Let me start by saying I am not a licensed physician. The following is the point of view of myself, and many in the field of hypnosis, opinion of how and why hypnosis works. Some have different perspectives but we all have the same goals.

I highly recommend you speak with your doctor and do your own research before deciding if hypnosis is for you. If you have a medically diagnosed issue that you would like assistance with you must get a referral from your physician before we can begin to work on it. For a copy of a referral form that you can give to your doctor please click here.

Now for you to understand hypnosis, you need to know how your mind works. Before I begin please note Hypnosis is a very natural state. There is nothing mysterious about it! Throughout our lives we go in and out of hypnosis maybe three to five times a day. If you have ever daydreamed, or just driven down a road without ever knowing how you got there you’ve experienced hypnosis. Or if you have ever lost yourself in a good book or been so engrossed in a movie that you felt all the emotions, you have experienced hypnosis. Hypnosis is nothing more then an extremely relaxed state. So when you are in hypnosis, you are not asleep, you are extremely alert and very clear minded. All of your fives senses including hearing, smelling, tasting, and seeing are hundreds of times better than they are right now. Furthermore, hypnosis is actually self-hypnosis. The hypnotist is nothing more then a guide. The success of hypnosis is directly dependant on the person’s willingness to accept a suggestion and want the change. More on this later.

So why do we need hypnosis to bring on change? To understand this we need to understand the mind. There are three very separate and very distinct minds.

First the unconscious mind. This controls parts of your body such as your breathing, your heart rate, and your immune system. This is not an area that the hypnotist is concerned with or utilizes. We won’t need to concern ourselves with this part of the mind in hypnosis.

The second part is your conscious mind where we spend most of our time. It is the rational and analytical part of the mind. It looks at a problem, analyzes it and tries to figure out a way to solve our everyday problems. It also likes to rationalize, give us a reason why we behave in any particular way. If we don’t have a reason why we behave the way we do, then we become anxious, nervous, frustrated and if left unattended can lead to serious mental illness. It’s also where your working memory resides; remembering your kid’s names, your birth date, anniversaries, what you did years ago etc. Lastly, it is where your will power resides. When you make a conscious effort to change something, “I want to quit smoking” it is made in this area. I will get into why this doesn’t work in a moment.

The last part of the mind is the subconscious mind. This is where the REAL you, me and everyone else lives. The subconscious is extremely powerful. It makes us into who and what we are. It is also very much like a computer and operates like one. It has a hard drive that has been programming itself since you were a child and operates based on that program, it has no choice. But if you change the program, it must operate on the new program information that has been placed into it. This is the way our subconscious mind works. It’s a computer that makes us into the type of person that it perceives us to be based on all the programming that has been placed into it and will continue to be placed into it till we die.

The subconscious mind has four major operational software, if you will, in its internal computer. First is our permanent working memory. Everything that we have heard, seen, smelled or tasted is locked permanently into the memory banks of our subconscious mind. Even from the point of conception! This is the part many people have a difficult time believing, but I assure you it is true. Through regression hypnosis we can travel back and re-live your 3rd birthday vividly. Through hypnosis, it is like your own personal time machine where you can travel and re-experience, taste, smell, see and hear clearly all of your past lives.

The second part is habits. This is where our good and bad habits come from. We all have our bad or good habits. We just automatically respond in a certain way when something happens.

The third part is our emotions. When we get into an emotional situation the conscious mind parts like the red sea and we act out solely on our emotions; with the parting of our conscious mind goes our analytical and rational mind. If you look back at any emotional situation you’ve been in, after you have reacted and calmed yourselves down you wonder “why did I say that or did that?” You said it because your mind was working solely from the subconscious emotion without the rationalization of the conscious mind.

The last part of our subconscious mind is a negative part of us. Even though the subconscious mind is powerful, it is also VERY lazy. It doesn’t want to make the changes necessary to bring about a positive change in your life. It likes to keep things the way they are. Positive changes are one of the hardest things to get into our subconscious mind. However, negative suggestions can slide right in. Let me explain how this works. If you take a very heavy person ad have them stand in front of a mirror, what do you think they are going to say to themselves? “Boy am I Fat!” Now that idea goes right down into the subconscious mind and says “Yes, that matches the programming I have inside, that matches my perception of you.” But if he says “I’m thin and trim and I look good.” It goes into the subconscious mind and it says “No that doesn’t match with the conception I have of you.” The subconscious is our permanent memory, everything that has happened to us since our inception is recorded there. It also makes us into who we are. As a child if you ever had an experience that may have scared you half to death, but after a brief terrifying second you realize it’s your sibling and you both wander off laughing. Your subconscious remembers being terrified. It doesn’t utilize the analytical part of the mind that realized it was just your sibling, so if something down the road reminded the subconscious of the event, it will go into self-preservation mode to try and protect you. It will do whatever it has to get you out of that situation. Another example would be if your father or mother told you,” you’ll never grow up and amount to anything,” your subconscious mind would accept this as its basic programming and begin to build on that programming even though in our analytical mind we may know it’s flawed Our Subconscious creates a perception of who we are going be. It does this by gathering the information fed to us by the people closest to us, our parents, loved ones.

