Energy Overcharge

HYPER? OVER-EXCITED? BATTERIES OVER-CHARGED?
"It's wonderful to feel high on life, but if you're so super-charged that you feel disorganized, scattered or out of control, you'll probably function better if you "get it together!"

Try "Cook's Hook-up" from Donna Eden's Energy Medicine and taught in Barbara Mallory's book, Feeling Free! (to see it illustrated CLICK HERE) It feels great! For frequent hyper-arousal, do it many times a day!

OVER-ENERGY CORRECTION
Cook's Hook-up with Energy Imagery

1. Sit supported comfortably in a chair, or you may do this exercise effectively lying on your back with knees comfortably up to relax your back.

2. Cross your left ankle over right. You might think of this as an Earth Lock.

3. Cross your right hand over left at the wrist. Reach down toward the earth (or toward your feet if lying down). Imagine reaching way, way down to the center of the earth. Clasp the sacred energy radiating from the earth's glowing core. Now lock in your connection to the radiant Heart of Mother Earth.

4. Slowly draw your clasped hands up, drawing radiant earth energy up to your body. As your elbows start to bend, tuck your clasped hands under and up.

5. Draw Mother Earth's radiant energy slowly up through the center core of your body to your mid-upper chest. This thymus area is known as the High Heart or Soul Seat. (If you are familiar with the chakra system of energy centers, sense yourself drawing this glowing cord of sacred earth energy up through root and sacral chakras, through solar and heart chakras, all the way to the High Heart.)

6. Rest your clasped hands quietly over the High Heart, creating a Heart Lock.

7. Then mentally draw the glowing energy line straight upward from High Heart through your throat, brow and crown-of-head energy centers, and even farther, far beyond your crown, all the way to your Divine Source, wherever that is for you. There you might visualize a Sky or Heaven Lock.

8. Notice now, the energy connection you have created - a secure and radiant cord from the glowing Heart of Mother Earth up through your own radiant High Heart and all the way to the Universal Source or Heart of Heaven.

9. For your breathing pattern, inhale slowly through your nose, tongue to the roof of your mouth, collecting energy (qi or ch'i or prana), and draw that energy down through your glowing center core, all the way down to Mother Earth.

10. Exhale through your mouth, tongue down, surrendering all the ch'i or prana your energy system no longer needs, releasing it to the Earth for recycling.

11. Now, gently, quietly hold this position, and continue breathing slowly and deeply, for 30 seconds to 2 minutes, or until you feel centered, calm and clear.

The Over-Energy Correction (Cook's Hook-up) can serve as an effective and peaceful preparation for meditation. Just relax your hands and slip easily into your usual meditation procedure, benefiting from your present calm and clarity.

Hypnotherapy can help support the treatment of eating disorders.

Hypnotherapy can work as an effective way to support the treatment of eating disorders because it helps people feel better about who they are, helping them stop using food as way to cope with emotional problems, as they start to treat their body in better ways.

The results of hypnotherapy depend on the person’s emotional state, ability to be hypnotized, personality, and willingness to overcome the eating disorder. Many personal, family, and emotional factors affect the potential hypnotherapy has as a successful treatment for eating disorders. Ultimately, establishing a healthy relationship with food is the goal.

Hypnosis is not meant as a substitute for standard medical, psychological or psychiatric treatment and consulting hypnotists are required to advise you to seek your doctor's approval for any medically or psychologically diagnosed conditions or disorders. Hypnosis techniques are a complementary alternative for self-healing, self-help, and behavior modification.

direct and indirect suggestions

Direct suggestions are supposed to appeal directly to the conscious mind. The direct approach lets the client feel directly and consciously involved in the process.

The direct approach can help the client understand what's happening so in future they can help themselves. The difference seems to be between solving a problem and learning how to solve problems.

With the direct approach, the client shares with the hypnotherapist the responsibility for any results. The direct approach gives the the receiver of the communication a greater degree of control over the outcome.

Indirect suggestion has the power to appeal to the unconscious mind. It leads to greater use of the unconscious mind's experiences and learning in one's own behalf; it largely avoids the issue of resistance, defensiveness, and intellectualizing.

