is directed to follow the feeling back to the first time they ever felt it. They usually don’t do this. Their mind will usually take them back to a very significant time that has to do with that feeling - it may have nothing to do with heights at all. To absolutely clear the problem of this fear you must find the very first time that the feeling began. This is known as the initial sensitizing event (ISE) as I had just mentioned above. If you find the second or third time they felt this you will not permanently solve the problem, this is known as subsequent sensitizing event or (SSE). Most of the time the ISE is a mundane event that to the conscious mind is a real no big deal kind of event, but to the subconscious mind it was a big deal, it’s where the emotional hook was placed. Then to solve the problem you take your client back and forth between the time of the event and the current time until they can go through the event without the negative emotion.

“Okay, follow that feeling back to the first time you ever felt it, here we go, ten drifting back and letting go. Nine and eight, further and further back. Seven, six, back to a time that has everything to do with that feeling. Five, becoming small possibly, smaller arms, smaller legs, a child possibly. Four, moving quickly now, moving back to that event that has everything to do with that feeling. Three, becoming vivid, real and clear. Two, on the next count you’re there. And one – be there – quickly now, are you inside or outside? Is it daytime or night time? Are you alone or with people? Give me a full report, what’s going on?”

They will now tell you what’s happening and who is involved. After I have this information I will bring them back to the current time. Now I will discuss what happened. I’ll ask them, “Did you survive that event? Was that the worst thing that has ever happened to you? Did anyone have to go to the hospital or anything like that?” Through these questions they become aware that it wasn’t a huge deal and that they are okay. Then you say, “Okay, you know you survived it, you know you got through it. Let’s go back there now and notice how you feel now going through it again. At the count of one you’ll be back there, the whole thing is happening and you’ll have awareness of how you are feeling.” Sometimes I will go back with them. “Okay now we are both going back to this scene as adults. It’s like we’re movie directors, directing a movie, it will be right there in front of us. You’ll have awareness on how NAME is feeling, she’ll be right there.” When we arrive I’ll ask the client if she likes the child (herself). If she says no then I’ll build that feeling and regress on that, clear it, then come back and continue with this regression. I do a therapy known as “Child in heart.” This is where the adult person talks to the child. I’ll have the adult put her arms around the child and hold her close, “Let her feel the unconditional love, the strength, the security. Hold her tight… does she like that feeling? Does she feel safe and loved now? Good… Now hold her really tight. Tighter, and tighter and tighter until you’re holding her so tight that she starts to shrink. She is now getting smaller and smaller and smaller until she’s so small that she slips right into your heart, where she’ll always be. For you to watch over her, to protect her, to keep her secure and for you to love her unconditionally…” Good stuff.

Then after I believe the transformational work has been done it’s now time to test. I’ll bring them back to the current time and place and clear their mind and deepen the state a little bit. Then I will place them in a situation where before they were really feeling it. “Okay, you’re on a plane again. This plane goes higher than any other plane you’ve ever been on. You’re getting higher, and higher, looking out the window, looking way down at the clouds! Now try hard to find that feeling you felt so strongly a while ago. Try hard!”

If they cannot find the feeling they are cured of the fear. Then I will say, “Now let me ask you, the feeling that the adult was feeling. Was that the feeling of the adult or do you think that maybe that was the feeling of the X year old but only magnified over the years? Which do you think it is?” They will say that it was the feeling of the child every time. Now I do some direct suggestion. “Yes it was the feeling of the child wasn’t it. But the child feels good now doesn’t she? And you just tried hard to find that feeling in the adult but it’s gone now isn’t it? So that connection is broken and those feelings are gone, in the child and now in the adult. You’ve punished yourself quite long enough! You now realize that the fear of the child has been controlling you as an adult, but not anymore! Those feelings are gone now, gone forever and you are now free. Free to live your life without fear of heights or fear of anything. You control you, no one controls you especially those childlike feelings, never again! From this moment forward you will feel comfortable and relaxed while flying in a plane. You will feel happy and relaxed when in high places. Now you will always use prudent caution when in a plane or in a high place but no longer will that negative feeling be there. Safe, comfortable and relaxed just as you are now when on a plane…”

I did a session with regard to fear of heights with a woman who was flying overseas and didn’t think she would be able to make it for the ten hour flight. I built the feeling and she regressed back to a few scenes where she was flying in a plane and then one where she was very high in a building but those were not the events that placed this fear inside of her. Her mind then took her back to being four years old. She was standing on a chest in a rented lake cottage and was surrounded by her brother, sister, and a few friends. The chest wasn’t very high at all but the other children were chanting, “Jump, jump, jump…” She became frazzled, she couldn’t jump so her butt hit the chest, and she slid down and ran out of the room in tears. That was the ISE. It doesn’t sound like much does it? But you know the child like mind is much different than the adult mind. This could have been the first time she was introduced to failing in front of others, or the first time she felt out of place. Think about it. For every one of us we had these first times, these first events where we were introduced to a negative feeling. We didn’t even know that feeling existed! I cannot tell you how many people I have regressed to being a child in a crib, the ISE of feeling abandoned, feeling trapped. There you are a child, never having any idea whatsoever that the feeling of abandonment exists at all… then there it is! ISE.

So how do you know you found the ISE? I was trained a few different ways with regard to finding the ISE. Initially I was taught to just suggest to them that they would go back to the first time, situation, or event where they ever felt the feeling. Then you would assume that they did that. You would then bring them back to the current time and place and use direct suggestion to smooth everything out, take them back until they felt okay. Then you would use direct suggestion to tell them that the next time, or any time they were in a situation where in the past would make them feel that negative feeling, that they would be relaxed and comfortable…

Then I was trained to do this same thing but wherever their mind took them, you then had to ask the following question. “Now I’m going to ask you a question and I don’t want you to think the answer, I want you to feel the answer to this question. This situation you’re in, this feeling you have. Is this the first time you ever felt this like it’s a surprise feeling… or is it more like an old friend you’ve felt before? Which is it, old or new?” If they tell you they’ve felt it before then you build the feeling and keep going back until they say that it’s a new feeling. At that point you assume it’s the ISE.

Then I was trained to do it yet another way. You do the above, the asking if it’s a new or old feeling until they say that it’s new. Then you regress them back one day or one week, find out where they are and then ask them if they have said problem or feeling here. If they say they don’t then you can assume you have the ISE. The problem with this is that your client may take you through many, many events or get kind of lost along the way. They may in one regression be at the age of eight, then six, then ten… yikes, ten? How did that happen? Also I’ve conducted sessions where their mind has taken them to like fifteen places in their life and then finally they arrive at the initial event, whew!

Currently I build the feeling and regress to a significant event. Then I regress them back to before they ever knew this feeling ever existed in their life. I then progress them to the first time that led them to having the problem or feeling. This works really well. For a while I would then regress them back a day or week just to make sure that I had the ISE but I always do so I don’t test for that anymore.

Age regression is the stuff, it is so key in transformational work. When you seek a hypnotist to work with make sure that they are very good at age regression. Even talk therapists are starting to use regression but they call it something else. They are getting certified in something called Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR). They have their client watch a three foot bank of LED lights, back and forth, back and forth. While watching the lights the therapist will ask them questions from their past. Amazingly the client will have memories come back to them with regard to the problem they are there for.

Parts therapy is based off of how we have conversations in our own minds. It’s the process of pulling out different parts of a persons psyche and speaking directly to these parts. You need to explain this to your client before doing it with them. Patter: “Let me explain that we have different parts of ourselves and they communicate with each other. For example when your alarm clock goes off in the morning a part of you wants to hit the snooze button a bunch of times or just unplug that darn clock and go back to sleep. Another part of you hears the alarm and says, “I’d better get up and get around so I’m not late for work.” Another example might be that you’re at the shopping mall and you see a pair of shoes you really want to buy. Part of you says, “I must have these shoes, they’re awesome!” Another part chimes in and says, “Well maybe I’d better wait for a sale or payday, gotta watch the money.” These conversations go on inside of our minds until a decision is made.”

So what you do is call out the part that really wants to change, we’ll take the example of a smoker. “Now there is a part of you that really wants to be free of cigarettes, that wants to be healthy, that wants to be a non-smoker. You know the reasons why (list reasons) and their may be reasons that you’re not even consciously aware of and that’s okay. Now I’d like you to give this part of you a shape, imagine a shape to this part now. This shape could be anything… Now what is this shape you’re imagining? Good… now give this shape a feeling. Really feel the emotions that are attached to this part of you that wants to be healthy, what is the feeling? Good… now I want you to give this part of you, this SHAPE (mention the shape they identified) a name – what is your name or what shall I call you?”

Now that I’ve identified this part I now have them imagine that we are sitting around a table. So I have them imagine that the client, myself, and this non-smoking shape are all sitting in chairs around a table. The subconscious mind works best off of imagery and emotion so this therapy works extremely well.

It’s now time to call out the negative part, the part that is stopping you from achieving your goal. Go through the patter above to acquire the shape, the feeling, and the name of this part and then we place that part at the table with everyone else. When I do this I go through the things that the client told me in the pre-talk so I can describe this part to them well. I want to begin to build an affect bridge here (an emotion) so I can get the part well defined. Many times when I do this the part and name that they identify will have something if not everything to do with the ISE. This would be the smoking part, in the example I had mentioned.

For traditional parts therapy you now ask each part if it’s okay that you speak to them and that the other parts are allowed to listen in. You thank each part for showing up and recognize that they are all an important part of client. In traditional parts you act as a moderator until a decision is made. Then you ask the negative part a few questions such as: Are you here to punish or protect client? How do you accomplish this? At what times do you come out and affect client? At what age did you first find it necessary to show up (when were you born in client)? [ISE] Where do you feel this feeling (mention feeling) in the body? [Usually it’s in the head, heart, or gut] This is where I veer off course from traditional parts therapy… I regress them to the event they mentioned or build the affect bridge and do age regression here.

Here is why this is SO cool! You haven’t just built a feeling - you have clearly defined a part of your clients psyche. You’ve given the problem a face. Instead of just a feeling you have a shape, a feeling, and a name. It’s been placed in a separate chair at the table. Also you will get clients that are not great at regression, with this technique you are speaking directly to their subconscious mind. This is also all imagery so they get into it and go deeper. After the regression, fixing the ISE, you have the part come back to the table and you address the client. You ask your client to look around the table and have them notice if any of the parts have changed. The response you get here is amazing! This will tell you how well you have healed the person. Sometimes the part isn’t there anymore. A lot of times the “black box” shape is now white. Or the shape is still there but smaller… You can now ask where they get a feeling in the body, if they don’t, it’s an indicator that they are healed.

If my client has come to me for panic attacks, seizures, migraine, or anything that I would be worried about setting off, because lets face it, you could build an emotion and have your client go into a full blown panic attack or something, then you can do the following…

Before I call out the bad part and build the affect bridge, I tell the client the following: “Okay we are all at the table now… Now client, would it be okay with you if during our session today you feel physically and emotionally well and safe? Okay, I am getting up from the table you are imagining that I am placing a magic cloak around your shoulders. During our session emotions that are causing PROBLEM will instantly be absorbed in this protective cloak you are wearing. It’s kind of like a sponge, it absorbs all the negative emotion, it absorbs anything that might cause you PROBLEM and it keeps you safe. During our session your heart rate remains normal and steady like now, your breathing remains normal and relaxed, but you’ll feel the cloak becoming heavy. You will have full awareness of the emotions that are being absorbed into the cloak as it keeps you safe.” Or something like that…

This works wonders! You can now rattle their cage like there’s no tomorrow and they will have a strong awareness of the emotion but will not go into panic or any other physical problem. You can regress, it works great, and you don’t have to worry about setting them off in some negative way.

Another cool thing about this is when you’re at the table, at any point, you can call out the Overseer or the part of them that is Wise part of them. Whatever patter you want to use is fine. This is where you can interject some spiritual therapy into the session if your client is so inclined to this. I like doing this at the end of the session. If you come back and the part isn’t there or it has taken on a different shape that is positive, you can then call out the older wiser part of them, the part that knows everything about them. When it arrives, and it always does, ask this part for any other guidance or wisdom so we know that PROBLEM is completely gone. Does this part have any other wisdom to share with client? If you want you can launch into deeper spiritual visualizations, you could have the client look at this wise part as the white light fills the room, or whatever...

If you’re strapped for time and have to end the session you just ask the parts if it will be okay that we meet back here at the table in our next session and continue. During the break between sessions the parts will come to even more awareness as to why they are there, yada, yada, yada… Also if you don’t fix the problem in the first session you can give the parts a trial period to do some new tasks to see how things are going. In the example of the smoker you could ask the smoking part if it would be okay to cut down to a lesser amount of cigarettes a day until we meet again.

Chair therapy has been incorporated from talk therapy into hypnotherapy. The premise of this session is to rid the person of guilt and have them forgive those who have hurt them. I call these people “Offenders.” Most people, including myself, before I became a hypnotherapist, don’t realize the negative impact that others have over you. In my opinion everyone needs this therapy...

What you do is start with a bit of a story. You explain to the client that their life is kind of like a history book where bad things have happened, and in the history book of their life certain emotions took root. These experiences of life are learning experiences, nothing more, they are there to learn from… Then I tell them that they have three places to live and they can only live in one of three places, the past, the present, or the future. People who live in the future are daydreamers, they only think about what they want never taking steps to achieve that future. Other people (most people) live in the past. They allow all the negative things of their past to affect them in the now. Or you can live in the present, let go of the past, and plan for your future. Then I explain to them that people who have hurt them in the past are not even thinking about what they’ve done to them. Those offenders are out there living their lives and the only person who gets hurt by them is you (or my client rather) By allowing this to happen it’s like being convicted of a crime. “When you allow people who have hurt you to control you it’s like a jail term that gets longer and longer.”

After this section I talk about guilt. Guilt is an after the fact emotion, it only comes in afterwards and we say to ourselves, “Oh, if only I wouldn’t have done this, then this wouldn’t have happened – and then guilt comes in. Or if only I would have done that, then this wouldn’t have happened – and then guilt comes in. And do you know that guilt causes fear - all kinds of fear. If you could let go of all the guilt do you know you would feel better than you’ve ever felt in your entire life?” What I’m doing here is building a case just as a lawyer would do. I’m setting the stage for them to be able to forgive those who have hurt them. I explain to them that the people who have hurt them are just products of their own programming. These people had no choice as to how they acted and I must have them understand that if they weren’t there being abused that the offender would just have been acting out this way with someone else. It had nothing to do with them.

Once the case has been built you explain forgiveness. To forgive someone it doesn’t mean you have to like them and it doesn’t mean you condone their behavior. When you forgive someone it just means that you understand that they are just a product of their programming, just like you are, just like I am.

