learn to use self-hypnosis to reduce stress, lose weight...
TRANSCRIPT
Learn to Use Self-Hypnosis to Reduce Stress, Lose
Weight, Stop Smoking & Be Healthier
Glen L. Bledsoe
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•Before we begin I want to give a bit of background about myself. •I first got involved in schools as an artist-in-residence back in the mid & late 80’s. I liked being in schools so much that I became an elementary school teacher. •Over the last 23 years I've taught 3rd through 5th grades in self-contained classrooms in elementary. I spent one year as a sabbatical replacement in the School of Education at Willamette University. For the last three years I've taught art and technology for 6th - 8th graders at Molalla River Middle School. I've also been a school librarian. Overall it’s been a good life.
glenbledsoe.com
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•I’m also a Consulting Hypnotist, which is the what they call hypnotherapists these days.
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I’’m located at the Oak Springs Wellness Centre in Salem, where I get to work with a lot of talented counselors, massage therapists, yoga instructors, and acupuncturists.
Artist => Hypnotist?
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How does one go from being an art teacher to a hypnotist? Easy. By becoming an magician first. The short version of the story is that I realized that while doing a mind-reading act I was accidentally hypnotizing my volunteers. I developed a kind of street hypnosis and finally decided to get formal training and become a certified Consulting Hypnotist.
Stress weight loss
smoking cessation positive life style
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How many people here are elementary teachers, middle school teachers, high school teachers, administrators? Anyone from Salem where I live? How many people here would like to reduce stress, lose weight or know someone who does, stop smoking or know someone who does or should, make better decisions about your health practices? Good. You've come to the right place.
What is hypnosis?
What hypnosis is NOT!
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Hypnosis is not mind control. Hypnosis can’t make you do anything that you don't want to do.
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Hypnosis takes place in the subconscious mind. The place where your morals are stored. You can't be made to do anything against your morals. I can prove it.
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Who takes the garbage out at my house?
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Who takes the garbage out at my house? I do. If I could hypnotize someone else to do it, I would.
What about stage hypnotists?
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So if a hypnotist can’t make anyone do anything in hypnosis they don't want to do why do people act like idiots during hypnosis comedy show? Some people like to act like idiots. Consider: •Stage hypnotists ask for volunteers who know only too well what is expected of them. •Even so some people on stage won't experience hypnosis and are cheerfully asked to return to the audience. “You’ll enjoy the show out there better than up here,” is what they’re usually told. •The people who do volunteer to go on stage are extreme extroverts and enjoy the attention and opportunity to perform for large crowds. Some of these people return year after year to stage hypnosis shows because they like the experience so much. Give these people a couple of beers and they'd likely do the same thing. •Looking at the faces of the people in the photo I'd be surprised if any of them are hypnotized by the look on their faces.
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This may be fun for some people, but unfortunately stage hypnotists create a misunderstanding in the mind of the public that is a real impediment to the use of hypnosis for beneficial purposes. After reading the above would you go to a hypnotist to lose weight? You might well be afraid you’d be humiliated.
What is hypnosis?
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So we’re back to the question: what is hypnosis?
Hypnosis is the seeding of suggestions into the
subconscious mind to change our perception of
reality best put to the use of improving our lives and
getting us more of the things we want and need.
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This is my working definition. Notice there is no mention of the word “trance.” That’s because trance isn't needed to produce the results of hypnosis. It makes hypnosis easier, but isn't strictly necessary.
"I want you to know that there are no colors in the real world, there are no fragrances in the real world, that there’s no beauty and there’s no ugliness. Out there beyond the limits of our perceptual apparatus is the erratically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. And we’re almost like magicians in
that in the very act of perception, we take that quantum soup and we convert it into the
experience of material reality in our ordinary everyday waking state of consciousness.”
Sir John Eccles
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Sir John Eccles won the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine 1963,
What does hypnosis feel like?
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As you're sitting there in your chairs you may be wondering what it’s like to be hypnotized. You may be both excited and a bit apprehensive at the same time. Please understand that no one here has to experience trance or hypnosis in any way for this session to be beneficial. There is no definitive hypnotic experience. Each of us experiences hypnosis in different ways, some subtle, some quite powerful. Regardless of whether you feel hypnotized or not you can benefit because we are all susceptible to suggestion to one degree or another. All you have to do is be willing to change your mental state just a little.
I think therefore I am.
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What are the conscious and subconscious minds? We have only one mind, but this mind appears to have both conscious and subconscious functions. The conscious mind is that stream of thoughts and self-talk that runs through your head. It’s gives you the sense of BEING. The conscious mind is limited. We can hold only about 7 things (plus or minus 2) in our conscious minds at once, which is why we don't multitask well even though we believe we can. It is critical part of our mind, meaning it questions what it takes in.
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The subconscious mind is larger, more powerful. It maintains our body temperature, our heart beat, our emotions, our memories, and it multi-tasks all of these functions automatically and with perfect ease. The subconscious mind in non-critical. It is the seat of our morals, which is why a hypnotist can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. There is where your suggestions will be planted.
What does hypnosis feel like?