The client can participate more creatively and actively in the process. It allows for the client to project meaning into the communication and allows him to find his own way to apply it. Allowing us to use the complex and extraordinary powers and richness of the unconscious mind.

The unconscious contains the key to your world view and self-image. It has greater power to facilitate change or the direction of the outcome you want. The direct approach may increase the likelihood of arousing resistance, which by implication the indirect approach is less likely to do.

There is less opportunity for the hypnotherapist to impose personal values and beliefs, demonstrating greater respect for the individual's integrity.

Clients are allowed to give their own unique interpretation to the suggestions that are given during a session, more easily bypassing any resistance. Creating more and more flexibility for the client, so symptoms may be viewed as a metaphor for the person's experience.

With indirect communication greater responsibility rests with the hypnotherapist to obtain successful outcomes.

A good hypnotherapist will always be aware when they are engaging in direct or indirect communication. They will be flexible, varying their style as they adapt to the needs of the client and won't be direct or indirect all the time. If a client is going to follow the hypnotherapist's suggestions, then the indirect mode is unnecessary. The more a client is unwilling to listen, the greater the need for indirect suggestion.

From Advances in Consciousness.

Don't worry if you don’t feel hypnotized.

Don't worry if you don’t feel hypnotized. Remember that hypnosis is a natural state of being. It doesn’t necessarily feel any different than other relaxed states you have experienced. If you want to bring about change, then keep practicing and the benefits of hypnosis will come.

What we say to ourselves determines when we succeed and when we fail, because it also determines how we think, what we feel, and what we picture in our mind. Those pictures affect our behavior and can either lead us to what we want, or what we don’t want.

In hypnosis we use positive language to the same effect. It’s like we are programming our mind and behavior with our thoughts. I’d much rather program myself to be successful, so I think of what I want to achieve. And I really feel what it will feel like when I acheive the results I want.

It’s important to remember that we do have a choice. We have a choice about what happens in our life. We have a choice about the words we use inside and outside as well. We can choose how we want to feel. We have a choice to be positive.

Changes begin to take place in our life.

Emotions, health and stress.

Don’t ever feel guilty about scheduling time in for relaxation — it’s fundamental to balance, whether that’s in your stress hormones or your life as a whole!

Taking steps today to reduce stress in your life has implications even greater than finding happiness and peace — it means you are preventing disease and preserving your health and longevity.

With the incidence of stress-related illness and lost years of lives increasing every decade, we absolutely have to take stress seriously. Stress may be a reality in our lives, but we don’t have to let it overpower us or prevent us from being our true selves.

Untying the knots at the root of chronic stress offers us long-lasting physical and psychological benefits.

In 1998, groundbreaking research known as the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study, verified that our childhood experiences remain inside the body and can affect our lifelong health.

The acronym NUTS stands for Novelty, Unpredictability, Threat to the ego, and Sense of loss of control.

Each of these situations lead to physical stress in the body, and the more of them you encounter, the more hyperactivated your body’s stress response becomes. But you can learn (or be taught) to recognize when you’re responding to one or any combination of these “ingredients,” redirect yourself, and stop yourself from “going NUTS.” This acronym works for both short-term stress and long-term stress, real threats or perceived ones.

This info is from the Women to Women webite article,
Stress and your health — it’s not just about being happier.

Past-Life Decision Therapy by Susan Barber

This is excerpted from:
Past-Life Decision Therapy by Susan Barber

"Have we lived before?

When people in hypnosis seem to remember past lives, are they deluding themselves?

And here's another question nobody is asking:
Does it really matter?

Here are some stories to help understand how reincarnational memory can help us in this life — whether it's real or not! ...

Reincarnational Memory: Is It ''Real''?

... people who come to a hypnotherapist for past-life regression do not necessarily believe in reincarnation.

If you are on the borderline with this concept, or if you have friends who perhaps scoff at your interest in past lives, there is another way of looking at the subject that makes perfect sense, even to the most devout believer in a mechanical universe.

