Self Hypnosis Without Trance 1. Hypnosis is a Dynamic Natural Process Due to it’s history and popular image, many people mistake hypnosis for something it is not — a special altered state that renders people open to suggestion. Modern research has shown this not to be so. Yet modern research also verifies the phenomenon of hypnosis… So what is it?
Well, formal hypnosis (the type you might see happening in a hypnotherapists office or at a stage show) is a process. It’s a process of harnessing a persons natural deeper neuro-cognitive processes through which they shape our everyday experience. Here is a definition that serves:
“Hypnosis is the use of language and communication to direct attention, lead cognition and seed ideas for the purpose of leading a person into an altered perception of reality.” So this is what a hypnotist really does through their rituals and suggestions.
But what is really useful to know is that we are doing this to ourselves, all day everyday. Shaping our own perception and experience through our internal communication and processing. Understand this and harness it and you can transform your life for the better in so many ways.
Be careful what you say to yourself… you might just be listening!
2. We Co-create our Experience of Reality There is an old Zen Koan hat asks “Who is the great magician that makes the grass green?”
What we perceive as the world around us is not really the world around us, it is the world as it occurs to us. Sure there is something out there — an erratically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup — but we do not get to experience or ‘know’ it directly.
Through our senses and meaning making processes we take the raw data presented to our senses and shape it into experience. WE do this (albeit unconsciously). WE are the magicians that make the grass green as without our acts of perception, there are no images or sounds, only light waves and sound waves.
If this seems a little abstract, remember our perceptions inform (drive even) our behaviour and responses, and that it is not just our perception of the physical world we are are co-creating, it is also our perceptions of our social world.
Think about your emotions — they are driven by your perceptions. Think about your reactions — they are driven by your perceptions. Think about the choices you see in life — they are driven by your perceptions.
By coming to understand HOW you are perceiving, you can get begin to re pattern your habits of perception, leading to new emotional and behavioural responses and new options and choices.
3. You are not who you think you are (you are who you are becoming) People are patterned — they walk the way they walk, talk the way they talk and think the way they think. Now, we end up patterned for a reason — so that we can get on with being and doing in the world without having to think too much or expend too much time and energy on everyday living. So mostly, our patterns serve us.
The problem comes about when we find that we have developed patterns of behaviour and response that are undermining us in living our lives as we would like to. Phobias, anxieties, overwhelming emotional responses, fears etc. And we all do this… We all end up having unconsciously (through our process of learning and growing through our ‘formative years’).
Many people get hobbled in the process of re-patterning themselves because the fall for the trap of thinking that now they are adults, they’re ‘cooked’ — they’re process of development is over. It isn’t! Modern research is showing that the brain continues to retain high levels of neuroplasticity:
“Our brains can continue to grow at any age. One of the startling revelations of the 21st century is the improvement in our knowledge of nerve cell development among older adults. Known as neurogenesis or brain plasticity, this new knowledge is showing us that the brain has the ability to CHANGE throughout life by forming new connections between brain cells, and to alter function. For a long time, it was assumed that as we become older, the connections in the brain became fixed, and then it was just a matter of time that we started “losing” brain cells. However this assumption is being aggressively challenged by recent studies showing that the brain never stops changing.” Brain Plasticity in Older Adults, Mario D. Garrett, PhD.
Realising this, it doesn’t really make sense to carry an ‘I am what I am’ or a ‘leopard can’t change it’s spots’ attitude. You are not a leopard and spots are not perceptual or behavioural patterns. And you are not who you are, you are who you are becoming.
One important aspect here, to free yourself up to change, is to STOP identifying with your personality and patterns — no more ‘I am depressed/stupid/quick to anger/a slow learner or whatever — and start identifying with the ‘I’ that owns and chooses. The ‘I’ of consciousness.
This means shifting to become the owner of your patterns and responses rather than a victim to them. This means becoming The Hypnotist in your own life, rather than the hypnotised. As the mystic Osho put it.
“The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.”
4. Elevate Consciousness — Become a Better Witness to Your Own Processing The first step in becoming the master of your mind through Hypnosis Without Trance is to ‘switch up’ and start better utilising your gift of consciousness.
Most of the time, in everyday life, we bring very low levels of consciousness to what we do. We carry out our habitual patterning without even realising it or only being aware that it is happening but knowing nothing of how it is happening. Often we find ourselves totally unaware even as to what mood we might be in (feeling grumpy but not realising so until someone asks “are you in a bad mood?”)
