Hypnosis AND NLP Articles  In the table below, you will find an index of articles  on Transpersonal Hypnotherapy, General Hypnosis, Self Hypnosis, Past Life Regression and NLP, along with  a short description of each. The viewpoints expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of WolfStone. All articles can be found on this page by simply scrolling down to the appropriate article number of interest. This is a work in progress so please come back frequently. To get back to the main article index, just click on the "articles" link at the bottom of the page. Namaste! Article 1-"Q & A About Hypnosis, Trance States, Hypnotherapy And Transpersonal Hypnotherapy " By S. Nathan Stein, Monday, February 04, 2007 This article, through a series of questions and answers explains what hypnosis and the trance state are and how it differs from hypnotherapy. It also explains the special and powerful orientation to hypnotherapy called Transpersonal Hypnotherapy.  Article 2 - "NLP - Healing Through Experiencing In New Ways" By S. Nathan Stein, Tuesday, January 16, 2007 This article presents an overview of NLP and how you can heal by changing the structure of how you internally store past experience.  Article 1- "Q & A About Hypnosis, Trance States, Hypnotherapy And Transpersonal Hypnotherapy" By S. Nathan Stein, Monday, February 05, 2007 What Is Hypnosis? Hypnosis is generally considered to be an altered state of awareness that is very different from the sleep state or from the normal conscious state. It is generally agreed that in the most basic state of hypnosis- known, as the trance state- people are much more open to suggestion as the critical faculty of the mind, is bypassed.  Another characteristic of the trance state that is generally agreed upon - is that a person’s attention is narrowly focused- a phenomenon called selective attention.  Very often people are taught to relax to facilitate entering into the trance state.  There are an incredibly large number of ways to induce a trance state.  Some are very elaborate and can take some time to work, while others can virtually work in a very few seconds.   The fact is, we naturally go in and out of trance states continuously throughout the day. For example, whenever we go inside ourselves for any reason, or daydream, or get absorbed by anything, or engage in repetitious or monotonous activity, we enter a trance state. Also just before falling asleep at night or just prior to becoming fully awake in the morning, we enter a trance state. Whenever we do anything on "auto pilot", we are in a trance state.   What is the difference between Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy?   While Hypnosis is a trance state of awareness described above, Hypnotherapy is both a profession and a series of guided processes that uses the methods & principles of hypnosis and related fields.  Hypnotherapy is applied to a broad range of physical and emotional issues, including unwanted beliefs and behaviors which limit a person in one or more ways.  Hypnotherapy is not used to diagnose medical or mental conditions or diseases.    What is Transpersonal Hypnotherapy and how does it differ from conventional Hypnotherapy?  The major difference is that Transpersonal Hypnotherapy works holistically and beyond- that is it works with the whole person- body- mind and spirit- not just the body and mind (i.e. transcends body & mind) and with the shared goodness that connects everything.  Its underlying assumption is that at the core of every one of us, is an innately pure being that is whole (meaning unbroken-completely well & pure) and completely at peace.  Another key assumption is that the underlying root of all our difficulties or problems we experience is the trance states of who and what we think we are and how we must relate to everything else.  The basic underlying strategy in Transpersonal Hypnotherapy is to dissolve the disempowering trance state/s at the root of a problem and treat the associated trauma.    How is Transpersonal Hypnotherapy as practiced at WolfStone Unique?    The Transpersonal Hypnotherapy practiced at WolfStone blends eastern and western views and techniques applied to Hypnotherapy.  It offers tremendous depth and breadth of tools and approaches, combining such thing as: depth hypnosis, regression therapy, past life therapy, inner child therapy, sub-personality and archetypal transformation, NLP, Ericksonian and quantum hypnosis, meditation and prayer techniques, shamanic journeying, comprehensive treatment planning, etc.     Can anyone be hypnotized?   While the answer would depend on who you asked- my answer is- “yes, of course”.  Hypnosis is a common, ordinary occurrence-everyone has a natural ability to enter into trance.  Everyone goes in and out of trance, the basic hypnotic state, naturally, easily and spontaneously, throughout the day.  In all probability, anyone reading this article has already entered into trance state several times already with out realizing that was what happen and therefore did not call it hypnosis.   Daydreaming, runners high, before sleep, upon awakening, reading, watching TV or a movie, video game playing, a boring meeting, or a highway drive, etc. - all naturally entrance you.  Anytime you move from an outward awareness to an inner awareness you enter trance.  Words you use induce trance too; "wonder," "amaze," "puzzle," understand," "curious," "mesmerize," "hypnotize," and “pretend” –among many others- cause you to go inside to make them make sense.  