Original Article Link

Why does one person have success after success and another has challenges just meeting daily standards? Why do similar people in style, talent and opportunity have wide discrepancies in results? There are two types of people. One is energized with confidence and faith. He or she sees possibilities for success everywhere. He “knows” that he is born to win and succeed. She “knows” good fortune favors the bold. Calculated risk brings out the best in this person.

Then there is the type of person that is de-energized. He has fears and doubts. Not necessarily doubts or fears of reaching mediocrity, but low energy for reaching maximum performance potential. This person thinks problems. He fears risk and avoids confrontation. What is the secret that one person possesses that sets him or her apart from their contemporaries?

The secret to one’s success lies in the power found in the subconscious mind, the computer storehouse for infinite intelligence. The mind governs, controls and directs your life. And yes… you have free will to protect it from negative influence and nurture it for your positive gain.

Your subconscious mind is behind the scenes like the Wizard of Oz. It is pulling the strings of your successes and your failures. It is amenable to suggestion. This is the good news and the bad news. And whatever you impress on your subconscious will be expressed on the screen of space as events, conditions, circumstances, situations or experiences. “Garbage in, garbage out!”

Plant positive seeds of thought and you’ll reap a bountiful harvest.
Plant negative seeds of thought and you may rue the day.
Check the suggestions that people give to you. You will find that many of these suggestions are for the purpose of making you think, feel and act, as others want you to and in ways that are to their advantage. Study what is said. Much is propaganda. Many statements to you are based on false assumptions, hearsay or gossip.

Some examples are:

You need luck to do that!
You haven’t got a chance
It’s no use.
It’s not what you know, but whom you know.
You’re too old.
We can’t win for losing.
You can’t trust a soul.
The world’s all screwed up.
What’s the world coming to?
Life’s an endless grind.
I figured that would happen.
You’ll never amount to anything
That’s just the way you are.
Love is for the birds.
Watch out, you’ll get the flu.
Everybody’s getting sick.
I told you that wouldn’t work.
That’s just the way it goes.
You can’t expect to succeed all of the time.
You win some and you lose some.
It’s all about the law of averages.
If you didn’t have any bad luck, you wouldn’t have any luck at all.
There’s not enough time in the day.
If we had better direction, we would perform better.
Why try? It’s not appreciated. It does us no good.
They don’t care what we do.
I’m just going to do my job and keep my mouth shut.

Do not initiate or pass along these types of statements.

More importantly, do NOT accept these suggestions. Most people want to be liked. It’s because of this feeling and the need for acceptance that we agree with other people’s sentiments, statements and feelings. Living in Chicago, you can be asked daily about the weather (especially this time of year). “The weather is so cold here. Don’t you wish you lived in a warmer place?” The best response is, “I love Chicago and I don’t mind the changing seasons.” But most of us want to be accepted and don’t want to offend the person asking the question. The typical response is to agree. “Yeah, I hate the weather here. I wish I had a home on the beach.”

You control what goes into your subconscious. You are the master filter. You have to give your mental consent. Other people’s thoughts must become yours for it to be an action in your mind. If the words are not to your liking, dismiss them or replace them with what’s positive for you.

Once your subconscious mind fully accepts an idea or thought, it begins to execute it. If the suggestion is negative and you accept it, you will be on your way to the mindset of a victim or judge. This is not the mindset of the champion.

Your subconscious does not reason or think things out. It does not argue. It does not make comparisons or contrasts. It is like the soil that accepts any kind of seed, good or bad. This computer storehouse doesn’t know or care whether your thoughts are good or bad, true or false or right or wrong.

Remember!

Whatever your subconscious believes and expects will manifest into its physical equivalent. Thoughts of despair and money woes will keep you in poverty. Thoughts of prosperity will lead to wealth and abundance.

Stand guard and protect your greatest possession. Free Will.

Stay in the Zone!

 

Original link

Your brain doesn’t like to keep secrets. Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, have shown that writing down secrets in a journal or telling a doctor your secrets actually decreases the level of stress hormones in your body. Keeping a secret, meanwhile, does the opposite.

