When we “solidify” verbs, when we freeze processes through our use of language, we inevitably create a propensity for misunderstanding. In order to minimise that, I will spend a little time explaining what “Spiritual Development” means to me, and how I use the term.
I have a number of suspicions about the nature of the world. I suspect that what we understand as “life” and “intelligence” are in fact manifestations of causal feedback loops in the inter-related systems that make up manifest reality. As human beings, we are individually each just one such system within the inter-related systems.
I suspect that identity and individuality are the result of perseverance of such systems. So I am “I” by virtue of the perseverance of a pattern of relationships. The metaphor I often use is that of an eddy of water, a swirl in a stream that arises, persists and then passes.
It is my experience that this sense of identity can, at times and under certain conditions, be transcended. That, just as the swirl of water has its own identity for the duration of its existence, it is also part of the stream itself. And the stream too is part of the greater ecosystem of the water cycle. And that, too….
I also very strongly suspect that when we are congruent not just within ourselves (often regarded as a desirable goal in personal development) but with the greater ecosystems of which we are part, then what seems like magic can happen.
Trance states have been part of spiritual systems since time immemorial. It appears that there are certain ways of knowing and certain ways of experiencing the world that are only accessible in other-than-mundane-waking-consciousness states. One of these ways of knowing and experiencing is the experience of being that transcendent intelligence of which the individual is a manifest part.
There are many schools of thought and spiritual development training these days that teach a range of techniques that aim to achieve these trans-personal states. Interestingly, an awful lot of them teach these techniques on the back of a form of “intentional manifestation” or “law of attraction”, but if you approach the study of the different traditions of spiritual development with any seriousness it is plain that they all teach a form of “surrender”, that one does not carry the petty concerns of one’s ego into these trans-personal states but that the true congruence comes from manifesting the trans-personal in one’s mundane life. The eddy in the stream goes where it does because it has no concept of being other than a pattern in the stream.
In self hypnosis, I find a route to experiencing altered states of consciousness more rapidly than I ever did through my years of learning different meditation techniques. I have also found that I have far more control over the outcome (I know that might sound like a contradiction with respect to my earlier comments about surrender, but bear with me. Surrender is a desirable goal within the context of certain mainstream mystical traditions. Me, I prefer my current status of explorer and psychonaut). By approaching different self hypnosis techniques and altering certain aspects of them in relation to how I experience the stimuli I use to induce trance, I am able to effect subtle nuances in the states induced.
One such example of the sort of experiment one can develop in this field produced my trance session Receiving The Wisdom Of The Guru Self, in which the Guru Self refers to a future self that has acquired a wisdom from the experience of these trans-personal states and is able to pass that back through time to the present self. I wrote about the strategy here.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 05.31.2010 at 3:49 pm// Tagged: Spiritual Development //
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There are hypnotherapists who are certain that hypnosis can transport you back to a past life, that by using hypnosis to regress the subject back through time to the time of their birth and before, that the subject can be aided in recalling events from lives before this one. I have to hold my hand up and say I don’t know what to think on the subject of past lives. I have had experiences and people I know report experiences that give the concept credibility. One clinical psychologist I know had an experience with a client, utterly spontaneous, of xenoglossia (the experience of being able to speak or write a language one could not have acquired by natural means). His client, during regression, started to speak in a foriegn language which on analysis (the recordings of the session were sent with the clients consent to an expert in languages) turned out to be an obscure dialect of ancient Aramaic. My colleague further claims that the subject complained of being able to partially read signs in Hebrew when they appeared on the news.
My own experiences are a little more prosaic. My daughter went through a period when she was very young (maybe 4) of talking about her “other” family, the one she had “before”. This family had clear consistent structure, and she reported familial relationships and experiences that she had had no direct experience of in this life. Then one morning, they disappeared and she had no recollection of even talking to us about them. I myself have the ghost of memories of events not experienced in this life. But any self respecting hypnotist must recognise that memory is a very fragile thing. Even without the influence of hypnotic suggestion it is incredibly fragile and constantly undergoing revision. Witness the disagreements we may have with close family members about how events occurred, or the need for investigators who interview witnesses to be specially trained in “clean” interview techniques so that the questions they ask and the way in which they ask them do not contaminate the witnesses recollection.