As a hypnotist for nearly 30 years, and a member of many professional organizations during this time, I have never personally run across or even heard of a client — mine or anyone else's — who could not come up with an appropriate ''costume drama'' when asked to go to the past-life source of some current situation.

The dramas that arise ... are totally, awesomely, amazingly apt. They are like icons on our desktop that, when clicked, burst into a full audio-video presentation of a huge and complex program.And when people access these programs and ''debug'' what went wrong — change the coding, in other words — they invariably experience almost miraculous transformations in their lives.

What If I'm Just Imagining This?

This question comes up for many people in doing past-life regressions:
Is this real?
Did I really live ''before''?
Did this experience I just had in hypnosis really happen?

My answer is always the same:
Who cares?
What if it's not real (whatever ''real'' means)?

What if, purposely or not, everybody simply makes up these incredibly detailed past-life stories, these thrilling costume dramas.

What matters is that these stories always explain, with absolute perfection, the psychological underpinnings of current emotional problems and life patterns — and enable us to release them.

Consider this:
How do we know that our past memories of this life are real?
What if something totally awful happened to us when we were four years old, and all the people involved in it are dead except ourselves. Did it ''really'' happen? We can't prove that it did. Perhaps we just imagined it.

And consider this: What is ''imagination,'' anyway? It's a word we use a lot, but what does it really mean? No one has ever answered this question to anyone else's satisfaction.

I think it's enough to know that everybody has these costume dramas in their heads, and that by examining and changing the programming contained within them, we can ''debug'' what's not working in our lives. That much is most definitely ''real.''[1]

In a computer program, when the coding arrives at a ''choice point'' in processing, various criteria are used to make a ''decision'' as to which subroutine the program will now use to continue processing.

The two stories that follow illustrate how decisions in past-life circumstances have created choice points in present programming — and how we can change them. They illustrate that reincarnation is a living, working idea, not just a theory that makes no difference in our lives.

Reprogramming Past-Life Decisions: Two Cases

Case No. 1: The Man Who Hated Women

When I was studying hypnotherapy in school, our teacher, John Kappas, did not believe that past-life regression had any therapeutic value. It was something we did for fun, because it was fascinating. But we were not to take it seriously.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kappas was working with a client who had come into therapy in order to release an illogical hatred of women. Weeks and weeks of positive post-hypnotic suggestions were having no effect. The man still felt an unreasoned hatred for women. Then Dr. Kappas began regressing him, first year by year, then month by month, trying to find some trauma, some incident that could explain the man's attitude. Nothing.

Not knowing what else to do, Dr. Kappas began regressing his client ''beyond birth.'' They went back one life at a time. And in each one, the man hated women! Finally, Dr. Kappas simply told the man, ''Go to a period of time immediately preceeding the beginning of your hatred of women.'' And without further ado, the man went directly to a lifetime as a slave during the Roman Empire. ... So this slave gave himself a ''survival suggestion''[2] to fill himself with overwhelming antipathy toward all women. And because it was related to his own survival, and accompanied by such strong emotions, this suggestion had followed him through all his lifetimes ever since.

Dr. Kappas then asked the man, in hypnosis,
''Do you still need this suggestion?'' No.
''Would you like to have a new suggestion now?'' Yes.

So together they searched for a new way of looking at love and hatred and men and women, a way of looking that the man in his current lifetime could accept, opening him up to harmony, love, and compassion for the opposite sex.

When they were both satisfied, Dr. Kappas gave the suggestion that from now on this new way of looking would replace the man's previous decision to hate women.

Further, Dr. Kappas suggested to him in hypnosis that all memory of that past life and its horrors would disappear. Nothing that happened in that lifetime would ever affect this man again, he suggested, except for whatever positive learnings had been gained.

And that was that. After going through the hypnotic ''awakening'' ritual, the man had no memory of the session. And he no longer had negative feelings toward women.
(His wife was ecstatic.)

Case No. 2: The Witch Who Wasn't
My own introduction to reincarnational therapy began early one Monday morning in 1978, when my student Claudia (not her real name) made an emergency appointment to visit my office. ...