Then you have them imagine that they are sitting in a room, sitting in a straight back chair and there is another straight back chair about five feet in front of them, facing them. “On the count of one I want you to put in that chair the one person who has hurt you more than another other person. Three, two, one! Who’s in that chair?” Usually it’s mom or dad. Then you have your client speak to the person and say the things that they need to say. You want to have them release emotion here, this can get very intense! If the feeling is anger you slip a pillow under the persons hand, have them make a fist and then get them yelling, crying, and pounding that fist into the pillow until there is no more anger left. This is AMAZING! The emotional release from this is so transformational I cannot explain it to you in words. You then place a few other offenders in the chair and go through this process with them. I always ask women if they have had an abortion before this session, and how many. If they have had an abortion I will place the baby, or babies in the chair and have the woman speak to them. I will speak as the babies to allow the woman to release the guilt. I know abortion is a hot topic, so to speak, but I can attest to the fact that women do hold in a load of guilt from getting an abortion. When I ask if they’ve had an abortion in the pre-screening I’ve had several women nonchalantly tell me, “Oh yes, I’ve had three…” No big deal. No big deal to the conscious mind, but to the subconscious mind they are crying and weeping when we get to this stage. I also place deceased people or offenders in the chair when needed. I’ve placed deceased pets in the chair as well. I speak as the dog or cat. I know that sounds ridiculous but it serves its purpose. The transformations in people’s lives after a session like this are astounding. Words can’t even describe the healing that takes place from this process. A funny side note here is that for the last few years my office has been in a building with many other offices. I’ve bumped into people in the hallway more than a few times and they react with, “What the hell is going on in there?”

Once you get the major offenders cleaned off I give the client a period of silence. “In this period of silence the names or faces of everyone who has ever hurt you will come into your mind and you will forgive them truthfully and honestly. When no more names or faces come into your mind you’ll let me know that you’re done by simply saying out loud, I’m done. So now your subconscious mind is directed to give you all of the names or faces of people that have ever hurt you, living or dead, and you’ll forgive them truthfully and that period of silence begins now.”

Once they say they’re done its time for self forgiveness. Depending on the client I’m working with I’ll either have them imagine they are standing in front of a full length mirror and say, “Now that person in the mirror, that is the person that needs your forgiveness…” This is the final part, self forgiveness. I’ll do the mirror imagery or I’ll go into parts therapy and get the forgiveness there and change the roll of a part that used to be self defeating into a more positive part.

This chair therapy is so powerful, it really is. You have no idea what names or faces will surface. I had the name and face appear to me that dumbfounded me. It was a girl I knew from first grade. I don’t remember any conversation I ever had with her and I certainly don’t remember her and I ever having any conflict at all but there was something in my subconscious mind that needed attention.

So my approach to hypnotherapy is going through all of these phases. In the initial session I usually do a few convincers, a few things that prove to my client that they are indeed in hypnosis. This does a few things. First it gives them hope. Most people don’t go to a hypnotist when they have a problem. The hypnotist is usually the last thing they try. They go to the doctor first, then a specialist. They don’t get fixed so then they go to a mental health talk therapist and that doesn’t work for them. Then they open themselves up to other alternative healing modalities and go to an acupuncturist, Reiki, a tarot card reader and then finally… they go to a hypnotist. If they go to the right hypnotist they will probably find their answer. So they are showing up on my doorstep after failing many times over. By them knowing they were able to go into hypnosis it builds hope for them that they may have come to the right place. It builds a belief in them as well. A belief that their mind is powerful and a belief that you the hypnotist are good at what you do.

After this initial session or part of the first session I generally use age regression. I use this in conjunct with parts therapy - it’s kind of my own special blend. I want to find out why the problem is there and fix it at its source. Then I conduct chair therapy and in the final session and sprinkled throughout, I do direct suggestion. The change is immediate and it is permanent. Of course if someone comes to you for a problem, you fix it, and then they go right back into the same environment that caused the problem, they may develop the same or similar issues again. That’s like going back into the tank of sharks after you’ve been treated for shark bites, but the person has changed now and more often than not they can avoid the same pitfalls that once tripped them up.

Let’s go through a typical case of depression and see how hypnosis can solve the problem. In describing our subject we will give them the following issues: She has been sexually abused as a child, she has had an abortion, she is consuming large quantities of alcohol (tequila) and without even talking about it, you get a very strong sense that she is depressed… that’s our case.

After interviewing our subject I have written out about three separate roads I want to regress her down. So we know that our subject is drinking a lot, which always means that they have a feeling of worthlessness. In the interview we found out that her drinking occurs more when she is alone and on the weekend. Drinking will require at least two separate regressions. One for the feeling of “Worthless” and in the second regression we will want to find the emotion that leads her to drink, the urge (the feeling that is force feeding her alcohol). The third regression will be targeted to her feeling of depression feeling.

Hypnotist (speaking with excitement) - “So we are here today to take care of feelings you don’t like, feelings that have everything to do with why you drink to excess. If you do what I say we’ll pluck these feelings right out so you’ll never have to feel them again and you can get on with your life without drinking all that poisonous alcohol.”

“There’s a feeling you have about yourself, a feeling you don’t like! You’ve tried to run from it, you’ve tried to hide from it, you’ve tried to drink it away and numb it, but today you face that feeling! Imagine in your mind right now that you’re at home all alone and it’s the weekend. That feeling starts bubbling up in your mind, there it is, and you’ve felt this feeling so many times before… You can’t stand it anymore. You look over and on the counter is that bottle of tequila, one shot, just one shot, you’ve got to have it!”

“You reach for the bottle, pour a double shot and pick the shot glass up and you can smell it. The feeling is powerful in you now as you raise the shot to your mouth, it’s almost there but the weirdest thing happens! It’s now two inches from your mouth but all of a sudden your arm turns to stone! The harder you try and drink that shot the more locked down your arm becomes and the more locked down it becomes the more that feeling builds in your mind, that feeling that’s causing you to drink in the first place! You’ve go to have that drink!” (Finding the urge to drink here)

“Okay now, nod your head when you’re feeling that feeling. (Nod, yes) Okay focus on that feeling, hold on to it. I’m going to count from one up to five, with every count that feeling becomes more powerful, it doubles with every count! When I say five this feeling is bigger than it has ever been, the urge to drink. And one, there it is, you’re already feeling it! Two, building and building that emotion! Now three, feeling that feeling powerfully. Doubling again with four! That feeling spilling into your mind and now bigger than it’s ever been - five! Bigger than ever before! There it is hold on to that feeling! Focus on that feeling.”

So what have we done? We have targeted the feeling that is directly linked to the action of drinking alcohol, why she has an urge or craving to drink. Every feeling equals a behavior and her behavior is to drink to excess. Some people don’t feel anything and if that happens I fade this whole scene and use the Dave Elman method of regression of taking the back to a young age and I ask if they have problems with drinking. They will say no, so I’ll move them forward maybe five years and ask the question again, they say no again. Then I’ll say something like, “I’m going to pick your hand up and drop it, when it plops on down it will be the first time, situation or event that led to you drinking to excess.” I generally don’t use the Elman method because I think the technique of building the feeling is faster and more accurate but if the subject doesn’t feel anything or maybe they shut down their feelings as a child for some reason, the building of emotion won’t work. Of course if this is the case, if they have indeed shut off their emotions then that will be a separate regression to find out why they did that.

So now the feeling is strong in her mind, next we regress. This will take her back in time to find the initial event where this feeling originated. There are many ways to do this and I use many different ways depending on the subject or how I feel that particular day. Sometimes I will have my subject give me a word that describes the real and true cause of the feeling we just targeted. Other times I’ll just regress off of the feeling and do a count from ten down to one. There are many ways to do this part…

Hypnotist – “Hold on to that feeling, focus on that feeling! In a moment I’m going to count from one to three at the count of three you will give me one word. I’ll ask for this word letter by letter, this word will give me the real and true cause of this feeling. One, two, three - quickly give me the first letter! (D) Excellent, second letter quickly! (E) Third letter! (A), you know the word what is it? (Dead) Good, now I’m going to count from one to three again, at the count of three I want you to use the word “Dead” in a sentence or phrase that describes your real and true cause of this feeling. One, two, three - quickly one sentence now!” (Panny is dead - Sob)”

“Okay in a moment I’m going to count from ten down to one, you go to the very first time, situation or event that has everything to do with the word dead, Panny is dead. Ten, drifting back and letting go. Nine and eight, further and further back. Seven, six, back to a scene, situation or event that has everything to do with “Panny is dead.” Five, becoming small possibly, smaller arms, smaller legs, a child possibly. Four, moving quickly now, back to that even that has so much to do with that feeling. Three, becoming vivid real and clear. Two, on the next count it’s as real as real can be, you are there at that event of significance - and one!”

“Are you inside or outside? (Inside) Is it daytime or nighttime? (Day) Are you alone or with someone? (There are people around me) Good, give me a full report, what’s going on? (Sob - I got home and Panny is dead, she’s died.) Who’s Panny? (Our dog) I see - this feeling you have right now, have you ever felt this way before? (No) Okay, come back to the current time and place on the count of three, one, two, three, current time and place deeply relaxed, your mind is now clear and your body is heavy with relaxation, deeper and deeper and deeper…”

I will take my subject back a few days before this event to see if the feeling can be found just to make sure the ISE has been found but for this example we’ll say we have found the ISE, her dog died. Notice how fast I got her out of the event? I do this if the event is a negative or difficult one.

So we have discovered something very important, she is reaching for that shot of tequila because of the feeling she had when her dog died... Huh? What do you mean? Remember that every behavior is connected to a feeling and the feeling is the very negative specific feeling of when her dog died. Here’s the thing… The feelings she is feeling right now in her adult life that make her drink are not the feelings of the adult in my chair but rather the feelings of that child after discovering her dead dog. Those negative feelings have been magnified through the years and have broken through to the conscious level mind and have associated themselves with the action or urge to drink (we always try and comfort and distract from negative feelings). To cure this woman of the drinking problem you don’t cure the adult but you have the child feel good both physically if that is relevant, and emotionally at the event where their subconscious mind took them. In this case the event is the death of her dog.

This is where true, instant healing occurs. This is the power of hypnosis, right here!!! You find the source of the problem, the source of the feeling and change that perception in that initial event. It’s just like going into a time machine, back to a difficult situation but bringing with you the knowledge and wisdom of the adult so that you can get through the event without the emotional baggage. Of course our society uses talk therapy (critical factor watch dog on guard). If we drink too much we go to fifteen step programs and attend meetings forever - not necessary! In fact the alcoholics I’ve cured can go have a drink if they want. They are just like everyone else now, they may go to dinner and not drink while everyone else is or occasionally they may drink a little too much. Get rid of that ISE that is making them drink and they no longer are controlled by that feeling.

So we have found the feeling that led to the event, how do we fix it? I won’t go through the entire process but depending on the person it can take about two minutes or if they really did something bad it may take ten or twenty minutes. I worked with an X prostitute who came to me for an addiction to smoking crack cocaine. We fixed that urge in the first session but on one of the regressions she was stoned and her little baby boy was in dirty diapers and had been for quite a while. He had a terrible rash and she was unable to take care of him, this made her feel very bad about herself as a mother, she felt very guilty. I had to give her some words of encouragement to change her perception of herself, many words, before taking her back to the scene to correct it.

“Okay, you are now in the current time and place deeply relaxed and we have found the cause of your drinking problem. Let me ask you, even though that situation was hard, you did get through it right?” (Yes) It is sad when we lose people or pets that we love but you know you got through it. Did you ever get any other pets? (Yes) So you see, life does go on and it was time for Panny to go back home. Was she an old dog? (Yes, very old) Okay, I understand. You love Panny and Panny knows that. In a moment I’m going to count from three down to one, at the count of one you will be right back there where you were a moment ago when you discovered Panny, actually it will be five minutes afterwards and you’re going to notice that you feel so much better. Now, you may not be jumping for joy but you did get through this situation and you know that everything happens for a reason, it was just Panny’s time to go and you’ll see her again. In a way our pets have it better than we do. They don’t know what death is, they just change at the moment of death and keep on going. Boy I wish I didn’t know that I would die someday, wouldn’t it be nice to not know like Panny? (yes) Okay here we go, at the count of one you’ll be back there right after it happened and notice how you feel. The negativity of this situation has dissolved and dissipated. Three, two, and one - there you are, it’s about five minutes after you discovered Panny and you’re with your mom. Now tell me, you have an awareness of how you feel, how do you feel right now? (I’m okay) Are there any negative feelings here right now? (No, I’m okay)

If there were still negative feelings I would bring her back to the present and then back to the scene of Panny’s death again with more suggestions of feeling good. If it’s really a bad scene or we can’t get the bad feelings to go away I’ll go back with her and have her talk to the child in the situation. When I am confident that we have resolved the problem, I will test to make sure. I will have the subject imagine a scene, maybe the same one I started with (her arm turning to stone while trying to drink a shot of tequila), and have her try and find those feelings. “Try hard to find those feelings that made you want to drink so strongly!” If she can’t find them, the urge to drink is gone. If she can find negative feelings we roll up our sleeves and dive back in. We would again build up those feelings and go back using that same regression technique. Around twenty percent of my clients will still have feelings at this point but in the cases where they do still have feelings the road we go down the second time is different than the initial regression. They will end up at an entirely different event.

With our subject, we would then build, regress on, and eliminate the worthless feelings that are associated with every alcoholic. We would also do this with the depression feelings. She was also sexually abused. Sometimes I regress on this and sometimes I don’t depending on the person and situation. This can be fixed with chair therapy, or with the use of regression. I never put someone in an abuse situation or a situation where there was trauma. What I will do is regress just before this happened and/or ten minutes after it has ended. When confronting these situations I always ask how they feel physically as well because sometimes they are hurt. If they are hurt you can easily suggestion to them that when they go back to that situation they are feeling physically fine, and they will be. If someone does regress into a horrible situation I pull them out of it as soon as possible, almost instantly. The mind has targeted the event, we don’t need to relive it. Many other hypnotists do have the person go through the negative event several times until they can without the negative emotion. I do not believe this is necessary, I’ve seen positive lasting results without making them relive the event.

To conclude the regression segment of therapy I will have them look into a mirror, a magic mirror or pool that shows them all the feelings they have about themselves. “These are the feelings that no one else knows are there but you. All the feelings and emotions that you have about you are revealed inside this magic mirror. The feelings of when you have those private conversations in your own mind are in front of you now. The feelings and emotions that has everything to do with why you were drinking / depressed… Now tell me, do you like these feelings, yes or no?” If they say no then I build these feelings and regress on them. Once this process is done I place them back in front of the mirror until they like the feelings.

Do you now see the power of hypnosis? It’s just like stepping into a time machine and arriving at a difficult event or arriving where a misperception was formed and stepping through it again with more insight, more courage, and with the adult mindset. I’ve solved so many problems with this technique. Once all the regressions are done and once I’ve gone down all the necessary roads we move to the next phase.

