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The Art of Creation
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| Live more of your life with Self-Hypnosis |
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| Relaxing for a Self-hypnotic session |
| Physical and mental relaxation is the key to beginning a session of Self-hypnosis, at least in the learning stages. Following are some techniques that I, and others who have tried them with me, have found to be highly effective at inducing a relaxed state. Through my experience I have found that emphasis on physical relaxation is more conducive to a relaxed state of body and mind. If you already have a form of relaxation that you practice then you may wish to use that system. There is no absolute system of relaxation that works more effectively for Self-hypnosis, only what works well for the individual. So in order of preference and therefore perhaps effectiveness I offer the following techniques: Technique 1, Dropping one's weight underside Either lying or sitting down imagine that your body's weight is falling underneath yourself, under your bed, chair or through the floor on which you sit or lay. Imagine yourself underneath your physical Self, imagining that you are the sum total or your body's weight. Just imagine yourself either laying underneath your bed, underneath your chair or sunken under the floor. (A relatively few people find that they cannot imagine this because they have concerns nagging away in their mind when imagining themselves laying in the ground beneath them. If you find this is the case, then just imagine your body weight resting heavily in your hips if you are sitting or that all your weight has fallen to your side or back if lying down.) It is important not to make this a concentrated effort and just casually imagine in a light way. The idea is to induce a state where one will experience Mind Drift, a sort of uncontrolled daydreaming where images and thoughts flow through one's mind without too much direction from one's Self. I have found this technique to be one of the most effective to Self-hypnotic induction both for myself and others, for what I surmise to be the following reasons; i. This technique takes one's attention away from the physical Self and therefore reduces the stress of wondering whether one's body is relaxed enough (eventually relaxation will not be so necessary for Self-Hypnosis). This reduces tension in itself. ii. The technique itself is an autosuggestion of relaxation using a powerful tool of autosuggestion, imagery and imagination. Technique 2, Expanding and contracting shapes Also an effective technique is to close one's eyes and imagine an opaque shape, like a solid white square or circle, in the mind's eye and watch it expand and contract slowly in front of you. You could imagine a white square and then see it float away in front of you and become smaller and smaller until it is merely a pinhead, then imagine it getting bigger until it completely fills your ambit of vision and all you see is white everywhere. Then repeat the process. This is a more mind oriented technique but is equally effective as that above. The reason why this technique seems so effective may be that it simulates the drifting in-and-out feeling one gets before falling to sleep, an auto-suggestion perhaps? Also black and white may be good colours to use as the first imagery experienced when drifting into sleep is black and white, apparently. I personally haven't experienced the loss of colour before sleep though. Technique 3, The white dot technique With your eyes closed, imagine a white dot between your eyes or brow, maybe some distance away, and allowing your attention to linger upon it gently, let other images and thoughts to float past whilst only paying them the slightest attention. This technique allows one to practice the art of detachment, in terms of not attaching one's attention to the everyday mind drift in our minds allowing us to relax. A great deal of tension can be created by our own thoughts, imagining situtations which cause our bodies to tense up and so on. If we practice detaching our attention from these thoughts then relaxation must inevitably be the result. I found this technique works well with an autosuggestion such as repeating to oneself every now and then a phrase like "gently touching" or "observing the mind from a quiet place". Gently touching relates to how we treat the white dot itself, by gently focussing upon it and even more so on drifting thoughts and images. I find this technique to a fairly good one. Technique 4, Autosuggesting relaxation A more conventional autosuggestive technique to relaxation is repeating a phrase like, "Relaxing deeper, deeper and deeper". Although I find this particular autosuggestion more conducive to sleep than relaxed awareness, any suggestion along similar themes may well serve someone else quite well. You may want to repeat the phrase in one's mind when exhaling only or repeat it randomly. Technique 5, Imagining a natural scene This technique is simple. Just imagine oneself in a natural scene like a deserted island, a meadow, by the beach, on a mountain or whatever. I have found on occasions that this imagery mixed with autosuggestion can be quite effective. Although my mind is too active for this to work by itself. Other techniques which I found didn't work as well for me personally but which I will include for one's own experimental purposes are: 1. Imagining you are walking down a flight of stairs into your mind or into a meadow from the sky. 2. Counting backwards from 100 to zero until you reach a deep state. 3. Catching an elevator into a deeper state. and so on....You could probably find any number of techniques yourself. |
| Create a Space for Self-Hypnosis |