... we used hypnosis, and I asked Claudia to ''Go to the point immediately preceeding this feeling of being closed in and not belonging here.'' I was expecting to find a childhood trauma. I'd never before done reincarnational regression in a therapeutic setting, and hadn't intended to do so this time.

But Claudia went straight to a scenario in Salem during the time of the witchcraft trials. ...
Unmaking that decision was pretty easy, and having done so, Claudia's fear and dissociation came to an immediate end. ... The most remarkable thing about this story is that, after the past-life decision was rescinded and Claudia stopped dissociating, she never had another episode.

How Decisions Create Problems

In order to live in the spirit of Oneness, we need to rise above polarity, ''me versus thee,'' ''us versus them,'' ''man versus the elements.'' But in order to have a world, polarity is required!

Polarity is simply a limitation that is applied, at first by choice, to that which is in its essential nature limitless. So how, then, can we resolve this seeming paradox.We do this by being ''in'' but not ''of'' the polarized situation. And we actually do this every day, in some way or another.

For example, when reading a book, we can immerse ourselves in the characters and feel what they feel, live what they live, experience the beauty or terror or whatever the characters are going through. But we can also set the book down and go on with our lives. We can get ''into'' the book without being ''of'' it. We can thoroughly enjoy Wuthering Heights without seeing Heathcliff in every man we meet.

Another instance in which we experience harmless polarity in daily life is in the games we play. A golf course, for example, without the ''rules of golf,'' is just acres and acres of beautiful real estate. There is no universal rule that we must bring our golf clubs along when all we want to do is walk the course's verdant hills and fairways. But when we want the rules to be there, we can accept them. So in one reality — one set of polarities — we can pick up that little white ball and drop it into the hole if that's where we want it to be. And in another reality — totally by choice — we have to hit it with a golf club. If we touch it, we will be accused of cheating and no one will play with us.

In both cases — the book and the game — there are two realities side by side. The limitations, or polarities, of one do not necessarily apply to the other. And we can be ''in but not of'' either one of them, if we see that this choice exists.Sometimes actors get caught up in their roles. They accept the polarities defined by the drama, and no longer relate to the wider context of their own lives. But no matter how caught up an actor may be in playing Hamlet, if the theater starts to burn down in the middle of a performance he has no trouble stepping ''out of character.''

Yet here in physical reality, most of us have forgotten the larger context. We are so caught up in our roles that we step out of them only by dying. If the theater starts burning, we burn right along with it, playing Hamlet to the bitter end.

And every decision that we make from this vantage point becomes a new rule in the game of our life, creating unnecessary and usually inappropriate limitations. For example, going back to the golf analogy: Many golfers play golf as though sand traps exert a magnetic attraction over golfballs. Somewhere along the way, when they didn't know how to hit the ball very well yet, they ''decided'' that when there's a sandtrap, their ball will usually go into it. And so it usually does! (Arnold Palmer apparently never made that decision.)

So decisions become rules, they become how reality operates. And when survival is in question, and there is strong negative emotion present, these rules create a new reality. They operate as ''the nature of things.'' To change the reality, we must change the ''decision.''

Falling Out of Love
From my experience, strong, self-destructive attraction to a romantic relationship is the most difficult feeling to overcome. We try to extricate ourselves from these negative situations, but when we try to put new behavior into effect, even if we succeed, it is with gritted teeth and inward grieving. And inevitably, this behavior modification fails us, as we find ourselves in yet another, probably more destructive, relationship of the same kind. Or else, in no relationship at all. Because we still have not dealt with the lessons of the first one.

Trying to change behavior without changing the ''decision'' that motivates that behavior simply doesn't work.

David (not his real name) came to me seeking help with a relationship that was destroying not only his personal life but his business. ... Now, he quite reasonably thought that he was going crazy.I recognized the symptoms of a past-life decision and decided to ''go for the cause'' right away.

But since this was going to involve doing reincarnational regression, I first had David do some practice runs with remembering past lives. He came up with various images, but no cohesive ''drama'' emerged. I told him that was fine, we were just practicing, and that between appointments his mind would prepare him for the next step and it would be easy.