Now it is time to change the perception of people in this woman’s life that have hurt her, time to get rid of the “Offenders.” It’s now time to use chair therapy, placing the main offenders in the chair as I have already discussed. You get forgiveness for the offender, you understand that what they did to you had nothing to do with you as they are just acting out on their own programming and then we set them free. As I stated earlier, if there is a trapped tear in there, tears that have been there for decades, you must get that feeling out. If they are angry with someone I have them make a tight fist and beat on a pillow until there is no more anger left in that fist. In our case I would place the aborted baby in the chair and reconnect the woman and fetus in a positive loving way… and get the tears out. I always end this segment by the baby asking the mother to think of happy thoughts when thinking about the baby she had to let go… Chair therapy can get intense, and it should because a huge reason we develop problems is due to unresolved and unexpressed emotion. I’ve had people’s glasses fly off their face while pounding on the pillow, legs kicking, even yelling and swearing at this point. Those are the unexpressed emotions that have been hurting them.

I believe that so many problems, emotional, habitual, and physical, stem from unresolved emotion in the subconscious mind. If the feeling gets big enough physical problems result. A simple example would be the common ulcer that creates holes in the stomach. These holes in the stomach lining come from existing under stress or in a high-pressure environment for a sustained period of time. We accept that a feeling can burn holes in the stomach, that’s true. Tumors grow out of nothing. There is a reason they grow and they can shrink back to nothing. Legs shake, bowels act up, and sometimes our unresolved emotion will cause us to have chronic fatigue where we can’t even get ourselves out of bed in the morning.

Sometimes the person arrives at the ISE but is unwilling to look at what is going on. Sometimes people repress memories because they are so bad or damaging, the conscious mind has no idea that the event even took place. Once the negative feelings have been released, the offenders have been forgiven and the client has forgiven themselves for what they have done, we now move into phase three, direct suggestion.

You can think of the person as kind of a hallowed out shell at this point. The garbage has been taken out and disposed of. They are fixed at this point but your client is hollow, purged of the offending negativity. So now it’s time to build! The icing on the cake is direct suggestion. This person came to me for depression and alcoholism so I’ll give general suggestions of feeling great, a bright future, maybe read some patter regarding self-esteem… I know they are already fixed but doing a great direct suggestion session is very important for placing them on a new path where they will be happy and successful and feel as though they can do anything they want in life. Remember, what the mind expects to happen tends to be realized and now we need that inner mind, the goal oriented mind to know that there is a positive future waiting. It’s time to reprogram while the critical factor is napping. “I deserve all the love, all the riches and all the health that this world has to offer now, I grow young, I grow strong…” Maybe I’ll place them on a timeline and have their past stretch behind them, leaving all the negative events and people of their past in their past. These were only lessons to be learned anyway. Then we’ll look at their future timeline, only bringing to the future positive energy and thoughts, etc…

Another possibility at this point is reviewing past lives that may have something to do with their initial problems. Of course this depends on a few things. Does your client believe in past lives or are they open to seeing if there is something there? Do they want to spend the time and money for this step? The vast majority of time I do not do this with my clients, I see myself as a clinician and past lives falls into a completely different realm. In many people’s eyes this subject just doesn’t fit in with clinical therapy, right? However… if I had it my way I would travel this road with every client because it does unveil important links and information. Let’s step away from our case study for a moment so I can give you insight into what I’m referring to.

Let me tell you a few of my own personal experiences. Fear of public speaking is one of them. I had one session that I thought cleared the problem. I went from not being able to speak more than a few sentences in front of a group to conducting seminars without any fears. Several years after this initial session I began doing seminars and noticed I would get a twinge of fear for a minute or so, and then I was fine. Then in one seminar this twinge of fear lasted for like ten minutes, I also noticed that I would feel physically ill the night before conducting a seminar, almost like I was coming down with something but I wasn’t. I had a fellow hypnotist do a telephone session on me so we could get to the bottom of it, wow what a session. We did the usual build the feeling and regress, my mind took me to a few places that needed attention, we cleaned them up and this would have been the usual end to the therapy. Instead of that he had me imagine a hallway. On one side of the hall was a flat smooth wall and on the other side was a series of doorways that led down and away from me. Each door in this hallway represented a lifetime. He had me look down this very long hallway and told me I would notice some kind of illumination on the doors that had everything to do with the feelings I was encountering when speaking in front of a group. He said that I would know which ones were most important. At that moment I noticed three doorways that looked as though someone was shinning a flashlight on them. One had three round lights on it and the other two only had one light on them, one being brighter than the other. Then in my mind the doors that had the lights moved side by side so they were in sequential order. He told me to open the most significant door and that I would find myself in some event that had everything to do with the feelings we were working on in this session. I stepped to the door with the three lights on it and opened it. Instantly I had stepped into a situation, a stressful situation. I perceived myself standing on a hillside outside and the townspeople were gathering below me. I represented the government and an angry mob of people were gathering to let me have it. I saw the anger in their faces and was worried that they might overtake me and hurt me. I perceived this event taking place in the year 1760, or somewhere around that time.

Then the hypnotist had me back out of that door and enter the next door, the one with the brighter light on it. All of a sudden I’m a woman standing in a large square room, it was kind of where two rooms come together, and the rooms were half inside and half out. Most of the crowd was sitting on the right side of the room including my father, a rather fat man wearing a decretive turban. I was brought in front of this group of people to be accused of stealing. I knew that I had stolen in the past but I did not steal the precious thing that they were accusing me of. I didn’t know what was stolen, I didn’t hear any accusations, I just somehow knew that I was being blamed for something I didn’t do. I then backed out of this door and entered the third door.

Here I found myself trying to hold myself up from the floor of my cave. The hypnotist had me look down at my feet, I was wearing some kind of animal skin wrappings around my feet and my cloths were similar to what Fred Flintstone wears. I was at the mouth of my cave and was shocked to look up and see all of the people of my tribe/clan at my door. They were gathering as they do to bid farewell to those who were about to die. I was on my left side holding myself up with my left arm, on my hip with my legs on the floor bent at the knees. I knew I was sick but I wasn’t dying! Why were they treating me as though I was dying? Some were chanting, some were speaking words and making strange sounds. I was sick and frail but I wasn’t dying! Then the hypnotist asked, “Did you die?” Yes... Wow, the shock of those people showing up at my door, I wasn’t going to die, I cannot believe they were doing this with me, coming to my door!

Ending a session like that was amazing. No wonder I was becoming fearful when speaking in front of a group. Was it real? I don’t know. Are past lives real? Who can know, but one thing I do know is how I felt in those events, it was no different than being regressed in my current life. Once I recognized these scenes I wasn’t controlled by them any longer, the negative emotional energy simply left me.

Let me tell you about another problem I was having where my session had everything to do with a past life. I was waking up every morning with my heart pounding in my chest. It felt heavy. Almost every morning I would wake up and my heart was just thumping. It didn’t hurt and it always went back to normal within fifteen minutes after I woke up and started moving around. It was just one of those annoying kind of physical problems. I asked my friend to do a session on me so we set the day and conducted another telephone session.

In my case history my father died in front of me of a heart attack when I had just turned twenty years old. I held his hand as my mother, a nurse, resuscitated him three times. I’m thinking this is probably the ISE, I was wrong… as the conscious mind usually is. The hypnotist starts the session by doing parts therapy. One part wants to be free of the thumping heart and the other part is causing the heart problem. When I imagined the part that is causing the heart problem, the hypnotist has you identify that part with a shape, a feeling, and then you put a name to it. A very interesting thing that came to me here was the shape looked like a very heavy triangle made of solid metal but the triangle was longer at the top like it was stretched up and the sides of it were concave. After identifying the part causing the problem he builds the feeling behind the thumping heart, regresses on that feeling, and I find myself in a trench fighting in a war. Its night time and bombs are going off all around me. My friends are being blown up right in front of me. It’s very dark except for the explosions. I stand up in the trench to fire my rifle and I’m shot just slightly above the heart. I’m blown back and die before my body falls to the bottom of the trench. I find myself floating above my body, my entire being is still shaking violently from the impact. The scene then fades out of my mind...

This is the ISE, the initial event. As we work through the session the event of my father does come up, it was a part of the problem and we clear this away as well. Towards the end of the session when we return to the good and bad parts the most amazing thing takes place! The triangle takes an even more distinguishing image in my mind, it’s the Eiffel tower! I died in France in WWI. The heavy triangle is the Eiffel tower and it also represents the heavy feeling in my chest (dying in France). Since that session I have not had even one occurrence of a thumping in my chest, not one.

So what if we ended our case study with past life regression? In our case the woman was sexually abused as a child, could this have something to do with karma? What about being an alcoholic? Could we gain insight into this problem by examining past lives? Is there a trend here? Either way, we’ll end our case study here. I hope you can understand how hypnotherapy heals, now that we’ve looked at an example. When you are in the theta brain wave state and go through a series of sessions like we’ve just described, it is the most healing experience. It cleans the slate, makes people whole again, it simply heals people.

What’s best to elicit real change, direct suggestion or regression? Traditionally hypnosis was all about direct suggestion. The hypnotist used eye fixation, like a pendulum or spiral disk or a long winded relaxation script to put his subject into hypnosis. Then, without testing to see what level the person was at, the hypnotist would simply read patter to them and then emerge them. My approach is much different. I always opt for regression first or regression/parts therapy, even with my smokers, which traditionally is a direct suggestion session with most other hypnotists. I feel you must find out why they are doing the undesirable behavior in the first place. I regress them on the urge to smoke and to the first cigarette. I’ll pull out the part of them that wants to quit and the part that is blocking this from happening. However I should add that in the early days I just used direct suggestion and it worked well.

I had a fear case a while back with a thirteen-year-old girl. She had a fear of chewing and swallowing food. She had just gotten out of the hospital after a three-week stay. She had a feeding tube, I believe her lung had collapsed and when she arrived with her parents at my office she weighed only sixty-seven pounds! Her parents told me they thought the eating disorder was present because of two incidents where she had been choking badly. One was on a cruise ship while eating potato chips. The other occurred when she was swishing her mouth out with some kind of dental fluid at the orthodontic office. Can you guess what I’m thinking? This information is all conscious level. The conscious mind doesn’t know where the problem originated. So we did the session and I had a very strong feeling she is just telling me things I wanted to hear. She regressed back to both of these events and we changed her perception of them from bad to good.

I received a call a few weeks later from her mom who said she was doing much better for a few days but then she slid down into the fear of chewing and swallowing again. I don’t mind telling you that her parents were at their wits end at this point. She had already seen two psychiatrists, one psychologist and a host of doctors without relief. She came in for a second session and her dad wanted me to use some kind of self-hypnosis tape for her, but of course I didn’t. I shoed him out of the room and decided to get in this girl’s face a little bit. I told her what I expected. I told her that I didn’t want her to play along this time so we could find the real cause of this problem and she would leave without ever having this problem again. (Some mental expectancy here)

We start into the session and I find the ISE at the age of three (ISEs usually stem from very early events). She leaves and I didn’t hear from them again until I got the most wonderful home made thank you card in the mail. Every letter was in a different colored marker and it said something to the effect, “Just want to tell you that the thirteen year old thanks you and the three year old thanks you, I’m going great!” What a nice card.

I brought this case up to make the following point. Some hypnotists will rely on the traditional method of direct suggestion. Fewer will use regression. This family had actually gone to a different hypnotist, a person who was one town away. He quoted them that he could fix her in seventeen sessions. Seventeen sessions, holy cow! Most problems I work with can be solved within just a handful of sessions. So what was he doing? All he was going to do was sit that little girl down, hypnotize her and, you guessed it, use direct suggestion. Would it have worked? Yes - for a while. But without finding the ISE that program is still running in her mind. It wouldn’t have lasted. I’d bet that at some point that feeling would have returned again and she would have returned to the familiar pattern of behavior.

Don’t get me wrong though, direct suggestion is a very powerful tool. When using hypnosis you must change perceptions of people, events, and a persons past, present, and future. All of this is done using direct suggestion. Even more powerful than words is using imagery, the subconscious works very well off of imagination. Just last night a hypnosis session was being conducted on me with regard to my chronic sinus problems. The hypnotist had me imagine I was entering a wind room where powerful wind would be blown into my ears and out my nose. In this wind a mist consisting of a special agent would be used to finally clear away all of the gunk and blow it out of my nose for good. This was extremely powerful in my mind. I was smiling, wanting to get into this room so I could finally be free of my sinus problems. Of course this imaginary wind room was only used after finding the ISE, which in my case was an event when I was four years old when I jumped into a swimming pool and half the water washed up my nose. It was a great session and I feel much clearer now than I have in many years.

So, can everyone be hypnotized? Are there good and bad subjects? The answer is no, and yes. Anyone with an IQ of seventy and over can be hypnotized if they want to be. Drunk people cannot be hypnotized as they cannot follow directions. I’ve worked with the young and old and have even worked with children, children respond very well to hypnosis. They usually drop like a rock - works great. But… if a person has a fear of what you’re going to do or a misconception of what hypnosis is they won’t allow it to happen. If they don’t know that you’re about to hypnotize them it probably won’t work, they’ll just look at you funny and ask you what the heck you’re doing. Some people have what I call the “Mile-a-Minute” syndrome. They think and think, always thinking about something. I had two of these just last week! If a mile-a-minute person follows my simple instructions the whole process will work very well. If they don’t there isn’t much that I can do. If they are thinking it’s as if they are interrupting me while I’m speaking to them, they are thinking over my verbiage and not listening. My instructions to every client are very simple. “Don’t think, don’t try, and when I ask you questions don’t think of the answer. I want the very first thought, the very first impression that pops into your mind when I ask you questions. If you think of the answer it destroys the whole process. If I were to ask you what your favorite color is and you blurt out kangaroo, then if kangaroo was your first thought, kangaroo is the right answer.”

So what can end up happening at times is that a mile-a minute client is in deep hypnosis but as I’m counting down for a regression and getting to the last number… they don’t see anything or go anywhere. “Are you inside or outside?” They might say, “I think I’m inside.” I told you not to think! Or they might say, “I don’t see anything.” A lot of people will think the very moment you give them the instructions. “In a moment I’m going to lift your arm and drop it. When it drops you’ll be six years old, and drop.” While you’re giving these instructions they will be cycling through old photographs in their mind trying to remember what they looked like or trying to remember where they lived when they were six years old. Of course the regression fails because they’ve activated their thinking conscious mind.