Your brain also doesn’t like stress hormones. So when you have a secret to tell, the part of your brain that wants to tell the secret is constantly fighting with the part of your brain that wants to keep the information hidden, says neuroscientist David Eagleman.

“You have competing populations in the brain — one part that wants to tell something and one part that doesn’t,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And the issue is that we’re always cussing at ourselves or getting angry at ourselves or cajoling ourselves. … What we’re seeing here is that there are different parts of the brain that are battling it out. And the way that that battle tips, determines your behavior.”

Eagleman’s new book, Incognito, examines the unconscious part of our brains — the complex neural networks that are constantly fighting one another and influencing how we act, the things we’re attracted to, and the thoughts that we have.

“All of our lives — our cognition, our thoughts, our beliefs — all of these are underpinned by these massive lightning storms of [electrical] activity [in our brains,] and yet we don’t have any awareness of it,” he says. “What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.”

On today’s Fresh Air, Eagleman explains how learning more about the unconscious portions of our brain can teach us more about time, reality, consciousness, religion and crime.

Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine and directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action. He is also the author of Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia and Sum: Forty Takes from the Afterlives.

Excerpt: ‘Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain’
Updated May 31, 20112:07 PM ET
Published May 31, 201110:08 AM ET
DAVID EAGLEMAN
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
INCOGNITO: THE SECRET LIVES OF THE BRAIN
BY DAVID EAGLEMAN
HARDOVER, 304 PAGES
PANTHEON
LIST PRICE: $26.95

Chapter 1: There’s Someone In My Head, But It’s Not Me

Take a close look at yourself in the mirror. Beneath your dashing good looks churns a hidden universe of networked machinery. The machinery includes a sophisticated scaffolding of interlocking bones, a netting of sinewy muscles, a good deal of specialized fluid, and a collaboration of internal organs chugging away in darkness to keep you alive. A sheet of high-tech self-healing sensory material that we call skin seamlessly covers your machinery in a pleasing package.

And then there’s your brain. Three pounds of the most complex material we’ve discovered in the universe. This is the mission control center that drives the whole operation, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armored bunker of the skull.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia — hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. And each one contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

The cells are connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The three-pound organ in your skull — with its pink consistency of Jell-o — is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

Ours is an incredible story. As far as anyone can tell, we’re the only system on the planet so complex that we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us.

And what we’ve discovered by peering into the skull ranks among the most significant intellectual developments of our species: the recognition that the innumerable facets of our behavior, thoughts, and experience are inseparably yoked to a vast, wet, chemical-electrical network called the nervous system. The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us.

THE TREMENDOUS MAGIC

In 1949, Arthur Alberts traveled from his home in Yonkers, New York, to villages between the Gold Coast and Timbuktu in West Africa. He brought his wife, a camera, a jeep, and — because of his love of music — a jeep-powered tape recorder. Wanting to open the ears of the western world, he recorded some of the most important music ever to come out of Africa. But Alberts ran into social troubles while using the tape recorder. One West African native heard his voice played back and accused Alberts of “stealing his tongue.” Alberts only narrowly averted being pummeled by taking out a mirror and convincing the man that his tongue was still intact.

It’s not difficult to see why the natives found the tape recorder so counterintuitive. A vocalization seems ephemeral and ineffable: it is like opening a bag of feathers which scatter on the breeze and can never be retrieved. Voices are weightless and odorless, something you cannot hold in your hand.

So it comes as a surprise that a voice is physical. If you build a little machine sensitive enough to detect tiny compressions of the molecules in the air, you can capture these density changes and reproduce them later. We call these machines microphones, and every one of the billions of radios on the planet is proudly serving up bags of feathers once thought irretrievable. When Alberts played the music back from the tape recorder, one West African tribesman depicted the feat as “tremendous magic.”

And so it goes with thoughts. What exactly is a thought? It doesn’t seem to weigh anything. It feels ephemeral and ineffable. You wouldn’t think that a thought has a shape or smell or any sort of physical instantiation. Thoughts seem to be a kind of tremendous magic.