The thinking process itself, which inevitably deals with concepts, ideas and beliefs about your self and every one and everything else, is a series of trance states.  The fact is, whether you know it or not, you practice hypnotism everyday by the things you say to yourself and others.   Who Can Perform Hypnosis? Literally everyone can. Anyone who makes a conscious decision to and can concentrate for a few moments can easily learn the steps it takes to induce a self-hypnotic trance.  You hypnotize yourself with repetitive actions and thoughts. This is called autosuggestion. Mothers and fathers are master hypnotists and their verbal and nonverbal conditioning of their child often stick for life. Advertisers use hypnosis in all their work and so do religions. Professional hypnotherapists receive special training in the technique and use of hypnosis before they achieve certification from a professional group.  Typically, depending on the group- this can involve from 150-300 hours of training and practice.   To choose a professional hypnotherapist, find out what training and experience they have and if they belong to a hypnotherapy organization. Professional groups, like the National Guild of Hypnotists, and schools such as the Wolfstone Transpersonal Learning Center, offer training and opportunities to keep skills updated.  Hypnotherapy is a hypnotherapist’s main focus and training.  In contrast, other therapists such as psychotherapists may have only limited training and consequently have a limited focus on hypnotherapy.    How does hypnosis feel? Familiar!  People in hypnotic trance are aware of everything going on around them and can often carry on a normal conversation with the therapist.  They are not asleep or unconscious in any way.  Typically hypnosis results in relaxation where muscles, nerves and mind relax. Some describe it as feeling passive, placid and mellow, others as filled with light or being surprised by new perception.  People are often profoundly moved by their transpersonal hypnotherapy experience and feel it is difficult to find the words to adequately describe what they felt. When in hypnotic state there is often a distinct experience of automatic, spontaneous or thought or action as compared to the feeling you get with conscious choice.  Your senses are usually heightened and your awareness is heightened many fold in comparison to normal awareness.  Returning to regular "room awareness" makes everything more peaceful.   Each hypnotic trance may be different from what you expect, or from the last one you experienced because moment to moment you are a different person.  Your experience of trance will differ from somebody else because it is uniquely personal. Sometimes part of us can be hypnotized while another part is not. This makes it possible to be in a waking trance.  For instance, if you are driving a car and having an animated conversation with your passenger, the part of you driving may be unaware and hypnotized and the part of you talking, fully conscious.   Hypnosis looks different than it feels. From the observer's point of view, the client might appear resting or passed out and, therefore, we might presume that the client is unconscious. Actually, clients are super-conscious and keenly aware of everything going on around them. This keen focus may leave the client feeling like they aren't doing anything particularly unusual.   Why do some people have doubts about Hypnotherapy?  Sometimes Hypnotherapy is often misunderstood because it looks different than it feels and because people confuse hypnotherapy with stage hypnosis.  The Media cliché "Look into my eyes you are in my power" and the stage performance, “Cluck like a chicken” has sometimes caused a false impression of its value and workings. Some doubt the value of hypnosis because they themselves have not experienced its benefits. And there is a tendency for the conscious mind to judge new unfamiliar ideas harshly. Once they experience hypnosis for themselves, they know how safe and rewarding it is. Some folks fear the unknown. Others are afraid of being vulnerable. Some have a notion that hypnosis will force them to "go out of control" and then they will reveal some buried truth that they're "not supposed to." Some feel they will lose control or, even worse, look foolish. While in trance your inner wisdom is your guide and that wise part of yourself will tell you the truth. Such truthful insights are a tremendous relief. And, you need not worry; your subconscious mind will only reveal what you choose to reveal. In a trance, any suggestion that violates morals or self preservation is greeted with a natural "cancel, cancel."   Can Hypnosis Be Dangerous?  Practiced by you (with appropriate training) or a qualified hypnotherapist, it is safe, satisfying and self-empowering. Being hypnotized by parents, teachers, mates, co-workers, etc. or your own self-talk to believe you are less than, incompetent or a failure- are some of the real dangers of hypnosis.  When you learn to choose which suggestions you receive or act upon, you take back control of your life. If you don't control your subconscious mind, it will definitely control you!   Do I loose Control while in a trance state?  Definitely not.  As described above, you can’t reveal secrets or be made to do anything against your moral or ethical codes.  And at any time you can count yourself out of the trance state by simply counting from 1 to some other small number-say 5 or 7.   