You know, one of those thoughts that goes round and round in your head. The more you try not to think about it, the bigger it gets. Maybe you find yourself replaying a conversation that you felt went badly with someone, over and over again, or rehearsing a conversation that you want to have.

Sometimes the thought forms a kind of monologue. Some schools of psychotherapy might call it an internal script and suggest that it can be helpful to recognise whether the script reminds us of someone we know – a parent, perhaps, or an ex-partner. We can easily internalise the words or ideas of people around us when we hear them say something often enough. It’s a kind of learned script, a sort of habit. It can begin to shape the way that we represent the world outside us – events, experiences, arguments, conversations – to ourselves inside our own minds.

It can be very revealing to slow down and begin to notice consciously the conversations or ‘voices’ or internal thoughts that are going on daily inside our minds. It can also be helpful to begin to ask ourselves whether those voices or thoughts have a certain kind of tone or remind us of someone we know. But then what?

What do we do next?

Sometimes it might be tempting to think that we need to get rid of those unhelpful scripts/voices/thoughts. But is that really possible?

In my own experience, both of working on my own internal critical scripts and of working with clients, it perhaps isn’t helpful to think of never having one of those unhelpful thoughts ever again. In fact, the desire to rid ourselves of such thoughts might throw us back into feelings of guilt or shame about even having them in the first place.

What seems more important and helpful is how much importance we give to the thoughts. Saying to yourself ‘It’s just a thought’ might be more helpful than worrying about how to get rid of it.

Remembering and reminding ourselves that the thought has no power over us unless we choose to give it some kind of value seems to help the thought to dissolve.

In other words, our internal thoughts can be ‘hypnotic’ – but only if we allow them to be.

If you think about it, when you try really hard to get to sleep, you’ll probably find yorself achieving the opposite effect. When you try really hard to stop giggling in a lecture theatre or business meeting, you probably find it quite hard to stop.

Hypnotherapy  has a long tradition of talking about this relationship between the conscious will and the unconscious imagination. Emile Coue’s theory of auto-suggestion and Milton Erickson’s ‘indirect’ model each recognise that trying to do something usually brings your conscious will and your unconscous imagination into conflict. A kind of resistance is created to the outcome that you want to achieve.

One method to experiment with when you notice yourself having an unhelpful thought is to take a nice deep slow breath, letting your shoulders soften, your stomach gently expand, hold it for a moment and then breathe out, listening to your breath leaving your body. Thinking about something whilst cultivating a relaxed kind of focus seems to help the thought to become less important or troublesome.

As you continue to cultivate this relaxed focus, say to yourself, ‘It’s just a thought. It’s just a thought.’

It might even be helpful to make a kind of internal gesture in a way that feels helpful to you, such as brushing the thought gently away or watching it dissolve.

Hypnotherapeutic techniques such as creative visualisation, repeated regularly, can bring a calm, relaxed quality of acceptance and kindness to the experience of any previously troubling thoughts or scripts.

Over time,  you might also begin to notice that such thoughts happen more often when you’re feeling tired or in a certain context. In fact, your unhelpful thoughts or voices can even become friends to you, offering useful signals e.g. that you need to rest or that a certain person or situation is unhelpful to you.

We probably don’t need to get rid of our unhelpful thoughts but, by noticing them and accepting them for what they are – just thoughts – we can help ourselves to live more easily with them.

You might have seen the advert I’m thinking about. It starts with a rather beautiful cow, standing on an empty beach, and the voice over says ‘This is Molly. She’s always dreamed of being a horse.’

(Or the cow might be called Mary – I can’t remember.) The point is that this is such a hypnotic concept, isn’t it? A cow that has always dreamed of being a horse.

Just the idea of this cow having an inner world that might be rather like our human one, with dreams and longings and aspirations, is powerfully hypnotic. It gets our attention and we start translating that experience into our own wanting and yearning and longing and what that might mean for us.

And then Molly, or Mary, begins to canter along the beach, her hooves splashing through the shallow water, her body rippling, her udders swinging, whilst the soundtrack surges to something that stirs our own sense that, hey, perhaps we too could do anything we dream of… (And also, isn’t it a bit funny too? What do we ourselves  dream of that is a bit funny or even ridiculous?)

