The human mind is a wonderful, complex and sophisticated thing. In order to not overload with all the complexities that exist, as hypnotists we have the advantage that we can use a simplified model which will allow us to use the power of hypnosis quickly and easily without too much fuss.
But I’d like to give you some definitions here so that we are both on the same page and talking about the same processes so that we can usefully talk about different levels of consciousness and the role that hypnosis has to play in that.
The Conscious Mind
First of all, we have this idea of a vague conscious mind. The conscious mind is what we’d like to think of as being ourselves. It is our intellect, it is the choices we make everyday, it is the things that we are aware of.
Think of your conscious mind a little bit like a searchlight in the middle of a dark cave. The searchlight can always look at only one portion of that cave. Wherever the light goes and shines on, you can see a few things, four, five or six objects, but then the light runs out and the rest is in darkness.
The darkness, the things that you are not aware of, that is your unconscious mind. And the relationship between the light in the cave is actually quite a nice metaphor for the one between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.
The conscious mind has certain limitations. For starters, you can only process seven plus or minus two bits of information. What that really means is that if I gave you a random set of facts to remember, by the time I get to six or seven facts, you can probably hold that reasonably easily inside your mind. Eight or nine facts, it starts to get a little trickier.
Ten, eleven, twelve… you’d have to be a trained memory expert to be able to hold all those things in your mind at the same time. The reason for this is because your focus of attention is limited to how many things you can deal with at a time.
The Unconscious Mind
Unconsciously however, your unconscious mind can handle millions and millions of pieces of information at the same time. This is one of the reasons why we have the experience of mulling over a problem to which we can’t seem to find the solution; then we sleep on it and in the morning the answer just seems so obvious.
This is one of the things that the unconscious mind does for us; it finds solutions to problems and it helps us to get through life, to make our way through life.
Now this is an important thing. The unconscious mind is really everything that’s happening in the background. If you think of it almost like the computer and the operating system. Whenever you have a file up, like a Word document or an e-mail program, that’s your conscious mind, that’s
where your attention happens to be.
Everything that happens in the background, all the operating system, all that complex code that no one but a few special experts understand, that is the operating of the unconscious mind.
And just like your computer has a 101 different things operating at the same time to allow you to use your Internet program, to allow you to use your email, to allow you to use your Word program, so the unconscious mind is running all kinds of things automatically to allow you the freedom to choose
your way through life.
So as an example, the unconscious mind runs your body. It makes sure that your blood temperature is regulated within a very precise range. Just a few degrees too high and you suffer a fever. A couple of degrees higher and you’ll probably die. A few degrees too low you suffer from hypothermia. A
few degrees below that and again, life isn't possible.
So just within that tiny range where life is possible and life is comfortable and good, your unconscious mind – every single day, regardless of what the outside temperature is like – is regulating it within perfection.
Similarly, you’re using your unconscious mind to run your heart, your internal organs, all your blood pressure and your digestion system, all these things are running without you having to put a single thought into it, because the unconscious mind is there to help you survive and thrive.
And this is one of the keys to the workings of the unconscious mind. It has certain operating principles, certain things that it has really been designed to do for you. One of the key things is to help you to survive. It is there to protect you. Now you know this.
You’ve had many experiences where the unconscious mind has protected you from something unpleasant happening, on a simple day to day level. You might have been sitting in a restaurant and a fly is buzzing around, and it is coming straight for your eye. Without even thinking about it, you blink, you protect the eye. The eyelid comes down and the fly cannot hurt you.
In the same way, you’ve had experiences or other things happening, a narrowly avoided accident, being in a tough situation and suddenly knowing exactly what to do or say without really knowing how you knew it.
Conscious - v - Unconscious Conflict
These are all examples of the unconscious mind coming to your rescue, doing what it is designed to do. Now, of course, the problem starts when you start conflicting between different functions.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Imagine that your mind and body are like a ship and the captain of the ship is a bit like your conscious mind. It is there to look into the distance and look at the charts, and then decide, “Here is the way we’re going to go.”
