Track 5 9:12
I would like to describe to you the whole method, so that you understand how you're going to use self-hypnosis and how it works and all fits together before we actually install the method into you during a self-hypnosis procedure. The method itself is very straightforward.
1. It starts off with a preparation phase.
2. Then it goes to a prehypnotic suggestion phase.
3. Then you induce the trance.
4. You'll drift around in there for a while.
5. And then you'll return.
Step 1: Prepare Yourself
To prepare, you're basically going to be looking at creating the right conditions in order for you to be able to get the most out of the hypnosis.
Set Time Aside
First of all, just choose a time and a place where you'll be doing this. It's ideal to do this in a quiet place where you won't be disturbed. Give yourself 15 minutes at least, maybe half an hour. Really, once you get used to it, you'll only need five or ten minutes.
Minimise Distractions
Try to make sure that there will be no outside distractions. That means you turn off your mobile phone. That means you lock up the dog. That means you ask someone else to take care of the children for a while and you take the phone off the hook. Just make sure nothing will intrude on you.
The Safety Statements
Then, as part of your preparation you're going to create certain statements, or safety statements; statements of intent to basically set up a session for you. These safety statements are actually prehypnotic suggestions that you give yourself, to make sure that everything turns out well.
The safety statements basically are:
1. whilst you're in hypnosis you want to give yourself a time limit so that you come back out of it spontaneously. If you don’t give yourself a time limit, you may
have to keep opening your eyes to look at your clock and find out whether or not you’ve taken enough time up or something else has happened. When you go in, start getting used to saying, “I'm going into self-hypnosis for ten minutes,” for example.
2. The next thing you want to do is to create the basic safety statement which says, “ If anything should happen that requires my attention whilst I'm in hypnosis, I will wake up instantly, feeling refreshed, relaxed, alert, and ready to deal with the situation.”
Basically, what this deals with is a situation where perhaps you're in a nice, deep, self- hypnosis trance. You're drifting away. You're ignoring the outside world for awhile and your house catches fire. At that point, it would probably be a very good thing for you to come out of self-hypnosis and deal with the situation, rather than spending the next ten minutes in trance whilst the house burns around you.
Time & Place
You choose a time and a place. You create a safety statement where you choose a time. “For the next ten minutes I'm going to go into hypnosis, and should at any point during this self-hypnosis procedure something require my attention, an emergency or otherwise, I'll come back out feeling refreshed, relaxed, alert, instantly, so that I can deal with the situation quickly and efficiently.” That’s the preparation phase of it.
Step 2: Prehypnotic Suggestions
Now you're going to go into the official prehypnotic phase, in which you take out the suggestion that you’ve prepared previously. You’ve written it out on a little piece of paper and you're going to read it to yourself between five and ten times. Sometimes you'll
get the feeling that just once is enough. Sometimes you may want to do it a few more times, but basically what you're doing at this point is filling your mind up with that suggestion.
Don’t just fill up with the words. The words aren’t the really important part. The really important part is the meaning behind the words. Treat your prehypnotic suggestion slip as a kind of exercise in philosophy and ask yourself, “What do you mean?”
Make sure that those words represent the entire SMART goal, the things that you thought about going in, the things that you want to avoid, everything that goes around, that gets activated every time you read the prehypnotic suggestion. It becomes like a little red light, a little button that lights up all the associations you have to that. You want to get your mind really around it. You want to fill your mind completely with that idea before you begin with hypnosis, so that this is like the dominant idea that is inside your mind as you go into hypnosis.
Of course, just like when you’ve had a really busy day or a day with a really dominant theme and you end up going to sleep at night and dreaming about that, so the same is true in hypnosis. When you fill your mind up with some dominant ideas or dominant theme and you go into self-hypnosis, that dominant idea will be the guiding theme throughout your self-hypnosis session.
Step 3: Induce Trance
Then you induce a trance. I'll describe to you in a moment how you do this. Then once you're in a trance, you just allow yourself to drift. Don’t do anything in particular.
Step 4: Drift
You may have a kind of hypnotic dream, a kind of a daydream about the things that you thought about. That’s fine. You may think about different things. That’s fine. You may not think that you're thinking about anything at all, and that is also fine.
The key idea is to allow your unconscious mind freedom to express itself and do with the suggestions whatever it wants to. It needs to absorb them in its own way. Just drift around. Enjoy the experience. It will be very pleasant.
Step 5: Return
Then at the end of the time, return. How do you know it's time to return? You'll kind of get a feeling. You'll get a sense that it's time for your eyes to open. Maybe a little voice will tell you that your ten minutes are up, or your fifteen minutes are up. You may get some other version of this.
Importantly, when you get a sense that it's time to return, just bring yourself back. Just allow yourself to kind of notice where your legs are, your feet are, your hands; bring yourself back into your body. Open your eyes. Take a few deep breaths, and you'll probably want to stand up and have a nice big stretch to make sure that everything is back
in its normal place.