But just like voices, thoughts are underpinned by physical stuff. We know this because alterations to the brain change the kinds of thoughts we can think. In a state of deep sleep, there are no thoughts. When the brain transitions into dream sleep, there are unbidden, bizarre thoughts. During the day we enjoy our normal, well-accepted thoughts, which people enthusiastically modulate by spiking the chemical cocktails of the brain with alcohol, narcotics, cigarettes, coffee, or physical exercise. The state of the physical material determines the state of the thoughts.

And the physical material is absolutely necessary for normal thinking to tick along. If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident you’d be distressed, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this might change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror — thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, comic instincts, great ideas, fetishes, senses of humor, and desires all emerge from this strange organ — and when the brain changes, so do we. So although it’s easy to intuit that thoughts don’t have a physical basis, that they are something like feathers on the wind, they in fact depend directly on the integrity of the enigmatic, three-pound mission control center.

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you — the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning — is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.

Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot. This book is about that amazing fact: how we know it, what it means, and what it explains about people, markets, secrets, strippers, retirement accounts, criminals, artists, Ulysses, drunkards, stroke victims, gamblers, athletes, bloodhounds, racists, lovers, and every decision you’ve ever taken to be yours.

* * *
In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women’s faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their decision making. None of them said, “I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one.” Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn’t quite put a finger on.

So who was doing the choosing? In the largely inaccessible workings of the brain, something knew that a woman’s dilated eyes correlates with sexual excitement and readiness. Their brains knew this, but the men in the study didn’t — at least not explicitly. The men may also not have known that their notions of beauty and feelings of attraction are deeply hardwired, steered in the right direction by programs carved by millions of years of natural selection. When the men were choosing the most attractive women, they didn’t know that the choice was not theirs, really, but instead the choice of successful programs that had been burned deep into the brain’s circuitry over the course of hundreds of thousands of generations.

Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not. Whether we’re talking about dilated eyes, jealousy, attraction, the love of fatty foods, or the great idea you had last week, consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.

You see evidence of this when your foot gets halfway to the brake before you consciously realize that a red Toyota is backing out of a driveway on the road ahead of you. You see it when you notice your name spoken in a conversation across the room that you thought you weren’t listening to, when you find someone attractive without knowing why, or when your nervous system gives you a “hunch” about which choice you should make.

The brain is a complex system, but that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes have been. And so has your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.

Consider the activity that characterizes a nation at any moment. Factories churn, telecommunication lines buzz with activity, businesses ship products. People eat constantly. Sewer lines direct waste. All across the great stretches of land, police chase criminals. Handshakes secure deals. Lovers rendezvous. Secretaries field calls, teachers profess, athletes compete, doctors operate, bus drivers navigate. You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary. So you pick up a newspaper — not a dense paper like the New York Times but lighter fare such as USA Today. You won’t be surprised that none of the details of the activity are listed in the paper; after all, you want to know the bottom line. You want to know that Congress just signed a new tax law that affects your family, but the detailed origin of the idea — involving lawyers and corporations and filibusters — isn’t especially important to that new bottom line. And you certainly wouldn’t want to know all the details of the food supply of the nation — how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten — you only want to be alerted if there’s a spike of mad cow disease. You don’t care how the garbage is produced and packed away; you only care if it’s going to end up in your backyard. You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories; you only care if the workers are going on strike. That’s what you get from reading the newspaper.

Your conscious mind is that newspaper. Your brain buzzes with activity around the clock, and, just like the nation, almost everything transpires locally: small groups are constantly making decisions and sending out messages to other groups. Out of these local interactions emerge larger coalitions. By the time you read a mental headline, the important action has already transpired, the deals are done. You have surprisingly little access to what happened behind the scenes. Entire political movements gain ground-up support and become unstoppable before you ever catch wind of them as a feeling or an intuition or a thought that strikes you. You’re the last one to hear the information.

However, you’re an odd kind of newspaper reader, reading the headline and taking credit for the idea as though you thought of it first. You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

And who can blame you for thinking you deserve the credit? The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito. So who, exactly, deserves the acclaim for a great idea? In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him — they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.