There is one more part of the conscious mind we haven’t discussed yet.

Picture if you will an invisible barrier between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. This is known as the critical factor. It “protects” the subconscious from suggestions that do not match its programming. It also diverts suggestions into the conscious mind where it can be rationalized and analyzed. Its job is to stop, put on hold, divert, any suggestion of positive change that we give ourselves or receive from an outside source. It simple stops it to protect. For example, the critical factor says, “This person wants to stop smoking, can I let this suggestion in?” But the subconscious mind says, “Wait a minute, He has been smoking for years, he needs cigarettes for security or whatever reason.” “Besides, I have to do so many years of re-programming and I don’t want to do it so reject the suggestion!” So the critical factor of the conscious mind complies and rejects the suggestion and it won’t go into the inner mind.

The only other place left to send the idea is to Will Power in the conscious mind. And we all know how long that lasts. So how do we get a suggestion into that subconscious mind? Through Hypnosis, we by-passes the critical factor, find the initial event and reprogram the subconscious. Hypnotists use different approaches to make this happen, such as direct suggestion, age regression, parts therapy, ideo-motor therapy, forgiveness therapy, etc. It is all toward the same goal, which is to desensitize the harmful event that caused the viscous cycle. Once this is done, just like pulling out the bottom can on our reverse stack of cans, the whole thing comes crashing down. That is why most people describe, “a tremendous weight lifted from their chest,” immediately following a session. Hypnosis is a process and not an event. Finding the destructive programming is part of the goal and process, giving you relief from whatever it is that is holding you back in your life is the ultimate goal.

Now when you hear that suggestion, these are tools for success or failure with hypnosis. When you hear the suggestions there are FOUR mental attitudes you can take about that suggestion. Which one you take determines whether it is allowed to come into your subconscious mind or whether it is rejected. If it is allowed to enter, you will have the changes that you are here to achieve. What are the FOUR mental attitudes? Well the first is when you here the suggestion, you think to yourself “I like that suggestion and I know it is going to work!” Now, that mental attitude at the conscious level is the one that allows to enter for change to occur. Unfortunately you have 3 other choices. The 2nd choice could be it just doesn’t feel comfortable to you, it just doesn’t fit. Therefore it will be blocked and there is no change.

The 3rd choice could be that you are neutral about the suggestion, you don’t care if you get it or not. It is meaningless and therefore rejected.

The 4th is the choice that causes more people to fail with hypnosis. When you hear the suggestion, you say to yourself, ”Oh, I like that suggestion and I HOPE it works.” The word hope is like the word TRY. How many times have you tried to do something but failed? “Okay mom I’ll try.” “Yeah dad I’ll try to do better.” Enough said!

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis and I will be your guide. If you allow me to be your guide, I will show you how to place yourself in a beautiful state of hypnosis. Feeling the physical relaxation and mental alertness. If you allow me to be your guide, I’ll show you how to stay there until we’re finished. If you don’t want to be in this beautiful relaxed state, the slightest thought by you and it is over and you are back to your normal state of awareness.

Hypnosis is not a state of sleep. Your mind is three to four hundred percent more alert than you are this very moment. It has nothing to do with sleep. Then there is the misconception that some people have that says I can control you and make you do anything I want you to do. Remember you have FOUR mental choices when you hear a suggestion. The only time a suggestion is allowed to enter your computer is if you say, “I like it, I know it’s going to work.” I can’t force that in or control you.

So in conclusion, hypnosis is up to you. I know exactly what to say to my clients and if they accept those suggestions, they’ll have a wonderful change and if they reject them they will have no change at all. It’s up to you. Remember, hypnosis is a wonderful, beautiful way to change our lives and it is available to you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to assist you.

It is said that within each and every one of us resides our own physician.

Hypnotism is a completely safe, noninvasive and very effective tool that gives you the opportunity to reach within yourself, and open up to your own inner wisdom and innate capabilities. It allows you to discover, resolve and release the thoughts and feelings causing illness, disease and disorder. It gives you the opportunity to heal your self.