| More than just creating a space in your bedroom or lounge room, you will create a "space" in your mind for carrying out various techniques in autohypnosis. Once you have relaxed into a dreamy state of mind, using one of the techniques above maybe, imagine in front of you a door, with the title "Hypnotic Workshop" on it either engraved or on a gold plaque etc. This will be the door that you will use to enter and leave the room that you will create in your mind. Open the door slowly into an empty room with nothing in it except perhaps light. (You may find that as you open the door a room is already set up for you, though not essential, you may choose to go with this set up or recreate a room from scratch and do the following). Expand the walls, either by physically, in your minds eye, pushing the walls out to the size you want or just imaging them opening to the size you want. You may also push or imagine the ceiling to be higher or lower. The room may be square, circular and the ceiling may be dome like, flat, etc. Decide where you want the following features of the room to be, if indeed you want them at all: Windows - what type of windows, stained glass, lead, large, small, round, square, triangle. Do they open or close? What can you see out of them, a garden, beach, forest, etc. Do they let alot of light in, or do you want to put lights in the room? Furniture - Chairs, desk, lounge, meeting table, coat hangers, bookshelves (with books?). Other items - Computer, typewriter, pictures hanging on walls, an alcove with flowers in, crystal ball, stereo unit, gymset (see additional rooms at end), telescope...The list is endless. Compulsory Item - The one item that I would consider compulsory is that one wall of your room have a cinema screen or projector screen on it. With this screen you will be doing most of your work. In front of my screen I have a silver chair that hovers above the ground, with a high back, in a teardrop shape. I sit in this chair when I want to do some work with the Screen. On the right arm of the chair is a small, thin joystick which I use to zoom in or out of the picture for close ups or far away shots. On the left is a joystick for focussing, lighting of the picture and forward and reverse. Pretty much like a video recorder crossed with a computer graphics program. I recommend that your screen have a form of light around the outside, either a phosphourous white light, or golden light, though I guess if you are into neon lighting you may choose neon tube lighting. The idea behind the light is to create a symbol around the screen, and therefore the images you project onto the screen, of the expectation of positive results to manifest from the images one projects. (We'll practice some visualisation exercises next). Additional Rooms - Additional rooms that can be attached to your hypnotic workshop via another door or by a walkway outside in a garden etc, can be a gymnasium, where you can practice weights exercises and any weight and rate you want. A martial arts room, Dojo, Dojang etc where you may imagine mats and a training partner, this you could use maybe to practice techniques in slow motion and even freeze frame yourself to examine a move and perfect its execution etc. I personally use an inner dojo for this reason. An art studio, to practice techniques of art that you may not have practiced, or to study and perfect a print, painting, sculpture etc that you are working on. If you are into surfing or waterskiing you may have a perfect pool or stretch of water outside to practice in, it doesn't necessarily have to be a room. |
| A few visualisation exercises to help your visualisation |
| Once you have built your workshop, you can project images onto the screen you have created. Following are some exercises that will help improve your visualisation of images and control over images. 1. Imagine a simple object on the screen, maybe an orange, a tennis ball, a flower. Once you have an image (It doesn't have to be TV picture quality, even an indistinct image is an image, we'll work on focussing later) either using a joystick, turing knob, button or whatever, imagine the object slowly getting smaller and smaller until it is just visible as a point on the screen. Next imagine the object slowly getting bigger and bigger until it fills the entire screen and keep going until you can see even the most tiniest details, eg, the pock marks on the orange, the fine fur fibres on the tennis ball, the ridges on the petals of a flower. Practice doing this for a couple of minutes or twenty times, and then rest. This exercise is good for when one wants to say, see an object in its surroundings or if one wants to see a large object but wants to reduce its size. Try this exercise with a mouse and then an elephant. 2. Erasing images you don't want. Occasionally you will find, either through your own preoccupation with something or through mind drift, that other images may want to get in the way of what you want to visualise. First ask yourself whether the images that arise have any significance to what you are doing? Don't make a philosophical discussion about it, the answer is either yes or no. If the image is more of a nuisance then there are a few techniques that can be used to erase the image. i. Imagine a big red or black cross over the image, like the ones you would use to mark something as wrong. Once you have done this, the image is erased and you can continue with what you are doing. ii. For a persistant image, you can imagine a black cross over the image and then see each triangle section of the image floating apart or away into the distance, never to return. iii. You could imagine a grid over the image and see all the square sections float apart or see cubes floating away into the distance. iv. Scribble over it, tear it up and chuck it into a bin, like the Recycle bin you see on a Windows desktop. If the image is still persisting, then you yourself maybe causing the problem with a preoccupation upon actually getting rid of the image rather than imagining what you wanted to imagine in the first place. I've done it, so theoretically anyone can. It is then a case of calling upon the wrong image and a misguiding of attention. 3. Seeing the image. If you are having problems creating the image you want, try actually creating a grid of blank, white squares to begin with, and concentrating on each square, put a little piece of the image together one at a time. Like a jigsaw puzzle. Eventually you will have the whole picture available to look at. Also instead of a grid you may just want to add square pieces of the image to the screen one at a time, starting from one corner and moving left to right, right to left or top to bottom (depending on the direction you read) until the whole image is presented. |
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