Sometimes people have to learn how to relax their minds. I often give self-hypnosis CDs to clients who have this mile-a-minute syndrome and tell them to come back after they have listened to it for a week. Most of the time they come back and go into deep hypnosis, they stop thinking through everything and we get the job done. I want to talk to the feeling level mind not the analytical mind. I want them to respond off of feelings, intuition, or having a hunch as if using their sixth sense. I find that older people tend to not listen as well to instructions, older males in particular. I’ve worked with ADD (ADHD) people as well and for them it’s actually not a deficiency in attention, it’s just that all noises and distractions hit them with the same attention value. These things can be overcome and greatly improved if they are willing to do the work and if they are willing to do what you tell them to do. Some people simply cannot follow directions. For the most part this is a very small percentage of people and I have only failed once when trying on several occasions to hypnotize a particular person. So pretty much everyone can be hypnotized but once in hypnosis it’s a matter of if they will follow directions from that point forward and keep their mind quiet. You must simply go with the flow.

In general hypnosis is a great tool for the masses. Young and old, children and adults, most everyone can benefit greatly from this buried treasure called hypnosis. If they truly want the change they are coming to me for, if they can follow simple directions and don’t think about the answer before answering, then hypnotherapy is incredible for curing or greatly helping most people. Anything that stress makes worse hypnosis makes better. For people who are actually mentally ill I would not recommend hypnosis, this is around five to eight percent of the population. For all others hypnotherapy is the best healing tool out there.

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud stated that, “All psychosomatic problems, psycho meaning mind, soma meaning body, are hidden from the conscious mind.” “There is no effect without cause and the cause is usually deeply hidden from the conscious mind.” “Amnesia lies at the base of all neurotic symptoms and our goal is to reveal those forgotten memories through yet to be learned methods.”

Freud understood back then that when people have a problem there is always a hidden cause related to that problem. He knew that we had to go back into the mind and find the hidden cause of the problem. It sounds a lot like the hypnotic age regression doesn’t it? The only problem Freud had was that he didn’t have any idea how to do it back then. He did know what was needed to solve the problem and his “Psychoanalysis” method resembles what I do in my office. It is amazing to see emotional, physical, and habitual problems be quickly and neatly put to rest by finding the cause. In fact many times just discovering the cause of the problem is enough to fix it, serving up the information to the conscious mind so it can finally be analyzed and picked apart is a huge part of the work. You must remember that your conscious mind doesn’t know where the problem started, it is hidden from you. Your subconscious mind, which is thousands of percent sharper than your dull conscious mind, knows the answer. It knows you physically and emotionally. It knows the time and day when you were stamped with that crippling emotion. It’s like that feeling is stamped right on that child’s forehead and there it remains. As time passes that feeling gets bigger and bigger and then manifests into emotional and physical problems. These are real problems that hurt and cause dysfunction. The symptoms are real and can medically be charted. Unresolved emotion changes us chemically causing pain, tumors, legs wiggling around, depression, and fatigue, but those are all symptoms of the hidden emotion that needs to be found and released.

Hypnotherapists who use regression understand the process. Find the emotion, magnify it and find where it started. They have the subconscious mind follow that feeling back to the very first situation that they ever felt it and then change the perception of that situation. Even if the person had felt that feeling hundreds of times in their life it is unnecessary to go to all of those events. If you clean up the first one they will be healed. I like to fix the initial event and maybe one or two other subsequent events if they seem significant, but this isn’t required. You can think of it as an inverted pyramid built of bricks. Even though every brick contributes to a person’s problem, by kicking away the lowest brick, the one holding up that inverted pyramid, the whole thing comes crashing down.

A good example of this would be the feeling of being a stupid person. Let’s face it, kids in school and other people throughout our lives have called us stupid from time to time. It is unnecessary to visit each of these events. We just need to visit the first event or the initial event that started the negative emotion. Moreover if someone came to me saying they are feeling stupid I would not use the word stupid when trying to build an emotion before doing a regression. Many times when a person describes a feeling they have it turns out that it’s different than what that person really feels (they are aware of what the conscious mind is telling them). When they say that they “Feel stupid” it could actually end up being an entirely different emotion.

As you might imagine there have been tens of thousands of regressions done by thousands of hypnotists through the years and certain patterns have been noticed. If you were to have a clinical test group of one hundred people all with let’s say, “Test Anxiety”, most of them would have very similar causes that are rooted in the feeling of a fear of failure. That’s what test anxiety usually is. They would all have very different events but those events would be linked to this failure fear. Let’s take a look at some patterns that have been noticed. While reading through the list below, just remember that it isn’t always the cause that I am referring to but these are patterns that come up a large percentage of the time. As you red this list it’s possible a light bulb may pop up in your mind if any of these problems happen to be yours or the problems of people that you know.

Cancer and/or chronic illness has been found to be strongly connected to a person’s experience as a young child or baby. The feeling of knowing that it’s parents, the ones that are suppose to love it, don’t want it to live. There is talk of abortion around the baby or perhaps a failed abortion attempt. Abandonment, blame, deep hurt, and in extreme cases attempted murder of the baby. The feeling of, “I don’t deserve to live or somebody would be better off if I weren’t here” and/or “I am a burden to my parents because they cannot afford to take care of me.” This is the powerful subconscious feeling level mind actually hearing these words before the child can even understand the language in which it was spoken! How can an unborn or newborn baby possibly know this? As you now know the subconscious mind is thousands of percent sharper than the conscious. The baby does hear what is going on around it, you can think of the fetus reaching up a few months before birth and hitting the record button. But it doesn’t interpret the words until that child comes of age where it has learned the language. At that point it is translated by the subconscious mind and the program comes online. It’s the same as if you had a very good friend who spoke Chinese and after knowing this person for a while you finally decide to take a Chinese language course. In class you now begin to understand what they have been saying to you. The first day of class the instructor gets up and teaches you a sentence and its interpretation and a light bulb goes off in your head, “Oh, that’s what she’s been saying all this time!” It’s the same thing with the subconscious mind of the infant. Beyond the interpretation of words the subconscious mind has also been picking up on emotions. I cannot tell you how many times a person has regressed back to the womb and the problem (ISE) was the feelings of the mother coming through into the child. A very interesting thing about regressing a person into the womb is that when they are there you, the hypnotist, can ask questions of the soul. I know that sounds kind of “out there” but it is true. We’ll discuss those topics later.

Fibromyalgia and arthritis equate to deep buried sadness, usually something in line with being crushed by the weight of life or a feeling of heavy burden. Fibromyalgia is a very real and wandering pain. Most people describe it as being focused in the muscles predominantly in one area, but the symptoms come and go as it travels to different locales throughout the body. I just watched a TV commercial on fibromyalgia and it showed a split screen of four people in pain and crying, this of course was produced by a drug company… It fired me up so much I wrote an article for the local paper saying, “I just fixed this yesterday in my office, again!” There’s no need to drug that person - but who would ever know that a hypnotist could cure them, right?

Stuttering usually if not always stems from one or two types of specific scenarios. The child was not allowed to cry in situations where he or she felt it necessary. Usually a father figure standing over a little boy, “Boys don’t cry, cut that sissy stuff out right now!” In addition the child on many occasions wanted to say something, inject something into a conversation but was repeatedly told to shut up. Attempting to pronounce words became stuck in the throat. A stifled cry or hushed verbiage is a great way to embed stuttering in a child.

Allergies and hay fever are produced during a period in life where the person or child cried a lot. No allergy itself is emotionally produced but all reactions to allergies have an emotional basis. If you were to go and get an allergy test to see what you are allergic to you would still be allergic to the same substances with or without hypnosis. An allergy attack or hay fever attack happens from a trigger. The trigger might be rolling around on a carpet made of wool when wool is what you’re allergic to or it might stem from an emotional trigger that may cause the attack. The same holds true for someone who has asthma, producing the asthma attack is a triggered response. Many times asthma is related to a lack of bonding between mother and son or daughter when young.

Obesity is a need for security and comfort similar to nursing from the mother at infancy. Some neurosis is there as a trigger. Many times the subconscious has a body image that was imprinted at an early age due to sarcastic remarks made of one’s own body. Another prevalent cause is sexual abuse at an early age. The subconscious responds in this way - “If I add these layers no one will ever touch me like that again.” Also when we are born the first event that happens is that something is placed in our mouth. We go from the most secure comforted place we will ever know, our mother’s womb; to the most insecure we will ever feel, the moment of birth. At that moment they place something in our mouth, which is interpreted by the subconscious mind to relate to security. As children when we cry or are hungry, tired, or want attention, our parents stick something in our mouth, food or a pacifier! No wonder we shove food in our mouths when we seek comfort or security later in life, think about it…

Alcoholics and substance abuse cases always involve the feeling of worthlessness. It is the feeling of that person not being as good as everyone else. They drink or do drugs not to feel good, party or celebrate, but to feel better for a little while. What they are doing is comforting and or distracting from negative emotion that is inside. People are sometimes labeled with addictive personalities, they smoke too much, drink too much, etc. What really is happening is that they are simply trying hard to distract and comfort themselves from an emotion that is growing in the subconscious mind. The too muches: Drink too much, smoke too much, too much sex or masturbation, shop-a-holics, gambling addictions… it’s all the same, “Gotta get away from that negative feeling inside if only for a little while.” The label “Alcoholic” is a misunderstood label. When you here that term you generally think of the homeless bum who is urinating on himself and living in the street. This is not the typical alcoholic. Most alcoholics hold down good jobs, they exercise and have families. After work, they have a drink, then another drink with dinner. Maybe they’ll have a glass of wine or two, maybe a few beers while watching the game and a nightcap right before bed. This is the typical alcoholic pattern.

Test anxiety. This is when you’ve studied pretty hard and you know the material for the upcoming test but when you sit down to take the exam your mind blanks out on you. This is always due to a fear of failure. I was working with a woman once for smoking cessation and had completed two really good sessions with her. She called back three days later and had not quit yet. I told her to think about why she thought she was still smoking. When she came in she said all she could come up with was that everyone was watching her to see if she would be able to quit. Her husband, her kids, and her parents, everyone at work kept asking how it was going. Then an idea hit me - maybe she feared she wouldn’t be able to quit with everyone watching her? I asked her how she did with tests back in school and my suspicions were correct. She informed me that she “Blanked out” and didn’t do well most of the time. Test anxiety! So I regressed her on the fear of failure and the initial event causing this was that while in eighth grade at a track meet she was pulled into an event she had never done before which turned out to be a relay race. One of the girls on the squad didn’t show up and they needed a fill-in. Everyone was at the track meet watching, her parents, friends, and school mates… I corrected her feelings in this event, barely even mentioned smoking in the session, and she immediately became a non-smoker. Who would have thought, consciously thought that is, that test anxiety was the key for her to quit smoking? That subconscious mind is its own animal for sure.

Ulcers & indigestion are usually fear-based experiences that have the people literally “Eating away at themselves.” (IBS) Irritable Bowel Syndrome comes to mind. I discuss ulcers and high blood pressure a lot when trying to have people understand that emotions and feelings are directly related to physical problems. I think most people can relate to the fact that if you are always stressed out or on the go for an extended period of time then an ulcer or high blood pressure will likely be the result.

What about binging? Binging on anything? Emotionally, binging equates to one thing. The problem the person is having is the same thing that comforts that person. It’s a vicious cycle. People binge on food, sex, alcohol, drugs, shopping, and gambling… Let’s say you’re trying to stop drinking but you mess up and drink to excess one night. The next day you feel really bad physically and emotionally, kicking yourself because you promised to lay off the booze! Well the booze is the thing that comforts you so you find yourself with a drink in hand once again and the cycle continues. Everyone tries to comfort him or herself, that’s just part of being a human being. If that comfort food or activity is hurting you it’s generally simple work to find out where it started and derail the program.

(RLS) Restless Leg Syndrome happens to people usually at night just before or after falling asleep. Their knees start knocking, they can’t fall asleep because of it or it wakes them up after sleeping for a short amount of time. The ISE of this problem usually has to do with repressed anger. A lot of the people that have this repressed anger are so nice, everybody likes them but inside the anger has built and it will be expressed.

This is a partial list of course, there are many other problems that people have but the ones listed here are the ones that I’ve seen many times. If you are interested in a more comprehensive listing of problems equating to feelings then I would suggest buying the book, “Heal Your Body” by Louise L. Hay. I have a copy in my office and many hypnotists use it as a reference to get insight into their upcoming sessions, I believe she also has a movie on this topic.

To heal a person you have to cover all the bases. What I want to do is first go to very specific places and clean up specific events. I do this by using Parts Therapy/Age Regression techniques as I have mentioned. For most cases there are usually four to six specific feelings we need to track down with four to six separate regressions to be performed. How many sessions is that? My record stands at completing seven different problems using regression in one session. This all depends on the person seeking help. Every person responds differently and with regard to my record of seven different problems being solved in one session, I can tell you it wasn’t because I’m so incredible. This client was at the ISE before I could even count all the way down to one.

If someone tells me they are depressed, that label “Depressed” is like a huge banner and doesn’t come close to the very specific road we’ll have to travel to find the real negative emotion. I’ll ask them when they feel depressed the most. Is it in the morning, at night, when alone? I’ll try to narrow it down. In session I’ll have them imagine themselves in that situation and have them feel that feeling. Remember, in hypnosis your mind is much sharper so imagining things is almost real. “Use your wonderful imagination and imagine that it’s night time, you’re all alone and those feelings are creeping in, those feelings you don’t like.”

I never use a label like depressed because you are “Leading the witness” as it were. “You’re all alone and those feelings you don’t like are creeping in, coming in strong now - I will count from one to five and with each count those feelings you don’t like will double. If you try and push those feelings away the stronger they become!” To be a good hypnotist you must use voice inflections. You have to be an actor and get into it. If you sound like a robot the subconscious is unresponsive. This is the exact opposite from what you see in movies. This is the part of the mind where emotions and feelings reside so you must speak with emotion. If they are sad I put a cry in my voice, and my voice becomes gruff if I am building the feeling of anger.

You might wonder how I get a feeling from physical symptoms like chronic headaches, CFS, high blood pressure or fibromyalgia... I wasn’t trained in this but have invented a great way to find those feelings underlying the physical issue. The biggest problem that faced me when I first started working with physical problems was how I would build up the feeling without bringing on the symptom. You wouldn’t want to bring on a splitting headache and then have the client follow that feeling back… I simply use the imagination of my client, I’ll have them imagine they are at the doctor’s office and the doctor places a label on their arm, Migraine. I tell them that the glue holding this label to them are all the feelings and emotions they don’t like, all the feelings of why they have migraines to begin with. “And you start feeling those feelings now, they’re coming in now.” I also place a magic cloak around their shoulders that absorbs all of the negativity while keeping them safe as I have mentioned.