It is often thought that hypnosis aids in the accurate recollection of events. In and of itself, it doesn’t. Hypnosis can increase the confidence and vividness with which one recalls events both accurately and inaccurately. It is even perfectly possible to construct utterly fictional memories and give them the full plausibility of real ones. Many things can act to create a false memory. Sometimes, simply being told something by an authority one trusts is enough to create the certainty that it happened. False memories are all too easy to create. In fact, in NLP it can be done deliberately in order to create a set of internal resources rooted in the experience of memory that can be drawn upon in future (although in my experience such deliberately constructed memories have a “half real” quality about them so they can be distinguished from historical events yet still act more effective resources than pure imagination, for ethical reasons).
Hypnosis can assist in the recollection events, but only if the hypnotist is trained in “clean” interview techniques for the same reasons police investigators have to be careful not to contaminate.
Given all of this, I personally have to adopt a pragmatic approach to past life regression under hypnosis. I cannot be certain that my memories of this life are an accurate representation of the events I remember. In fact I can be pretty certain that they are not. So to regard any regressed memories as evidence of a past life requires me to be very cautious. While the experience of xenoglossia and my daughter’s descriptions of her “other” family add some plausibility, I cannot say that memories “recovered” under hypnosis of a past life provide any meaningful evidence for a past life or re-incarnation.
I *can* say, however, that by working through the metaphor of the narrative that the experience of past life regression creates, we are very often able to work through issues, problems and blocks in this life. A past life memory has the impact of being a memory, rather than a guided visualisation. One is engaged with the recollection of the experience in a far more direct way. It is certainly highly plausible that one of the reasons for the effectiveness of past life regression is that the resources generated through the process, such as resolving grief or phobic issues, are far more personal and are thus internalised in a far more integrated way making them more readily available to draw on.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 05.16.2010 at 9:11 pm// Tagged: Hypnosis , Hypnosis, Memory, Metaphor, Past Life Regression, Reincarnation, Self-Hypnosis, Time Lines //
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I promised some thoughts on how the way in which we use language everyday can generate new possibilities for all of us, our selves and those we interact with. I’m going to start by thinking about how language can be used to link two sets of suppositions.
Think of the linked statements
I would like to play guitar. I can’t play guitar.
These two statements take us from a state of desire to a condition of negation… I would like to/I want ->I can’t.
Try reversing the sequence.
I can’t play guitar. I would like to play guitar.
and noticing how that feels compared to the first statement, moving from a closed condition (negative capability) to an open one (desire to acquire ability).
Try out the following statements and see how they create different experiences.
I would like to have more money. I don’t have enough money.
I don’t have enough money. I would like to have more money.
I would like to be OK with spiders. I am scared of spiders.
I am scared of spiders. I would like to be OK with spiders.
Come up with a few of your own. When phrasing the open statement, phrase it in the positive (notice that the phrase sequence “I am scared of spiders. I don’t want to be scared of spiders.” is quite different in effect to “I am scared of spiders. I would like to be OK with spiders.”)
Pay attention to your own self talk. Do you tend to finish you statements focused on the negative capability (“I can’t) or on the condition you would aim to achieve? Think about the things in your live that occupy your thoughts and proceed to write a few statement pairs for them as above, noticing how each one can offer possibilities of growth and expansion of phrased in the desired direction.
If you notice, each of these statement pairs is a reframe from a negative statement (can’t, scared, don’t) to an open desire positive statement (would like to, want to). So these patterns of reframing can also be used effectively in talking with others. A statement such as “I don’t feel good about myself” can be met (embedded in the larger response) with a reframe “and you would like to be able to feel better about yourself”.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 05.14.2010 at 6:52 pm// Tagged: Personal Development , Affirmation, Language Patterns, Limiting Belief, NLP //
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There is always much focus of interest among people interested in NLP and hypnosis in this idea of “conversational hypnosis”, sometimes referred of as “covert hypnosis”. Partly based in the model that all communication is hypnosis, and partly a structured communication model in its own right, it effectively consists of ways of restructuring the subject’s internal resources through the use of language in a systematic fashion.
While interesting, I have a real difficulty with the concept. It is primarily a moral objection. I am decidedly uncomfortable with the idea a systematic approach be brought to bear on an unknowing subject in order to lead them into specific states which are in most cases intended to benefit the manipulator. By far the most common area in which people encounter these “covert” techniques is in the field of speed seduction, a field that is largely marketed (in my opinion) to people with emotional insecurities on the promise of one sided sexual gratification. There was always something about the marketing approach of the Speed Seduction courses and their variants that made me think of the adverts for X-ray glasses (“See naked girls!“) in the back of comics in the 60s, next to the “HypnoCoin” :-).
