Deep Down

Posted By a starsoul on June 18, 2010

Law of Attraction is a universal, or metaphysical law. These days people treat it as a tool – “to use Law of Attraction to get what I want” that’s what’s on people’s mind. It is in this sense I’m putting these two together, because Hypnosis can also be used as a tool towards a goal.

They seem, however, different approaches. Law of Attraction is more like: I take my position here. I launch desires, and watch my thoughts and feelings to match what I desire, so that I can ATTRACT what I desire to COME TO ME.

Hypnosis, on the other hand, is to move you forward to where you want to be faster. It’s more like “I want to get somewhere and I use hypnosis as a vehicle to get there”, instead of “attracting what I want to come to me”.

It is actually the same thing but expressed differetly. Anyhow I tend to prefer Hypnosis, because it has this inference that nothing needs to move to me, but I move myself towards joy, peace, success. It adds “experience” and “journey” to the whole picture.

In Law of Attraction, there is no concept of subconscious mind. It says when you are keen enough about how you feel in every given moment, and finding better feeling thoughts to feel the “release”, you are right on your track. I actually agree. “Subconscious mind” is just a sub-concept to illustrate the whole picture of how mind works, so to make the whole illustration more convenient. The goal, in both processes of Law of Attraction and Hypnosis, is to bring what’s conditioned hidden beliefs into our awareness, so we can live a life of conscious choices.

Usually we think a thought which creates a feeling. If this feeling is not comfortable, we have resistance, which causes more like thoughts, which generate more unwanted feelings. Sooner or later, these become our dominate thoughts and feelings and produce what we call reality. And the cycle continues…

Unless, Law of Attraction tells us, we use the feeling as an indicator to find the contrast, and launch the desire of what we really want out of this circumstance, and focus on what we want, delibrately choose the better feeling thoughts, we break the cycle and create our new reality.

Or unless, you use Hypnosis, to break the chain somewhere, and everything changes. You may not know what has exactly happened, but every time you want to react, the old way just doesn’t work anymore. Change can happen to you with much less effort.

Category: LOA, Self-hypnosis, Use of Hypnosis | No Comments »
Tags: LOA

Posted By a starsoul on May 31, 2010

What can you learn in 4 minutes 21 seconds?

I remember crying many times while reading Viktor E. Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Today I found this rare video of Frankl on Youtube, filmed during his 1973 lecture to the Toronto Youth Corps. I love how Frankl is able to use 4:21  to explain why believing in other people is the greatest gift we can give. And this indeed should be the motto for any psychotherapeutic activity, “If we take man as he is we’ll make him worse. But if we take man as he should be we make him capable of becoming what he can be”.

Here’s a story of my overestimating man and promoting man to what he really can be:

This morning, during my contemplation, I got an equation: Truth = What I want it to be. This is how I got it: What is is what is manifested in our physical world therefore can be perceived by our senses. They are “appearance”. If we live a life based on our five senses, which is what most people do, we might get the same results or worse. Life can’t be changed for better until we shift our attention to the “truth”, in the world of energy (Don’t forget Einstein’s equation, E=MC2, energy IS matter), that simply means “what I want it to be”.

I then was excited and felt empowered by this newly found truth. Now all we need to do is to constently hold the picture of “what I want it to be” tight, in Frankl’s words, to overestimate the situation and promote it, then we get all those we want.

I started to do the experiment: Instead of complaining about some behaviors of my 18 year old nephew, who’s living and studying in Canada with me, I decided to see his sweetness and kindness that I’d like to see in him and felt the love towards him. Today, after school he went to grocery store and bought some apples and made a pie! Can you believe it? It blew me away. He makes very good apple pies but before I had to make my order and promise things and give him extra money… Today, he volunteered! Out of nowhere!

Or, out of the overestimation I felt towards him?

Well, in fact, it’s not just how to see a person, this empowering way of seeing, is how you see everything. – “When you change the way you look at things… the things you look at change.”