If I can’t visualize or imagine very well can I still be hypnotized?  The fact that basically everyone who uses his or her conscious thinking mind is hypnotized implies that you can visualize and imagine well enough to do it!  The problem is many people have a weird sort of performance anxiety about visualization and imagination.  Sometimes this is related to the fact that what they are asked to imagine or visualize is not believable to them or is too big or abstract a concept.  Actually the very idea of not being able to visualize or imagine is a hypnotic trance in itself- that takes effect because of self talk and comments by others that a person can’t visualize or imagine very well.  A hypnotherapist, especially one trained in how people internally represent their experience, can help you discover how visualization and imagination can best work for you.  For example, maybe you can’t visualize numbers hanging in the air or on the sky but could easily see yourself writing numbers on a pad of paper or a black board.  Most people who think they can’t visualize- if asked to visualize what their car looks like (assuming they had one) or one of their children, etc. would not have much difficulty doing it.   Article 2 - "NLP - Healing By Experiencing In New Ways" By S. Nathan Stein, EFT- ADV, CH,TCHT/NLP Tuesday, January 16, 2007   “Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again”        - Unknown I love the opening quote because it reminds me of many examples of how we often trick ourselves into being unwell because of the way in which we experience life.  One of the most powerful ways we deceive ourselves is by the principle of inertia applied to the human mind and experience. Inertia is a principle of Newtonian Physics that says if something is at rest (not moving) it tends to stay that way, and if it’s moving it will tend to keep moving, unless affected by an outside force.  This principle makes us reason that, because something has been experienced a certain way in the past, it has to be re-experienced the same way in the future. While this might seem reasonable, it actually is erroneous for several important reasons. First, there is the aspect of human “free will,” or intent and awareness.  These are our own incredibly powerful internal, not external, forces, which quantum physics suggests creates our reality.  The second important reason has to do with the subjective nature of our experience, and this is where the topic of  NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, comes in. NLP is really a set of powerful perceptual tools for change, based on an understanding of how people naturally experience their world internally.  The formal definition of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is: “The study of the structure of subjective experience.” At WolfStone, NLP is integrated with the practice of EFT and Transpersonal Hypnotherapy and actually enables a person to make long-lasting change by utilizing everyone’s natural ability to re-assign meaning to experience. Richard Bandler, Ph.D., an information scientist, and John Grinder, Ph.D., a linguist, developed NLP in the early 1970’s. They were interested in how people influence one another, and in the possibility of being able to duplicate the behavior, and therefore effectiveness, of highly influential people. It began as an exploration of the relationship between neurology, linguistics, and observable patterns, or “programs,” of behavior. The word neuro refers to an understanding of the brain and it’s functioning. Linguistic relates to the communication aspects (both verbal and non-verbal) of our information processing. Programming is the behavioral and thinking patterns we all go through. What Bandler and Grinder found out was that there is a relationship between perceptions, thinking and behavior that is neuro-linguistic in nature. The relationship is operating all the time – whether we are aware of it or not. Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, MD - a world renowned psychiatrist and hypnotherapist.  It was Erickson's work that formed the foundation for a lot of NLP, thus the tight connection with hypnosis.  Some of the more important findings of Bandler and Grinder are shown below. First, they found that thinking is tied closely to physiology.  People's thought processes change their physiological state powerfully.  A good example of this is a person going to a doctor’s office to get their blood pressure checked.  Just sitting there, thinking about it, perhaps even worrying about it and waiting for the doctor to come in, is usually enough to make your blood pressure register higher than it would normally. Also, interestingly, they found that it worked in reverse - that a person’s physiology powerfully affected their mental state.  So, for example if a person was worried or upset and their body was all tensed up, the person could alleviate how he or she felt by taking steps to relax their body.  Another very significant finding was that a person’s surface sentence structure provides keys for understanding their subjective experience. The various ways in which this can happen were called the Meta Model. An example of this is “nominalizations” – a grammatical changing of processes into things. So, for instance a person might say: “Our relationship (thing) needs work” instead of, “I don’t like the way I relate (process) to you”.  This allows people not to have to take responsibility for the part of the process variables that they can control, and not to have to address the question “What is it about how am I relating (process) that I don’t like”.  