These are the directions we want to go in and this is the path that we’ll take to get there. The unconscious mind is the ship and whole of the crew. And whilst the crew and the ship is well trained and does their thing, a captain just points the direction and enjoys the breeze, everything is fine.
And yet, from time to time, the captain is getting a little bit nervous or loses a little bit of trust in his crew, and what happens then?
Either the captain is so busy running down stairs to check that the coal engine is working and swabs the decks and then goes into the kitchen to prepare the dinner, who’s minding the ship?
Who’s deciding which direction to go? The crew gets frustrated because the captain is interfering and the captain and the ship lose the direction or purpose in life because the captain is too busy interfering with things that are best left to the crew.
This is an example of where hypnosis becomes a tremendously powerful tool. When people interfere in their own lives too much, when they get in their own way, hypnosis is a great way to bypass the captain, regulate the crew again, give them a new set of instructions so that they do their job
properly, give them a new set of conditions, and then the captain can get on with happily doing his job which is looking at the charts and deciding which way the ship should go.
Accessing The Unconscious
Now, as a hypnotist, I quite like the analogy I just gave you. And one of the reasons for this is because it actually explains a lot of the things that we can actually experience in our day to day life.
You see, everyone thinks that the things that are in the unconscious are terrible and repressed and there’s no way to access them, and that simply isn't true. Whilst there are places that the captain might find difficult to find, there are other places that he can go to whenever he feels like it. It is just a question of when he turns his attention to it.
Likewise, there are many unconscious processes that we can be totally aware of and have influence over when we choose to focus our minds in a certain way.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Right now you are listening to this recording and hearing the sound of my voice, and maybe even thinking about some of the things that I’m talking about. What you are probably not aware of is the sensation in your left foot, or the temperature of the skin of
your back or your shoulders.
But now as I mention these things, you’re attention is turned towards them and something that was unconscious a moment ago suddenly becomes conscious. It is not that the temperature on your shoulders didn’t exist, it is not that the pressure or the sensation in your foot didn’t exist whilst you weren’t paying attention, it was always there. It was just kind of running in the background of your mind and there was no reason for you to be aware of them. There was no reason for your attention to be drawn towards that until I mentioned it.
Now, in the same way as you can be aware of different parts of your body just by focusing on it, there are different parts of your mind that you can access by focusing on them, and by focusing in a certain way.
Many people find they can do this through life. In other words, they find natural talents or knacks which they probably developed in childhood and then evolved with over time. So classically, some people can go to bed at night and just choose to wake up at a certain time in the morning, and
without an alarm clock, they just do.
This is incidentally something that you can be taught how to do with hypnosis. In the same way, there are people who are more creative than others. Now, it’s not that people are more creative, just think what this means.
How many times do we dream?
Well, every single night. In fact, you dream many times in every single night. And who plans their dreams?
Who sits there and says, “Okay, we need a plot line, a character line, and we’re going to have this thing happen, that thing happen”?
There is absolutely no need to do that because your unconscious mind is creative. There’s a little pod inside your mind that creates dreams spontaneously off the cuff, and they are always good ones. They are always relevant in some way, shape or form.
So creativity isn't just a gift that people have, it is a room inside the mind that you can access. And hypnosis is like a map that guides you into the different rooms and allows you to show people how to access abilities they weren’t aware of.
The same, for example, is true of health. In hypnosis it has been shown that we can improve our health, we can strengthen our immune system, we can speed the rate at which we heal something like a broken arm or a leg, and it has even been shown that you can reduce the amount of bleeding you have.
For example, if you go into an operation, so that recovery times afterwards are much, much shorter. These are some of the things that you’ll be able to achieve once you master the power of hypnosis.
And these are the sort of things as a hypnotist you’ll be able to help other people do. So the power of hypnosis really rests in the ability to reach this powerful unconscious mind and to influence it so that it heals things more quickly, it overcomes emotional wounds, it helps solve problems in life, and
it helps you find new directions when you’re stuck and not sure which way to go.