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Tags: CMI

Posted By a starsoul on May 25, 2010

In his book Hypnotherapy, Dave Elman had a very astounding description of “Esdaile State”, the deepest or the fouth level of hypnotic state, also known as coma state as there is no response to physical suggestions. (The subject is incapable of taking a “physical” suggestion. When he is asked to raise his arm, the muscles may quiver. Then movement ceases. Many patients, after coming out of the coma, are certain in their own minds that they followed the suggestions of the operator, and did raise the arm as requested. In this state, they can hear and understand every word said to them.) Dave is well known for teaching doctors how to use hypnosis for pain relief of their patients, including using hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia.

One day, one of his doctor students reported that he had used the coma for a delivery. And he said, “It was the most beautiful delivery I have ever seen. The patient maintained a smile during all of her contractions, during the episiotomy, delivery and repair. The only time she came out of the coma was at the instant the baby was born. She was so anxious to see her baby that she brought herself out. When she was satisfied, she went right back into the coma for the rest of the procedure. I tell you it was beautiful.”

Is this a state of bliss or not?

And when the state is achieved, “There came a time during the coma when they wished everybody in the room would stop talking, particularly the operator.” So the subject’s judgement is still there.

It seemed to Elman that the Esdaile State “to be nature’s own anesthesia which has been made avilable to mankind since the beginning of time.” he further shone some new light to psychotic or prepsychotic patients by saying “they don’t need hypnosis to reatreat from reality. They find their own means of doing it.” This makes me long for being in this state and also makes me wonder: If this is the natural state of our beingness, which I’d like to believe is so, then most of us, if not all of us, in most of the time, if not all the time, are living in an altered state of mind, known as “living in reality”, and think that is natural.

This state of bliss, is it the same as those achieved by deep meditation?

Some people call hypnosis “an altered state of consciousness”, as if being in a stressful, anxious state is more natual. Hypnosis induces the mind and body into a calm state, triggering the body’s relaxation response which releases hormones and neurotransmitters that flood the body and mind with pure, cleansing relaxation. This, for me, is a natual state of our beingness.

Look at animals in naure, food or no food, rain or shine, there is no problem. Their natural being is relaxed. We humans take being stressed out as normal, and call relaxed state “hypnosis”. But in fact, when you find yourself looking for cell phone while talking on cell phone, when you watch TV for a whole night and can’t tell what you saw at the end of the night, when you stare at the same page reading and not progressing… you are hypnotized. To see a hypnotherapist, getting back to your nature state of being, for a lot of people, is to be “de-hypnotized”.

The notion of attaining “altered consciousness” may also seem like some mystic experience involving a deep philosophical or religious ritual. Subjectively, the feelings associated with this altered state of consciousness have been described as ecstatic, clairvoyant, beautiful, and totally relaxing. others have felt ease with the world, peace of mind, and a sense of well-being akin to that feeling experienced as a period of exercise but without the fatigue. despite the diversity of description, there appears to be a universal element of rising above the mundane senses, a feeling beyond that of common-day existence.

Who really want so much to be “common”?

Physical life is but a dream. We dream so hard and believe the play is true. In this altered state of mind, we take everything very seriously, until in hypnosis, we go back to the natural state of being, and start to remember…

Category: Trance State | Comments Off
Tags: Esdaile

Posted By a starsoul on April 18, 2010

If you do nothing else in your self-growth or spiritual quest but training your mind – in another word, do the practice, or mind exercise, you are well on your way to fullfillment of anything you desire.

What you desire always comes to you, unless you cancel it by negatively using the power of your mind.

How many times we talk about our “poor concentraion”, memory, lack of this and that? We seem to enjoy talking this way, as if our unsuccess is therefore justified. The person who talks about his lacks and weakness is really talking about his untrained mind. Although the immediate objective is to increase the ability to concentrate, to have better memory, to have more, this kind of talking sounds like stating a fact but actually is causing more of what this person doesn’t want.

If you could let go that old way of talking – to others and yourself – and thinking. First imagine yourself being successful in all your endeavors, or act as if, it is a well-know fact that if we think of something long enough and hard enough, it will tend to realize itself.

