Several people have requested to know about hypnosis. Make yourselves comfortable, take a few deep breaths and read on… Richard Bandler, one of the creators of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) wrote, “Remember the last time you drove your car on a long trip? As you sit there, reading about this, you are beginning to review that experience. At some point, you entered a highway. Perhaps it was during the day…or at night. Maybe it was daytime, approaching night. Soon, you began to notice the lines in the road passing by one after the next… after the next. The vibration in the steering wheel…the sound of the engine purring; and the wind whistling by your side-view mirror. The repetition of moving road objects…the din of experience…your breathing may have slowed…your heart rate…and your body temperature changed…just as soon as…you were aware of becoming very relaxed. And you told yourself, you need to stay awake…and this was important… but you felt very tired…and you could have checked the time…once…and then resumed driving…and looked at the time again…believing an hour had passed… and instead, discovered that only minutes had gone by. And you became curious…because other times, you would appear to daydream… for only a second and yet thirty minutes had gone by. You may have asked yourself… how you arrived at your destination… since your thoughts were elsewhere…but you did…and knowing that made you feel suddenly alert and insightful…realizing that something in your unconscious…that is both a part, and apart of you…allowed you to drive the car…while it communicated with you…about certain experiences…a resource from which you could learn. So when you arrived and stopped…refreshed, and very comfortable…you were aware of new understandings…and more energy than you thought possible…all things considered…”

Ask the average person what he knows or thinks about “hypnosis”, and he may tell you its something that talk-show magicians use to turn people into chickens; or he might tell you that it is some mysterious “snake-oil” cure for everything from allergies to skin rashes. Still others believe that it is dangerous and should be left alone. Interestingly, the professionals who have studied and used hypnosis also have widely divergent opinions and understandings about its uses. While it has been used for centuries for different purposes, there is considerable controversy about what this phenomenon consists of and how it works, though there is little disagreement that it does work to alleviate many problems. Emerging from the various definitions, procedures and explanations, is a model of hypnosis that I believe to be most useful; one which is applicable in the various contexts of your daily lives: All communication is, in a sense, hypnosis. We are constantly bombarded by enormous amounts of information. The way in which our senses– primarily vision, sound and feeling–organize themselves to experience this information can be called a “state of consciousness.” However, the quantity of information greatly exceeds our ability to register it consciously as part of our ongoing experience.
For example, as you are reading this, you are likely unaware of the feeling of the toes on your left foot, against your shoes…until now! So we develop internal “programs” that help us cope effectively with this abundance of input, by storing it unconsciously. These programs are first experienced in a state of consciousness and then go “inside” and operate out of our awareness, while we attend to other information consciously. To illustrate, before learning to read, you first needed to learn to recognize letters– an “n” has one hump, an “m” has two. Lower-level patterns such as this became unconscious, allowing your conscious awareness to be occupied with more complex patterns such as word recognition, and so forth.
Most human behavior operates in this fashion. Imagine what your life would be like if it were necessary to retain all your experiences in consciousness–tracking letters, turning a doorknob, tying your shoes, rates of breathing–the list would be endless! “Hypnosis”, in this model, refers to your ongoing experiences in their many different states of consciousness. In other words, it is something you do all the time, without fully realizing it; as opposed to the more popular understanding of hypnosis being something you sit down and do to solve problems, for discrete periods, and then get up and do something else. “Yes, but does this mean I am always hypnotized? And what about when and how hypnosis is used by professionals?” Be sure to rejoin this state of consciousness, next time. Meanwhile, I would like to offer a suggestion (and since our topic is, “hypnosis”, this can only be…a “suggestion”) that some time this week, you consider something in which you become deeply engrossed with a limited focus of attention (i.e., reading, exercising, driving, intimacy, etc.), and think of it in terms of its sensory components (visions, sounds, feelings, scents); and be aware of what happens…