Let’s say you had a friend who is going through a divorce. You call your friend and talk to her one evening to try and have her feel better about the situation. “Everything is going to be alright, you’ll find someone new. He wasn’t right for you anyway. Time heals all wounds and you’ll look back on all of this and laugh some day.” If you spend an hour on the phone with this person and you are relatively convincing you may make her feel better for at least a little while. However, after this conversation she will still remain deeply hurt. But if you were to hypnotize her and say the exact same thing, the odds are she will actually feel much better and be able to heal at a much faster rate if not right then and there. Bypassing the critical factor, flying in under the radar is the key to healing…

So how do you change one’s perceptions about giant mistakes they have made in their lives or terrible things that they may have done? “I left my husband and three children without a word because I knew this fate would be better than if I stayed.” This was a true ISE of a woman I was helping and she came to me just to quit smoking! When she was pregnant with her third child, within the last few weeks of her pregnancy her mother became ill. Her mother had been just fine until one night when she became very dizzy so the family rushed her to the emergency room and she died. This unexpected death caused a huge ISE in my client. This is one of the rare ones where it did not happen in childhood. For some reason this woman knew that her fate would be just like that of her mother. She felt that when she reached her mother’s age she to would die. Because of this reasoning she decided to abandon her family and spare them that impending grief.

This woman had came to me to stop smoking but told me about a deep depression that she had felt for many years. She was actually in a mental hospital for two years because of it. Through regression we went back to the night that her mother died and to the time when she left her family shortly after the birth of her third child. You can imagine that it was extremely difficult to simply take her back and forth from these events and have her feel okay about them with the usual patter of, “When I count from three down to one it’s the time when you left your family high and dry but this time you’ll feel just fine about it, three, two, one.” Unfortunately she was not able to forgive herself and most likely is still harboring guilt over what she had done. This makes the point rather clearly that a hypnotist cannot make you do anything even if it’s for your own good. I couldn’t make her forgive herself even though she would have benefited from it greatly.

This is not the first time I have encountered a substantial ISE with a pregnant woman. I would guess it is due to the hormone imbalance within their body during pregnancy. Instead of a bowl of ice cream accompanied by a pickle sandwich, apparently they sometimes just decide to leave everyone they know…

“Let me ask you, have you ever made a mistake? Little ones, big ones, maybe made the same mistake more than once? Sure you have. You have, I have, haven’t we all? Show me a person who hasn’t made a mistake and I’ll show you a complete idiot. But when we make mistakes we kick ourselves don’t we? How could I have been so stupid to make such a dumb mistake, you’ve said to yourself. But mistakes aren’t stumbling blocks, they’re building blocks. Building a smarter you, a more compassionate you, a more knowledgeable you. Mistakes are how we learn, how we get better.”

As children we learn that mistakes are bad and we get punished for them. It makes perfect sense that we continue that programming into adult life. This is a great way to be self-defeating and I think we are all guilty of it. When people have made huge mistakes, been abused, or their life is in the toilet, I generally relay the following to them. It’s very important to put their life into perspective. The following patter has a huge impact on the subconscious computer.

“Have you ever had to deal with difficult people? They’re out there aren’t they… but again they are there for a reason and that reason is for you to learn and grow from them. What about difficult situations, have you ever gone through one of those? Put it to you like this… Imagine you were born into a family of great wealth. I’m not talking about millions of dollars, I’m talking about billions of dollars and you got everything you ever wanted handed to you on a silver platter. When you learned how to ride a bike you received one hundred of the best bicycles ever made. When you learned how to drive you had your pick of any car in the world! You never make mistakes, your parents never made any mistakes either, no one is ever difficult to deal with and you have never gone through a difficult situation in your life. Everyone who is the opposite sex falls in love with you and everyone else wants to be your best friend. Now tell me… When you are very old looking back over this imaginary life do you honestly think that you would have learned a lot of life’s lessons living a life like this? (No) No, I didn’t think so and that’s why you make mistakes. That’s why you’ve dealt with difficult people and difficult situations so you can learn and grow, and you have learned, you have grown. Now you’re beginning to understand what life is really all about. It’s not about money and having everything always working out. Put it to you this way, I’ve never seen a hearse pulling into a cemetery with a suitcase strapped on top of it, meaning you can only take with you what you learn, and you have learned, you have grown. Mistakes, difficult people, and difficult situations are all one thing and that one thing is - a lesson. We learn and grow by going through these lessons.”

“Now I want you to imagine that you are in heaven and haven’t come down here to live your life yet. It doesn’t matter what your belief system is just play along with me on this one. Imagine that there is a level system. We’ll say level one through six. The level ones and twos are newbie’s, it’s not that they are dumb but they haven’t learned a lot of lessons yet. On the other hand the level sixes are very advanced. They have learned many lessons and are much wiser. Okay, you’re in heaven and let’s say you’re a level four. The higher ups come to you and ask, “How would you like to advance and become a level five?” Wow! You get all excited, a level five, heck yea! What do I have to do, tell me! They say, “Calm down, calm down, it’s not that easy. You’ll have to go down to the school called earth and live a life. When that life is over, after going through many lessons you will return here and will then be a level five if you do well. You get all excited, okay I’m in. I’ll do it! Here’s the thing, (and I loudly get out a notebook and a pen and start listing out my clients problems as I checkmark them off on the page). You’re mother will beat you, your father will leave the family when you are five years of age, you will be raped when you are ten, you will become a drug user, you will…”

“Now that you know the challenges of this life, will you go down to earth and live it so you can learn and grow? Well, you know what you said? You said yes. Yes I do want to learn those lessons and become a level five! Then the higher ups inform you of one other point. There is one more thing though… you won’t remember we had this conversation. Amnesia will be placed in your mind in the first few years and you won’t remember any of this or any of us because if you did you’d have all the test answers - the choice is yours.” Well, that didn’t put you off, you agreed to come down here and live this life because you did want to learn and grow. So they waved their magic wand or whatever they do and Poof… you were born. They were right though, fairly quickly the amnesia did set in and boy oh boy you’re in the thick of it! Mistakes galore, difficult people, bad situations, and you are now living your life in this boarding school here on earth.”

“You see, life is a school - some people call it the school of hard knocks. You’ve been through a lot in your life, some good and some bad. I’m going to tell you this though, when you die, when you go home, you’re not suppose to arrive all nice neat and pretty because if you do, they’ll take one look at you and know you didn’t try. You are supposed to arrive all scratched up, dented and bruised from being knocked down, shoved down, and pushed down. And those marks, those scratches, dents and bruises are nothing to be ashamed of. Those marks are badges of courage, they’re trophies and proof that you did try, you did learn, you did grow! And if you did arrive all nice and pretty then what was the point of living that life to begin with? That life would have been a waste of time. There is an old ancient Chinese proverb that says, “Knock me down seven times, stand up eight.” And that is why you’ve lived the life you’ve lived. How could you possibly learn what the darkness is without first having stepped into it and then back into the light? That’s why you’re living, that’s your path. And speaking of paths, we are all on our own individual paths. Yours is different than mine and mine is different then everyone else’s. And in the future you will make mistakes. You will have to deal with difficult people and difficult situations knowing that everyone’s paths are different. Let me ask you this, in the past, in your life - have you ever run into one of those level ones? You know the people I’m talking about. It’s not that they are stupid but it’s like they just haven’t evolved in certain ways, you know the ones I’m talking about.” (I might mention one of their offenders here) And in your past haven’t you been through times or situations that were so hard that you didn’t think you would get through it? But you did, didn’t you? Yes you did because nothing has been set on your path that you can’t handle. Oh sure sometimes you come close but nothing has been placed in your life chart that you cannot get through. If you’re honest with yourself those tough times were the times where you learned the most. Actually you picked the path you’re on in order to learn very specific lessons and you are learning them, you are growing. And the next time you make a mistake you celebrate that mistake. You step back and say wow, I was just given a wonderful opportunity to learn something here. And you will learn all that you can from that mistake because what you are really doing, going through all these lessons, is developing and expanding your consciousness. That’s why you are here, that’s why you are going through these lessons.”

The patter above is very powerful in changing ones perspective on situations, events, and offenders. I hope that moved you a little but make no mistake about it, when a person is in the state of hypnosis and you explain that to them, it will change their life forever. Yet another part of healing someone emotionally and physically, as I have mentioned, is to have the person whole-heartedly forgive those who have hurt them and even more importantly, forgive themselves. For this, I use chair therapy where the person speaks directly to the offender. Everyone in the world could benefit greatly by going through this therapy which only takes one hypnosis session. You must build a very strong case here. They need to understand that the person that hurt them is just out there living their life not thinking about what they did to you, the only person in the entire world it’s hurting, is you.

What comes to my mind using this therapy, this technique of talking to people that have hurt you and also seeing it through their eyes is identical to a person’s life review after death. When we die, supposedly we go through a life review. In this life review not only do we see how we affected others but we can then see the entire situation through their eyes, very powerful. If someone climbed through your window when you were a child and murdered your mother you could spend the rest of your life harboring hate and anger toward that person. It could actually ruin your life. But if magically you could see that event through the eyes of the murderer and completely know his past, completely understanding how he came to the point of killing your mother, your hate and anger very well may turn to pity for this person and wash away all of the negativity because you now simply, totally understand. That’s real healing right there and that’s what hypnosis offers. It’s not as good as that life review but it comes closer than anything else I’ve seen due to the fact that it isn’t just words but the person feels it as they are going through it.

Of course in doing this kind of work you will run into people who are grieving or possibly feeling responsible for another person’s death in some way. Many people kick themselves because they weren’t there when someone died or felt as though they could have done more. This usually adds up to one emotion, and that emotion is called guilt. Guilt is an after the fact emotion, it only comes in afterwards and then we beat ourselves up over things that we should have done or should have said.

“Let me ask you this. You’ve had haircuts before right? (yes) What about your nails? Have you ever clipped your nails before? (yes) Sure you have. Did you know that when you sleep at night you lose skin follicles and every day you lose eyelashes and hair? Ever clean the wax out of your ears? (yes) Now let me ask you something. Those things, your hair, eyelashes, skin, wax and finger nails, those are a part of your body right? (yes) Do you keep all of those bodily things like in a box somewhere? (no) I want you to imagine that you have kept every hair clipping, every finger nail clipping, all of that bodily stuff and it’s in your backyard right now in a big pile. Imagine you go out there, dig a hole and bury it. To make sure you remember where you buried all of that you place a marker on the top of the hole. Now tell me, wouldn’t it be ridiculous to go out there and place flowers on that hole? (laugh, yes) Sure it would, you better believe it! Okay, do you care about those things at all? (no) But they were a part of you. They were a part of your body, right? The point I’m making is that your mother and father, they feel the same way about their bodies. Their physical bodies, that wasn’t ever really them! It was just a vehicle they used in this physical world, in this boarding school that they were in, but they have now graduated. It’s no different than you getting into your car. Your car is the vehicle that transports you around. You see we are beings of light inhabiting a physical vehicle for a short time, that’s all. They don’t care about their bodies any more then you do about your finger nail clippings.” (I also add that you will see them again if this is a part of their belief system)

To heal someone I take a very specific approach and if I only help the person a little I feel like I failed because usually hypnosis greatly or more often completely heals the person you’re working with. You first pinpoint the emotion relating to the problem, regress to the first time they ever felt that feeling and change that perception. Once all of these specific issues are done, i.e. “One, I’m depressed. Two, I drink too much. Three, I have daily headaches.” Then you clear away the negativity inflicted by people who have hurt them. This process is three fold. You want to first pinpoint and release trapped emotion relating to the offending person. Next your subject needs to understand that what happened isn’t their fault; it was the “Offenders” fault. “If I could go back in time with a magical crane and pluck you out of any of those situations and place any other little girl there, you know your father would have done the exact same thing to her. It’s not your fault that your dad acted this way. You’ve punished yourself quite long enough!”

These offenders could be living people, dead people, bullies that go all the way back to third grade and so on. They now forgive and set free the major offenders. Once this process is done with the major offenders you have their subconscious mind reveal to them the names or faces of everyone who has ever hurt them. Friends, business partners, school kids and have them send forgiveness to each one realizing that to forgive someone doesn’t mean you have to like them, and it doesn’t mean that you condone their behavior. And finally we arrive at self-forgiveness. “Imagine that you are at home all alone and you’re standing in front of a full length mirror. That’s the person that needs to be forgiven, you have to be forgiven! Of course you’ve made mistakes, haven’t we all? Forgive her, tell her you love her, tell her you forgive her and watch that frown disappear. It’s time to smile, it’s time to wipe your eyes and step into the light…”

Next you clear away any residual negativity in their inner mind. I have them imagine their inner mind as a room. Stored in this room are all of the negative thought and emotional energies and feelings like hatred, anxiety, rejection, fear, doubt, guilt, and unhappiness. These feelings are represented by imagining red bits of what appear to be paper. You have them imagine that they are tearing these red bits that appear to be paper down from the walls and dispose of them down a hole so they can never get back in. Once this process has been completed the spaces left by the red bits are then replaced with white bits of paper – positive feelings, energizing helpful emotional energies and feelings…

And finally it’s time for direct suggestion and future pacing. Looking to the future in a way where there are no blocks, the future is theirs, it’s positive and bright. They own this world and deserve all the joy, all the riches, all the love and all the health this world has to offer. They are special, very special. I also instill self-love and self-respect times ten because if you love something and respect it, you take care of it! It’s kind of like buying a new car. When you buy a new car you usually wash it a lot and don’t generally take it through McDonalds and wad up the bag and throw it on the floorboards. You take care of it because you love and respect it. The interesting thing is that the negative feelings that are causing all of these problems aren’t even the feelings of that individual in the current time and place, but rather they are the feelings and emotions of them as a child only magnified through time from events that are years and years in their distant past.

We are human beings, we are imperfect and we are living in an imperfect world. We begin as children and the child like mind is where we originated. That child like mind is much different than the one you now have as an adult. The child looks to its parents, schoolteachers, police officers, and everyone who is taller in stature as authority figures. Children are taught to respect their elders, they are right and I am wrong. The critical factor doesn’t even develop until the child is between five and six years old so everything goes directly into and is registered inside of their subconscious mind at this age. When a child’s parents get divorced the child-like mind takes it personally. “What did I do to cause you to break up? Was it when I didn’t clean my room? Was it when I didn’t listen?” When a child is sexually or verbally abused the child like mind asks what it did to cause this to happen. The adult mind is much different. If someone came into the room and started yelling at you right now, you’d probably say to yourself or out loud, “Man, what’s your problem? You’ve got some nerve talking to me like that!” The child does none of that. Herein lies the beginnings of the downfall, the self destructive thought processes. When this person grows and becomes an adult the pattern of kicking oneself is in place. The negative accumulated thoughts and patterns can become a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve seen this time and time again. We all do it to a certain degree. You can think of the child as being stamped with a rubber stamp right on the forehead. “Shame”, “Guilt”, “Worthless”, whatever the feeling might be and usually that feeling does not stem from abuse situations. Of course sometimes the ISE is a rape or someone yelling or hitting, but not usually. Usually the ISE is just the first time that child was introduced to some kind of negative feeling for the first time. As the years progress that feeling magnifies, it gets bigger and bigger in the subconscious mind until it gets so big it breaks through to the conscious level mind and to the body. Unresolved mounting emotion is the root of so much physical and emotional trauma and it is all just a perception of oneself or of certain events. The child also has a lot Firsts. The first time they fell down, the first time they hear an argument, the first pinch, the first scrape. After a session, after we discovered that the cause of “Clinical” depression was just a three year old feeling as though they are abandoned when in fact they were not, sounds so simple, so stupid. How could anyone be clinically depressed from that? BUT… think of it from the mind that didn’t even know that this feeling existed. You’re a child sitting there feeling okay and then it dawns on you for the very first time - you’ve been abandoned! Those two taller beings are not there and you need them! Aaaaahhhhh! I actually think we should rethink using cribs for our children because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve discovered the ISE when a child is in a crib. “I want to be over there, I feel helpless, I feel abandoned.”