This question, asked in this way however, has the advantage of elucidating the “players”: their actions, presuppositions, etc.  From another perspective, a nominalization is a way for people to disassociate from their feelings of discomfort or pain in a situation by symbolically putting it in a box so-to-speak - by labeling it.  Bandler & Grinder made an important observation relating to internal experience appearing to be highly structured. When you think about this a moment it makes some sense, because as we go through life and interact with the world, we use one or more of our senses, and we form feeling associations with those things encountered which causes us to react in certain ways. After an experience is over, the only thing that remains with us is internal experience - some internal representation of it that is eventually stored in our sub-conscious mind.  Now, what they observed specifically was that the structure of your internal representations determines your response to the content. For example, picture someone you really like.  Make the colors more intense, as if you were turning up the color intensity on a TV. Now turn the color down, until it's black and white. For most people, high color intensifies the feeling, and B&W neutralizes it. The degree of color, part of the STRUCTURE of the representation, affects the intensity of your feelings about the content. Now think of a voice that you associate with authority or perhaps even the sound of a person’s voice that you find intimidating in some way. Now think about something they said to you and hear them say it to you in your mind. Now think about that again as you change the voice in your mind to that of a cartoon character like Daffy Duck or maybe Tweety Bird.  Did what you hear have the same power over you?  And what would happen if you mentally turned down the volume of that cartoon voice and imagined it to move far back from where it spoke before – does that affect the power of it further?  You see, for many people the degree and quality of sound is also part of the structure of the internal representation.  In fact, from their work it was learned that any of the physical sensory channels, such as the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc., could be part of the structure of our internal representation of an experience. It is also important to mention that although many people have a primary physical sensory channel, people can and do use more than one simultaneously.  Out of these understandings, an NLP principle called the “4-Tuple” was put forth, that states that if you use at least 4 of the 5 physical channels to internally represent an experience, it makes it very real, vivid and powerful to the sub-conscious mind.  So, for example, if some experience happened to you in the past, and every time you think about it you visualize it in intense color - perhaps as a close-up or a movie, and you hear harsh, loud, shrill words or sounds, and perhaps you re-experience smells that were present and have strong unpleasant feelings in your body - chances are that it will seem very real and powerful to your subconscious mind, and you will react spontaneously to it.   Bandler and Grinder, observing the work of Milton Erickson and others, noticed that different people seem to represent knowledge in different sensory modalities. In fact, they found that the language used reveals their representation. Often, communication difficulties are little more than two people speaking in incompatible representation systems. For example, the "same" sentence might be expressed differently by different people as follows: Auditory: "I really hear what you're saying." Visual: "I see what you mean." Kinesthetic: "I've got a handle on that."  A practical application of this, as Erickson taught, and the founders of NLP were quick to pick up, is that naturally mirroring a persons posture, as well as their representational systems, creates strong rapport.  So what is the practical value of NLP and what are some of the real-world problems they can be applied to? First, let me state that NLP, as is the case with Transpersonal Hypnotherapy, can bring about rapid and long-lasting beneficial change. NLP has several techniques that are extremely effective for intervening in certain situations. For example, there are methods for dealing with phobias, even life-long phobias, that work very rapidly. There are ways to de-traumatize past traumas, ways to identify and integrate conflicting belief systems that keep you from doing things that you want to do. One way an NLP therapist might approach a client in session is by understanding the cognitive structure of how the client creates a problem. They then help figure out the cognitive structure of an area of life where the client deals satisfactorily. Then they would teach the client to use the good strategy in the problem situation.        Yes, experience is a wonderful thing. It can help you recognize a mistake you’ve made before, when you make it again. Learning to experience in a new way is even better however, because it can help you to heal and, at the same time, to not repeat the mistakes.  For more information about how NLP and Transpersonal Clinical Hypnotherapy can help, contact Nathan at WolfStone (603-539-5344), go to the "Contact Us" page or the Services page of this website.  You can also email us directly at wolfsource@wolfstone.us.