The Power of Hypnosis
Some of the questions I am asked about most are: What is hypnosis? How powerful is it? What can I expect? Can everyone be hypnotized? Can hypnosis help me? How do I find a good hypnotist? And on and on.
The answers are straightforward. First of all, everyone can be hypnotized because hypnosis is simply an altered state of consciousness, and all of us experience this regularly! Hypnosis is a marvelous tool that can be used to improve the quality of your life in many different areas, ranging from stress reduction to spiritual enquiry. It can help you learn about yourself, learn why you respond the way you do to certain stimuli, recover buried memories, train new behavior patterns and so on. There is no limit to the ways you can use it to improve the quality of your life. In fact, if you can put the words, “will power” in front of anything you strive for, then hypnosis holds great potential for you.
Technically speaking, I think of hypnosis as a state of hyper-suggestibility. This is a brain wave state commonly thought of as alpha or theta. In our normal waking state we typically have a predominate brain wave pattern above 14 cycles per second (cps), for some this can average in the upper cps. When the predominant pattern falls to between 8 and 14 cycles per second, you experience a twilight stage of consciousness. This is the same state that usually accompanies rapid eye movement during dream sleep and hypnosis. Fall a little lower in brain wave cycles per second to say between 4 and 8 cps and you are in the state commonly seen in deep hypnosis and known as theta.
All hypnosis is fundamentally self-hypnosis and this idea is not new from me, for one of the real pioneers of modern hypnosis, Dr. Milton Erickson made this statement many years ago. The fact is, hypnosis is based on suggestibility and you must be willing to accept the suggestions or there is no so-called trance state to follow. This is to say that YOU are the key to a successful hypnotic session. The common fear of hypnosis, that someone else has control over you is therefore totally untrue.