Also it is so important how you perceive your past, your present, and your future. This is monumental in eliminating problems of the mind and body. If you think about how our minds really work it is unfortunate for us. Our immature mind as a child absorbs the negative feeling which stems from certain past events or people. That feeling grows through our lives and can pull us down. Our culture here in the US is one that largely treats these symptoms of unresolved buried emotion with drugs, both prescription and illicit. We are also told as children to cover up any bad or negative feelings. My father used to tell me, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” The subconscious mind generates these feelings and they need someplace to go, they need to be expressed. If you learn to constantly stifle your feelings and put on a happy face, illness occurs. We don’t teach our children how to correctly release emotion. We teach them that displaying negative feelings is wrong. Anger, fear, jealousy, pouting, sadness are all no no’s. So what do we learn? What have we learned from our childhood? We pretend to be happy. We put up a front so others perceive us as being happy and successful. Let’s say you’re having a crappy day and you walk by Sue at work and she’s having a crappy day as well. She says, “Hi Tim, how’s it going?” I reply with, “Good, how are you?” She says she’s good. As you pass each other, two steps apart now, walking by, both of you hanging your heads low… These negative emotions that have not been expressed cause us varying degrees of problems. Keep stuffing them back in, they’ll go away - yea right.

So what hypnotherapy is really doing is wiping the slate clean and changing perceptions. Let’s face it, after living a while and getting kicked so many times it causes ISEs in our psyche. Most, if not all of us, enter adulthood carrying with us all kinds of garbage we were programmed with from our childhood. But when we are born the slate is clean, right? (Kind of…) We just started to live a new life and minus the fetus picking up on negativity from others speaking around it or from the mother, things are going great… most of the time that is. Sometimes, and I know what you’re going to think, sometimes we carry emotional and physical pain with us into this new life from past lives. There, I said it. Are past lives real, or not? Let’s take a close look at this now.

As I stated before, when thinking of hypnosis people think of the tarot card reader, witch doctor, or have visions of the stage hypnotist. Another view, which derails the professionalism of clinical hypnosis even more, is having it equate to the metaphysical. So is this phenomenon real? Could it be real? And how does it connect to the subconscious mind?

One thing I should tell you is that the subconscious mind works with things both real and imagined. I once helped a woman with a fear of snakes and the event causing the problem was a nightmare she had when she was six years old. This wasn’t even a real event. She had never been injured by a snake or known anyone bitten by a snake. This could also happen if a small child watched a TV show that they shouldn’t have. It’s very possible that what they saw on TV might develop into a fear that grows as they do. So could past lives be on this same order? Let’s set aside any religious beliefs just for a little while and really look at this past life phenomena with an open mind.

When I regress my clients with regard to an emotion what I am essentially doing is something known as a “Non-Directive Regression.” This means I am not telling them or directing them to go to a certain age or event. I have no idea when or where their minds will take them. Of course occasionally I will take some of my clients back to a specific age or event. For example, I take all my smokers back to when they were six years old before they were a smoker (except for one person who was already smoking at age six…) This is called a “Directive Regression.” With directive regressions we know where we will end up. We are directing them to a certain time or situation. For the non-directive regressions in therapy I will get a person every other week or every three weeks or so who ends up in what they perceive to be a past life. If you do regression work you will have to deal with this, it will come up. To me it really doesn’t matter. I’ll still ask them if this is the first time they’ve ever felt the feeling. If it isn’t and they go back to a past life I correct it the exact same way I would as if they ended up as a child in their current lifetime. I once had a woman follow her fear back and she perceived herself as a man in Egypt walking up a steep hill with some kind of wooden carrying device over his shoulders with gourds hanging from both ends. This was the first time she/he ever felt the feeling. I’ve had five clients to date go back to the German death camps in WWII.

I had another woman come to me with a mix of different problems a while ago. When I started working on her problem regarding a professional block, a day trader who couldn’t trust her trading plan, she became very emotional. She regressed to being six years old, outside, nighttime, and with people. She saw herself in a courtyard of some large structure standing next to a huge bond fire with all the other homeless and poor. Her father had just been imprisoned which was a death sentence back then and her mother was already dead. She found herself orphaned and had nowhere to go. The tears soon followed.

Another person I was regressing, I don’t recall what we were working on, was in deep hypnosis and followed her fear back to a previous life as well. She was wearing a Victorian style dress, black with white lace and she started to cry and cry... I asked her what was wrong and she conveyed to me that she was walking out of her home and the house was on fire. It was just a shell of a house that was totally engulfed in flames and her three children were inside. She couldn’t save them and they died there.

One thing about regression work is this. To the person going through it, it’s not just remembering it, it is more like reliving it if done correctly. They are reliving the event as if they are there for the first time. As you can imagine this invokes real fears or joys depending on where the person might end up. Sometimes when I am working with a person they start talking in past tense like, “I saw my mother hit me.” It’s up to me to put them back in the situation, back in the moment, by saying something like, “No, you see your mother hitting you. It’s happening, continue.” Sometimes it’s my fault. If I change the tense they’ll go right along with me. The proper way to conduct a regression is to keep it in the present tense, “What happens next, instead of what happened next.”

Sometimes if I have a really good rapport with my client and they are interested in past life regression I’ll just go for it. I’ll ask permission first of course but when we are nearing the end of our work together I might say something like, “Would you like to go back and see what you used to be in a past existence? (Sure) Okay, in a moment I’m going to lift your arm and drop it, when it plops on down you are going to go wayyy back in the memory of mind. When your arm plops on down it will be a different time, a different place, and a different you. (Plop)” Here I’ll ask the usual questions. Are you inside or outside? Is it daytime or nighttime? Are you alone or with people? How old are you? These questions get them into where they have arrived. I also suggest to them that it will be vivid, real, and clear. Clearer each time we move forward or backward. I will then have them look at themselves and tell me if they are male or female (Apparently we incarnate as different genders). I ask how they are dressed and what’s going on. To get the year I will generally have them give it to me one number at a time while I tap their forehead. (Tapping the forehead keeps the conscious mind busy.) I generally only do this if we haven’t deepened the state of hypnosis much.

Now to see if their conscious mind is making this stuff up or if they are really where they say they are I fire off a series of questions that should be very easy for them to answer, questions like, “What’s your name? Where do you live? Your current life has dollars, quarters, nickels, and pennies, what is your monetary system here?” If these answers come out easily and quickly I assume they aren’t making it up, but if they are struggling with the answers I’m not buying it and it’s categorized as a “Wanna-be regression.” What the mind expects to happen tends to be realized, it’s true. It’s true even with regressions. If someone comes to me and says, “I think I was Abe Lincoln in a previous life”, then guess who’s going to show up? You got it, old Abe! Of course the answers to my questions will come out slowly and be difficult for them or they won’t remember what Abe’s mothers name was if it is in fact a wanna-be regression.

I have to tell you that I come from the perception of a clinician. I know what I’m doing. I do it step by step and by the numbers. I don’t even list on my web site or in my brochures that I do past life regressions, can you guess why? Let’s face it, if you are considering coming to me with a very real problem such as depression or fibromyalgia and you notice I also do past life regressions, well it really takes the professional wind out of my sails doesn’t it?

So are these past life regressions real - do we reincarnate? I’ll let you decide as you red through this chapter, but can any of us really know? I don’t think we will really know until we cross over to the other side. Only then will we find out the true answers. I should mention that there have been some past life regressions that will just floor you! Names, facts, phone numbers, places, and people who are still living that verify the facts that originated from a past life regression. Is this a past life? Has the person in hypnosis somehow become psychic? Is someone or something telling this person all of these facts? I’ll let you decide for yourself.

I’ll first start this section off by conveying to you one regression that was told to me by one of my teachers, Gerald Kein. This one took place years ago in Florida. He was in a small crowd of people and he ended up doing a recreational past life regression for a teenage girl. I believe he said she was fourteen and pregnant, with her second child… Yikes! At the time of the session she lived in Florida and had never traveled outside the state. She wasn’t that knowledgeable or worldly by any stretch of the imagination. He hypnotizes her, does some deepening and then recites similar patter as I did above to take her back to a different time, a different place, and a different you…

She finds herself working in a law office. She’s there on the weekend to catch up with some typing but doesn’t mind doing the overtime because she likes to be caught up and have everything in order by Monday morning. She tells him that the year is 1941 and she finds herself typing away while listening to the radio. Jerry asks her who is playing on the radio. She answered by reciting a few musical groups from the time. Benny Goodman is what is currently playing, currently in her mind in 1941 that is. So after collecting all the small details of this particular day he then says to her, “Okay, in a moment I’m going to lift your arm and drop it, and when I do I want you to go to the most significant day of this life… Plop.” She finds herself, once again, still typing away at her desk listening to the radio. It’s the same day, the same event, and Jerry’s like, hum okay we’re still here…

All of a sudden she hears an announcement on the radio. “We interrupt this broadcast to announce that Pearl Harbor has just been attacked by Japan!” Her voice becomes very excited, and in her mind she hops up, shuts the radio off and excitedly expresses, “I’ve got to run home and tell my parents!” She races down the stairs, runs out into the street and… gets hit by a bus! She’s killed instantly.

Wow, hit by a bus! I guess that was the most significant day of her life. The interesting thing during this regression was that she had recited names, addresses, and phone numbers of all of these people that she knew. She remembered the name of the town, the name of the law office, her brother’s name, etc. After this amazing past life session, about six weeks later Jerry gets a call from her mother. They’ve been checking out all of the facts and details that came out during the regression and they have been adding up. The law office still exists today under the same name as back in 1941 and it does reside in the town that she described. They even called the brother. Can you imagine? “Hi, my name is so and so, I used to be your sister - I’m your dead sister reincarnated.” Click – hang up! Jerry asked them to kindly inform him that if they get any more information to please give him a call back. Turns out that the former brother of this Florida teen, AKA dead sister, finally listened to what she was saying and reluctantly agreed for them to fly up so they could meet.

In this meeting they took her to the law office and she described the interior of the building as if she knew it. When inside she noticed changes to the architecture, some that she liked and some that she felt they shouldn’t have changed. It turned out that the sons of the retired and deceased fathers who used to be the lawyers running this practice were now running the office. This Florida girl had mentioned details to them regarding their fathers practice and their fathers themselves that directly correlated with reality. They then took her to the house where she had grown up. Her brother in her past life was still living there. He had inherited the house from his parents after they passed away. She was taken inside the home and she knew the layout of the house as if she had lived there. She was taken into her old bedroom and she became very excited. She asked for a crow bar or screwdriver or some kind of prying tool. She went into her old closet and started prying at the baseboards in one particular spot. These baseboards were the old type that were really tall. She got the baseboard off the wall and reached around inside the wall. She then emerged grasping a mason jar full of money, old money like silver dollars and currency from that time. She was saving to buy a car and had just remembered where her stash was! Later they took her to the grave of… herself, but she had no emotions about it one way or another.

Wow, what a story! Can you even imagine a stranger contacting you that had details of someone that had died in your family decades ago? This is an actual case history and there have been many others just as exciting. Could this have really been the reincarnated soul of this person’s dead sister? If it wasn’t then how could this have ever happened? Is it possible that while this teenage girl was in trance that the spirit of the deceased office worker was speaking through her, and if so why? Could she have become psychic?

I will now convey to you another case history of past life regression. While I was working with one of my clients, in one of our last sessions together I asked her if she would be interested in knowing about her past lives. She is very open to this and very interested, actually I believe her to be quiet psychic so I decided to regress her back to her most previous past life.

While in deep hypnosis I lifted her arm and with suggestion told her to go back to her most current past life. When her arm dropped down she found herself in a tent. She was in a fairly small tent with her father. She noticed that there were animal skins covering the floor like a carpet. I gave her a few moments of silence so she could become acclimated to where she had just arrived and all of a sudden she proclaims, “I’m not in a tent, I’m in a teepee. I’m an Indian!” I had her describe her surroundings inside this teepee and asked her about her father. I then asked her for the year one number at a time. She gave me the numbers, 1, 8, 2, 6, - 1826! I asked which country she was in or where she was living in the world but she didn’t know. I then lifted her arm up and directed her to go one month into the future. When her arm hit the couch she became very happy. I asked where she was and she said, “I’m naked. Wow, I’m so beautiful.” She was looking down at herself and saw herself bathing in a river, no one else was around. She kept going on and on about how beautiful she was with this big smile on her face.

I then decided to go back a little further, “When your arm plops on down I want you to go back, way back again in the memory of mind. I want you to go back to the person you were before this life as a female Indian.” Once I released her arm her demeanor visibly changed. I asked her where she was and what she was doing. In this life she was the wife of a senator, very proper, very rich, and very powerful. She was wearing a rather uncomfortable long dress that was tight around the neck and waist. She was in a large building that she perceived as a public government building and there were many around her. I then asked her for the year one number at a time. This time it was 1782. I asked her what she would look like if she were to see herself in a mirror or in a reflective surface. With a gasp her mouth opened with almost a startle. “My god, I’m so old, I’m an old woman… I’m ugly!” Her being old and ugly seemed to have distressed her quite a bit because she went on and on about it for a minute or two.

I ended the session shortly afterwards without taking her to the day of her death or getting in any deeper. I actually have been regressed to one of my past lives where I perceived myself as being an old man of Asian decent. I remember walking down a village street seeing little shack like buildings on one side of a dusty road. In this session I actually was taken to the day of my death, once there I felt shaky and weak. A suggestion was given that at the count of three it would be all over and that life would be through. At that count I felt as though something grabbed me by the back of my neck, and I felt as if I were being lifted by my collar straight up and out of my body. I felt very good. I wasn’t jittery any longer and felt a great piece come over me. In another session I was a woman living in the middle of what seemed nowhere. The grass was very tall and I had a dwelling in a field. A man, a Viking, was taking care of me. The hypnotist asked if this was my husband but I said no, he just looks after me, takes care of me. Then the hypnotist, a female, stated that she had a personal question for me. She asked what I do during that time of month. I instantly knew the answer. I told her that I do all of my other work during the month first, the work where I have to be mobile. When it’s that time I see myself sitting on a big rock covered with cloths, I am dormant and I sit and do my weaving and other such work.