David didn't believe in reincarnation, so I also told him what I have said earlier in this article: ''It doesn't matter. Belief is not required.''

In the next session, David gradually began to see himself as a rich man named Petrus who lived on a huge estate on the seacoast of France during the early Middle Ages. .... In this lifetime, David had the strength to accept this woman who was wrecking his business and his life. Subconsciously, he was still seeing DJ as Serafina, a wronged woman, totally dependent upon him, a woman who deserved his love and protection. ''If I could, I would take care of her.'' Well, now he could. And he did.

In hypnosis, David allowed that his decision to take care of Serafina ''if I could'' had nothing to do with DJ and his current situation. He felt that he was free to act in a way that would support his other employees and his own life. ... David chose that now. Afterward, he calmly, kindly, but firmly gave DJ two weeks' notice, helped her find a place of her own, and went on with his life.

He loved, but he was no longer ''in love.'' He was free.

It's Not About Emotional Release

People often feel that past-life memory is all about ''accessing'' the traumatic feelings that underlie some current behavior pattern. They think they have to find the trauma and ''go through it'' in order to get results.

I and many of my colleagues have hundreds of case histories to prove that this just isn't true.

In fact, it doesn't work. If going through something once is traumatic, going through it twice or ten times simply locks us even further into the drama.

Emotional release work is therapeutic whenever we have been forced to repress emotion for some reason (e.g. an adult who was told as a child, ''If you don't stop crying, you little brat, I'm going to make you wish you were never born''). If such a repressed person can be coaxed into raging, crying, and screaming in front of a group of people who encourage this release, that person then finds out that the world does not end because we express how we feel. This is healing. It enables people to become free to allow their own emotions.

But emotional release only works at first. After one or two releases, the group are now training each other to bring up negative feelings and act them out. People who keep on doing emotional release work are actually being rewarded for feeling bad and for expressing it. They now have a new program: Don't get ulcers, give them! Perhaps that's an improvement, but only a slight one, ...

It's not really about all the emotionalism, all the drama, all the big and impressive stories we uncover as we ''go for cause.''

It's about the decisions we made at that time, decisions which became cemented in place by pain and fear, decisions which we need to ''unmake'' in order to move into the Light and move on.

The only ''decision'' I have ever found that really works in the long, long haul is: ''I am a Conscious Co-Creator with God.''And we don't need pain and fear to remake our decisions. All we need are a loving space, an understanding heart, and a willingness to change.

Then Why Remember Past Lives?

Rather than providing emotional release, these ''reincarnational dramas'' enable us to see our issues in full relief.

They help us understand why we are feeling what we are feeling.

They show us, in exaggerated form, the patterns we are replaying over and over like a song.

But when we access a past-life scenario, it's a no-brainer for us to realize that we are no longer that person — to realize that the dire consequences our subconscious mind is trying to warn us about are not actually part of the here and now.

I particularly remember one lady of medium height who weighed over 220 pounds. When we regressed her, she went to an experience of drowning in a past life. She had been a very skinny five-year-old who could not swim, she remembered, but had nevertheless gone out in a rowboat without adult supervision. The boat tipped over, and you know the rest.

How could drowning relate to a weight problem? Well, as the little boy was sinking for the last time, he remembered that his grandmother had always told him, ''Eat, eat, that's why you can't swim, you need some fat on your bones so you can float.''

This story points up an interesting aspect of the kinds of self-serving decisions we make, in past lives and in this one. We make many of our ''decisions'' in an attempt to exonerate ourselves for what is happening, rather than taking responsibility.

A sensible ''decision'' in this little boy's circumstance would have been something like: ''If I had it to do over again, I would not go out in a boat alone unless I knew how to swim.'' Instead, my client's past-life child decided, ''If I had it to do over again, I would eat, eat, like my grandmother always told me, so I'd have some fat on my bones and I could float.''

He/she now ''had it to do over again,'' and boy, could she float!

Can I Do This At Home?

Some of the people, some of the time, can access past decisions and remake them in the light of present knowledge and understanding. But even those few people who may have a few successes are probably going to fail when it comes to their larger issues.

