“There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow,that that path is for your steps alone.” -Robert Hunter

Develop Your Unique Voice

Roger Love in Sing Like the Stars has some great advice for learning to find your own voice as a singer. This advice can be easily applied to finding your own voice as a hypnotist. He suggests that you begin by closely studying great singers. Listen to CD’s of your favorite song. Try to imitate what you hear. If you stick to just one singer, the danger is that you will sound just like them. Instead, do the same thing with a variety of singers. Finally you have to forget everything that you learned and find your own voice. The same idea applies the finding your voice as a hypnotist. In the beginning, you will listen to hypnotists that you admire and try to imitate their style. After a period of time; however, it’s time to find your own way of doing hypnosis. You will have at your disposal all that you’ve learned, but you will use what you’ve learned to express the total being that you are. » Read the rest of this entry «

Probably the most important factor that leads clinicians to adopt a rigid by the book approaches is the fear of making a mistake. A common question from my hypnosis students, is what if it doesn’t work? My answer is usually, “Then try something else.” One of the biggest blocks to creative expression is the fear that somehow what you do will fall flat. To cure my students of this paralyzing malady, I have them form a circle. I then instruct them to give one of the other students a suggestion, which they’re pretty certain will fail. I tell them if they fail they succeeded if they succeed they failed because they didn’t choose something outrageous enough. The point is to prepare them when the client responds differently than they expected. » Read the rest of this entry «

In order to improve your ability to be creative in hypnosis here are some suggestions. Start by learning to induce a playful state in yourself. One way to do this is to induce a state of relaxation and then age regress by imagining what it was like when you were a child. As children we had deep access to our imaginative resources. I can remember, when I was very young maybe three or four years old. Every day I would pretend to be someone else, one day Superman the next Mighty Mouse. I enjoyed the playfulness of this imaginative world. We have all had similar experiences. Let yourself drift back in time. See what you saw, hear what you heard, and most importantly fell what you felt. Remember that feeling of playfulness and take it with you next time you induce hypnosis. » Read the rest of this entry «

Don’t under estimate the power of your own state of mind. When performing hypnosis you have much more available to you than simply your words. You have your own state of mind. The deeper you are able to move into a trance yourself the deeper your client will be able to go. If I myself can access a deep and powerful trance state, then I communicate that state nonverbally to the client.  By accessing this state, and utilizing a congruent tone of voice. I could say almost anything and it wouldn’t matter. The client would still experience a deep trance state. When you are in a deep trance state this is where you have access to your own creative resources. Though I can’t prove this scientifically, it seems to me as if my mind is somehow linking up to the mind of my client and in this interactional connection creative responses and solutions to the client’s problem can emerge. » Read the rest of this entry «

In pop-up thinking, ideas images simply pop up into your mind. We’ve all had this experience. We can’t remember someone’s name, we struggle to remember it but fail. We give up and move on to something else. Suddenly while we are engaged in a completely different activity, the name pops into our mind. This is how I experience creative thinking.

Learning to access your ability to respond creatively to your clients is largely a matter of learning to access your own ability to respond. It works a lot like a water faucet. The more trust you have the more the faucet opens and the more water flows through the pipes. The less trust you have the more the faucet closes down, and you are left with a mere trickle of water.

The other piece of this is adequate preparation. In listening to the client, with a not-knowing attitude, you are preparing the soil of your own creative resources. Listen to the words that they use, the metaphors, which shape their experience, and the values that they express. All of these factors are ingredients that you can use to create a therapeutic stew. » Read the rest of this entry «

So how can we wakes up our hypnosis? How can we bring more aliveness and creativity into the work that we do?

Giving Permission and Learning to Trust Your Creativity

After the former head of the hypnosis program at a professional school of psychology suddenly left, I was called on to continue with the program. Luckily for me, for the first group of students this was their first course in hypnosis, so they lacked any inhibitions to their creative impulse. The second course was interesting, because among the students were people who had trained with the original instructor. To my shock, they had trained by reading scripts. My approach had been just the opposite. I told my students that reading from scripts was not allowed. They were to begin with a basic idea in mind and from that basic idea they were to improvise and to create suggestions in the moment in relationship with what the client offered, utilizing whatever feedback was offered by the client. » Read the rest of this entry «

“Dust off those rusty strings just one more time. Gonna make em shine.”

The Grateful Dead’s live performances epitomized the ecstatic wonder of spontaneous creation.  They did not abandon song structures all together; rather, they treated those structures as jumping off points for wild improvisational excursions. In their slyly oxymoronically titled album, Live/Dead, the band traverses its way through a diverse terrain of musical genres.  No matter the material, the music is alive with a vibrant energy.   This vibrancy of expression is the result of both the joy of spontaneous creation in the moment, as well as the fact that the Dead’s music was relational in nature. They were not simply communicating with their audience, but the audience was also communicating with them in a rock and roll feedback loop. » Read the rest of this entry «