That is not to say though that I don’t believe that we should study and understand the ways in which language influence people… I think that if we start from a different position, a more altruistic position, we can learn far more interesting things about communication that can impact upon those around us in constructive ways. Think of each and every communication as an opportunity to create new possibilities
What if we view language has having the potential to open up resources, opportunities to bring resources together in new ways, that are lead not by someone with an agenda, but by the other-than-conscious intelligence of the parties involved?
To that end, I will be spending the next few blog entries exploring how this might make sense… exploring how we can think of language as a possibilities creator, a new resource generator.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 05.03.2010 at 10:21 am// Tagged: Hypnosis , Belief Change, Creativity, Ecology, NLP, Personal Development //
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Very often in NLP or hypnotherapy, approaches focus on “parts”… “parts” integration, getting one “part” of ourselves to communicate with another. It’s a metaphor I employ myself, but it is one I think we have to be very careful of and not allow it to develop potentially toxic overtones. The danger with a “parts” model is that it can suggest that one can work on a part in isolation and then integrate those changes in a two step process. But when we consider what these parts of us we are referring to are, that is patently not the case. A “part” in this sense is a nominalisation, a process made into a noun, something that is in reality experienced as dynamic and always in relationship changed by a process of language into something fixed and static. The conscious self, the part of me that feels hurt etc.
I find it far more useful to start from the principle that the mind and body are ONE system. Change *any* part of the system and you change the WHOLE system. We all ecological systems participating in a larger ecological system. As a part of us changes, we change. As we change, the world around us changes. Instantly. Without “integration” or facilitating communication.
The trick, I think, is in trusting in the integral intelligence of that system (something more than “that part of me which processes data cognitively”, a holistic quality of innate intelligence) to lead that change, to manifest its own “evolution”. And that requires getting those “parts” that seem to have become regarded as having autonomous authority (that part of me that is self-aware and identifies as “I”) to simply get out of the way and allow the process to happen.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 04.29.2010 at 5:19 pm// Tagged: Personal Development , Ecology, Metaphor, NLP, Parts Integration, Therapy //
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There is a lot of hype and a lot of critique out there related to the “Law of Attraction”. Now, I am a pragmatist. I am not so arrogant as to claim direct mystical connection with an understanding of how the universe works (I have strong suspicions and a willingness to play, but certainties, no :-) ), though conversely the same position prevents me from taking a categorical stance on whether a Law of Attraction in the sense of “sympathetic vibration” or some other metaphysical mechanism does or does not exist. What I do know is that there really is something that I will call “The Law of Attention”.
The Law of Attention. You will get more in your life of whatever your attention is directed towards.
In its simplest form it can be seen manifesting in the difference between pessimism and optimism. The person whose glass is always half full, who notices the abundance in their life, receives blessings from an abundant universe. The person whose glass is half empty lives in a povertised world, where there is never enough of anything.
In reality, we all far more complex than that. We behave as we if we have complex, multiple and often mutually contradictory motivations, so our attention is pulled in many directions like a chariot being pulled by 25 horses all pulling in different directions. We may be so used to attending to poverty we no longer see that is what we doing. So a drive to create wealth that is motivated by a need to escape a past of poorness and poverty can result in attention being strongly focused on lack. Even if successful in accumulating wealth, this permanent fixation on lack and poverty denies one a perspective on what the potential of what true wealth can be, the wealth of opportunity as opposed to the simple accumulation of coins.
We can train ourselves in attraction by training ourselves in attention. The ability to attend and to direct that attention is one of the great gifts that make us human, that truly enables us to create and co-create the world we live in.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 04.28.2010 at 12:58 pm// Tagged: Personal Development , Abundance, Attention, Law of Attraction, NLP, Personal Development //
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I’ve noticed over the years how so much in the personal development industry is productivity driven. Making your first million, getting the best grades, getting that place in a good university. And I get that, I really do. Dreams, aspirations, its what it is all about. But I can’t help but get the feeling that all the goal setting and achievement programmes miss one slight point. That it is the quality of our life that matters, not the quantity.
One can be so busy focused on achievement that time and attention that could be spent on those things that really make your life worth living get missed. Getting, gaining, acquiring, all seem very much “driven” activities. Me, I like “attraction” activities. I like to move toward stuff that looks good rather than feel compelled to move away from stuff that feels bad.