We are, in essence, very poor witnesses to our own processes of perception, cognition and behaviour. What happens here is that our consciousness gets ‘swept up and swept along’ by our patterns. Pulled into our hypnotic loops. What we want to master is the skill of disembedding from our patterns and loops so as we can shine our torch of consciousness upon them.
This way, we can become better witnesses to our own processes and for the first time move ourselves into a position where we can begin to re-pattern them.
5. Use Your Inner Dialogue to Influence Our cognitive processes are like an ongoing cascade of words, pictures, sounds, feelings, emotions etc. Much of the time this cascade is cascading outside of consciousness, and when we do become conscious of it, we are limited in how much of it we can be conscious of (our flashlight of consciousness has a relatively narrow beam).
Whilst the linguistic elements of this cascade are only part of it, they are a very powerful and useful part of it for us as they are a part that is most easy for us to consciously utilise.
This is because we are used to using words with volition in our everyday communications… And we are deeply conditioned to respond to them.
The words we speak to ourselves as part of our cognitive cascade are powerful self-hypnotising tools, whether we choose to utilise them or not. If we allow them to just flow unconsciously, they will be spoken on autopilot from our unconscious assumptions, and they will serve to reinforce those assumptions. Patterns will persist… And we’ll get more of what we have always got (whatever than may be).
Through taking charge of our internal dialogue and using it with consciousness and intent, we find ourselves with a means to steer the flow of our cognitive cascade in more useful directions, as well as a means to bring our own consciousness and cognition back to bare upon our assumptions, and thus a means to re-write them.
6. Develop a High Quality Transformative Engine (Organic Transformation beats Magical Transformation) When people want to change, they often look for the quick fix. This is quite natural, but the quickest way to get change happening is to engage our natural and innate learning and change faculties — this means eschewing Magical Transformation in favour of Organic Transformation (OT is faster than MT because MT is no transformation at all)
Effective, efficient OT is driven by what I call a High Quality Learning and Change Engine. This is a metaphor for a collection and integration of mental faculties and skills — essentially the ability to direct consciousness, make cognitive adjustments and pay quality attention to feedback.
This last aspect is enormously important. In making change it is essential to be attuned to change — to be able to filter for it and bring it to the fore. Indeed, difference is the ‘essence of change’ — no difference, no change. Setting consciousness to seek out difference creates feedback loops that drive further change. Most people who have trouble changing do exactly the opposite — they sort for sameness. This means they diminish and erase difference and amplify what is not different. How we pay attention to difference and utilise feedback is essential.
7. Become a Semantic Engineer Becoming a semantic engineer means becoming aware of the key operational concepts, beliefs, values, ego stories, and ‘power arrangements’ that sit within your semantic base, and underpin your thinking and responding.
To become a semantic engineer you must first become a semantic detective. This is a skill — a way of using consciousness to ‘see/feel’ into the semantic base, as well as ‘see/feel’ into the implications of the semantic structures.
This skill is one of the most valuable you can ever develop in terms of taking charge of your life. It is also a deep skill — you could spend a lifetime making it your art and still be learning and developing. Here, we will be making a solid start.
8. Make Use of Emergency Hacks Emergency hacks are techniques and tools that can make a difference now. They are imperfect but often powerful inthe-moment interruptions to get change happening as and when needed. What you get is rapid but not usually necessarily deep or lasting change — just something to get you through a tough spot. We have 3 categories:
Interruptions
Manipulations
Collapses
Whilst these interventions are aimed at getting quick change now, they can also lead into deeper change when combined with semantic work.
9. The 7 Step Self Transformation Protocol We will be unpacking the following framework for self transformation through self hypnosis:
1.
Identification
2.
Dissociation
3.
Evaluation
4.
Exploration
5.
Re-creation
6.
Adaptation and Maturation
7.
Transcension
10. Engage with The Path of Mastery Developing high level skills in these methods means walking a path of mastery. Note here a path OF mastery not a path TO mastery. If you make this your art you will develop high levels of skill. Of course, you can just read through and cherry pick the bits you can use easily — this is one choice, but as with so much in life, you ‘get out what you put in’.
Additional Notes: Reality Shaping – We Co-create Our Experience of Reality
“Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Albert Einstein As human beings we co create our reality. What we experience as everyday reality is not really reality at all – it is just the sense we make of reality rather than reality itself.
The neuroscientist Sir John Eccles puts it like this:
“I want you to know that there are no colours in the real world, there are no fragrances in the real world, that there’s no beauty and there’s no ugliness. Out there beyond the limits of our perceptual apparatus is the erratically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. And we’re almost like magicians in that in the very act of perception, we take that quantum soup and we convert it into the experience of material reality in our ordinary everyday waking state of consciousness.”