And consider the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He began using opium in 1796, originally for relief from the pain of tooth-aches and facial neuralgia — but soon he was irreversibly hooked, swigging as much as two quarts of laudanum each week. His poem “Kubla Khan,” with its exotic and dreamy imagery, was written on an opium high that he described as “a kind of a reverie.” For him, the opium became a way to tap into his subconscious neural circuits. We credit the beautiful words of “Kubla Khan” to Coleridge because they came from his brain and no else’s, right? But he couldn’t get hold of those words while sober, so who exactly does the credit for the poem belong to? As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd put it, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

Excerpted from Incognito by David Eagleman. Copyright 2011 by David Eagleman. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Original Link Article by hypnosistrainingacademy.com

It’s a familiar line of questioning…

Is hypnosis real, and does it actually work?

Is it just a myth, or does it have any basis in reality?

Can some of the results be backed up by science, or are they just one-offs?

Are they just coincidences?

Or is something else going on?

One of the problems, of course, is that there’s often no general agreement.

Ask two different professionals, and you might get two different answers.

That’s why you need solid proof.

You need to know that someone, somewhere, has taken the time to find out.

That they’ve done proper research under the right conditions.

That their results have been replicated elsewhere.

That’s what proof is, after all, right?

Evidence.

Verification.

Findings that have been confirmed over and over again, so there’s no mistake.

Because once you’ve got proof, you can’t argue with it.

No matter who you are or how many degrees you hold.

It’s fact. Written down in black and white.

And fortunately, when it comes to hypnosis, that kind of proof exists.

Hypnosis Rises Out Of The Fog

You probably know the story by now.

Hypnosis gets a bad rap because it’s so widely misunderstood.

Because of its association with mind control.

Thanks largely to being sensationalized by the media.

By newspapers, TV and film.

But, of course, it’s not about that at all.

Hypnosis is something you let happen to yourself.

It isn’t something someone else does to you.

If you don’t want to go into a trance, then no-one can force you to.

They can’t taken over your thinking.

They can’t make you do things you wouldn’t normally do.

It just can’t happen.

Once the myths surrounding hypnosis have been rebuffed, it’s possible to get at the truth.

And the truth is fascinating.

Hypnosis has the potential to be used in an almost limitless number of practical applications.

Here are just a few examples:

• To stop smoking
• To lose weight
• To cope with IBS
• To manage pain
• To deal with depression
• To fight phobias
• To wipe out stress
• To eliminate addictions
• To aid recovery from surgery
• To ease the process of childbirth
• To relieve nausea
• To repair skin conditions

And as research continues and our understanding grows, more uses keep on being found.

So what is it about hypnosis that makes it so powerful?

It’s not magic.

It’s not witchcraft.

But there’s definitely something going on.

Something that makes it possible to kick bad habits, endure the unendurable, and reverse long-standing conditions.

Almost like magic, but more like a secret ingredient.

And that secret ingredient is – you.

You + Hypnosis = Miracle

Miracle might be a strong word, but what can be achieved through hypnosis is almost miraculous.

Why?

Because under hypnosis, your conscious mind gets sidelined.

Your attention turns inward, and you connect with your unconscious mind.

That’s where the ability to heal, to make decisions, and to motivate yourself comes from.

Access that, and anything’s possible.

You can stop smoking, even if you’ve smoked for most of your life.

You can stick to your diet, even if you’ve never had any success before.

You can handle pain, even if you’re not given any painkillers.

You can convince your body to start healing itself.

You can program your mind to begin thinking in different ways.

You can achieve things you’ve never been able to achieve before.

But unlike magic, it’s not a trick.

It’s simply the power of the human mind put to proper use.

Switch it on, and watch yourself go!

Scientific Proof That Hypnosis Works

There are truckloads of studies that back it all up too.

For instance, Drs. Elkins and Rajab did a study on the potential for hypnosis to help people stop smoking.

30 smokers were referred to the study by their physicians.

After an initial consultation, 21 of these came back to try hypnosis.

Following a 3-session hypnosis program, 81% had managed to stop smoking. And almost half of these said they were still not smoking a year later.

In another study, hypnosis was integrated with a Rapid Smoking treatment protocol.

