Mind Reality

5 Hypnosis Myths Exploded

OVER the years, hypnosis has picked up all sorts of weird associations from stage hypnotists, the media and superstition. This is a great shame, because in reality, hypnosis is your single most effective tool for change. Hypnosis is your birthright, and you should know how to use it so it doesn’t use you. Here we dispel the biggest hypnosis myths.

Hypnosis Myth 1) All hypnosis is the same

As with anything, hypnosis can be good, bad or indifferent. The most common is old-style authoritarian hypnosis of the type “You are getting sleepy, you are feeling confident”. Unsurprisingly, this sort of hypnosis doesn’t work well with many people. Good hypnosis uses subtle psychological principles and advanced communication patterns.

It’s like the difference between a football coach who thinks you’ll perform best if he yells at you, compared with the more elegant style of a great leader who knows that to get the best from his people, he needs to understand motivation, to cajole, encourage and reward.

Hypnosis Downloads.com offers hundreds of sessions using the best type of hypnosis.

Hypnosis Myth 2) Subliminals work

Subliminals are words that you can’t hear. Common sense says they shouldn’t work, and there’s no research proving that they do.

Hypnosis Myth 3) Some people can’t be hypnotized

The only reason you can’t be hypnotized is if you are incapable of paying attention due to extremely low IQ or brain damage. That’s not to say that every hypnotist can hypnotize you however. The more flexible the hypnotist, the more effective she will be with the largest number of people.

Hypnosis Myth 4) Hypnosis is something weird that other people do to you

If you couldn’t go into hypnosis, you wouldn’t be able to sleep, to learn, or get nervous through ‘negative self hypnosis’. (You know when you imagine things going wrong and it makes you feel anxious? Well that’s self hypnosis!)

Hypnosis is simply a deliberate utilization of the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) or dream state. We’re not giving people medication here – if it wasn’t a natural ability, hypnosis wouldn’t work!

Hypnosis Myth 5) You lose control in hypnosis

Crazy news stories, stage hypnotists and gossip have created the illusion that you lose control in hypnosis. In fact, when hypnotized, you are relaxed and focused – and able to choose to get up and walk away at any time. You choose to give your attention to the hypnotist, and you can withdraw it at any time.

If you have been scared of hypnosis in the past, this article has hopefully convinced you to at least give it a try. But remember, ensure what you’re getting is the real thing. Visit www.hypnosisdownloads.com

Article by Mark Tyrrell of Hypnosis Downloads.com.

Comment: short & sweet. I do, however, not completely agree. “Myth 2″ is still unsolved in my opinion. I tested quite some subliminal stuff (visual and audio) on myself and friends, and while my results are certainly not “scientific”, they strongly suggest that certain types of subliminals actually DO work, e.g. messages flashing on your screen (used this to keep my neck relaxed during looong days in front of the computer), and the kind of audio subliminals that the Centerpointe Institute uses (like in the “Longevity”-Meditation).

Still I found these 5 brief corrections of popular misconceptions useful, so I reposted them here.

Today a headline popped up in my Google alerts that cought my attention: “3 Reasons Why Brainwave Entrainment Is Better Than Methods Of Hypnosis”. I headed over to the site and read it. OK - it was an obvious sales pitch for a maker of brainwave sessions (actually not bad, you can visit them here). Smile. Dismissed. But it still made me think.

WHY people always need this “better”, “vs”, competition, “3 reasons why I kick ass and you not”, domination stuff?

OK, times are “hard”, our rotten economic system goes belly up, well deserved, and while some people learn and start working together in communities and neo-”tribes”, others continue to sharpen their elbows and feel an urge to kick everybody else in the teeth even harder than before.

See - there is no competition between brainwave technology and hypnosis. And there is no “better”. They serve different purposes and different kinds of people. And actually the combination of both techniques can be very powerful.

Personal example: I am a very “brainy” person. I know about “spiritual” things and the unknown, I am curious and open - but I am a watcher, a “scientist”. So whenever I work with hypnosis sessions, I have a hard time to actually get into trance. Too many parts of me are listening, analyzing, questioning, having fun when they understand the hypno-tricks and NLP-triggers the hypnotist uses, and so on…

For me it is very helpful to have sessions that already embed brainwave patterns that help you to relax, release the mind chatter, and go into trance. And if I have a great hypno session that comes without waves, I just mix them - e.g. import the hypno session as an audio file into Neuro Programmer, then have NP play supporting brainwaves and stimulating my mind to relax and let go…

So: “combined arms” instead of “friendly fire”. Embrace the hypnotic brainwaves… ;-)

Maybe I should FIRST do Wendi’s “Do it NOW!” hypno-course *lol*. No, just joking, that one is up next after the review series about the “Financial Abundance” sessions.