Think Maslow for a minute. If you don’t know Maslow’s work, among other things he is the progenitor of the idea that we have hierarchies of motivation. So we are motivated to meet our physiological needs before we are in a position to turn our attention to our safety needs (see diagram below) and our safety needs before we can bring attention to bear on meeting our love and belongingness needs, and so on. Most of us (and particularly those of us who have an interest in personal development) are privileged enough to have be in the position of being able to pretty much deal with our safety needs and turn attention to love and belonging, esteem and even self actualisation.
But wealth generation for its own sake is an activity geared to meeting security needs. And I suppose a Ferrari might be nice (people tell me they are worth aspiring to), but I don’t really get why or how :-) I have a friend who for years carried a picture of his dream home (dream home? Surely there are much more exciting things to dream about). I work closely with this friend on a couple of business projects. He recently moved to a home abroad that exceeded his expectations, but as I work with him, he still gets as stressed, is still as driven by the need for acquisition than he was before. Achieving the dream has not made him happier nor has it given him any real, tangible improvement to the quality of his life.
As far as I am concerned, once my survival and security are reasonably taken care of, the rest should be fun!! I don’t need to make a million pounds to show on a bank statement in a universe that I experience as being abundant. I would rather spend it as it comes in, seeing money as a transaction that needs to be in flow to produce change. I don’t have to outsmart a competitor. I would rather spend my time finding creative ways of working collaboratively.
Personal development, self improvement, is (in my book) about becoming. Becoming a better person, not a faster one, or a more effective salesperson. A better person. One who can care about himself and those around him increasingly effectively. Who can communicate in ways that open up possibilities for people that they hadn’t seen before and who has fun along the route to trying to make this a better world for all of us.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 04.24.2010 at 11:20 pm// Tagged: Personal Development , Abundance, Creativity, Personal Development //
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OK, I promised you a few ideas around the concept of building trance states as a form of “glamour” in the early sense of the word, a charm used to influence the perceptions of those around you :-)
We are going to look at three stages of creating such a state. The first is trance induction. What sort of trance is going to be useful to us in this process? The second is metaphor. As we are going to be establishing a “charisma” trance, I am going to use the metaphor of an energy field, an “aura” (and there is no need to worry about whether this is or is not a metaphor. For the purposes of this exercise, it is a metaphor and being a metaphor does not exclude the possibility of being something else entirely :-) ). The final stage is going to be the creation of an anchor. An anchor is simply a sensory stimulus that can be used to access the trance state we are building, thus by passing the need to construct it from scratch every time. Think of it as a post hypnotic suggestion.
So, trance, metaphor, anchor. Given that the work we will be doing involves working with a metaphor, and that we want to produce a state within which we can function readily without breaking the state, I would suggest we are looking to weave a light, relaxed state suitable for meditative work. I personally find the Betty Erickson Self Hypnotic Induction excellent for this sort of purpose, as it combines elements of focusing on external and internal stimuli as part of the induction. As well as the article on this blog, I also have a short training mp3 available to registered subscribers over on the main HypnosisAudioCDs site. However, feel free to explore whatever induction methods you choose. We are at play here :-)
So, having sat comfortably and induced our trance state, we can start to work with the metaphor of our energy field. Imagine, in what ever way suits you based, that you are surrounded by an egg shaped glow, extending a couple of feet from your body. If you don’t get a sense of imagining seeing it, that’s OK, imagine being aware of how it feels, how it feels to have you “self” extended beyond the surface of the body in this way. Imagine what it might sound like… does it vibrate? What colour is it? Start to explore the metaphor through every sense available to you, how it would look, how it would feel…
As you do that, start to notice how it can be made to gently pulsate in time with your breathing. As you breath in it can expand and brighten, intensify… as you breathe out it gently contracts, to a size still larger than its previous contracted sense but just as intense… so with each breathe it gets stronger, brighter, more “tangible”, and extends further and further from your body, until your bright powerful energy field just fills the room and dazzles.
Once you feel that you are happy with this new field, you can imagine that over your shoulders you have a cloak. As you reach round and remove the cloak, the extra intensity of this field just enfolds itself into the cloak, which now fair hums with a quiet intensity all of its own. And when you reach round and unfurl the cloak over your shoulders again, the field itself unfurls and instantly fills the room with the same dazzling intensity.
Go on. Have a play :-)
Posted by Adam Sargant on 04.23.2010 at 7:13 pm// Tagged: Hypnosis , Autosuggestion, Metaphor, Self-Hypnosis, Trance //
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So… come sit for a spell :-)
Those of you who know me know that I have a more than passing interest in story rooted in tradition, the tales passed down, shapeshifting through each retelling to each generation. Some of these yarns weave worlds of magic, faery and glamour. We talk of glamour now in the sense of something that adds sparkle and attraction but that is often regarded as superficial. The glamour of the old stories was something altogether more enchanting, a spell woven to alter the subjects’ perceptions in some way, often to make someone appear more attractive. It was only in the 19th century that a “non-magical” item used to enhance appearance and make one more attractive came to be known as “a glamour”, and gradually the term came to its modern usage.