Of the 43 participants, 39 stopped smoking.

That’s more than 90%.

And they were still not smoking when followed up at intervals of 6 months and 3 years.

With results like these, it’s easy to see why hypnotherapy is quickly becoming a mainstream option.

For instance, take Hugh McCorry.

He was the first full-time hypnotherapist at Belfast City Hospital.

Working in collaboration with the Northern Ireland Chest Heart and Stroke Association, McCorry gave group sessions to members of the public on Belfast’s No Smoking Day.

According to the Association’s spokesperson Myrtle Neill, more than half of those who took part were able to stop smoking.

McCorry is quoted as saying that one session backed up with take-home audio tapes was often enough to quench a 20-a-day habit.

Others, however, believe the best solution is to approach the problem from multiple angles.

Despite that fact, throwing hypnotherapy into the mix usually brings higher quit rates.

Higher than nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) alone.

Higher than going cold turkey.

That’s what Dr. Hasan from the North Shore Medical Center in Salem, MA, concluded.

He compared the quit rates of 67 hospitalized “smokers” divided into 4 groups based on the form of treatment.

Patients were followed up 26 weeks after discharge.

50% of those who received hypnotherapy alone, or hypnotherapy with NRT, were non-smokers.

That compared with 25% in the control group (going cold turkey) and just over 15% in the NRT only group.

According to Alvin V. Thomas, MD, FCCP, President of the American College of Chest Physicians:

“The results of this study and many others confirm that using a multimodality approach to smoking cessation is optimal for success.”

Hypnosis has also proven to be highly successful at helping people lose weight.

In one study, Cochrane and Friesen worked with 60 women between the ages of 20 and 60.

Each of the women was at least 20% overweight and not following any other diet regimes.

The women were divided into 3 sets, one undergoing hypnosis, one hypnosis with audiotapes, and a control group.

All of the participants were checked for weight loss straight after the sessions, and followed up after 6 months.

The results confirmed that hypnosis is an effective method for weight loss.

Studies have also shown how hypnosis works better than other forms of therapy.

One case reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychology compared 17-67 year olds given diet and exercise treatment.

The participants were split into two groups, one given hypnosis and the other not.

Both groups were successful at losing weight.

When followed up at 8-month and 2-year intervals, however, the differences were significant.

The groups who did not undergo hypnosis failed to lose any further weight – and most of them gained all their weight back.

The group who underwent hypnosis kept losing weight and were able to keep it off.

These results led the researchers involved to conclude that “hypnosis should be used by anyone who is serious about weight loss.”

Because weight loss is such a big deal these days, even the studies themselves have been scrutinized and analyzed.

In one such case, 18 studies were examined where other forms of therapy were supplemented by hypnosis.

It was discovered that people who received hypnosis lost more weight than 90% of participants who did not.

Not only that, but they kept the weight off for two years after the sessions.

The same researchers also investigated 5 weight loss studies chronicled in 1996 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

They reported that these studies showed hypnosis to be more than twice as effective as more traditional approaches.

Studies like these show just how useful hypnosis can be.

They provide the proof that hypnosis is a viable and realistic therapy.

That’s why hypnotherapy has been recognized worldwide as a practical method for managing a wide range of conditions:

• In 1996, the Australian Hypnotherapists’ Association introduced a peer-group accreditation system for professional Australian hypnotherapists.

• In the UK, the Department for Education and Skills developed National Occupational Standards for hypnotherapy in 2002.

• In the USA, hypnotherapy regulation and certification is carried out by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners (A.C.H.E.). The first state-licensed hypnotherapy center was the Hypnotism Training Institute of Los Angeles, licensed way back in 1976.

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

And then, there are phobias.

Phobias have been described as the fear of fear.

You’re not simply afraid of the spider, or of flying, or of speaking in public.

You’re also afraid of the way those things make you feel.

The way they make you lose control.

Most of us know these fears are irrational, but we just can’t help the way we react.

Interestingly, many phobic patients are believed to be easily hypnotizable.

Why?

Because their phobic experience puts them into a sort of trance-like state.