What you talk about is always heard by your subconscious, and your subconscious takes whatever you say as a command to bring what you talk about into materialization. So, train your mind, starting from this moment.

Self-hypnosis, by setting a certain time everyday, is a wonderful and simple tool to train your mind. You can also use your powerful God-given imagination to see the end result of what your desire.

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Posted By a starsoul on February 25, 2010

I did the suggestibility questionnaire three times, once on the website of Crossroad’s Training Institute, I got 53; once in class where I got 41; once at home alone and I got 55. As I’m more and more experienced in this and my understanding grows, I know I am a somnambulist (in hypnosis term) with issues of “Control”.

Tonight my life segments came to me like movie scenes. I see how my view points about anything change easily and quickly (I used to understand this phenomenon as “being open minded”). I see how my breakfast habits change over the years – Now I am under Wattle Wallace’s influence having a “No Breakfast Plan” (see his book Science of Being Well); but I once had full bacon-egg-toast breakfast plan, I once had jam and bread plan, another time I had only sweet little cake plan, I had noodles plan… totally depending on with whom I was. I changed naturally and even claimed “this is me”. I see how my accents and gestures mimicking the person closing to me easily and effortlessly. I see how my life has been drifting around to a point an old friend, when she saw me after many years of no contact, said she felt I was living different lifetimes in one lifetime…

Now all my behaviour patterns seem to make more sense. A natural somnambulist, I may have been living in hypnosis most of the time.

Which, makes change easy – Being somnambulistic means very suggestible, which can be very good, or not. I’m glad I stopped watching TV and reading newspaper all together some years ago, as I found I just couldn’t let go whatever bad news I saw or read. Reading newspaper for half an hour in the morning required me a full day to digest. On the other hand, I only need to be associated with people I look up to for better changes. And as long as I can see the best in people I interact with, I can let myself being influenced without conscious efforts.

By the way, there is a question in Suggestibility Questionnaire “Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night and felt that you could not move your body and/or talk?”

Have you ever found this question a bit weird? Well, not to a Somnambulist.

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Tags: List of use of hypnosis

Posted By a starsoul on February 8, 2010

Before we start any therapeutic process, we would establish a safe place that the client can go anytime during the session. It is critical, it was said, and I do understand it — A place which is completely safe and secure; a place that nobody or nothing can get in, is all for protection.

While learning it and using it, I keep wondering to myself – Where is my safe place?

Some told me their safe place is actually changing. Every time it is different. I found this quite amazing. What does this tell me?

One answer I found in mind is that: Maybe, for this particular individual, the whole world is a safe place?

Is that possible? Or is that not? Classroom didn’t further illustrate us anything. But think about it, for an innocent soul, who sees the whole physical world safe and secure and beautiful and amazing, why do we tell them the world isn’t safe in the first place and ask them to find a safe haven in it? It makes little sense to me personally.

Every time when instructed, I always go to one place that I’ve established in my mind. It’s an imaginary terrace on a Greek island, to be specific, I’d be in a hammock under the sun… but why would I mind anybody or anything getting there? If they can manage to find their way to my imaginary place, they must be mostly welcome.

Maybe I haven’t got it. Maybe I don’t really need protection.

Connection, rather than protection, rings more true to me.

Think about it, if we see the world with love, everything and everyone becomes either an expression of love, or a cry for love, that includes violence, anger, hatred….

I think about my earlier travel years. I hitchhiked my way around in remote villages in southern Mexico as that was the only economic way to visit those small sized middle-of-nowhere silent Mayan ruins… I arrived at midnight in Santiago-de-Cuba and got on a cranky cab with a crazy black driver without exactly knowing where I was going. “To a casa particular,” I earlier told him. I realized that it either looked like we’d end up in an accident or I’d be robbed… I took an overnight long distance bus trip in south China. The sleepers were extremely narrow and I was pushed to a corner by a big guy who owned the bus… I could always find a way to transform those not so favourable moments, because, in those earlier innocent days, I had no fear. I had only compassions. There was knowingness in me innately that I just knew how to handle those situations.

