Hypnosis for Permanent Change

By Rena Greenberg

From losing weight to reducing stress, you can access the subconscious mind to make the changes you have always wanted to make in your life.

Do you find yourself sabotaging your weight loss or other personal goals? Is it hard for you to believe that it’s possible to change and sustain that change over time? Does it seem as if you often take two steps forward, only to fall three steps back?

Even though it may sometimes seem as if we are destined to keep repeating the patterns that have kept us stuck in the past, we all have the ability to change and grow on a permanent basis if we learn to connect to the vast wisdom of the subconscious mind and use tools such as hypnosis to achieve and measure our goals. When our deep-rooted thoughts change, our behaviors naturally change along with them—and that’s how transformation begins.

How can you access the subconscious mind to make the changes you have always wanted to make? Let’s begin by taking a look at the difference between the conscious and subconscious parts of the mind. The conscious is the logical, analytical part of the mind. Consciously, of course, you want to be happy and healthy, at your ideal weight, with loving, joyful relationships.

What stands in the way of this? The obstacles to success lie in the subconscious mind, which has two parts. The first is the Reactive Mind, and it’s on autopilot; it responds to your environment, both positively and negatively. When you wake up in the morning and automatically turn on the faucet to brush your teeth and jump into the shower, your autopilot subconscious mind receives a positive activation. When you see your child or partner doing something you don’t like, and you react by yelling, most often this is a knee-jerk negative response generated by the Reactive Mind. Unfortunately, it’s this part of the mind that gets people into trouble because it is always prompting them to repeat the same behaviors over and over, regardless of whether they lead to positive or negative results.

Fortunately, it is possible to recover from unproductive, second nature behaviors by accessing the second, deeper aspect of the subconscious—the Wise Mind—which is intuitive and connects to the highest intelligence available to humanity. As a result, it allows you to tap into your greatest resources of love, compassion, wisdom, strength, power and creativity.

The Power of Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a state of deep physical relaxation and concentration, and it is one of the most powerful and effective ways to shift sabotaging automatic thoughts and programs from the Reactive Mind. It also accesses the Wise Mind to create new, productive patterns of thinking and behavior. In this state, the subconscious part of the mind is more available to suggestions, and it is possible to replace old mental movies and thought patterns that no longer serve you.

Thought precedes all action, but most often these thoughts are below a person’s conscious awareness. For example, when you wake up in the morning and feel compelled to brush your teeth and get dressed, you most likely are not aware that mental movies are driving these actions. Perhaps you see a project that needs to get done at work or have a brief mental glimpse of a luncheon that you are going to be attending later in the day. These images then motivate you to take positive steps and get ready. This is your subconscious mind working for you.

What if you are struggling with your weight? When you wake to the sound of your alarm, you are most likely making mental movies about the foods you are or aren’t going to eat that day, and these images are causing you to constrict your muscles and feel tense. When you find yourself pulling into Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to work against your better judgment and ordering a donut and coffee, you probably won’t even make the connection between your constricted inner state and your undesirable choice.

You can use self-hypnosis to increase your awareness of your choices and the thoughts that precede those choices, and then you can positively reprogram your mind.

In cases such as this, you can use the hypnotic state to become aware of inner mental movies and adjust them so they lead to the result you want. In the relaxed, focused state of hypnosis, which is similar to a mental massage, you can begin to imagine yourself confident, in control of your life and your eating habits, and making healthy choices easily and effortlessly. You also can specifically imagine yourself making better decisions and how good that makes you feel.

As you reinforce images in the hypnotic state, either by working with a trained therapist, practicing self-hypnosis or listening to a self-hypnosis CD, these new responses soon will become second nature. By using hypnosis in this way, you can magically tap into your Wise Mind—which is brilliant and creative—and your whole identity can change.

In addition to making modifications in your subconscious, hypnosis also actually shifts your bodily systems. Moreover, these results have been verified scientifically by the use of biofeedback instruments, which measure the various physiological systems in the body using sensors attached to computers. Use of this equipment has successfully documented that a hypnotic state decreases blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and sweating response, and at the same time increases peripheral skin temperature.

The Good News

Everyone can be hypnotized. It’s a natural state that we go in and out of every day. When you wake up in the morning, and when you fall asleep at night, you naturally pass through a state of hypnosis. People also can be hypnotized by the media, advertising and the voices in their heads, which tend to repeat messages from the past. If you’ve heard someone say, “I can’t be hypnotized,” understand that it’s because that person didn’t allow himself to be hypnotized.

In this process, there are different levels of hypnosis that range from having no conscious memory of the experience (as in hypnotic anesthesia) to not even feeling like you are hypnotized, even when you are responding to suggestions. The good news is that personal change can happen regardless of the level of hypnosis you achieve. For instance, during group seminars at hospitals throughout the country I’ve heard many people tell me that they were sure they weren’t hypnotized, and yet they left the seminar and never smoked again or walked out and lost 60 pounds and kept it off. That is the miracle of the mind!

Hypnosis is a way to go beyond the limited thinking of the conscious, analytical mind, and the automatic subconscious reactions to life that cause us to repeat patterns that stunt our personal growth. It’s a way to access the deeper, Wise Mind, and to connect to our greatest strength, courage and wisdom.

Rena Greenberg, a Hay House author, can be reached at EasyWillpower.com. Her weight loss and gastric bypass hypnosis success has been featured in 150-plus news stories including USA Today, Woman’s World, The Doctor’s, CNN, Good Morning America and Nightline. PBS stations nationally aired Rena’s show, “Easy Willpower,” in August 2015. Her wellness program is sponsored in 75 hospitals and 100-plus corporations. She conducts hypnotherapy sessions with people all over the world on Skype.

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