Not a particularly nice state, but trance-like all the same.

Maybe that’s why hypnotherapy is so good at helping people overcome their phobias.

Under hypnosis, the hypnotherapist can implant powerful suggestions in your mind.

They can also combine hypnosis with other forms of therapy.

Using desensitization or the Rewind Technique.

Desensitization involves breaking the fear down into a series of steps.

Working from the least frightening to the most frightening.

Using relaxation and coping mechanisms to deal with levels of fear at each step.

The Rewind Technique is used when a client has been put under hypnosis.

The therapist gets the patient to imagine watching a movie of themselves experiencing the phobic event in the past.

They then rewind the movie to a safe point, and then fast forward it.

The process is repeated until the client no longer feels any emotion about it.

Until they become desensitized to it.

Able to regain control of their lives and get on with living it.

And with help from hypnosis, it’s more than possible.

Hypnosis has been proven effective in dealing with a whole range of psychological issues.

From phobias to bulimia to post-traumatic stress.

As time goes on, it may turn out that we’ve only just scratched the surface.

That hypnosis and hypnotherapy are capable of a lot more than we ever imagined.

And if that’s true, you can be sure there’ll be plenty of new studies to back it up.

What Hypnosis Really Is

So what do all of these techniques and studies tell us?

They tell us that hypnosis is not a gimmick.

It’s real, and it’s practical.

In the right hands, it’s a valuable tool for helping people.

Sure, hypnotherapists make money doing what they do.

So do doctors.

But that doesn’t stop you from seeking out their expertise.

Because in the end, you’re getting the help you need.

You’re accessing your own internal powerhouse to make positive life changes.

To drive home suggestions that help reprogram you.

So you can think differently, feel better, and change your behavior from the inside out.

It’s not always possible to do that on your own, though.

You might already have a life that’s so busy, there just isn’t time to devote entirely to yourself.

Even if you did, you might not know how to go about it.

Hypnosis is a natural state we all enter on a regular basis.

When you get absorbed in a good book, or wrapped up in your favorite hobby.

It’s completely harmless and totally non-invasive.

It makes significant and lasting changes without altering who you really are.

And if you let it, it might just dramatically improve your life.

By Nanice Ellis

Contribution Writer for Wake Up World

Have you ever wondered why so many relationships end in heartache? Even relationships that begin with incredible love, faithful promises and the best of intentions often come to a bitter end. If love is all you need, why does it all go so wrong?

What if I told you, there is a single core issue responsible for almost every break up and break down, and, not just in our romantic relationships, but in all our relationships?

As a relationship coach for almost twenty years, I share this insight with you now so that you can gain the wisdom and power to find love in all the right places.

Humanity’s Invisible Wound

Most of humanity is silently suffering from the invisible wound of unworthiness. Because we have amnesia of our true selves, and we have forgotten that we are unconditionally loved by an All Loving Source, we come into this world asking, “Am I worthy of love?” From our first breath, we seek this answer, not knowing that the life-long quality of our relationships, prosperity and health all depend on our immature interpretation of the signs.

In most cases, this pivotal answer is, “I am worthy if….” Until we awaken, Conditional Worthiness is the foundational belief for almost every human being on this planet, and the core belief that every other belief is based upon. If you believe that you are fundamentally unworthy of love unless you meet certain conditions, you will construct a reality built on this false premise, and, as a result, you will embark on this game of life, seeking love outside yourself, and building unsustainable relationships upon that search.

Most people spend their entire lives trying to prove that they are worthy of love, never considering that the quest for worthiness is impossible to fulfill, nor understanding, that this impossible quest covertly sabotages virtually every loving relationship.

The Core Wound

If you look deep, you will find that the core wound of all emotional wounds is the belief of unworthiness or conditional worthiness. This belief is so painful because it is completely untrue, but since our parents, teachers and peers all suffer from the same debilitating belief, it seems perfectly normal.