But actually everything got delayed since I am stuck with the re-design. Kinda Catch 22 - upgraded to current release candidate of Wordpress 2.7, which has odd effects on the themes from themehybrid.com (which I have chosen now instead of the ones from elegantthemes.com), so I have to iron out that first and worst case wait for the WP 2.7 final release, which is due next week. I’ll keep you posted.

I announced it several times, *lol* but now its in the works: mind-reality.com gets a new face. The old design wasn’t actually bad, but not very easy to read for longer articles, and there were some hickups with the recent versions of Wordpress and several of the Wordpress plugins (for the technophobes: Wordpress is the content management system that is used to write, present and manage everything here on the site, “plugins” are additional little programs on the webserver that add special functionality to Wordpress, like picture galleries, newsletter, and so on… And a “theme” is the layout blueprint that determines how the site is displayed, graphics, buttons, fonts… )

I got some very nice themes from elegantthemes.com and will play with them during the next day - so do not be puzzled if the site design changes every couple of minutes and sometimes is broken…

After the new design is up, I have a special for you: I recently got my hands on Wendi Friesen’s “Financial Abundance” course, will work through it, and will take you with me on that journey… take-off next week!

So check back or subscribe to the RSS feed so you do not miss the updates!

This article is not brand new, but I just came across it and thought it might be interesting to some who still doubt the effect of meditation on your physical “thought organ”.

Lazy today and in a rush, so just a full quote.

Meditation Found To Increase Brain Size

BrainPeople who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

“Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice.”

The researchers compared brain scans of 20 experienced meditators with those of 15 nonmeditators. Four of the former taught meditation or yoga, but they were not monks living in seclusion. The rest worked in careers such as law, health care, and journalism. All the participants were white. During scanning, the meditators meditated; the others just relaxed and thought about whatever they wanted.

Meditators did Buddhist “insight meditation,” which focuses on whatever is there, like noise or body sensations. It doesn’t involve “om,” other mantras, or chanting.

“The goal is to pay attention to sensory experience, rather than to your thoughts about the sensory experience,” Lazar explains. “For example, if you suddenly hear a noise, you just listen to it rather than thinking about it. If your leg falls asleep, you just notice the physical sensations. If nothing is there, you pay attention to your breathing.” Successful meditators get used to not thinking or elaborating things in their mind.

Study participants meditated an average of about 40 minutes a day. Some had been doing it for only a year, others for decades. Depth of the meditation was measured by the slowing of breathing rates. Those most deeply involved in the meditation showed the greatest changes in brain structure. “This strongly suggests,” Lazar concludes, “that the differences in brain structure were caused by the meditation, rather than that differences in brain thickness got them into meditation in the first place.”

Lazar took up meditation about 10 years ago and now practices insight meditation about three times a week. At first she was not sure it would work. But “I have definitely experienced beneficial changes,” she says. “It reduces stress [and] increases my clarity of thought and my tolerance for staying focused in difficult situations.”

Controlling random thoughts

Insight meditation can be practiced anytime, anywhere. “People who do it quickly realize that much of what goes on in their heads involves random thoughts that often have little substance,” Lazar comments. “The goal is not so much to ‘empty’ your head, but to not get caught up in random thoughts that pop into consciousness.”

She uses this example: Facing an important deadline, people tend to worry about what will happen if they miss it, or if the end product will be good enough to suit the boss. You can drive yourself crazy with unproductive “what if” worry. “If, instead, you focus on the present moment, on what needs to be done and what is happening right now, then much of the feeling of stress goes away,” Lazar says. “Feelings become less obstructive and more motivational.”

The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch. “These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives,” Lazar notes. “This suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and nonmeditators.”

As small as they are, you can bet those differences are going to lead to lots more studies to find out just what is going on and how meditation might better be used to improve health and well-being, and even slow aging.

More basic questions need to be answered. What causes the increased thickness? Does meditation produce more connections between brain cells, or more blood vessels? How does increased brain thickness influence daily behavior? Does it promote increased communication between intellectual and emotional areas of the brain?

To get answers, larger studies are planned at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard-affiliated facility where Lazar is a research scientist and where these first studies were done. That work included only 20 meditators and their brains were scanned only once.

“The results were very encouraging,” Lazar remarks. “But further research needs to be done using a larger number of people and testing them multiple times. We also need to examine their brains both before and after learning to meditate. Our group is currently planning to do this. Eventually, such research should reveal more about the function of the thickening; that is, how it affects emotions and knowing in terms of both awareness and judgment.”

Slowing aging?

Since this type of meditation counteracts the natural thinning of the thinking surface of the brain, could it play a role in slowing - even reversing - aging? That could really be mind-boggling in the most positive sense.

Lazar is cautious in her answer. “Our data suggest that one small bit of brain appears to have a slower rate of cortical thinning, so meditation may help slow some aspects of cognitive aging,” she agrees. “But it’s important to remember that monks and yogis suffer from the same ailments as the rest of us. They get old and die, too. However, they do claim to enjoy an increased capacity for attention and memory.”

(found on sciencenewsden.com)

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