Hypnosis in  Ireland is being used more and more. This month I want to talk about the art of hypnosis and it´s relationship to personal change. Ïn this article I will explain how hypnosis works and how you can use it to change your life.

Hypnosis is simply a state of absorbed attention where you get access to parts of your brain that you don´t normally get access to. By access I mean that you can offer suggestions to yourself to improve things which are not under your conscious control. Basically, your conscious control is what you have control of with your conscious mind. It refers to your own ability to think logically and deliberately focus your attention on certain things. The problem is that often this is extremely limiting and proves of little value for long term personal change.

In order to achieve more long term change the key is to learn more about your conscious mind. Your unconscious is the description given to the part of your mind which controls all your memories, wisdom, perceptions and most importantly your habits. Whenever your find yourself engaging in an action or feeling that is not good for you in a consistent way, you will discover that it is unconscious. By using hypnosis you can learn how to communicate with your unconscious and thus discover how it is possible to chnage these habitual patterns.

Your unconscious mind is also responsible for your automatic survival and body repairing mechanisms. It regulates your heartbeat and breathing. Hence, you can use hypnosis to positively change how your body responds to physical problems or ill health. You can use hypnosis to look and feel younger, overcome allergies, heal yourself, as an anaesthetic which frees you from pain, become stronger or change your metabolism. In fact, all the time we are finding out more ways in which hypnosis can be used to cure sickness. The principle is this. If you can instruct the body how to heal, it has the resources it needs to do so. Hypnosis acts as the instructor.

So, hypnosis works by capturing a persons attention and helping them allow your focus to be absorbed so that they can allow their unconscious become more receptive to suggestions. Every time, you drive your car you go into a type of trance. every time you watch a film, you go into another kind of trance. If you want an example of how this works think about films. When you watch a film, you get so absorbed in the movie that you get excited when you think the main character is about to die. EVen though you consciously know that he is only a ´character¨ and is an actor in real life, we still manage to relax our conscious minds in such a way that it helps us to relax deeply our logic and explore the world of our imaginations.

In trance or hypnosis, the difference is that certain suggestions are planted which are designed to improve your quality of life. Once your focus and attention are captured, your conscious mind relaxes and suggestions are then offered to your unconscious.

Now there are two main forms of suggestions. The first is visual suggestion. This comes in the form of visualisation. What is important in using hypnosis is to get the person to imagine themselves vividly as they would like to be, engaging in new habits, feeling healthy or whatever. This idea is then virtually programmed into the persons mind that these changes will be permanent.

The second type of suggestion is the verbal suggestion. This is a suggestion given in the form of hypnotic commands or presuppositions. This uses language to give specific instructions to the body and mind of what to do differently.

Through using either one of these hypnotic skills, you can learn to achieve exactly what you want from using such ideas. In order to learn the best way of improving the visual suggestions that you give to yourself is by learning more about the qualities of the visualisation (submodalities is the word we use to describe that in NLP land).

The best way to improve your ability to give better verbal suggestions is to learn more about the milton model and the language patterns which allow you to communicate and influence people in much more powerful ways.

So, there are two keys of the hypnotic process. The first involves the verbal suggestions that the person is given about what will happen after the experience... these are also known as post hypnotic suggestions. Sometimes they will make connections between the future experiences and new, more resourceful feelings, thoughts and actions. The second refers to the visual suggestions or vivid images that are created in the mind of the person about the future event. This is also known as future pacing. Although often visualisation can be used to describe a process for the person to go through there and then, it is absolutely essential that they are ´presented with an image of themselves in the future with the desired changes. It is also important to have them experience this image in two ways. Firstly, seeing themselves vividly engaging in the new behaviour/feeling/habit/thought pattern (dissociated) and secondly, having the experience of being in themselves (fully associated) actually doing it.

Hypnosis is a powerful way of helping you transform yourself and heal yourself. Although there are many ways to hypnotise, the two main types are directly and indirectly. Directly usually involves a relaxation meditation where you get the person to relax all parts of their body and focus their attention on that relaxation or their breathing. Indirect hypnosis is conducted by usefully using metaphors or stories which create a state of trance in the listener. The most important quality in either form of hypnosis is to be in the state yourself first. Once you are in a trance, your tone of voice, rhythmn and the way you communicate with the person (all essential components of a successful hypnotic induction) will most likely bring about a state of trance in your listener.

When you learn about NLP through a Practitioner or Master Practitioner, you will discover how to hypnotise others and yourself in useful ways and discover just how powerful this state is for allowing you to produce personal change effectively.