To make a little more sense of this, it is useful to think for a moment about what is happening when we are dreaming. In the movie Inception, the main protagonist Cobb describes dreaming thus: “In a dream our mind continuously does this — we create and perceive our world simultaneously and our mind does this so well that we don’t even know it’s happening.”
When it comes to dreaming, this is a pretty intuitive and uncontroversial description of what is happening, but what most people assume is that when we wake up, we stop dreaming… and, really, we don’t! The same mechanisms of creation and perception keep turning, only now with a live data feed — the data that flows in through our five senses!
So your experience of these words you are reading is 100% created by your neurology to make sense of the data being received by your senses about whatever form it takes in the ‘real world’ (re read Sir John Eccles quotation again!).
The fact that we neurologically organise our reality into our moment by moment experience of life accounts for why two people in almost identical situations can experience them very differently. E.g…
Person A thinks their friends pet rat is cute, person whereas person B freaks out and screams.
Person A loves meeting new people, whereas person B feels self conscious and ‘clams-up’.
Person A loves travel and adventure, whereas person B can’t leave the house without having a ‘panic attack’.
When it comes to using hypnosis and hypnotically delivered interventions to help people change their experience, it is their organisation of reality we are influencing! This is what we do as hypnotists!
Hypnosis Without Trance — Hypnosis Definition Hypnosis Without Trance is an approach to hypnosis that is concerned with taking a functional view of hypnosis. For this reason there is a strong bias towards process based descriptions over state based descriptions (because process is about doing and happening, which is what we need to know about in order to do and make happen). The most basic idea behind Hypnosis Without Trance is that, being as people are neurocognitively organising and shaping their reality moment-by-moment anyway (“…in our ordinary everyday waking state of consciousness.” —
Eccles), all we are really doing as Hypnotists is ‘hijacking’ those neurocognitive processes and directing them in interesting and useful ways. It isn’t really about ‘trance’, or special altered states, it is about:
The use of language and communication to direct attention, lead cognition and seed ideas, for the purpose of altering a persons perception of reality. Language and communication (including non-verbal dynamics) are our tools, altering perceptions of reality is our aim, and hijacking mental processes is our method.
So, hypnosis is a way of altering a person’s subjective experience through means of verbal and non-verbal communication, and this could take many forms — you may have someone experience:
Their hand as being stuck to a table
Their name as gone from their mind
A powerful emotion
The relief from physical cravings for cigarettes
A change in response to a stimulus
…or whatever.
In Self-Hypnosis Without Trance, we are concerned with how we are influencing our OWN experience and perceptions of reality through 0ur own internal communications. All experience is hypnotic… we want to optimise our influence with our own through becoming better, more conscious self-hypnotists.
The Three Levels of Mind The three levels of mind model is a functional model of the human mind. Many approaches to hypnosis utilise the notion of the conscious and unconscious mind — Hypnosis Without Trance doesn’t! Instead we utilise the ideas of Mind and Consciousness, with consciousness as a faculty of mind.
As a metaphor, think of the mind in it’s entirety as a warehouse and processing plant full of cool stuff and machinery… but there are no lights! Consciousness is a torch (flashlight) beam – it illuminates whatever it alights upon and nothing else! Now remember that definition of hypnosis again… remember the ‘directing attention’ bit? A key part of what we are doing is directing the torch beam.
So if the torch beam is consciousness, what is the stuff and machinery that’s in the warehouse/processing plant? Well, the ‘stuff’ is your semantic material – all the ideas and concepts you hold outside of consciousness (the torch beam is rarely shone towards them) about the world you know and how it works. This includes all your ideas and concepts about who you are (sometimes called ‘the ego’). The ‘machinery’ represents your cognitive processes – the manipulation of data via thoughts, feelings, imagination, mental imagery internal dialogue etc. Most of our cognitive
processes take place outside of consciousness too, but consciousness tends to get more involved with that than it does with the semantic material. We can think of this as 3 levels of mind:
In this simplified functional model…
Consciousness = Conscious awareness along with the sense of ‘I’ and a sense of agency. ‘I am’ and ‘I can’. In our metaphor, it is the torch.
Cognitive Processing = the processing of visual, auditory, kinaesthetic/emotional, olfactory/gustatory and semantic data. It is the internal ‘theatre of the mind’… but only when your consciousness is paying attention! In our metaphor, it is the machinery.