And all that is going on beautifully, we’re engaging with it all and then…

WHAM! The voice over starts talking about other stuff, starts spelling out to us what is going on and what might actually happen and telling us what to think. The camera cuts to a girl with beautiful red hair and a far-off expression who just happens to be poised perfectly on a rock eating a spoonful of yoghurt.

At this point, for me, the ad’s hypnotic effect just ebbs away. I’m being told what to think. It’s overdone. It’s ruined.

I sat in the cinema thinking, ‘Why didn’t you just leave us with this delightful Molly (or Mary) cantering on the beach? Why did you overcomplicate it?’

And the flow of my own thoughts began to move to how true this is of life in general, of what I do as a therapist, making use of hypnosis and hypnotic principles, to help people to experience changes in their own inner states and private worlds.

I know that if I try to do too much in a session, it won’t be as effective as if I keep things simple.

I meet people from time to time who seem very pleased and proud that they know sixteen different NLP techniques for a phobia ‘cure’ (and how I hate that word ‘cure,’ as if there is something ‘wrong’ with the person in the first place, which they have to be somehow ‘cured’ from rather than just some unhelpful habit or way of thinking they’ve got into that it might be helpful for them to unlearn).

Yes, we may know five techniques for helping people to see things from a different point of view but, probably, we only need one – and that is the one that is right for that particular client at that particular time.

You know, I think it is so easy to overlook sometimes that the most powerful and effective ways of working with our clients might often be the simplest.

For example, you could use an all-singing, all-dancing method with all kinds of complicated visualisations for helping someone to let go of their spider phobia but, first of all, why not just take them through a very simple desensitisation process and find out what happens?

And, even more hypnotically, why not allow them to really own that process as their process rather than showing-off your language patterns and your fifteen complicated techniques?

And I think that if we have a a cow-who-wants-to-be-a-horse for a client, we need to help them to check out whether wanting to be a horse is the most helpful wanting that they can be doing right now. And, if it isn’t, why not help them to find the experience that is most helpful for them, right here, in the here and now, and how they can begin to connect with that and allow it? In their way, a way that makes sense to them.

Then we need to get out of their way.

Oh, but eat lots of yoghurt too. It’s supposed to be good for you.

R D Laing

This, from one of the most influential psychotherapists of the 20th century, merits further reflection, I think.

When we slow down enough to notice, to become more consciously aware of, a feeling or a response and how we are doing that response, we can begin to let go of it or enhance it, do more or less of it, depending upon the effects that we now notice it has on our well-being.

So much of what I do as a hypnotherapist is about helping people to notice, right now, how they’re doing this thought, this feeling.

What is that film you’re running inside your mind, right now, and what effect is it having on the way you live your life?

Sometimes your body is desperately trying to tell you something. When you slow down enough to notice – not just with your head but with your body and your breathing – what is happening for you and how you’re doing that response, it is so much easier to begin to recognise what is helpful and what is unhelpful to you.

It can be interesting, surprising – and fun – to notice, with a kind curiosity towards yourself, what you’re doing in any one moment.

You may want to spend the next hour or so just experimenting with that and notice what you notice.

Together with my colleague, the incredibly talented hypnotherapist and trainer,  Adam Eason, I’ll be offering an intensive 18-day training throughout February and July 2011 in my beautiful home town of York.

Adam and I are both very excited about working together to offer people this unique opportunity to gain all the skills and knowledge necessary to become fully qualified and accredited Clinical Hypnotherapists. It is going to be fabulous to work together in this way, combining our approaches to equip people with the latest evidence-based skills and practices in this field that we are both so passionate about.

You’ll train with us in February, go away and deveop your skills with our guidance and then return in July for further in-depth training.

More details to be released over the next couple of weeks. Watch this space – or in the meantime drop me a line if you want to be the first to find out more.

As I blanched, chopped and stir-fried, I stuck my iPod in our speaker-gadget thingie (technical term) and whacked up the volume. It wasn’t long before I was dancing around the kitchen to tunes I hadn’t heard in a very long time: Morcheeba, Moloko, Goldfrapp and one of my all-time favourites, ‘Instant Pleasure,’ by Rufus Wainwright.

I had my music on the shuffle setting and tracks popped up that I hadn’t listened to in a couple of years. It was very interesting to me that, as each song came on, images from the past would pop into my mind.

