My ezine article this week was about using self-hypnosis and the power of your mind to create a phenomenon known as ‘Time Expansion’ – do make sure you have registered for my ezine if you’d like to read it, it’ll only be live for this next week… Anyway, as a result, one of my favourite people, inner circle members, Golf Hypnotist and previous student, Andrew Fogg, sent me on this link to this marvellous article over at the New Scientist which makes for very encouraging reading for those interested in this subject. It is about how your brain ‘enters the fourth dimension’…
So I thought I’d share with you again an older article of mine on the subject, written in the build up to Christmas, aimed at practicing the skill of altering your perception of time. Here you go…
My niece is going to be getting her very first vacuum cleaner for cleaner for Christmas! Yes indeed, I have bought her a brand, spanking new kiddies vacuum cleaner that does all sorts of things…I was telling my brother that it seems like only five minutes ago when I was a child that I used to be scared of the vacuum cleaner every time my Mum wheeled it out – what a ferocious noise it made.
Isn’t that funny though? I mean that when something seems very real and has strong emotions and thought attached to it, that the experience can seem like it was five minutes ago?
When I was at secondary school, I can remember being sat in my history class and being thoroughly uninspired and bored and watching the clock on the wall behind my teacher. Now, I swear to this day that as I yearned for the time to go past quicker, the second hands on that clock went by slower and slower. One hour felt as if it was ten hours. My experience of time during those lessons was painful. I often struggled to keep awake.
Gearing up to the Christmas season, I am off to a Black Tie Christmas event this weekend – I can’t wait! I know that in years gone by, these are events where I have done so much in a night – had a formal dinner, danced the night away, got holes in my tuxedo trousers from knee skidding on the dance floor, had many laughs – yet the night seemed to zip by in an instant.
I am sure that you have had varying experiences of time. Whereby time seemed to fly by or drag, depending on what you were doing. That is what this article is all about – Time Distortion.
There are people out there who can calculate mathematics in an “instant” mentally. There are fantastically successful baseball players who, when focused, seem to experience the ball coming toward them much slower than others seem to. There are also high-speed readers, who can read over 2,000 words per minute and they all experience a sense of time distortion as information flashes through their mind in only seconds. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that stuff too?
You know what I am going to say, don’t you?
You can do those things.
As Einstein pointed out, time flows at different rates for each person. Some people have experienced their entire life flash before their eyes in a matter of seconds just prior to a sudden death-risking situation. Also, dream researchers have discovered that a one-minute dream sometimes feels like hours to a dreamer. In one experiment, hypnotised subjects were given imaginary tasks to perform in their minds — like designing a dress and preparing a complicated meal.
They were tricked into thinking they had an hour to accomplish their tasks, but they really had only 10 seconds. After 10 seconds had elapsed in world time, the hypnotised subjects experienced intricate and accurate detail in their inner perception that seemed to them to be a complete hour! Given the same tasks in the waking state often stymied them so badly that they could not think of a single dress design and actually prepared a meal in a very disorganised fashion.
In interviews after the hypnotic sessions, it was revealed that the subjects experienced no difference in their “thinking” and that at no time did they feel hurried or “speeded upâ€. Time distorted thought thus seems to have superior clarity to usual conscious thought beset with constant distraction.
The experiment was achieved by starting a metronome at 60 beats per minute while the hypnotist stated that he was slowing it down gradually. The subject was to listen carefully as he did so and when in the subject’s opinion the metronome had been slowed down to the rate of one stroke per minute, the subject would acknowledge by saying, “Now.” The metronome’s beating always remained the same, but the hypnotist progressively encouraged the state of suggestibility in the subject by saying that the metronome was going still slower.
Let me run through a process that allows you to distort your perception of time. Remember, you are only distorting your perception of time and not time itself – that is the territory of our sci-fi heroes!
Step One: Get yourself in a place where you are going to be undisturbed for a period of time. Have an audible second-ticking clock n the place you are in. Assume a comfortable position with your arms and legs uncrossed.
Focus on your breathing, move you awareness inside your mind, engage in the moment, observe yourself and use whatever meditative, relaxation or self-hypnosis technique you know to develop a receptive state of mind. Go get my self-hypnosis book if you want to learn how to get into a really good state of self-hypnosis.
Allow yourself a couple of minutes to recall and remember an occasion when time seemed to be dragging… Become aware of how you felt about it, where he feelings were in your body and start to be in that state again as much as you can – access that state and frame of mind.
Step Two: After getting into a deeply relaxed, receptive state, your heartbeat tends to start matching the slow rhythm of 60 beats per minute in line with the clock. Listen closely to the ticking and concentrate on deep rhythmic breathing.
You may want to use your internal dialogue to deliver some suggestions to your mind at this stage to enhance the notion of allowing your brain to slow down…. when suggesting to your mind to do such things, remember to use the words “as if….†Instead of “is.†By that, I mean you can deliver a suggestion to say to yourself that “time feels as if it is going slower and slower…†rather than “time is going slower…†This is because you are not actually altering time. You are altering your perception of it.
Bear that in mind. If you start suggesting to your unconscious that time itself is slowing down, your unconscious will just respond by thinking “no it isn’t†and ignore the suggestion rendering it impotent. Be aware of using the most progressive and precise language and deliver suggestions to help slow your perception of time right down.
Step Three: Begin to start saying something along the lines of this to yourself:
The time between each beat seems longer and longer.
I am more and more relaxed and I have lots and lots of time. All the time in the world.
Time is only relative to what I want it to be.
Each stroke is further and further apart now.
There is lots of time.
I feel so relaxed and at peace with myself.
Time feels as if it is slowing down.
Each beat of the clock feels more and more distantly separated and sounds as if it is too.
Then continue to repeat the above suggestions or similar ones over and over to yourself until you “feel” that each click of the clock is spaced between 2 – 4 minutes apart.
Step Four: Then, whilst in your slowed down, self-hypnotic state and having a suggestive state of mind, you can review any material you wish in a matter of seconds over and over again. By being relaxed and saying to yourself that you have lots of time, your mind does indeed ‘create’ lots of time.
You can and do work at optimal levels of efficiency when you are relaxed and enjoying yourself. The more you practice this exercise, the easier it does become.
Step Five: When you have spent enough time in this slowed-down perception, open your eyes, wiggle your toes and take some deep breaths and get everything into its correct and proper time zone.
Do your best to remember as often as you can to give yourself a post-hypnotic suggestion that the next time that you want to experience self-hypnotic time distortion, it is so much easier and faster to undergo.
Once you have mastered doing this one way, you can begin to use it and apply it so many other things. I have worked with men and women who have learned to heighten their enjoyment of sex by slowing down their experience of their orgasms. I have also used these techniques to allow plane journeys to fly by, so that you step off the plane feeling fresh and free from jetlag. I tend to find that however comfortable they make planes these days, it is really difficult to do much that is constructive whilst on board, so I just get it to seem like it flew by.
You will be amazed how well your unconscious mind’s clock can and does work. Have some fun and enjoy slowing time down, especially with the fun-filled Christmas period on the doorstep.
Have a great weekend folks… 🙂