The subconscious mind is very interesting isn’t it? When I was newer to hypnosis my mind was reeling with the possibilities. If our subconscious stores every event of our current life and past lives, maybe I would be the one to finally resolve that age-old question. When we die, do we consciously die or do we go to this place called heaven? Well, it’s kind of been done already.

So who cracked the code? Who’s the one who found a way to regress people into any past life and even into the spirit world? His name is Michael Newton. If this topic interests you then do yourself a favor and buy his books, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls. I have read these two books many times. Michael Newton was, and at the time of this writing is a hypnotist/PHD. In the late 40’s Michael was working with a client and employed a non-directive regression and his client ended up in a past life. This intrigued him so much that he geared his practice from typical hypnosis work such as smoking cessation, weight loss, and such to embark on a voyage that would take this work to a whole new level and it did just that. In my office I hypnotize and then deepen for around twenty minutes or so and then get to work. Michael deepens for up to an hour and that’s after a long induction. He uses breathing exercises, counting, and imagery to take the person into what he calls the “Superconscious” state. This is beyond the subconscious.

The superconscious mind in spiritual literature is referred to as God or the “Universal Mind.” It is the source of all power, all knowledge, all love, and all peace. It knows of no time, nor space. It has no limitations. The superconscious mind is omnipresent, one mind expressing through all and each human mind is only an individualized center of consciousness of this one mind.

The hypnosis process that Michael came up with is termed LBL, short for “Life Between Lives.” After focusing all of his energies on this process he has come up with a two-session method to take a person into their spiritual memory of mind. In the first session he deepens the subject into this superconscious state and regresses them to different events in their current life, then finally arriving in the womb. Here he asks questions of the fetus to get the first clue as to what level of soul development they are. Next he regresses the subject into the most current past life, a handful of major events in this life, and then to the day of their death. In the second session he repeats these steps once again but then continues on into the spirit world after the death scene. He feels that this is a much more natural way to enter the spirit world, through a death scene, rather than backing them up from the womb and into the spirit world. I personally find this fascinating.

Michael’s clients go into great detail during these long three to four hour sessions. They can recall their spirit name (Mine is Allosh), the spirit names of their guides and cluster group members. They recall specific group members and the rolls they have played in previous existences. According to these seven thousand cases that he references, spirits are in varying stages of development. He calls these stages, “Levels”, and classifies people in levels one through six. Each stage of spirit is recognized by their color. Apparently the beginner spirits are white in color and as they advance in knowledge and lessons learned their core become a dark purple. He knows that there are stages beyond level six but has no resources to these upper levels because these spirits don’t need to reincarnate on earth any longer. He also describes the spirit world as being very organized with spirits having specific jobs to do. For example a spirit may be in training to become a guide or some have jobs trying to persuade lost souls, or ghosts, to return to the spirit world. He describes exactly how spirits come to this earth plain to communicate with loved ones. The book also talks about animals, birthing of new souls, and other mental and physical worlds where some of us incarnate.

What he did before writing his first LBL book in 1985 was regress some seven thousand people and had taken case studies from each of them. Remarkably these thousands of people tell of exact terminology, none that stem from religious texts. They describe what it was like to die, who they first meet, the meeting with their spirit guide or teacher upon death, and then it’s on to the “Counsel of Elders” for life review and finally ending up in their cluster group or spiritual family. The souls in this group are entities that they have known and reincarnated with many times through the ages. Now of course this goes well past the line of many religious belief systems. I guess the only way to make up your mind whether you believe this or not would be to find yourself an LBL certified hypnotist and experience it yourself. It’s kind of like someone describing what it’s like to be in love but if you’ve never felt it before then you probably wouldn’t believe in it.

Dr. Newton uses this LBL technique not only to uncover who his clients really are but also uses it in a clinical way. If someone is struggling with his or her life, instead of building a feeling off of that problem and regressing on it he takes them into the spirit world and they can go to the “Life Selection” area. Apparently we choose our bodies. We also choose the cast in our play, which are the characters in our life. This is kind of mapped out for us and by us for the sole purpose of learning lessons and completing karma. If we are having major problems with people or situations or if our body is crippled or diseased it sometimes can be very hard to continue with life with regard to these difficulties. Sometimes we need to understand new perceptions of why we are this way to begin with. It’s possible that you may come to the understanding that you selected these issues and this problematic body so you can learn from them or so others around you can learn. Interestingly the spirit guide of the person going through an LBL session sometimes blocks information for the sole purpose that they still need to learn lessons and by receiving the “Test Answers” too early would ruin the test. Michael won’t even see people who are younger than thirty years old because of this blocking.

I was working with a woman about a year ago who came to me with blocks in her life. We regressed to cause on these and it did help her quite a bit. She recently came back for a few follow up sessions as things have changed for the better but she felt that there is still something there, some kind of block overall in her life. She has had two divorces, the second husband being so verbally abusive that her children don’t want anything to do him. After a lot of deepening, I built up a feeling and we regressed on it. She began to speak to me very fluidly and at first I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. She kept saying that she was right, she was right and that they didn’t want her, they had kicked her out. She described being in a somewhat dark area but could see lights in the distance, almost as it would look as if you were to look up at the night sky. She couldn’t believe that she had been kicked out, then she started saying that she was wrong. After much probing it turns out that her spirit group had banished her away from the group. She was supposed to go down to earth to be born but she didn’t want to and she was now stuck between the spirit world and earth. She knew what she was facing in this new life and was very apprehensive in starting it but knew that she had to begin. I had her look down at herself and she vividly saw that she was a deep purple color, indigo (upper level spirit here). She had been very stubborn with her spiritual group, not bending an inch knowing that she was right, but then she had a revelation. Her lesson was to be blocked by success so she could learn how to eat humble pie. She needed to be knocked down a few rungs and learn humility. This was to be her life lesson.

In her life she excelled at school, graduated magna cum laude from college and wanted to become a doctor but her husband wouldn’t allow it. She had been through two failed marriages. In the second marriage she was married to a narcissistic personality type and he threw her to the mat any chance he got. She had put together a way to trade stocks that was phenomenal but couldn’t find it in herself to actually implement the plan. In deep hypnosis, in the superconscious state it finally dawned on her why she had been living this life of travail. She needed to learn humility. This was the missing puzzle piece as to why she had not become more than she had become. Now that she understands this it seems as though the curse has been lifted and she is now excelling in life.

Another metaphysical/clinical approach basically parks the body in deep hypnosis or in the coma state, and then raises the mind higher and higher into the spirit world. In this state the person in hypnosis asks the questions and receives answers. The answers come to them from inside, from spirit guides, or from the universe. I have used this on many occasions and it does seem to give them great insight into problems they may be dealing with. This is a newer approach and many other hypnotists are using this method in replacement of or in conjunction with regression therapy. When using this method it is possible to speak with the deceased, with spirit guides, and it is also used to scan the physical body to detect problems that may be hidden from us.

Some hypnotists use deep trance in an effort to obtain spiritual release. Ridding the person of an “Evil Spirit” that has attached itself to this person is another approach some use. When deep in hypnosis, body parked and mind lifted you can scan your body for black spots. These sometimes turn out to be entities. You can get a name and a purpose for why they are hanging out with your client. I have conducted a handful of these and as bizarre as this sounds it did seem to release problems that my clients were experiencing.

On a few occasions I have had some pretty remarkable events happen in my sessions but I mainly stick to the clinical aspects of hypnotherapy. I do have to say that the more of this work I do, the more I lean toward that spiritual side. While in sessions with my clients I often come up with the right words or phrases that I’ve never used before. These words seem to be exactly what this person needed to hear and I have no idea where they came from. From time to time I also will see faces in my mind while in session, people I don’t know. I’ll ask my client, “Who’s the thin guy guy, black hair, pitted face, thin mustache?” And the client will tell me that I just described a close friend of theirs who has passed away. I see faces like these about half the time when I go into self hypnosis as well so there has to be some kind of connection here, maybe the subconscious mind is really our spirit or connected to it in some way.

I have also mentioned that I will have my client imagine a chair in front of them. We then place a person in that chair that has hurt them in order to work through the emotions and problems with that person. If someone is in grief over a loved one who has died or if one of the “Offenders” has already passed away, I put them in the chair. I also do this with aborted babies. In this chair therapy I very often tap the subject on the shoulder and speak as if I was the departed person or I speak for the aborted baby(s). The strange thing about this is many times I get a feeling as if that person, or spirit, is there. I perceive an image in my mind as to how that person appeared physically. After the session I’ll ask my client if their diseased mother, or whoever had big hazel eyes, a slender face, a certain build that I had pictured in my mind… I haven’t been wrong with a description yet. With the aborted babies I get the image that around or near the face of the baby are beams of light stretching out from them. I can see big smiles on their faces. And again, I’ll ask the client what they imagined during this part of the session and many times it matches up with my own imagery.

I once had a woman that I was regressing and she followed her negative emotions back to the most bizarre places. She was in a physical world but it wasn’t earth. She was describing things out of some bizarre sci-fi episode. She was very upset because she was some kind of scientist and the global problems her world was facing were directly related to what she had done wrong. I now think one or two possibilities could have been at work here. In the LBL book, Newton speaks of some of us incarnating to other mental and physical worlds beside earth where we can learn. It’s possible my client was describing one of these past incarnations in another world, or maybe she was just making it up… I don’t know, but she sure seemed to be there.

Another client of mine, an exotic dancer from a town near my own, came to me because of self-confidence issues. Her daughter was getting to the age where she knew what mommy was doing for a living but she didn’t have the confidence to go after more normal means of making a living. So I’m doing chair therapy, working through her past offenders and getting forgiveness. I finish with the chair therapy and have her imagine she is standing in front of a full-length mirror. I tell her that the person she is looking at in this mirror is the person that needs her forgiveness most of all. She needs to be forgiven. Then it dawns on me... I messed up! She had told me she had an abortion and I totally forgot to put that fetus in the chair while doing chair therapy! This needs to be done - I cannot skip it! I’m kicking myself about right now and it would be lame to fade this scene, then have her imagine that chair room again and then come back to where she is now. I get this great idea. (I’m making this up as I go along now) Since she is already imagining herself looking into this mirror for self-forgiveness, how about I change the function of the mirror? I now tell her that the mirror she is looking into is a magic mirror!

“This mirror in front of you now shows the spirit world. Now look deep, deep, deep, inside this mirror and you notice someone has come to you. It’s the fetus of the aborted baby you had to let go” - pretty good thinking on your toes there right? So I work through this with her as I would normally do with chair therapy and she allows the cry to come out and we are able to reframe the guilt with regard to the abortion. Just when we finish the abortion issue she seems to become physically distraught. She places one hand on her forehead with the palm facing out and begins to breathe very heavily. She is muttering something like, “No, no, don’t, don’t!” or something like that. I’ve never seen this before so I begin to get a little nervous. I ask her if she is alright. She doesn’t reply so I ask again, are you okay? Do you want to end the session? She says she does.

I quickly emerge her with all the positive suggestions I can think of. I ask her if she is physically okay. She doesn’t really answer but asks for some water. I scurry out the door of my office and down to the water cooler then back. She is visibly shaken. She seems okay but with wide eyes she begins to tell me what has happened. She tells me that after the baby faded away from the mirror a woman appeared. This woman looked similar to herself and she felt a very strong connection with her. The woman in the mirror was dressed in Native American clothing. She described her as being very beautiful and she felt a strong desire that she wanted to go with her. My client felt like she was floating out of her body towards this Indian woman. One part of her really wanted to go with the Indian woman but the other part became frightened because she thought that if she did float away with this spirit she would die, hence the hand on forehead and the heavy breathing. Needless to say I have never had anyone look into a magic mirror that reflects the spirit world again! I do have yet one other tale to tell with regard to spiritual hypnosis.

I was working with a man who had so many problems that it’s amazing he was still living. Out of all the people I have worked with over the years his childhood is the worst that I have ever seen... and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones. He has multiple issues, one of them having to do with mild schizophrenia. Since early high school he has been seeing and hearing things. Every time he closes his eyes, even when blinking, he either sees shimmering words or an evil face that sometimes talks to him. The words are always negative and self-defeating evil words. The face is a face of a demon.

My client is on medication prescribed by a psychiatrist. We have already worked through a multitude of sexual abuse, verbal abuse, and other issues at this point and we finally arrive at the session where it’s time to try and get rid of this demon and eliminate these shimmering evil words. I’ve never done this before so I’m winging it! I have him imagine he’s looking into a magic mirror, one that shows the spirit world – I’m kidding!! No… not going there... Instead I have him imagine that he is in a fairly large room sitting in a chair in front of a regular mirror. I then go on about how he has changed, he was a very negative person but now he has let so much of that go and deep down he isn’t negative at all. Then I tell him that like attracts like, birds of a feather flock together. I ask him if he’s ever seen a motorcycle gang with a little old lady sitting on one of the bikes knitting. I compound this idea that like attracts like and since he no longer is a negative person, why would negative energy want to hang around him? (I do have to say that I’m feeling pretty good about myself here for making up such good patter right on the spot – one of those times that words come from nowhere) This demon or whatever it is has already become bored because he is no longer negative. It’s time to dispel this thing once and for all. He agrees. So he is imagining himself sitting in front of this mirror, I then have him image a spotlight which is a protective light surrounding him. This light is like a protective shield kind of like the shields they used around the starship Enterprise on that old TV show Star Trek. He tells me he feels safe and his dog has arrived there with him (the dog is a deceased loved pet and is something we worked through in a previous session)

I then say something like, “On the count of three this negative entity will be revealed to you. One, two, and three!” I ask if he can see it, he looks distraught. He says he does. I compound the idea that he is safe in this protective light and then ask where this terrible being is in relation to him physically. He tells me that it’s behind him to the right, standing there. I ask if it’s male or female. He says male but the face is just a black washed out shape. He describes this thing as the traditional evil demon. It’s got a big head, horns, a man’s torso, and from the waist down it’s like the back end of a horse with hoofed feet. I ask if this creature senses that it’s about to be banished. My client says that it does. So I reiterate the idea in his mind that they no longer belong together because good and evil don’t want to cohabitate. They are no longer appropriate for each other and it’s time to get rid of this thing. I then do a count from ten down to one and say, “At the count of one this entity will be gone, never to return. It is time and it will no longer have any power over you. It vanishes forever at the count of one!”

