Over the years, I have offered up a number of ways, methods and means to commence with self-hypnosis sessions, through the format of a structured induction. This is not always necessary, but has been something that has worked incredibly well for me with my own subjective experience.
You regular readers will be aware that I have a number of stock means and methods that I refer to regularly and today is going to be offering up another way of doing that.
In coming weeks, I am going to be offering up a lot of evidence base for self-hypnosis and my ongoing research and reading is already shifting my own relationship with self-hypnosis, as well as altering the way I plan on teaching it and then I plan on releasing a revised and wholly different version of my original book on the subject of self-hypnosis.
I think the reason I mention this is because I now plan to develop a very different approach to self-hypnosis based upon the academic works I have been reading but making it accessible to those not so familiar with academic writings… You’ll see what I mean in coming weeks I hope.
On to today’s process then.
This type of induction process into self-hypnosis is actually a great one and is a bit more advanced than many I tend to offer up, it is also more demanding. The reason is that often we use nature to advance our imagination. For example, imagining your arm is getting heavier when you hold it outwards is easy to do as it would perhaps feel heavy anyway as a result of gravity and the slight strain of doing so, the same goes for imagining your eyelids getting heavier when you use an eye-fixation process…. This technique here today involves some fixation, it eventually utilizes nature but importantly requires some real purposeful use of the imagination.
Within this process, you are required to engage your imagination and to elicit some ‘hypnotic phenomena’ within yourself. If your internal dialogue or belief start to defy your imagination, then quiet it by imagining a volume control of your internal dialogue, or wrapping duct tape around the voice of your internal dialogue or doing whatever you need to do to keep it quiet while you engage your imagination. You’ll also get some autosuggestion affirmations to give yourself (real Coué style) so that your cognitions get dominated and distracted too.
Enjoy this new self-hypnosis induction and deepening process, follow the simple
Seven Steps To Use Floating Arm Self-Hypnosis Induction:
Step One: Of course you want to be in a place where you are going to be undisturbed for the remainder of this session.
Be sat in a comfortable, upright position, ideally with your feet flat on the floor and your arms uncrossed. Be in a receptive posture, and not slouched, your posture will help you to engage with the process and be attentive to it.
Have your hands resting in your lap, upon your legs with the palms facing upwards. Once you have got yourself into this physical position, then you keep your eyes open and proceed to step two.
Step Two: Keep your head in the same, still position while you look at your hands. Focus all your attention, all your awareness and gaze attentively at the palms of your hands resting in your lap, whilst keeping your head completely still, just moving your eyes to look at them.
As you look at them, start to be mindful of your hands. That is, notice any sensations within them, which there are likely to be more of when you really focus and heighten your awareness.
Notice the temperature of them, are they hot or cold or somewhere in between? Are they perfectly still or is there the tiniest fraction of movement within them? Notice the details of the lines in the hands.
When you have really engaged with your hands, move on to the next step.
Step Three: As you continue to look at your hands, work out which of them feels the heaviest. Even if it is just a tiny bit more than the other, which one feels more settled in its position.
When you have worked that out, turn your attention to the one that feels the lightest. Stare at a fixed point on that palm, the palm of the hand that feels lighter than the other.
Enjoy the fact that it feels lighter than the other for a couple of moments.
Now start to imagine it is feeling lighter with each breath that you breathe. Almost as if each inhalation is making the hand and arm feel as if it is getting lighter and lighter. You have to really engage your imagination and believe that this is absolutely the case.
Use your internal dialogue and cognitions to dominate your thoughts while you imagine this and say to yourself with real purpose and volition “my hand is feeling as if it is lighter and lighter” and keep repeating it as you imagine your hand moving up off your lap.
Keep repeating the phrase with real meaning, keep engaging the imagination and as soon as you get a tiny movement of any kind upwards with the hand, then move on to the next step.
Step Four: Now engage your imagination further by imagining that in the palm of this lighter, slowly moving hand is an incredibly powerful magnet. A really incredibly powerful magnet. Imagine a second magnet is on one of your cheekbones and that it is attracting the palm of your hand closer and closer.
Watch as the magnet pulls the hand toward your face. Stare at the palm of the hand, imagine it is moving more purposefully towards your face as the magnet pulls the hand to your cheekbone.
Some people like to imagine that they can see some sort of magnetic force that is present and is drawing the hand closer to the face. You can do this if you want to.
Now start to engage your internal dialogue, again suggest to yourself using an affirmation; “the magnetic force is pulling my hand to my face” and repeat it with meaning, say it to yourself like you really believe in it 100%. Over and over in your mind as you imagine that magnet and the magnetic force pulling the hand to your face in easy movements at a pace that is right to you.
This is key: Now make an important distinction, think carefully as closely as the hand moves towards the face; work out if the hand is being pulled more strongly by the magnet in the palm or the magnet on your cheekbone. Make sure you can tell where the magnetic force is stronger.
When you know that, move on to the next step.
Step Five: Continue to engage really purposefully with all the above steps and watch the hand move closer to the cheekbone, and as you watch it arrive beneath your eyeline, let your eyes continue to look downwards and then just close as any part of your hand gently touches your face.
As your eyes close, take a deep breath and imagine the magnetic force is cut. Imagine that as your eyes closed, the magnets were switched off in some way.
With them switched off, notice how your hand and arm feel heavier and heavier and you tell yourself that the arm feels heavier and heaver and imagine it floating slowly back to its original position on your lap. Imagine it drifting back down and as you imagine that, let it relax, feel heavier and tell yourself “as my arm drops, so I go deeper and deeper into hypnosis” and keep repeating the words “deeper and deeper” as the arms floats all the way back down to the lap.
Let each exhalation increase the heavy sensation as the arm drifts to your leg where it began this exercise.
Once it reaches the lap, as it touches, exhale deeply and let the relaxation in that arm spread throughout the body and then move on to the next step.
Step Six: Having engaged in the induction and deepening process, you are now ready to engage in any changework or deliver suggestions for advancing your well-being in some way, or follow a technique or process with a goal of some kind in mind. (The likes of which have dominated this blog for the past year)
Once you have done that, simply thank your mind and proceed to the final step of exiting hypnosis
Step Seven: tale a nice deep breath, wiggle your fingers and toes and open your eyes or use a more formal exit procedure such as the one I talk about in my books or audio programmes, and then go about your day or take some action that will help develop what you did in the session with your changework.
Enjoy that, have a great weekend and I’ll be back next time.
For a full, evidence based approach to learning self-hypnosis and it’s many applications, grab a copy of my book The Science of Self-Hypnosis: The Evidence Based Way to Hypnotise Yourself.