I am not sure if I can still do that after I finally learnt and kind of accepted by my subconscious that the world is not a safe place. There are still quite some unlearning work to do.

If you meet everyone at where they are with understanding, everyone has this potential to shine their inner light. I wish I had never lost this wisdom.

No, I don’t need protection. I love connection. I mentally go to my hammock on my sunny terrace in a Greek island purely for fun.

I wonder if I can ask my fellow therapists to rename it to a “fun place”.

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Posted By a starsoul on February 4, 2010

Basically, anything that you consciously agree and want but find it hard to live.

Examples are everywhere: Why do people want to quit smoking but find themselves still in the process of “quitting” years later? Why do people have the desire, the intention, and all the will power to go to gym but find themselves still lying in the couch? Why do people fight hard with themselves to get out of a toxic relationship only to find themselve getting into another one with the same pattern? Why do people still eat junk food when they tell themselve not to? … Oh yeah people have two minds.

Look at your own life and others’. You think you are in control. Your conscious mind makes decisions; however, little do you know that your subsoncious, of which a lot of contents are not even yours, makes decisions about your decisions.

That marvelous subconscious mind is out of your daily awareness – that’s why it’s called “unconscious”. You don’t have access to it at your own pace and will. However, a hypnotist can assist you tapping into it and making changes so that your subconscious is in alignment with your conscious decisions and agreements.

Oh well. Right now a thing I’m working on (by my fellow Masters of Hypnosis) is “surrender” – I know intellectually that for my highest good I should (and would) let go more of trying to figure out, to micro-control, and to hold on for the sake of control. I’ve read enough books, from Buddhism to Taoism to moddern spiritual teachers. But you guessed it, my reactions just show me how well I’m actually living it.

To do that, I need to deal with my fear of living in unknown. For subconscious, “unknown” is pain, even that means more glorious, more spendid, more promissing… but for the moment, it is simply UNKNOWN. That is scary enough.

Click here to see 146 ways Hypnosis might help you.

Category: Use of Hypnosis | No Comments »
Tags: List of use of hypnosis

Posted By a starsoul on February 1, 2010

I guess I did get a little drunk last night.

We planned to have a quiet movie night at home. There came this party invite from J, because he was invited to the party. I love J, as if I could hear him speaking to the hostess, “Thank you for inviting me to your house party. I’ll come over with 6 other friends.”

Tim still preferred movie at home, as most people there would be strangers to him. I had other ideas, “Let’s go to the party. It’s so close to us. If I make more friends, isn’t it better to make friends in the same neighbourhood?”

Off we went. I spent all night standing in the kitchen chatting with different people who came in for food, drinks, more food. Mostly I was chatting with this extremely tall German, who described to me the wonderful past life regression experiences he had over 10 years ago in Germany. He read this author’s book about past life regression therapy, wondered about it, had this strong interests planted in his mind… only to find the author was working in the same hospital that he had connection with. So there he was, sitting in his office, recalling fisherman’s life memories…

I found all his interests interesting. He talked, I listened, with a little sore on my neck as I had to look up all the time. One of his hobbies is to learn different languages. He tried many, until he stumbled upon Mandarin, as he discovered Mandarin the most beautiful language in the world – funny, I found myself not resonating with him - he is staying with learning this language now.

He’s going back to Germany, and will come back to town in March. I told him, someday, I’ll have to conduct some past life regressions to him, to trace back his another life in China maybe.

Vini joined us. He can never carry on a serious conversation in a party… ziga zaga ziga zaga hoi hoi hoi… There I was 2:40 in the morning, walking out of the house, wobbling all the way home, feeling this incredible love towards every beautiful soul in the house.

I wrote a note on a yellow pad after I got home. The next day, I found all the straight lined words on the pad, I could barely read them, which say: I love you beyond I know about you.

Is that my typical drunk words? Beer and wine can certainly do their share of work to put me in a trance.

Category: Friends | No Comments »
Tags: alcohol, Trance induction