Pueblo Colorado Sign

Traveling Hypnosis Road Show

and

OPEN-ENDED SUGGESTIONS

Every year for the past several years I have enjoyed the privilege of working for John Morgan Seminars. Right now, from early January until sometime around early spring, I’m on the road presenting Hypnosis seminars for Smoking Cessation and Weight Loss. As I mentioned in a post from September 2008, these seminars are a very effective means for people to accomplish their goals in these two areas. This even when participants face the challenge of the seminars being presented to groups that average about 50 people at a time. Last week in Colorado Springs we had 110 or so in the Smoking class. This is not exactly an ideal scenario for an Neo-Ericksonian approach that emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual.

How can it work then?

Soon to be ex-smokers in Wheeling West Virginia

I think one of the way it works is through the use of open-ended suggestions. Open-ended Suggestions are ones that are so general purpose that they’d apply to virtually any one. Statements like Coue’s famous “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better…” could be true for anybody.

You’ll hear Milton Erickson use a lot of open ended suggestions in the second half of his video-taped session with Monde and Nick. In the second half of the video Erickson’s primary patient is Nick, about whom Erickson has very little information. Since Milton doesn’t know Nick or his presenting problem he can be nothing but open ended with Nick.

As an example, Erickson says to Nick,

It’s always a pleasure to do good work

and to do good work with good material

It’s a pleasure

Pikes Peak from Colorado Springs

Another example of open ended suggestions are used in what is referred to as “cold readings.” You’ll see this in psychic readings where the “psychic” simply makes statements that could be true for anyone.

I remember reading about an experiment done by the amazing Randi where he took a room full of college students and told them he was going to do a computerized astrological reading for all of them. He gathered all their birth times and locations and loaded it into a computer. Soon the computer spit out individualized horoscopes for each student.

They were amazed at how accurate these readings were. They felt the readings uncannily fit them to a “T”. They became convinced that there must really be something to that astrology thing after all. They felt that way, at least, until they exchanged papers and discovered that ALL of the horoscopes were exactly the same! The descriptions were universal enough to fit anyone. Statements like, “you have wide ranging interests and your true potential is not being fully realized.”

So, in these seminars, when I say to people that they have many patterns that are subconscious and now they can begin to outgrow the old way and grow into a new way, it really is true for everyone in the room.

Neo-Ericksonian Approaches

Comparisons

I am blessed with having stellar dentist who took time from his vacation to see me last week. Seems I had a bit of a dental emergency and needed a root canal. Fortunately, I was on a staycation and could easily travel to see him. He fixed me right up, gave me a script for penicillin and made an appointment for a few weeks from now.

And - as great as that is - did I mention I had a root canal?

Them mothers hurt.

So as I was driving back from New Jersey I reflected on how amazingly fortunate I was. As little as a hundred years ago dentistry was pretty barbaric. Throughout the 19th century, there was no separate field as dentistry and tooth extractions were done by barbers! I’ve been barbers who hurt me when they cut my hair! But seriously. people DIED from complications of dental problems such as mine. They’d get an infection in a tooth - pull it out to try and save the patient, but without things like penicillin, people would frequently die from these infections. Heck, Bayer only invented aspirin in 1899. I had been given four ibuprofin.

So I started to feel pretty good driving along the Garden State Parkway. I mean I was in pain but the ibuprofin was starting to kick in, I was ALIVE, I had a prescription and a positive prognosis.

I was reminded of a simularity between Milton Erickson, MD, the great Hypnotherapist you may have heard of, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Monk, teacher, author of Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.

In both these great teacher’s teaching, the both make use of the common experience of a tooth ache. Milton was once doing a session with a client and asked her, “Do you have a toothache?” She said no. He said, “Isn’t that nice?”

Thich Nhat Hanh has pointed out that when we have a toothache, we focus a great deal of our energy upon it and wish it would go away. When it finally does we can be very happy.

What if could feel that way all the time?

A friend of mine, for a few days once, thought she had breast cancer. She was certain of it. Then was told that she did not - that she was clean. Don’t ya know the rest of her day went pretty well? Nothing else matters after that. Life is good.

I had a client just recently with whom I used similar a sort of comparison. She was feeling limited in her choices, so I said I knew how she felt. I told her that I’d worked for a few years in the Department of Complementary Medicine at New York’s Columbia/Presbyterian Medical Center and would make my rounds of the 6th floor transplant wing, where the guys were all waiting to get a new heart. They couldn’t leave that wing because of the extreme fragility of their condition. I described how on certain holidays, like New Year’s eve, hopes ran high cause hearts often became available on those days.