Some of the songs were powerfully associated for me with the last long hot summer I spent living in London; others revivified for me the experience of driving around in Tom’s car through the Yorkshire countryside in the first months after we met.

It reminded me of just how powerful music is for me in inducing these trance phenomena. To be more specific about it, you might say that music has the ability to trigger a series of age regressions in which I revisit specific scenes and feel in my body some of what I felt back then combined, in a particularly potent way, with my emotions about remembering those scenes from my past.

Fragrances and scents do that for me too:  the smell of old books with a certain kind of paper can regress me right back to particular moments from my childhood; the smell of a cocoa butter body lotion I like to use still carries with it a memory of my first holiday in France. I am leaning out of the window of an old house on the coast, looking at the sun making long shadows between the olive trees, stretching my arms above my head.

Of course, I have cultivated that particular association, perhaps deepened it over the years, because I enjoy experiencing it so much. I can still connect with the sense of excitement, of my life opening for me, that I felt as a thirteen-year-old in France and I want to reconnect with that feeling, from time to time.

The iPod-induced trance phenomena I experienced last night was a powerful reminder of the ability of our minds to create these associations. Sometimes it is extremely pleasurable to revivify and reconstruct the happy, life-enhancing memories and experiences that nurture deep parts of our selves.

You know, I think that sometimes, as hypnotherapists, we can easily forget that spontaneous regression as a phenomenon doesn’t have to be difficult or unhelpful. We might spend a lot of time working with people who need help in stopping the unhelpful regression to and endless reconstruction of incidents and events in their past that are troubling them in some way.

And yet there are all kinds of powerful positive memories and associations that we can draw upon as resources to help us to strengthen aspects of our selves.

I don’t think that’s what Rufus Wainwright actually means when he sings about, (ahem!) ‘Instant Pleasure,’ but it works for me.

I feel I need to warn you. This myth is a Big Myth. In fact, this myth is so pervasive in the world of therapy, hypnotherapy and hypnosis that perhaps it should carry a health warning.

I mean that seriously.

The problem, as I have come to understand it, is that there are many therapists out there – working in many different disciplines – who will tell you that it is necessary to understand why you feel the way you do in order to feel better. Let’s call this myth the Big Myth of Why.

But first, let me ask you something. Are there things going on for you right now that you understand perfectly well – and perhaps you may even have had a couple of years of soul-searching and/or therapy to understand where those feelings come from and you have a very good intellectual understanding of these problems – and yet you still seem to be experiencing them, all the same?

I meet people every day who have an incredibly finely honed and articulate understanding of the history of their problems. They have spent years thinking about it and analysing it. They can understand why that something is happening and yet the why doesn’t necessarily help them to change the behaviours, habits, emotions and responses that they want to let go of. The why doesn’t necessarily change anything.

My feeling is that ‘why ‘doesn’t serve us particularly well when we want to make changes in our lives.

And, indeed, I have met people who are on a search for why. They are on a big mission of why. They are making why their life’s work. Their internal script goes, ‘If I can just understand why this is happening, I will feel better…’ and they have been trying to understand why for the last two or twelve or twenty years. And this trying to understand why has become a painful and tortuous journey in which they find themselves feeling worse than when they started. Maybe they are now obsessed with the idea of wanting to know why or caught up in endless rumination and questioning that is creating a lot of anxiety and feelings of somehow not being good enough.

And this search for why brings them to the consulting room of a hypnotherapist. Because the Big Myth of Why says that a hypnotherapist can go inside your mind and discover why. A hypnotherapist can regress you to the exact time and place in your life where the problem started – and then you will know and then you will feel better. Right?

Well, erm, actually, not necessarily. In fact, probably not.

It’s a seductive notion, this concept of ‘deep underlying causes’ for our problems and issues. If we could neatly pin it down to one formative event – for example, the day our primary teacher told us off in front of the class for getting a word wrong and then we suddenly became unable to read aloud in front of others -  that might certainly be very convenient. But is this a little over-reductive?

Problem One: Now, I am not saying that some issues that people experience do not carry with them the resonances and echoes of prevous experiences. Of course, they can do. Over the years, we can form beliefs about ourselves as the result of our experiences, the things we hear around us,  our interactions with significant others, for example.

