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There’s always something.
Yes, “HypnotizeAmerica” is coming to a city near you. Billed as, “the largest mass hypnotist event” in the world, this nationwide series of free demonstrations and seminars is brought to us by Wendi Friesen, a Sacramento hypnotist who has come under fire for claiming hypnosis can enlarge women’s breasts, sprout hair on bald heads, make people taller and combat cancer.
But wait there is more, also on the bill is hypnotist Ron Nodvik who says he has had various girlfriends, and he has hypnotized them so that when he winked, they’d go into full-blown orgasms. Ron confided that, “it’s extremely useful.” (LA Times, Calendar section, January 11 2005)
I Bet.
Many of the people that go to these events where they can meet “Mister Hypnosis” are looking for some kind of breakthrough in their lives, be it height, new hair, charisma, improved eyesight, or eliminating or reducing cancer.
While it is highly suspect that these things can be cured or enlarged by hypnosis, there are some other things that we can do legitimately with hypnosis; reduce pain, decrease phobias, and reduce anxiety, according to Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford, and UC Berkeley psychology professor John Kihistrom.
In a sense we hypnotize ourselves everyday. We talk to ourselves about being good and bad. We talk to ourselves about defeat and success. We see TV commercials, hear radio, and see print and outdoor ads. Some of us might even get some spam in our e-mails to fill our sub-conscious with.
I do not know exactly how much of the brain is the sub-conscious, but I think it is a lot. I have seen the sub-conscious or unconscious mind referred to as an iceberg, were the conscious mind is the floating ice that we would see on top of the water, but most of the ice is below the water. Our unconscious mind is a vast storage place for everything we feel, think, see, hear, and taste, it records everything like a video camera.
At the end of the day we would go crazy if we had to sort through all of this information with which we are bombarded, so what we do is filter it to keep what we want on the conscious level, and bury the rest in our sub-conscious.
But just because we bury “stuff” in our sub-conscious doesn’t mean that we forget about the information overload in our brain. It all goes into our make-up and whatever is in there manifests its way back outside into how we act out our lives. We just don’t know exactly how it is going to affect us and how it is going to be acted upon when it all works together in this big brain of ours. We don’t know what events are going to trigger the use of this subconscious information on our actions.
For example, perhaps something that happened to you when you were in school was traumatic to you. It doesn’t make any difference what it is. It could be something trivial, but at the time it wasn’t trivial to you. It could be as something a simple as being turned down for a date, or not winning an election for the student body, or a teacher said an unkind word to you. This small thing could have had a large impact on your life and affect you for the rest of your life, and you don’t realize that this event had such an impact on you.
This one incident and others are in your sub-conscious mind, acting as part of the filter that directs how you behave.
You can overcome these temporary defeats in your mind that have become part of your mental model and self-image by putting new information in. The more great information that you put into your mind, the more it heals old “wounds” and grows new information to replace the old information.
You do not have to know what traumatized you in the past to overcome such an event in your life.
Your mind is like a garden, and if you plant new ideas and affirmations into the garden, new concepts of your self can grow and help you put away perceived failure and move on to successful behavior. Remember, our definition of success is the accomplishment of something that is important to you. It is not about making a lot of money unless you want to.
So we hypnotize ourselves into what we want to be by putting suggestions into our sub-conscious mind every day. Why not put positive suggestions in your garden instead of negative ones?
We could also talk about more serious trauma to the human being. I was speaking to a therapist that I admire very much, and he was sharing with me about things that we don’t get over as children. I am very interested in how Success Philosophy can help young people and teens grow up with their parents given the differences in today’s society.
What do I mean by “in today’s society?” I grew up in a small town in Indiana where there were very few divorces and if there was a divorce, people were slow to remarry. In today’s world it is not uncommon for people to be married 3 or more times during the raising of a family. How do children cope with that? My therapist friend replied that they don’t until they have grown up and matured. And this could be the truth, but if you were a parent wouldn’t you want something to help your child become better in today’s world?
Isn’t that an important part of what we call the American Dream? My parents wanted me to have more than them, not just in money, but also in education and culture. I know that is what I want for my child; to have all of the opportunities that he wants. I have begun to hypnotize him into going to a great university. He already has told mommy he does not want to leave (Chance is four) and actually started crying about going away for college. We told him he didn’t have to leave home to go to college, but I assured him that he might choose to leave. This seemed to settle everything down as he hugged mommy. Mommy and I want the best for him.
But what about dreams? My therapist friend says, “I say let them have the world, why not?”
In the over 225 years of America there have been 43 presidents. Do you tell a child that to become president is next to impossible, or if he wants the job do you encourage him even though you know there is a high probability of failure? Why would you ever want to discourage a dream? They could just hypnotize themselves all the way to president.
Children first want connection, then at some point they want freedom. This is a natural state of nature, and it is important for us to give children the best that we can, including Success Philosophy for them. We hope that these things; values, character, goals, attitudes, self-images, and mental model of the world, that parents give their children are positive so that when some bad things happen to them as children, it will have only a small affect on them because they have been given this mental strength.
Helping to direct the children’s minds (and our own) to a better and more productive place is a much better use of hypnosis.
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