I didn’t, of course, leave the discussion there, but by the time we both left the office that day, we were both really grateful to be able to walk under our own power and happy to enjoy the life we’d been given.

Reality - what a concept.

A long time ago a friend said “reality is just a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs.” But I think it is more than that.

The nature of reality is a fascinating topic that has long captivated the human imagination and could easily take many more pages of writing than anyone would want to read. After all, the question of what is real vs. what is imagined seems simple at first.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Or “Seeing is believing,” are two commonly used phrases that express this.

This is until you begin to recognize just how complex something as seemingly simple as vision really is.

We assume that when we open our eyes in the morning, the world is all out there in front of us and seeing is effortless and instantaneous. In fact, when you look at an object, you get a distorted, upside down image in your retina that excites the photoreceptors which sends the messages through the optic nerve to the brain where they are analyzed in THIRTY different visual areas in the back of your brain. And then finally, after analyzing all the individual features, you identify what you’re looking at. You piece it together and identify it in a place in your brain called the fusiform gyrus. That’s when your conscious mind pops in and says, “I know that face.”

More over, there are BILLIONS of bytes of sensory input happening at any given moment and the reason we aren’t just totally overloaded by it all is that our other-than-conscious mind distorts, deletes and generalizes all that information and we, consciously, focus on just a small sliver of all that. It’s a byte-sized bit we can handle.

And what we distort, delete, and generalize is based on our pre-conceived beliefs about what’s important to pay attention to.

So many times, our, “Seeing is Believing” idea is really, “I’ll see what I want to see and believe what I already pretty much do believe already.”

I actually think it’s kind of funny to think that we create our own reality.

Because, on one hand, we do… in the way I’ve described above… our perceived reality is based on our internal map of the world we’ve created in our minds.

But, on the other hand, there is also objective reality. As an example, tonight, before you go to bed, rearrange your furniture. Then in the middle of the night, when you get up to get a glass of water, your shins will remind you that the map in your mind did not put the coffee table back where it belongs. You do not create the objective reality; you do create your response to it and the map of how to interact within it.

This is where the Ericksonian concept of pacing and leading comes from. Erickson realized that this individual model of the world we live in is unique to each of us. There are many commonalities, of course, but the gestalt is unique to each individual. So he would attempt to enter into a person’s world (to pace their experience) and then gently lead them to an expanded way of looking at the world.

So while I think it is useful to visualize what you want and state it in the positive, don’t expect a genie to simply plop it in your lap. You might want to get out of bed and take some actions steps towards its creation.

At least, that’s the way I see it.

By the way, my friend and colleague Hali Chambers stimulated this discussion on a blog post she wrote last week. She’s added to the discussion on a more recent post. It’s excellent. Have a look. Here’s a link

I’ve lost count of how many marathons I’ve run. It’s under 18 and more than 12.
Along the way I’ve run thousands of miles in an effort to get in shape enough to run them well and ultimately qualify for Boston. The thing is, I can’t really do that anymore. I mean, never say never, but it would appear my calf muscles have other ideas. Every time I get competitive and try to race or do too much, they cramp or tear or do something dreadfully painful.

So, what to do?

I am endeavoring to embrace my limitations… to thoroughly enjoy what I CAN do.

The other day I was out running ( I still call it running although I believe many people can walk at a faster clip) along this beautiful rail trail in upstate New York. And with every step I took I attempted to just be in the moment and savor the full sensory experience along the way. It was like what Stephen Wolinsky calls a “no-trance trance.” In other words, not trancing out by age regression or imagining the future, but being simply in the here and now - which is for most people an altered state.

Hence a “no-trance trance.”

It’s a lovely practice… listening to the breathing, feeling the feet on the changing surface of the trail, appreciating all the different colors of the leaves and the dirt and the stones, smelling the variety of fragrances as I pass streams and farm land and cut grass.

Dave Dobson used to call himself a “De-Hypnotist.” He said that people were in trance most of the time and it was his job to wake them up. Not to “hypnotize” them but to pop them out of their old, habitual trances and get them to adopt new, more productive trances.

I think Steve Wolinsky would agree. In his book, “Trances People Live,” he draws a parallel between what meditators call Samadhi and Erickson called a “Therapeutic Trance.” Saying they were in fact the same state - what Wolinsky termed the “No-Trance trance.”

Maybe this is what my calf muscles have been trying to get me to do.

Sly devils.

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