Semantic Base = all of your belief, ideas, concepts, stories etc. about how life the universe and everything works. This semantic materiel essentially equated to the rules by which we operate and respond in life. It is the main operating system, if you like. In our original metaphor, it is the stuff!
It is through the interaction and interplay of these three levels of mind, in relation to the world around us, that essentially dictates a persons experience in life.
It is through the interaction and interplay of these three levels of mind, in relation to the world around us, that essentially dictates a persons experience in life. And as hypnotists, we are aiming to influence on these three levels. Remember the definition – the use of language and communication…
…to direct attention… influencing direction of consciousness …lead cognition… influencing cognition …and seed ideas… influencing the semantic base
One last detail to note here – in the diagram you will see arrows going up and arrows coming down, and there are more arrows coming up than pointing down! This represents the direction and magnitude of internal influence. Essentially the semantic material – the rules by which we operate – has the most influence experience and behaviour, and the consciousness and sense of ‘I’ has the least, and this is important to realise in the context of changework, because..
In changework/therapy, if the ‘client’ walks away from the intervention with exactly the same set of meanings and understandings about the world they arrived with, they will continue to have exactly the same kind of experiences. This is also true for ourselves in Self-Hypnosis — it is important for real self-change that we develop the skill to uncover and influence the meanings that we are referencing and making outside of consciousness (as discussed within the audios).
Now, although the semantic base is ‘all powerful’ it is only ever written and re-written via cognitive processes. In essence:
The semantic base has far greater influence over cognition and consciousness that cognition and consciousness have over semantic base, but the only way to influence the semantic base is via consciousness and cognition! If you need to read that over a few times to make full sense of it, that’s fine! All you really need to understand right now is that we re-write the semantic base through leading consciousness and cognition in useful ways to create a transformative experience! Just to re-iterate:
In mastering Self Hypnosis Without Trance, we learn to re-write the semantic base through leading consciousness and cognition in appropriate ways for doing so!
Consciousness and Generative Change Using this model, we work quite differently from traditionally hypnosis. Traditional hypnosis wants to bypass the ‘conscious mind’ to work with the ‘unconscious mind’. With Self Hypnosis Without Trance we are interested in working with ourselves as whole systems, understanding and utilising all 3 levels of mind. Consciousness has a key role to play in experience and change, so we need to know how to lead it and why. In Self Hypnosis Without Trance, we are often using consciousness as a conduit for transformative feedback. It is the channel through which we connect the system back into itself so as to create an amplifying generative change loop.
People are Patterned People are patterned – they go through life walking the way they walk, talking the way they talk and responding the way they respond. These patterns are cognitive-behavioural in nature (expressed at the middle level of mind) and will run the way they run unless interrupted and redirected. This is what we do as self-hypnotists!
We hijack the processes and redirect it in self-transformative ways!
That’s the primary skill of self-hypnosis, and when you know how it is relatively effortless to do. Developing the skill, however, will take some diligence and practise. Cognitive-behavioural patterns are held in place by two factors:
1.
Habit – Neurones that fire together wire together.
2.
Meaning – The things we believe and our way of understanding (material within the semantic base).
We need to be aware of this and be simultaneously working at both levels. We work on the 1st level using ‘emergency patterns’. We work on the latter through ‘Semantic Engineering”
Types of Problems and Types of Change
There are essentially two categories of problem that people will want help with:
The Essence of Change “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up, dust themselves down and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” — Winston Churchill Quite simply put, the essence of change is difference. And the essence of lasting change is difference that makes a difference!
To illustrate this, it is worth taking a moment to reference the work of the psychologist James Pennebaker. Pennebaker is an expert on trauma writing – a therapeutic intervention whereby people are encouraged to repeatedly write about the event that has traumatised them. Pennebaker noticed early on that some people seem to respond excellently to this intervention, whilst others made no progress at all. So he and his team created a computer programme to analyse the trauma writing essays of both the successful and unsuccessful changes, and draw out any patterns.
Essentially Pennebaker’s team found that those who failed to significantly change the impact of the trauma were writing the same story in the same way over and over, whereas those who changed essentially re-told the story in a different way each time, exploring new meanings, perspectives and interpretations each time.
The message is simple, change the way you make sense of something and you change your experience. Our primary aim in facilitating effective and impactful self-change is to facilitate the writings of different meanings into the semantic base.
Now, as mentioned above, getting change in experience is easy when you have some basic skills in using ‘emergency’ self-hypnosis. The trick is to manage meaning so as that difference makes a difference! We don’t want to be creating temporary shifts only and — to borrow Churchill’s words — picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves down and hurrying off as if nothing significant has happened!