There are two reasons for this.The first reason that ''decision therapy'' is tough to do alone is that we need to get deeply into right-hemisphere functioning. And when we do that, most of us just drift into sleep or associative thinking. With no guide there to keep us on track, our minds tend to wander away.

A good therapist is like someone who is driving the car for us and knows the way. As passengers, we are free to focus on the scenery.The second reason for obtaining help is that our biggest decisions are what we are looking with. That makes it literally impossible to look at them. A good therapist can see the assumptions that we have hidden from ourselves, and bring them into the Light.

But whether we have a therapist or are attempting to remake past-life decisions on our own, none of it works if we get all caught up in the dramas. ''I am like this because I was buried alive in Ancient Egypt'' is probably more interesting than, ''I am like this because I didn't have a normal home.''

But we all have to experience everything in this reality. And normalcy in the home is no guarantee of a ''normal'' life. Whether we blame other people, the government, past lives, or Karma itself, we are not taking responsibility.

We begin the process of creating our own reality when we realize: ''It's not what happened to me that matters. It's what I thought it meant.'' By changing the meaning, we can change our lives.

Footnotes:
We can ignore the folks who claim that past lives can't be valid because everybody remembers being Jesus Christ or Napoleon. That's just not true. People almost never remember being anyone we've ever heard of. Paranoid schizophrenics often think that they are famous and powerful historical characters, but reincarnational memory usually involves lifetimes as slaves and peasants and householders and soldiers — just folks, living in another time and faced with the same poverty and cruelty and repression and rejection that has characterized life on Earth since the beginning of recorded history.

I use the word ''suggestion'' here instead of ''decision,'' because that was how Dr. Kappas looked at these things. I later became deeply influenced by the work of Thomas Szasz, M.D., and his book The Myth of Mental Illness (Rev. ed. September 1984, HarperCollins, paper; ISBN: 0060911514). Szasz found in his research that all psychotic behavior was preceded by a moment of decision. However brief and subconscious, the decision was there. But truly, a life-changing decision is very much like a hypnotic suggestion — except that many types of hypnotic suggestion will eventually wear off. The types that reflect decisions never wear off. We have to consciously ''unmake'' them."

This is excerpted from:
Past-Life Decision Therapy by Susan Barber

The Magic of Suggestibility

This is excerpted from an article by Susan Barber, CHT:

"In all scientific laboratory tests done during the past 30 years, the conclusion has been that it is suggestibility, not trance, that creates the ''hypnotic'' effect. And suggestibility has to do with how the inner mind responds to words.

... we have such amazing powers, that we simply cannot believe we can do the things we can do. We need to think that some outside power is doing it. But there's no outside power. It's just ourselves, using our minds in a more powerful way than we have known before.

How to Make Suggestibility Work for You

By languaging something, and accepting what we have said or heard, we create that thing in physical reality. Words plus acceptance make it real. This, not trance, is the basis of the hypnotic effect. And the key word here is ''acceptance.''

Through an understanding of how your own, individual mind accepts and responds to words, you can customize healing processes to get the best results ... by understanding the suggestibility of the individual who sits before us, hypnotherapists use them in a different way than other therapists. We change the processes in subtle ways to suit our clients and ourselves...

Understanding Differential Suggestibility

The effectiveness of any suggestion is wholly personal. Some suggestion formats work very well with some people and not at all with others. Intuitively, we are already aware of this.

For example, if you say to some people, ''Close the door,'' they will just get up and close it and think nothing about it. They may not even remember doing it.

Say that to a person who rejects literal suggestions, however, and she will very likely ask you ''Why?'', tell you to do it yourself, or pretend not to hear you.

If, however, you say something like, ''Boy, there's a real draft coming in that door,'' she is the one who will most likely get up and close the door, while the first, literal person agrees with you and does nothing!

We have all had these kinds of experiences with people.

This difference in how we need to communicate with and respond to each other translates directly to the field of energetic healing. Whatever kinds of processes we use, it is often what we say to our clients that affects them, and not what we do.