However, fears, problems, phobias and habits tend to fade away over time unless we are actively keeping them fuelled with our own thoughts and worries and beliefs and the way that we talk to ourselves inside our minds.

So our primary school teacher may have introduced us to the notion of fear – but that is only part of the story.We have somehow kept the fear going. In order to let go of the fear, we need to understand how we are still doing it to ourselves twenty-five years later, so that we can start to change things.

Problem Two: Even if a hypnotherapist can help us to indentify the so-called ‘root cause’ of a particular issue, this doesn’t mean that it actually happened  or happened in the way that we experience it now in hypnosis.

We still do not sufficiently understand the way that memory works, for example, but it is thought that, in order to experience a memory, our brains need to go back and reimagine or recreate that memory in order for us to experience it again. And we may not recreate it in exactly the way that it actually happened.

Have you ever experienced a situation that really didn’t bother you until you began to go over and over it in your head and it gradually assumed all the proportions and details and colours of a horror story? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

In a similar way, dreams and fantasies can be re-imaginings and re-workings of what we have experienced in the day. And although our dreams can feel very ‘real’ to us when they are happening, we wouldn’t dream of supposing that they are representations of truth.

We can’t be sure that how people experience things in hypnosis is how things actually happened either. There may be a feeling-tone, a sensory theme of the hypnotic experience that carries emotions and  memories and associations from way back. But things can get a little blurry and what actully happened and how we re-experience it can get a little mixed-up.

But what really concerns me about the Big Myth that goes, ‘there must be an underlying cause somewhere in a person’s past for the problems and challenges that s/he might be facing in the present,’ is that this assumption can result in long (and often expensive) periods of fruitless searching, over-thinking, rumination and anxiety.

If you’re asking yourself why something is happening for you, a well-trained hypnotherapist can help you to understand how you are doing that thing in the present and what you can do differently to change it as well as any possible emotions, associations and habits you’ve been carrying from the past.

So, I think this is good news. Because if it’s possible that there is no why,  no single pin-downable ’cause’ for what you are feeling, then you may simply have been looking in the wrong direction. The search for why may have been holding you back from becoming more consciously aware of how you can do the problem differently.

This week, let’s look at the one that goes: ‘Hypnosis is weird/ scary/ mystical/ mind-control/ utter hippy nonsense/ what that bloke off the telly does/ brain-washing/ something you do to me to fix my head  *

* or a combination of the above.

Firstly, I want to let you into a secret. Noone knows exactly what hypnosis is. Nope. Hypnotherapists don’t know what hypnosis actually is, and neither do researchers looking at people’s brains whilst in this apparent state of hypnosis with MRI scans and other neuroimaging techniques.

In MRI scans, we can see parts of the brain either ‘light up’ or get ‘turned off’ when people are apparently in hypnosis. Here is an example of the kind of research into hypnosis that neuroimaging is making possible, carried out by Amir Raz, who wanted to look at how hypnotic suggestions might affect the regulation of pain in the brain. This particular research gives us fascinating data about how hypnotic suggestions ‘turn off’ the area of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which would normally get activated when performing certain tasks. It has many interesting possibilities for further research and application.

But it still doesn’t really tell us what hypnosis actually is.

The question of whether hypnosis is an actual state of attention (state theory) or a set of beliefs, attitudes and expectations (non-state theory) is hotly contested in the field of hypnotherapy and hypnosis. In fact, you will find people arguing about it all over the internet.

The state theory maintains that hypnosis is an actual change in the quality of our attention and awareness, a kind of experiential shift or hypnotic ‘trance’ state that is often described by people in terms of changes in temporal and spatial awareness (‘My body feels so heavy,’ ‘My hands feel so huge’ or ‘Has that really been half an hour? It felt like ten minutes’).

The non-state theory of hypnosis claims that there is no such thing as this altered state of awareness or hypnotic ‘trance’ and that the effects of hypnosis can be explained by the motivation, cognitive set and expectation of the person being hypnotised and the way that he or she is prepared to work towards a therapeutic goal.

You will notice that, so far, there has been no mention in either of these theories of a sleep-like or unconscious state, nor of vaudevillian stunts. Contrary to popular misconception – and I do still meet people who think of hypnosis in this way – hypnosis is not like being asleep or unconscious. It is not something that a hypnotist or therapist does to you.