As a way to cope with the emotional wound of unworthiness, the well-meaning ego selects a “primary emotional need,” that when met, temporarily fills this wound. The “primary emotional need” is specific to you and your life experiences, with the most common emotional needs including: appreciation, approval, acceptance, understanding and being heard, but there are many more, as well. This means that if your primary emotional need is acceptance, you must somehow get others to accept you, again and again, in order to feel worthy of love. Our personalities become molded according to this need and our unconscious strategies to get this need met, influencing our choice of careers, friends, clothes, interests and just about everything else.

Although we are usually unaware of this primary emotional need, there is a part of us who is constantly tracking for the fulfillment of this need, and, consequently, altering our behavior in order to get it met.

We might sacrifice our desires for approval, compromise our values for appreciation or hide behind a false self in exchange for being understood. Without knowing it, your primary emotional need runs your life, making you do things you don’t really want to do, and keeping you from expressing your true self. It is an invisible prison of your own making, and, even if you can get others to meet this emotional need, it is never enough to fill this bottomless pit of unworthiness.

Romantic Chemistry — A Trick in Disguise?

In an unconscious attempt to heal this wound, many of us search for that one special person who can love us enough to make us whole, but we fail to take into account that the wise Universe has another plan.

A substantial component of what we call romantic chemistry is the unconscious pull towards someone who will not meet our primary emotional need, and, as a result, trigger our emotional issues. Of course, when we first get to know this person, and we feel attracted, we usually believe that he/she will provide us with what we need emotionally, even if we are not sure what that is – which is generally the case. So, we open our hearts and we let this person in, totally expecting the relationship to grow and flourish, but within days, weeks, months or years, we recognize that we feel hurt and unloved because our partner is not giving us what we need emotionally, and then we blame him/her for withholding love. Our love language is really alanguage of emotional needs. No matter how much your partner says, or does, the “right” things, if he/she doesn’t meet your primary emotional need, you will likely feel unloved and unsatisfied.

This is the cause of dysfunction in virtually every problematic relationship. When our partner is not meeting our primary emotional need, we either sacrifice ourselves to do whatever it takes for our partner to love us in the way that we desire, be that through appreciation, approval or understanding, etc…, and if our partner still does not meet this emotional need, we defend ourselves with anger, resentment, resistance or we just shut down. We withhold love from our partner by denying him or her their primary emotional need in return. Of course, this is all orchestrated, by us, without our awareness. We just feel hurt and unloved, and, so, we try to protect ourselves.

Your Love Receptors

If you unconsciously believe that you are only worthy of love if your primary emotional need is met, your love receptors will only turn on when you perceive that this condition is satisfied, but, as soon as the condition is no longer satisfied, the receptors turn off. Your condition must also be met by a certain type of person, or a specific person. You might also have self- imposed conditions, for example, if you don’t look a certain way, even if your partner is meeting your emotional need, you won’t feel loved because your love receptors are turned off. This means that even a “bad hair day” can negatively impact a relationship.

The bottom line is, even if someone truly loves us, if our conditions are not met, we unconsciously block love. Conditions don’t bring us love – conditions block love.

On the surface, challenging relationships that our based on the “worthiness game” might seem like a waste of time, but, by no small means, this dynamic is by Divine Design. On a higher level, our true selves are playing the healing game. No matter the facts, details or history, the greater part of us is conspiring for our awakening. We don’t attract people who will meet our emotional needs because if those needs were met by others, we would remain oblivious to the deeper wound, which is not feeling worthy of love, and that wound would go forever unhealed, keeping us out of alignment with our true spiritual nature. We need someone (important to us) who will withhold the very thing we believe we need most, so that the pain and suffering associated with not getting this need met, will alert us to this wound, in such a way, we cannot ignore.

Relationships are meant to trigger issues so that we know that they exist within us, and we have the opportunity to heal, and free ourselves.

Many years ago, I found myself in a long term relationship where I felt completely unappreciated. I bent over backwards and even sacrificed my own integrity in order to receive morsels of appreciation, but no matter what I did, I still felt unappreciated. I requested, I demanded, I whined – still, less than nothing. As I grew resentful that my partner withheld appreciation, I began to withhold understanding. The key nuggets of our frequent arguments were, “You don’t appreciate me” versus “You don’t understand me.” As I felt unappreciated, I also felt unworthy of love, and as the pain grew with the passing of time, I arrived at the point where I was done seeking appreciation because it was just too painful.