But I’d like to give you some definitions here so that we are both on the same page and talking about the same processes so that we can usefully talk about different levels of consciousness and the role that hypnosis has to play in that.
The Conscious Mind
First of all, we have this idea of a vague conscious mind. The conscious mind is what we’d like to think of as being ourselves. It is our intellect, it is the choices we make everyday, it is the things that we are aware of.
Think of your conscious mind a little bit like a searchlight in the middle of a dark cave. The searchlight can always look at only one portion of that cave. Wherever the light goes and shines on, you can see a few things, four, five or six objects, but then the light runs out and the rest is in darkness.
The darkness, the things that you are not aware of, that is your unconscious mind. And the relationship between the light in the cave is actually quite a nice metaphor for the one between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.
The conscious mind has certain limitations. For starters, you can only process seven plus or minus two bits of information. What that really means is that if I gave you a random set of facts to remember, by the time I get to six or seven facts, you can probably hold that reasonably easily inside your mind. Eight or nine facts, it starts to get a little trickier.
Ten, eleven, twelve… you’d have to be a trained memory expert to be able to hold all those things in your mind at the same time. The reason for this is because your focus of attention is limited to how many things you can deal with at a time.
The Unconscious Mind
Unconsciously however, your unconscious mind can handle millions and millions of pieces of information at the same time. This is one of the reasons why we have the experience of mulling over a problem to which we can’t seem to find the solution; then we sleep on it and in the morning the answer just seems so obvious.
This is one of the things that the unconscious mind does for us; it finds solutions to problems and it helps us to get through life, to make our way through life.
Now this is an important thing. The unconscious mind is really everything that’s happening in the background. If you think of it almost like the computer and the operating system. Whenever you have a file up, like a Word document or an e-mail program, that’s your conscious mind, that’s
where your attention happens to be.
Everything that happens in the background, all the operating system, all that complex code that no one but a few special experts understand, that is the operating of the unconscious mind.
And just like your computer has a 101 different things operating at the same time to allow you to use your Internet program, to allow you to use your email, to allow you to use your Word program, so the unconscious mind is running all kinds of things automatically to allow you the freedom to choose
your way through life.
So as an example, the unconscious mind runs your body. It makes sure that your blood temperature is regulated within a very precise range. Just a few degrees too high and you suffer a fever. A couple of degrees higher and you’ll probably die. A few degrees too low you suffer from hypothermia. A
few degrees below that and again, life isn't possible.
So just within that tiny range where life is possible and life is comfortable and good, your unconscious mind – every single day, regardless of what the outside temperature is like – is regulating it within perfection.
Similarly, you’re using your unconscious mind to run your heart, your internal organs, all your blood pressure and your digestion system, all these things are running without you having to put a single thought into it, because the unconscious mind is there to help you survive and thrive.
And this is one of the keys to the workings of the unconscious mind. It has certain operating principles, certain things that it has really been designed to do for you. One of the key things is to help you to survive. It is there to protect you. Now you know this.
You’ve had many experiences where the unconscious mind has protected you from something unpleasant happening, on a simple day to day level. You might have been sitting in a restaurant and a fly is buzzing around, and it is coming straight for your eye. Without even thinking about it, you blink, you protect the eye. The eyelid comes down and the fly cannot hurt you.
In the same way, you’ve had experiences or other things happening, a narrowly avoided accident, being in a tough situation and suddenly knowing exactly what to do or say without really knowing how you knew it.
Conscious - v - Unconscious Conflict
These are all examples of the unconscious mind coming to your rescue, doing what it is designed to do. Now, of course, the problem starts when you start conflicting between different functions.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Imagine that your mind and body are like a ship and the captain of the ship is a bit like your conscious mind. It is there to look into the distance and look at the charts, and then decide, “Here is the way we’re going to go.”