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Some people feel as if they’re floating. Some people feel a tingling heaviness across the forearms and legs as if they were wearing a lead dental x-ray apron. Other people feel pleasantly heavy with relaxation. Some people feel nothing different whatever yet respond to suggestion and get the change they want. Hypnosis is not sleep and the experience doesn't usually feel like sleep even though hypnotists use the word sleep because culturally everyone knows it means hypnosis. Most people remember everything that was said during the hypnosis session, although the memory tends to fade a bit afterwards like forgetting a dream upon wakening. Nearly everyone can experience hypnosis at some level. The truth of the matter no one can hypnotize you. You hypnotize yourself. If you don't want to be hypnotized then you won't experience hypnosis. A hypnotist is just a guide for the process that you create.
Uses of hypnosis
Stress reduction relax relax relax relax & relax even more…
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The word hypnosis is synonymous with relaxation, although a person can experience hypnosis under noisy and stressful situations. Hypnosis can be used in emergency rooms. Using hypnosis anyone can create a mental space, a kind of safe house, to temporarily retreat from the world and recharge one’s emotional batteries. You will experience the sense of relaxation as a result of hypnosis soon.
Smoking Cessation Quit Now!
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Claims of success (100% in one session) are somewhat exaggerated. Medical research show that about 70% of smokers stop smoking using hypnosis in 4 to 5 sessions. Better than nicotine patches. It takes a highly motivated person to stop smoking. Remember the hypnotist can't make you do anything. He or she can only help you focus your full attention on what you truly want. Smoking is both an addiction and a habit, but the addiction and habit can be beaten as hundreds of people demonstrate every day. Hypnosis to quit smoking works with committed, highly motivated people. Remember, a hypnotist can't make you do anything. A hypnotist can't make you stop smoking. He or she can guide you to breaking the habit, but you ultimately do the work yourself.
Pain Control "...hypnosis offers one of the most promising new clinical approaches to pain control.
Although it has been a form of treatment for more than a century, only recently has it been recognized as an
empirically supported approach to pain control." Clinical Hypnosis for Pain Control (David R. Patterson Ph.D.)
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It’s well worth mentioning, although it’s perhaps a little beyond the scope of this presentation, that in my opinion the most potent use of hypnosis is in pain control. Research and confirmation of the efficacy of hypnosis in managing pain builds and builds and builds. For me, while I enjoy helping people quit smoking, lose weight and reduce their stress, I feel like I've done some real good when I can help people deal with acute and especially chronic pain. I've had good success with fibromyalgia.
Fitness &
Weight loss
Be healthy in all ways
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Hypnosis by itself usually accounts for only about 6 pounds of weight loss. But in combination with a change in physical activity and eating habits can be effective in losing much, much more. I've had first time clients lose 9 pounds in 2 weeks, although I don't recommend losing weight that fast.
process = goal
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Some important points: 1) The main purpose of weight loss is paradoxically not to lose weight. Instead I would propose the goal of weight loss is to create a process and instill a habit of physical activity and food choice that is natural, beneficial and rewarding in many ways. The process is the goal. The loss of fat and the benefits of fitness are a by-product but not the focus. The main purpose of hypnosis therefore, I believe, is to reframe our goal from achieving a particular body weight to learning to enjoy and even crave the process of controlling, refining, perfecting one’s body through physical activity and healthy eating habits.
self-esteem
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2) My experience with clients who come to me for weight loss is they usually have self-esteem issues as a result of their weight. I say this with the understanding that hypnotherapists are not primary care mental health specialists nor are we dieticians. We aren’t counselors. We shouldn't and can't legally diagnose depression. We are only technicians for planting suggestions into the subconscious mind. We mean to do so ethically and for the purpose of getting our clients more of the things they both want and need in life.
Lose fat not muscle
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3) Fad diets and rapid weight loss methods nearly all result in the loss of solid muscle mass. If you don’t exercise you’ll lose muscle when dieting because your body goes into famine mode. Muscle uses calories just to maintain itself so your body burns it first since it’s not needed. You want to burn fat (although technically fat cells don’t go away once created, they merely shrink in size) and develop muscle for all kinds of reasons physical and psychological. Granted that exercise doesn’t burn all that many calories (for a 150 lbs person it takes 15 minutes of vigorous weight lifting to burn 100 calories, or 30 minutes of walking to burn 100 calories) you still need to exercise to at least maintain—if not increase—your muscle mass. That doesn’t mean you have to become bulky, although an increase in strength is always welcome. It means you can shape and tone your muscle.
All these ideas are woven into
hypnotic suggestions.
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As I practice hypnosis for weight loss I weave these practices and concepts and more both consciously and subconsciously.
The heavy lifting is up to you!
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Keep in mind that a hypnotist can’t make you do anything. All I can do is focus your resolve and determination and help you develop the habits you need to create a regular, enjoyable and lasting process to maintain and improve your health. You, both figuratively and literally, have to do the heavy lifting.
Even more uses… regression, sports performance, forensic investigation,
test anxiety, phobias, etc.
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There are many other purposes to which hypnosis might be applied: time regression (forensic hypnosis), sports performance, test anxiety, hypnosis for travelers, and so on. Just to go on record I find it highly unlikely that if we have past lives (and there is no evidence that we do) that hypnosis is going to tell us what it was.
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Take ten minutes to stretch and to walk around and say hello to your neighbor if you haven’t already done so.
demonstration
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Has anyone here experienced hypnosis? Magnetic fingers Magnetic hands light heavy hands
Group induction & preparation for self-hypnosis.
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Ask audience members to determine the suggestions to be made. “Listen to and accept only those suggestions that you feel are positive and that are important and apply to you.” stress making good fitness choices No need to experience hypnosis. If you feel you aren't hypnotized, whatever that might mean, just pretend or imagine what it would be like.