People who reject literal suggestions will reject many self-help processes. People who cannot visualize will reject many more. So in order to make sure a process will work for ourselves or our clients, we need to change the ''patter'' until it fits the unique mind that is listening. We especially need to remove any suggestions that this individual mind cannot accept, because the mind tends to throw out the baby along with the bath -- in rejecting one suggestion, it will reject the whole process.

Example: What if you cannot visualize, and a process tells you to, ''See yourself walking through a beautiful forest''? Right away, your mind throws up a block, because you can't do this. Everything that comes after this command to ''see'' something is rejected.

What About Group Processes?

The average therapist speaks to people using his own ''reference system'' -- that is, he puts out what he, himself, understands.

So a visual therapist may say, ''See yourself walking through a beautiful forest and picture the tall trees with sunlight filtering through. Notice a stream bubbling over rocks.''

And a kinesthetic speaker might say, ''Imagine that you are walking through a forest. Feel the leaves crunching under your feet. Feel the warmth of filtered sunlight. Hear the babbling sounds of a nearby stream.''

In both cases, the idea is to locate ourselves in a forest of the mind. We can tell whether we are more visual or more kinesthetic by whether the first or the second set of words works best in making the forest ''real.''

But as group speakers, how can we tailor our delivery to meet all of these criteria at once? By being aware of the audience, and finding a way of languaging our process so that it reaches each one of them.

What works best is to say, for example, ''See or feel or imagine yourself walking through a forest. There's a stream off to your left. Picture it, or become aware of the sound as it bubbles over the rocks.'' If we always give listeners the option to ''visualize, feel, or imagine,'' then they will automatically select the mode that works.

If you are in this audience, or working with a therapist, and you are being told to visualize something you can't see, or feel something you can't feel, simply ignore the ''reference system'' and do what you do best.

If the speaker says, ''Okay, now, see a rose right in front of you,'' and you don't visualize, you can just say to yourself, ''What would it be like if there were a rose right in front of me?'' And you'll feel it. You'll remember how roses smell. And you'll be able to answer questions about the rose, even though you can't ''see'' it. You'll know what color it is, for example. And doing this, you'll be cooperating with your therapist to achieve optimum results.

Another variable that group processes must take into account in order to be effective is whether audience members respond best to literal or indirect suggestions. If we are working one-on-one we can figure this out for ourselves or our client. In a group, this can be tricky, but there's an equally tricky solution: Give all of your literal suggestions before you do the process, and don't give any literal suggestions during it.

So, for example, before the eyes-closed portion, you might say,
''This detraumatizing process will totally change your life. After doing this process, you will no longer be afraid of whatever the item is that you've chosen to focus on. The fear will be gone forever. And it doesn't matter how well you do the process. You won't be able to stop it from working. Even if you try not to have it work, it will still work.''

People with indirect suggestibility will not know how to reject these suggestions because they don't know that you are giving them suggestions. They function on inferences, and so they will ''infer'' that the process does not start until they close their eyes. As long as you don't say anything literal after that point, they will be empowered to achieve the desired results.

The Importance of Studying Hypnotic Techniques

In actuality, the only difference between a hypnotherapist and any other healing professional is that the hypnotherapist knows, beyond any doubt, that every word counts.

As individuals, we can start to become aware of how we learn, and adapt all self-help processes to suit our own unique suggestibility.

As healers, from the time we speak to clients on the phone until they walk out the door, we can be aware that we are putting out subtle energy in our words. Whether that energy helps our client or not depends, not only upon our healing abilities, but perhaps even more upon the skill with which we talk to them.

In a sense, we and our clients are already ''in hypnosis.'' We have made decisions about the nature of reality. Decisions about what we can and cannot do.... Decisions about what to expect from loved ones and society in general. And these decisions have become our ''hypnotic'' reality.

But these decisions exist in words, and are powered by the emotions that were present when we made them. By accessing these emotions and changing the words, we can change our entire experience of life.

By understanding suggestibility, we can help ourselves to awaken into the light of our own powerful consciousness, make better choices and decisions, and release the creative abilities..."