The true purpose of emotional pain is to wake us up, and make us pay attention to the false belief(s) that is causing the pain in the first place.

Of course, you can ignore this pain through methods of distraction, addiction, rationalization, etc… but pain is designed to grow stronger the longer you ignore it, requiring greater and greater methods of avoidance. Depending on your ability to tolerate emotional pain, eventually, there will come a point, where the only way to be free of this pain is to uncover its true source and pull it up from the roots.

Finally, I stopped looking outside myself and I looked within. I began to see a hidden history revolving around my need for appreciation that began with my mother in childhood. I could see that my need for appreciation was a symptom of trying to prove that I was worthy of love. I could also see that there was an empty space inside me where my own self-love was missing. It became perfectly clear that in this unconscious game of trying to prove my worth, the cards were stacked against me.

Relationships cannot prove your worth. Relationships can only demonstrate whether or not you believe that you are worthy.

Until we are fully awake in our lives, the purpose of relationships, and especially intimate ones, is to alert us to our disempowering beliefs, so that we can heal and wake up. Other people, we call family, lovers and friends unknowingly act out our false beliefs and trigger our issues so that we have the opportunity to recognize and release these false beliefs and heal our wounds. Therefore, if I believe that my worth is conditional and I must prove that I am worthy, my partner can only reflect this belief by unconsciously offering behavior (withholding my primary emotional need) that activates my feelings of unworthiness.

If you don’t love yourself, you will need others to behave certain ways so that you feel worthy of love, but others can only demonstrate your belief that you don’t feel worthy of love.

In addition, because worth is intrinsic and unconditional, it cannot be proven or disproven. The mere act of trying to prove that you are worthy or getting others to treat you a certain way so that you feel worthy, comes from a belief that you are not worthy. If you know that you are unconditionally worthy of love, you don’t need proof.

Original Link <click here>

For many people, the idea of being awake while your skull is cut open sounds like something straight out of a horror movie. However, 37 people decided to forgo anesthetics for brain surgery and opted to receive hypnosis instead.
Hypnosis in surgery is not a new concept. In 1864 a Scottish surgeon named James Esdaile reported “80 percent surgical anesthesia using hypnosis as the sole anesthetic for amputations in India,” according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In 1957, Dr. William Saul Kroger caught the New York Time’s attention when he used hypnosis on a breast cancer patient, the Miami Herald reported.

However, Dr. Ilyess Zemmoura of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Tours and his colleagues have been evaluating the effects of using anesthesia since 2011. Focusing primarily on brain cancer patients, he and his team have been conducting awake operations to remove brain cancer tumors.

Certain brain operations require patients to be awake for at least part of the process. These surgeries are very tricky, according to the International Business Times, and surgeons depend on certain responses and interactions to avoid damaging critical parts of the brain, such as the eloquent cortex.

Typically when a patient undergoes brain surgery, they will be put to sleep at the beginning of the operation prior to the skull being opened, woken up in the middle to ensure responses are normal, then put back to sleep again. This process is known as asleep-awake-asleep ‒ or AAA – which seems like an onomatopoeia when thinking about waking up in the middle of brain surgery.

Zemmoura and other researchers detailed the hypnosis process to a total of 48 patients, according to Ars Technica. Hypnosis sedation, much like AAA sedation, begins several weeks prior to the operation. The patient meets with a hypnotist to practice entering a trance. From 2011 to 2015, 37 of the 48 underwent brain surgery using hypnosis sedation. Six patients were unable to enter a trance at the time of the surgery and switched to AAA sedation.

While the drawbacks to hypnotherapy may seem obvious ‒ waking up out of the trance, pain, sneezing while a surgeon has their hands on your brain ‒ there are many benefits as well. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute estimated that the use of hypnosis could save both time and up to $338 per procedure.

Although some in the medical community remain skeptical – there was no control group in the study to compare results with – Zemmoura’s small patient group largely reported positive results. Follow-up questionnaires showed little to no negative psychological impact, Neuroscience News reported.