Imagine us having this meeting at my office in San Diego California. We would be learning together in my office and at the beach. We could expect to see dolphins, pelicans, lots of sun and small white puffy clouds. We would be feeling the warmth of the sun on our skin and the soft coolness of a light breeze flowing by us. Our session would include:

1. Building trust and rapport with each other as our number one goal, (like we are experiencing in the here and now with the ocean and the sky). This total trust and deep relaxation can lead us into successfully individualizing the session, the self- hypnosis approaches and meaningful results to help you in your everyday life.

2. Experiencing trance and suggestion that proves to you that there are significant differences between the awake state and the self-hypnosis state. New learning does evolve from education and especially from new experiences that integrate your own personal imagery. For example, when you are getting in tune with yourself (mind, body, heart and soul–as one), you may be feeling the rise and fall of each breath just as the waves are rolling in and rolling out–endlessly and effortlessly.

3. Empowering you to go deeper into your self-acceptance, self-change and unconscious potentials. Just as you look at the surface of the ocean, you can see beautiful waves forming, gorgeous shades of blue, green and gray, and a constantly moving flow of life back and forth. With this awareness, we also know that there is an abundance of life under the surface; colorful views, deep caves, extraordinary plant-life, big whales and small fish, old ships, and so much more. There’s always  more than the eye can see and usually in the depths of our oceans, we discover the most amazing understandings, perspectives, answers and wisdom that can inspire us on a daily basis.

4. Seeding numerous post-hypnotic suggestions so that everything you learned today starts to generalize into your everyday life. We’ll focus on surface goals, like riding the everyday waves with more ease and comfort. We’ll remember that in our friendships, conversations, self-acceptance, self-change, awareness, openness, freedom, music, dancing and loving; when in doubt, we’ll go deeper. Perseverance, effort, and patience are a few of the post-hypnotic responses you can learn from your self-hypnosis session today.

When you are real with yourself and others, you realize most of us do not know how to utilize our individual abilities. People have problems because their conscious mind has too much control over their lives. The answer is to help them get free of the controlling conscious attitudes and move forward into their unconscious potentials for living well. Wouldn’t it be fortunate if your individuality (and the people you work with) started moving out of your unconscious and the unknown? Encourage the people you are working with to learn to use experiential rather than intellectual knowledge for self-change. Unconscious learning is a basic issue in doing genuine trance work. Most people do not trust their unconscious to do all the learning necessary.

Self-hypnosis helps people go beyond their rigid and learned limitations. The intention is to free yourself from trying to control your life with your conscious mind. You create your approach around methods that allow your conscious mind to  withdraw from the goal and leave it up to your unconscious mind.

To reach this goal of freeing your unconscious potentials from the controls of  the conscious mind, I will be presenting a variety of self-hypnosis techniques. These  approaches are intended to open the doors for deepening trance and self-change.  The purpose is to help bring you more happiness, soul and feelings of wholeness.  Most people accept that we only use about 10 percent of our mind’s capacity. We  also accept that it would be useful to tap into the other 90 percent or at least 10  percent more than usual.

These approaches can help you get to a bridge that connects your innermost  self (unconscious awareness), and your outer most self (conscious awareness). Each  step closer to your own center increases your self-awareness, inner harmony,  positive feelings and compassion.

Indirect approaches for utilizing such unconscious potentials will be demonstrated in this workshop. These methods have been developed over the past  twenty years and originally with the guidance of Dr. Milton Erickson. All suggestions are designed and intended to bypass the person’s ego and limited (conscious) belief  system. Suggestions must be more creative and experiential than familiar ordinary consciousness.

Since the ego and observer function is usually more or less present in self-hypnosis  trance, the person will sometimes refuse to believe he or she was in a trance, and  this belief can limit further improvement. For this reason, we must demonstrate that  self-hypnosis trance is in fact different from the ordinary waking state. When you are  teaching self-hypnosis, have people explore all the differences in their sensory,  motor, and conceptual behavior between the trance and awake state.

Indicators of Self-Hypnosis Trance Development

Comfort and relaxation Eye changes and closure
Economy of movement Softening of facial features Feeling
Lack of startle response
Sensory, muscular and body changes
Slowing pulse
Slowing respiration
Time distortion
Unconsciousness and spontaneous imagery
Unconscious expressions and responses
(experienced as taking place all by themselves)

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