In hypnotherapy, the therapist does not go inside your mind and flick levers and switches or make things disappear or convince you that something you previously thought true is now suddenly untrue. (I don’t know about you but I would personally find that rather unnerving. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a hypnotherapist if I believed that s/he could do that to me!)

We know that hypnosis is something that you actively need to co-create with the therapist you choose to work with. The therapist guides you through the process of going into hypnosis (state theory) or you yourself create the mindset and beliefs within which the changes can happen (non-state theory) because you want to make the changes you want to make. Or a combination of these two.

To illustrate this more clearly, we know that if a person sits in the chair with their arms crossed and says, ‘Humph. Well you’re not going to put me under. You’re not going to hypnotise me, matey,’ well, then they are right. They will not be experiencing anything very soon except their own desire not to go into hypnosis. And maybe their own fear, which may be what is preventing them from making the changes in the first place.

So if we assume that most people seeking the help of a hypnotherapist actually want to make some changes in their lives, is hypnosis a state that therapists guide them into or a description of their set of beliefs and expectations that will make it possible for the therapist to work with them?

Personally, I think it is a combination of these two.

Many people who come to work with me are worried that they won’t be able to ‘do it right’ or relax sufficiently (see last Monday’ Myth-Busting) or go into hypnosis but, despite these fears and apprehensions, they learn exactly how to use the power of their minds and the power of self-hypnosis in helpful ways.

Whether you think that hypnosis is a weird (or mystical or in some way spiritual) state or non-state really depends upon your own set of beliefs around turning your attention inside yourself in a focused way. Some people think this is a very ordinary thing to do. For others, it is actually something quite special.

What I do know and continue to notice all the time in my own practice – both as a hypnotherapist and as someone who regularly uses self-hypnosis – is that it’s so easy to be carried away by the busy-ness of our everyday lives so that making time to direct our attention inwards in a focused way and really notice what we are feeling and thinking and how, in a sense, we are doing or creating or imagining our lives can feel strange, weird, pleasant, a relief or even slightly scary at first. It may be something we haven’t done for a long time.

When we begin to learn and understand how to do our lives and thoughts and internal experience in more helpful and progressive ways, I do personally think that is a very powerful experience. Learning to relax deeply or notice our thoughts or the way that our body feels in the midst of our busy-ness can be a kind of special or transformative experience.

There are some who would say that all our experiences are kinds of ‘trance state,’ either positive, neutral or negative, until we become consciously aware that we are doing them. So we find ourselves going into the trance of a particular relationship (he says that, she says that, you say that) or the trance of work (everything is so hard and it will never get any better) or the one about money (I need more and never seem to have enough and if only I had more my life would be so much better), for example.

Hypnosis, then, in this regard, is a kind of waking up from the trance of our everyday lives.

I think it’s an interesting and important question to ask.

Evidence can mean – and is often thought to mean, solely and entirely – the data gathered through third-person research and quantitative studies such as random controlled trials and systematic reviews. These are reviews that are largely designed to produce ‘objective,’ ‘third-person’ evidence.

However, can we really say this is true? RCTs are often, as Ben Goldcare often points out on his ‘Bad Science’ blog, trials designed to support our prejudices and biases. And when we hold a view about something, we can very often find a piece of ‘evidence’ to back it up.

Indeed, just yesterday I found ‘a small and very preliminary study’ that would support my personal view that dark chocolate is very good for me. Now I am not saying that this particular piece of research is not a good, solid piece of research. I really wouldn’t know unless I did a systematic review of all the studies that have ever been done on the health benefits of eating dark chocolate so that I could evaluate whether all the existing data contradicted or supported this study.

I merely point to this study as an interesting example of they way that I can find ‘evidence’ for pretty much anything I want to find evidence for.

Another kind of ‘evidence,’ which is perhaps less obvious to many people is what researchers refer to as qualitative evidence. This is often ‘first-person’ evidence: what people using the intervention – patients, clients, clinicians, health care professionals, hypnotherapists – feel or know or find out empirically through  first-person, qualitative and/or phenomenological evidence.