Here we go… I count all the way down to one and at the count of one, no kidding, the hair on my arms rise and I get the sense as though I have just felt a pressure shock of a bomb going off. A pressure from an unseen force going off in the room and at that moment all the lights dimmed almost to off, and then came back up. I kid you not! I’m like, what the %@#* was that! I ask my client - did you feel that? He answers with a resounding yes. I then had him look into the mirror. Is it gone? He answers, yes it’s gone.

From that day forward he never again has seen this thing nor has he seen shimmering destructive words in his mind. Was this some kind of evil spirit? I don’t know. I’m just glad that we were able to clear his mind of this problem that has been disturbing him for twenty-five years!

And what about progression, going into the future? A hot topic for this time period is the year 2012. A lot of people think it will be the end of the world in some form. For this I was placed in hypnosis and progressed to 2012 and then ten years later and then five hundred years later. What I saw was negative and an ending but not one that you might expect. I saw that people around the world got tired of government. They are disgruntled with spending, with war, and with the general makeup of society. At some point beyond the year 2012 people began to simply walk away from government. If you think about it, let’s say every person in the state of Michigan decided to not pay their taxes, what would the government do? What could they do? They can’t lock up that many people. And if everyone in Michigan did that then there would be others that would follow. Taking away the government’s money source is a good way to bring down government. I saw this happening and without a governing body chaos soon followed. Man against man, the survival of the fittest. I saw that this needed to happen to bring about a different way of life, one where we don’t spend all of our time chasing money. Five hundred years into the future the world was much different. Different energy sources, I saw that the veil between the spirit world and the physical world had lessoned quite a bit. Through the chaos and many decades of upheaval a new system was put in place that made our earth school much more unified and peaceful.

It is also possible to be a psychic. Anyone can do this who likes to go into hypnosis. You can place the person in the state of body parked and mind heightened through suggestion. So I’m the subject in this one. The other hypnotist had a rather unloving mother and there were ill effects in his life and his sibling’s lives because of her. She died of cancer years ago. His request was to place me in this spiritual state so we could talk to her, and we did just that.

He places me in the superconscious state and then asks me if I am aware that my spirit guides are there. Almost immediately I become aware of their presence. Then he asks for his spirit guides to be there as well, and again they show up immediately. Then we call on his mother’s spirit to be there with me. In my mind at this point I see an outline of a woman. I don’t see the face at first but I see a pronounced hair style. It looks as though her hair was long but cut out just around the face in a square. As he begins his questioning I notice that her dress is exactly like Dorothy’s from the Wizard of Oz except she is a little fatter. I don’t mention this.

He wants to know why she couldn’t tell him that she loved him. I then see in my minds eye as though she is standing behind a wall and in this wall is a vertical one inch gap that runs from the top of her head to her feet. This was the only window through which she could express love in her life. Her capacity to show love could only escape through this small opening. I convey this information and then all of a sudden I hear in my mind, I love you Buddy, I love you Buddy… over and over again. I convey this to the hypnotist and he starts to cry a little as his mother didn’t tell him this when she was living. His name is Bud and I have never personally thought to address him with the name Buddy. This did not come from me.

Then I am shown her shoes. They are red sparkly shoes just like Dorothy wore in the Wizard of Oz. So I break down and say. “Okay, she is showing me the dress and the sparkly shoes that Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. Why is she showing me this?” Again he sheds a tear. Apparently the only time she showed happiness was when the Wizard of Oz came on the TV. She would gather up the whole family to watch it which was a rare occurrence in his childhood household.

He then asked her what happened to her, why did she turn out like she did, why couldn’t she show love? I then get another amazingly clear image of a little six year old girl, which was her, being physically grabbed up by a very thin man by the wrist. I could feel her pain. I then somehow knew that she was physically abused, sexually abused, and emotionally abused as a child. All of these images were very clear to me and even clearer as I write these words. The session for Bud was very healing, just what the doctor ordered…

That’s about it as far as my ghost stories go although I have developed a new way to do hypnosis called Theta State Therapy. In this therapy, towards the end, I can call out the person’s higher self, the part of their energy left in the spirit world that knows everything about them and ask it for any further insight. I sometimes have them imagine a doorway that leads them down a hallway where a series of doors represent their many past lives and a few doors will be illuminated. As they step through a door they will find themselves in a situation that has everything to do with the problem they came to see me for. I do this after we have already cleared away the problem but when you see it from this perspective it is even more amazing. More and more I seem to be shifting and incorporating the spirit into my healing sessions.

So is hypnosis clinical or metaphysical? I guess it’s really a little of both. Isn’t medical science kind of both as well? If your outlook and mood are positive you heal faster. Trust in your doctor creates the mental expectancy of getting better. If we become extremely ill don’t we pray more and look to God and our higher powers? I think a good coupling of the clinical approach and the spiritual is a healing combination. Every person is different and we all have different belief systems. If you could spend a week or two in my office I would suspect your belief system would change dramatically.

Hypnosis is this world’s best-kept secret according to what I’ve experienced. Go to the cause and fix it. Change your life’s perceptions from negative to positive. Clear away the guilt and healing takes place. If you think about it, it really does make a lot of sense as to how unresolved emotions can cause distress. Guilt is a huge emotion that causes all kinds of illness. Guilt leads to fear, all kinds of fears. These emotions become trapped in the subconscious mind and if enough time and/or enough supporting events happen in one’s life, that feeling causes physical problems as well. If unresolved emotion has built up enough causing a tumor to grow and the doctor cuts that tumor out, the subconscious mind, which is the goal oriented part of us says, “That doctor just destroyed all my hard work! Now I have to grow another tumor and this time I’m going to make it even worse!” This is a program that is calling for extinction. Derail that program and the tumor shrinks back to nothing.

Programs running on your computer are very similar to the subconscious mind. The three pack a day smoker who is eighty years old and is still as healthy as an ox. He’s got a program running in him that he’s strong and nothing is going to take him down. But what about the twenty something year old woman who is thin, eats only foods that are healthy for her, works out daily but is sick all the time. What program is running in her mind?

Are certain people more susceptible to these programs than others? Yes. The insurance companies know this. Who will become sick this year? The answer is the same people who were sick last year. A person’s childhood has a lot to do with creating initial sensitizing events. Poor parenting or no parenting, I’ve had several people whose parents took them to funerals as children and made the child touch the corpse. Verbal abuse, sexual abuse, non-feeling, or overbearing parents cause a lot of problems and ISEs. The parent that criticizes the child on everything they do. “Good, you made your bed but I can still see a wrinkle. You got an A-, you should have received an A.” This child can never do anything good enough. Those programs get in there and then that darned critical factor filters out ideas that would have those programs change. Also the childlike mind misunderstands events, misperceptions continue on into the adult person. Perceptions initiate emotions and those emotions build and need to be expressed, they will be expressed.

The people I see who have the biggest problems tend to be, and I may ruffle a few feathers here, are very strict religious people. As I said before, children under the age of five to six years of age have not developed the critical factor in their conscious minds yet. Everything goes right into the subconscious and is permanently programmed in there. If you think of damnation for sins, divorce, or sexual conduct, you can easily see how strict religious beliefs can pile guilt up in the inner mind. Strict religious people kick themselves more than any others. When I work with these strict religious people it is usually much more difficult to change their perspective because they have been programmed from a very early age. They tend to be very closed-minded towards ideas that go against this programming. I of course don’t know if we are, or are not going to hell if we goof up in life but look at it this way... Imagine there was a little eight year old boy and his parents were axe-murderers. They went out every other week and killed people with axes and then came home all bloody and explained to him exactly what they had done. When that little boy grows up and becomes a man, do you think what he experienced in his childhood would have any affect on him as an adult? Of course it would! He might beat his wife, he might become a drug addict, and maybe he would even become a murderer just like mom and dad. Now when he is committing one of these socially unacceptable acts is it really entirely his fault? I don’t think so. Did he even stand a chance of turning out normal? Not much of one. Also our bodies can be physically out of alignment. Maybe our hormones are unbalanced or other physical issues are present. If there was a person like this, should he be damned for all eternity for what he had done? What if he was brought up in a strict religious family? There would be a load of guilt and fear in his mind that he may never recover from. There are a lot of people out there like this. I’m not meaning to say there are a lot of people who had axe-murdering parents but parents can make huge mistakes with their children. Taking off the blinders of a strict religious person can be very difficult. I’m not here to change anyone’s belief systems but my job is to get forgiveness so a person can move forward and heal.

The last thing I’ll say about healing is with regard to our society in the US and drug companies. Have you noticed the rise in TV commercials relating to drugs? In these commercials the very first sentence that is spoken is designed to make you uncomfortable. “In this fast paced world have you ever stopped and taken a moment to think about the breakdown of the cartilage between your fourth and fifth vertebrae? Clinical studies suggest that one in thirty people lose cartilage here which may result in paralysis of the back resulting in three percent of men over fifty years of age becoming paralyzed.” If you haven’t noticed it, start paying attention! How many times a week do you hear these words in commercials? “Ask your doctor.” In fact they say the word, doctor, five times total with the last sentence telling you to, ask your doctor. If I sit and watch TV for an entire evening I will hear that catch phrase repeated like a thousand times. We are made to feel uneasy about things that we don’t even need to think about. Know this - A consumer only consumes if they feel uncomfortable, if a consumer is content there is no reason to consume.

We now have a lot of newly labeled diseases such as acid reflux disease, irritable bowel syndrome, restless leg syndrome, and fibromyalgia. Where did these come from? I’ll tell you, glad you asked… If a drug company can get something labeled as a disease or syndrome they can then patent their drug and make huge revenues. Without problems being officially labeled they are unable to get a patent on the drug. Psychiatric diagnoses are categorized in the book know as “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” - better known as the DSM. If something gets into this book a drug can be patented for it. So we as a society are going down the road of medications and chemicals more and more. This is big business telling us to endlessly ask our doctor for their drug. The diseases and syndromes I just mentioned ALL can be greatly helped or more often CURED with hypnotherapy, its better than putting a chemical in your body and suffering the side affects. I believe our society needs to stop drugging away our symptoms and start going to the root cause of the problem and fixing it there. I haven’t been making up these “Hypno Healing” stories that you’ve been reading about. They are real cases I have been involved with and witnessed personally and I am in contact with hundreds of other hypnotists that are getting these same results.

It really doesn’t matter if you believe in hypnosis or not, it’s just simply how our minds work. Hypnotherapy, if done correctly, finds the cause of the problem and eradicates it. The perception our medical community has towards hypnosis is that it is affective but doesn’t last. That is true if the hypnotist is using only direct suggestion. If this is the case, it’s really no better than prescribing a drug for a symptom because the hypnotist is only masking a symptom for a short period of time. You cannot suggest away a problem and as you already know, the program in the subconscious mind needs to be found and derailed in order for that person to be permanently helped.

We are creatures of feeling. Our entire existence revolves around feelings. You recommend a book or a movie to someone only if it moves you emotionally. If you walk out of a movie theater without feeling happy, horny, sad, or happy then the movie wasn’t any good and you won’t recommend it to anyone. We choose boyfriends/girlfriends, husbands and wives around how they make us feel. When they no longer make us feel that way we dump them. Our emotions are completely tied to our behaviors. We also rely on the dumb part of our mind to elicit change, our conscious mind. For example if you are in your car talking on your cell phone and someone gives you a phone number you need to remember but you can’t find a pencil to write it down you will keep reciting the number over and over again. What if you sneeze? The number literally falls right out of your head! That’s the part of our mind we’ve been relying on for change.

We develop physical, emotional, and habitual problems based on our emotions. Disease is based on dis-ease, a mind that is at ease cannot cause disease in the body. Physical problems such as migraine headache, IBS, RLS, chronic fatigue syndrome, high blood pressure, fibromyalgia, caner, all kinds of skin disorders, obesity, osteoarthritis, and many other physical problems can be cured with hypnosis. Emotional problems such as panic attacks, anxiety, depression, fears, phobias and other problems can be cured with hypnosis. Habitual problems such as alcoholics, drug addiction, eating disorders, and the “too muches” can be cured with hypnosis. These problems or labels have been categorized by their symptoms but let me tell you something that may be a shocker to you, they are all the same. They are all unresolved emotion in the subconscious mind manifesting different symptoms. I can tell you that this is the truth because I use the same techniques to cure all of them. In our society today we have looked at the symptoms of these problems, created a label for them, and then prescribe drugs for them. Unfortunately these drugs are not curing. They do not find the cause and heal the person. Something like seventy percent of all US women today are on anti-depressants, unfortunately this incredibly large amount of people are still depressed. Drugs don’t find and relieve the offending emotion. If you’re a hypnotist using only direct suggestion you won’t find the unresolved emotion either, it’s like putting a band-aid over a symptom.

We are born into the world with a clean slate… for the most part. A few months before birth we reach up and hit the record button and from that moment forward every second of our existence is recorded into our subconscious mind. The baby picks up on the emotions of the mother and others around it while in the womb. The baby hears what is being spoken and then a few years later when it learns the language the dialogue is interpreted and stored. Then there is birth. We go from the most comforted and secure place that we will ever know to the most uncomfortable and insecure feeling we will possibly ever have. As we develop we are introduced to brand new emotions, ones we didn’t even know existed. Abandonment, rejection, all kinds of fear, and most of us develop the idea that we’re not good enough. Every scrape, every fall, every event bad and good affects us and molds us into whom we are today. We then carry all of this into our adult lives. “Time heals all wounds” that’s true for the conscious mind. If something bad happens give it enough time and you’ll feel better. The opposite is happening in the subconscious though. Once the emotional hook has been planted time magnifies the problem, it gets bigger. Once the emotion has had enough time to grow then we are evaluated, the symptoms are observed, we are labeled with a disorder, and subsequently drugged. “Ask your doctor” the TV commercials tell us, side affects may include death! Hypnotherapy seems to be a natural way to avoid this.

Placing ourselves into a higher state of consciousness seems to be the key for many things. It can heal you and it can reveal to you spiritual secrets. It makes sense, if you believe you possess a spirit inside your body that you would be able to tap into its memory and wisdom. Maybe being connected through your superconscious is the magic that psychics and fortune tellers use? Communicating with spirits and validating the information that comes through is something that hypnosis can do. Solving physical and emotional problems that have their roots in past lives is another thing that hypnosis can do. Shutting off pain, fixing physical problems and emotional problems is what hypnosis does as well. Progressing into the future can be accomplished. What about doing a mental makeover? What if you were to systematically work with someone on all the big emotional issue’s we all face such as fear, guilt, anger, unhappiness and fix them all? What would happen if we did that? Could we live forever or greatly slow down the aging process? What if we regressed on the aging process, could we stop it in its tracks? What if we truly believed we could live forever at the subconscious level? “I grow younger each day, I grow stronger.” What if everyone went through a handful of sessions, what would the world be like then?