These are the directions we want to go in and this is the path that we’ll take to get there. The unconscious mind is the ship and whole of the crew. And whilst the crew and the ship is well trained and does their thing, a captain just points the direction and enjoys the breeze, everything is fine.
And yet, from time to time, the captain is getting a little bit nervous or loses a little bit of trust in his crew, and what happens then?
Either the captain is so busy running down stairs to check that the coal engine is working and swabs the decks and then goes into the kitchen to prepare the dinner, who’s minding the ship?
Who’s deciding which direction to go? The crew gets frustrated because the captain is interfering and the captain and the ship lose the direction or purpose in life because the captain is too busy interfering with things that are best left to the crew.
This is an example of where hypnosis becomes a tremendously powerful tool. When people interfere in their own lives too much, when they get in their own way, hypnosis is a great way to bypass the captain, regulate the crew again, give them a new set of instructions so that they do their job
properly, give them a new set of conditions, and then the captain can get on with happily doing his job which is looking at the charts and deciding which way the ship should go.
Accessing The Unconscious
Now, as a hypnotist, I quite like the analogy I just gave you. And one of the reasons for this is because it actually explains a lot of the things that we can actually experience in our day to day life.
You see, everyone thinks that the things that are in the unconscious are terrible and repressed and there’s no way to access them, and that simply isn't true. Whilst there are places that the captain might find difficult to find, there are other places that he can go to whenever he feels like it. It is just a question of when he turns his attention to it.
Likewise, there are many unconscious processes that we can be totally aware of and have influence over when we choose to focus our minds in a certain way.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Right now you are listening to this recording and hearing the sound of my voice, and maybe even thinking about some of the things that I’m talking about. What you are probably not aware of is the sensation in your left foot, or the temperature of the skin of
your back or your shoulders.
But now as I mention these things, you’re attention is turned towards them and something that was unconscious a moment ago suddenly becomes conscious. It is not that the temperature on your shoulders didn’t exist, it is not that the pressure or the sensation in your foot didn’t exist whilst you weren’t paying attention, it was always there. It was just kind of running in the background of your mind and there was no reason for you to be aware of them. There was no reason for your attention to be drawn towards that until I mentioned it.
Now, in the same way as you can be aware of different parts of your body just by focusing on it, there are different parts of your mind that you can access by focusing on them, and by focusing in a certain way.
Many people find they can do this through life. In other words, they find natural talents or knacks which they probably developed in childhood and then evolved with over time. So classically, some people can go to bed at night and just choose to wake up at a certain time in the morning, and
without an alarm clock, they just do.
This is incidentally something that you can be taught how to do with hypnosis. In the same way, there are people who are more creative than others. Now, it’s not that people are more creative, just think what this means.
How many times do we dream?
Well, every single night. In fact, you dream many times in every single night. And who plans their dreams?
Who sits there and says, “Okay, we need a plot line, a character line, and we’re going to have this thing happen, that thing happen”?
There is absolutely no need to do that because your unconscious mind is creative. There’s a little pod inside your mind that creates dreams spontaneously off the cuff, and they are always good ones. They are always relevant in some way, shape or form.
So creativity isn't just a gift that people have, it is a room inside the mind that you can access. And hypnosis is like a map that guides you into the different rooms and allows you to show people how to access abilities they weren’t aware of.
The same, for example, is true of health. In hypnosis it has been shown that we can improve our health, we can strengthen our immune system, we can speed the rate at which we heal something like a broken arm or a leg, and it has even been shown that you can reduce the amount of bleeding you have.
For example, if you go into an operation, so that recovery times afterwards are much, much shorter. These are some of the things that you’ll be able to achieve once you master the power of hypnosis.
And these are the sort of things as a hypnotist you’ll be able to help other people do. So the power of hypnosis really rests in the ability to reach this powerful unconscious mind and to influence it so that it heals things more quickly, it overcomes emotional wounds, it helps solve problems in life, and
it helps you find new directions when you’re stuck and not sure which way to go.
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hypnosis learning
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