When I was researching a model for the use of writing in therapy, I had to create a methodology that gathered qualitative data – what the process of writing feels like for me and for other people engaged in similar processes – and then look for correlates of that data in the qualitative and quantitative studies in cognitive science, developmental psychology, neuroscience and various therapy traditions.

Because I was working in such a new area, I had to examine what we really mean by ‘evidence.’ So much research in therapeutic and expressive arts had not been, in the opinion of my supervisor and myself, very rigorous. (This is probably why arts-based research can so easily be dismissed by many hard scientists.) Doing my research really made me scrutunise the meaning and nature of evidence in therapy.

One of the problems is that, when we talk about the brain – and I wanted to do that because I wanted to identify possible neurophysiological correlates for the processes of change and transformation that I was seeing in my research – we often have to talk about in terms of metaphor. The term ‘mind’ is itself a metaphor. We can’t see the mind or touch it or isolate it to one particular area of the brain. Similarly, the self is a kind of metaphor. According to neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens, 2000)  even our earliest pre-verbal sense of self is a kind of ongoing mapping or ‘story without words’ created by our brains encounters with objects, internal and external. Bu that’s for another blog post.

Our field of hypnotherapy is changing. I love, embrace and applaud the fact that leading hypnotherapists  are demanding more rigorous training and evidence-based practice for our field. We need that rigour and that framework for our practice.

However, I also think that we need to remain mindful of what ‘evidence’ in therapy actually means.

Take any one therapist, a client, a problem or challenge, and an agreed outcome. My friends, colleagues and mentors in the field may work with that person in many different ways. We might draw on the ‘evidence’ from various quantitative studies where a particular model of therapy was used with one group and compared with a control group who did not receive therapy. So we would be engaged in evidence-based practice.

However, and this is crucial, each of us might apply this knowledge in different ways. Each one of the therapists that I respect or whom I have learned from or have been mentored by, works in a different way. Our way of being in the world, our more or less directive approaches, everything we can use and draw upon as therapists; and what the particular client presents to us at the time – their way of being, their verbal and non-verbal communication, metaphors, stories and experiences, abilities and qualities – will all inform how we work in a particular session. I am not at all sure that this kind of process can be turned into replicable ‘steps’ to be used in exactly the same way with all clients, all the time. That seems to be the very opposite, to me, of what effective hypnotherapy can be.

So, whilst we need evidence and evidence-based practice and more reigorous research in the field, I personally feel that we should not be wary of becoming complacent about what the evidence tells us. Perhaps what is most replicable and measurable about hypnotherapy is a model of flexibility, of listening to and responding to and being with the client in ways that give that client sufficient safety and sufficient freedom to make the changes s/he wants to make.

Hypnotherapy should be subject to the smae rigorous standards as any medical intervention or procedure. (Actually, when we dig deeper, many drug therapies and medical procedures are subject to surprising few trials and tests; so maybe we should say that hypnotherapy should be subject to even greater standards of rigour?)

But surely, in the end, what ‘works’ is what works for that client on that particular day – informed and guided by our knowledge and research, yes – but, above all, informed by the person we are working with.

Over the years, I have researched conceptual metaphor theory extensively and used it consciously and subconsciously in my own writing. I am fascinated by the way that we all use metaphor, every single day of our lives, to describe our experiences.

We have spatial metaphors: I feel so down today.

We have metaphors that suggest that we experience our body as a sort of container for our emotions: I was seething with anger. I thought I might explode.

These metaphors seem convincingly universal, across languages and cultures (Kovesces has done some fabulous research on this).

And then we have those personal metaphors that mean something particular to us alone, like a special kind of secret language.

When we become more consciously aware of the metaphoric language we are using to describe a feeling or a situation, we often realise that our metaphor is limiting in some way. And as we become more consciously aware of it, we can change it.

And so to the story of my new bed.

Yes, my new bed is a kind of metaphor for some of the changes I’m experiencing in my life. Or at least, that’s how I have come to understand it over the last few days.

We bought a new bed. In fact, it was a Christmas present from my partner’s parents and we looked forward to the arrival of this new bed with eagerness. It was delivered at the beginning of last week, I made it up with our new, specially-purchased king-size bedding. We lay down on our new bed together and… yes, dear readers… I am a little embarrassed to tell you on a public blog about hypnotherapy exactly what happened next.