The disguise adopted by Pwyll and Arawn during their period of swapping appearance in the first branch of the medieval Welsh tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi would appear to be an example of this kind of glamour, which was with Arawn’s power to cast as King of the Underworld. In that particular case the spell was potent enough to convince all who knew them best for a year and a day, but mythological literature the world over is full of tales of spells designed to increase attractiveness and charm.
What if I was to suggest to you that such abilities are not only feasible, but real, practical and achievable on a regular basis?
We all know people who’s simple entry into a room has everyone turning their head… if forced to think about the person objectively, we might very well say that they don’t always meet the usual criteria for physical attractiveness… but our eyes don’t seem to be sending *that* message to the brain, and nor do anyone else’s. A presence, a sparkle, a sense of electric charge in the air as they weave their way through a crowd yet managing to stay the centre.
Or you want to wear the mythical cloak of invisibility. To be able to sit in a room without drawing attention to yourself, your presence only a subliminal event in everyone’s awareness.
If we think about the sort of people that exemplify both ends of that spectrum, they both have very particular ways of being in the world. Both are particular styles of trance that we can emulate and learn to play with at will.
In the next few days I will introduce a few ideas around techniques that can be used to design such trance states. Until then, weave worlds of magic within which to play. :-)
Posted by Adam Sargant on 04.21.2010 at 8:51 pm// Tagged: Personal Development , Autosuggestion, Personal Development, Self-Hypnosis, Story, Trance //
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The following are tips that have been tweeted out via my Twitter account @trance-forms. I find Twitter communication interesting, in that there is a very specific challenge in condensing ones thoughts into 140 characters that focuses the mind in very specific ways and I thought it worth having written the tips to then turn them into a short blog post where I expand on each one briefly.
Hypnosis is communication… all communication directs attention in one way or another.
It has been said that there is no such thing as hypnosis, that all communication is hypnosis, and there is a valuable truth in this. A significant part of accessing states (including trance states) involves the redirection of attention, and that is precisely what communication is. A tool for redirecting attention and shaping events in people’s minds.
It doesn’t matter if the communication is directed at another, or if it is internal. Self-hypnosis is a method of communicating with oneself to produce useful trance states.
With *practice* you can enter deeply healing, relaxing trance states very quickly
First, a facility at self-hypnosis is one that is improved with regular practice. It is also worth utilising different trance methods… various self-hypnosis approaches, different styles of meditation and so on. Each method produces variations of the trance state and help you to recognise the subtler nuances of such states.
With practice comes speed… it is possible to induce trance states very quickly indeed, in a matter of seconds.
Self-hypnosis helps in maintaining a healthy, balanced mind, stimulating creativity and promoting valuable insight
One thing common to most states of self induced trance is a controlled state of dissociation, of detachment from external sensory stimuli (I say most because there are techniques that involve focusing very specifically on external stimuli, but even they tend to result in dissociation from all other stimuli). The advantages of engaging with this detached state *in a controlled way* are that it can provide a sense of space, of freedom from the external demands of the world, that enables you to allow things to take on a new and resourceful perspective.
Hypnosis gives us incredible opportunities for generative change, for making our lives better beyond just “fixing” things
Most people think of hypnosis and trance in the context of therapy, what I would refer to as remedial change, “fixing” things perceived to be broken. That is probably the context in which most people are introduced to trance work.
If change is possible, however, how much more interesting would it be to take something that isn’t “broken” and make it better? If you could be more creative? More observant? More curious?
In trance one can access and harness aspects of self that are involved in deeply creative behaviours
You know the old adage about “going to sleep on it”? It works. Your creative mental processes operate at a level far deeper than the conscious. I frequently wake with solutions to often complex problems in my awareness fully formed. The dissociated states associated with trance allow one to put the ego to bed as it were, if only for a short time. Trance can allow the other-than-conscious aspects of self to work in their own way, which is very much more metaphorical and associative, forming and reforming patterns of experience.
Posted by Adam Sargant on 04.20.2010 at 1:54 pm// Tagged: Hypnosis , Autosuggestion, Personal Development, Self-Hypnosis, State Management, Trance //
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