What happened next was that we both shouted at once, ‘Oh, no! This bed is so hard. This is not the bed we tried in the shop! Surely?’

It seems (because after several very uncomfortable nights on the new bed, I called the shop to ask them about it) that it takes time to get used to a new bed.

It seems that it takes time for a new bed to, erm, bed in (for that is the technical term used by the manager of the bed department to whom I spoke).

It seems that I have been given a metaphor for the way that we can experience change. I don’t like this new bed but I will have to get used to it. It doesn’t feel like the old bed. I want the old bed back. But now that I know that it is just a matter of time and everything will be OK and we haven’t wasted our money, it already feels so much better.

Yes, I even think the bed feels a teensy bit more comfortable now that I know that it can take about a month for a bed with 1200 pocket-springs to soften. Suddenly, it is not that I have ‘made my bed and now I have to lie in it.’ Suddenly it is that this is just a metaphor for change. It takes cognitive effort to make changes. And already this bed is feeling a little more familiar. Pretty soon, I know that I won’t even notice that it’s new at all.

Sometimes, when I’m working with new clients to gather information for the work we’re going to begin together, they will say something like: ‘I am worried that you won’t be able to hypnotise me because I just can’t relax.’

In other words, hypnosis and relaxation are often thought of as more or less the same thing. Well, whilst it’s true that many people experience hypnosis and self-hypnosis as a deeply calming, centring or grounding experience in which their mind and body begin to feel more relaxed, we do not need to actually feel relaxed in order to go into hypnosis.

In fact, here’s the thing: You do not even have to empty your mind of thoughts in order to go into self-hypnosis.

I remember that this was a revelation to me, when I first began my training in self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy: What, you mean I can work with my monkey mind that is always jumping about all over the place? I can actually use all this restlessness and jumpiness and my mind that is making connections and asking questions all over the place, in order to enter a hypnotic trance?

Wow!

And, in fact, you can go into trance with one arm raised in the air – not that you would generally want to do that, (unless, of course, you were entering a national ‘who can hold their arm in the air the longest? competition’). I merely use this, rhetorically-speaking, to demonstrate my argument.

You can go into hypnosis in a doctor’s waiitng room or before an exam or driving test or before giving The Most Important Presentation of Your Entire Life or in just about any situation that you might previously never have imagined that you could ever feel relaxed.

What’s more, there is a feature of the hypnotic trance state, which is often referred to in the hypnotherapy and hypnosis literature as ‘proneness;’ that is, an observable quality about the arms or legs or neck or hand or other such part of the person in the ‘trance state’ that can sometimes develop and is powerfully indicative that the person is in trance.

This ‘proneness’ is a certain quality of the way in which the person holds or adopts a position that, out of hypnosis, we might naturally experience by fidgeting or moving around. But, in hypnosios, it’s almost as if the person’s brain has said,’Oh, I’ll just leave that arm there for now. I don’t need to be thinking about it anymore. It’s just there for now but I’ve got more important things to be thinking about,’ and their mind focuses on other things.

So hypnosis can be a very effective way to retrain our minds and bodies from anxious and restless and discomfort to calm and focused and comfortable. When someone says to me, ‘I don’t think I will be able to relax,’ I think ‘Yes! Hurrah! You’ve come to the right place. Because I can help you to learn how to relax deeply if that is what you want to be able to do.’

However, it is also important to remember that we can use hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to cultivate the state of awareness that is approrpiate for the task in hand. For example, it might not be appropriate for you to feel all floppy and heavy if you are preparing to run a marathon or compete in a game of grand-slam chess. But it might be helpful for you to feel calm and focused, with the parts of your mind and body that you need for peak perfomance all working beautifully in their optimum state, whilst the rest of your body feels comfortable.

So, for today’s Monday Myth-Bust: Hypnosis is not relaxation and hypnotherapy is not necessarily ‘relaxation therapy.’ The consistent practice of self-hypnosis will help you to train your mind and body to cultivate deeper and deeper calm – which may include a feeling of relaxation. You don’t need to feel relaxed in order to use self-hypnosis or benefit powerfully from hypnotherapy. If you are a person who has found it difficult to relax, you may be surprised to discover the changes you ntoice when you expereince hypnotherapy and learn self-hypnosis.