Hypnosis for Beginners Dylan Morgan
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Hypnosis for Beginners Dylan Morgan Eildon Press THIS ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK for those who prefer a traditional book that they can read anywhere. You can find it via your bookseller or Booksort.com or myself. This is an enlarged version of the well-received first edition, nearly twice the length (73,000 words). Perhaps the most sought-after new material is a chapter on self- hypnosis. The first edition is still available here . NOTE: The contents of each chapter are summarised in the Chapter Headings. INTRODUCTION THIS BOOK, as the title suggests, is aimed at beginners and people who do not believe in things without good evidence. (I am one myself.) The best evidence is something that you can check yourself. This book gives a large number of things that you can do, starting from scratch, and also helps you to make sense of what you will find. It is perhaps ideally suited to students on a course in hypnotherapy who have an active interest in using hypnosis later in helping people. It will be of great interest to students of psychology as it will teach them a lot about the way that people's minds and bodies work from a slightly more practical angle than is common in textbooks. It should interest anyone who is motivated to have a more-than-average understanding of people - themselves and others - and of the ways they can be affected. It will also interest those who wish to use some of that knowledge to help themselves through self-hypnosis. It might also be of value to those who are already using hypnosis because it has a fresh approach to the whole subject. There are many hundreds of books that will tell you what to do. This book is pretty much alone in giving an understanding of what you are doing It is quite practical, with many suggestions for things that you can do. (Though any particular reader is likely only to attempt a proportion of them.) But there are a number of things that you will not find in the book. It is not a history of hypnosis or hypnotism: the best source for that is probably Alan Gauld's book The History of Hypnotism . It does not teach hypno therapy (clinical hypnosis) - though it is a very useful grounding in basic techniques. If it is at all possible, you should attend a proper school, of which there are many these days (in the UK at least), to learn hypnotherapy. But for a deep understanding of hypnotherapy I have written the more theoretical Principles of Hypnotherapy (Eildon Press 1996). It is not a primer in stage hypnosis. I am uneasy about the use of hypnosis on stage, where it seems to me that it is used to make people behave in a less-than-human way. It is not simply a rehash of earlier books on hypnosis. It is a fresh approach which offers insights that you will not get elsewhere. The book is based on a few simple principles. One is that hypnosis does not exist in some little isolated world of its own, somehow detached from all other human behaviour and experience. Stage hypnotists have a vested interest in making it appear so, for it then makes their performances more wonderful. But an unfortunate side- effect is that it cuts hypnosis off from millions of normal people. I hope to reach others who, like myself, have a healthy scepticism of things that stand far away from their normal experience and which do not have a clear explanation. You will therefore find that at very many points in the book I link hypnotic phenomena to our daily experience of related things. I would hope that the reader who starts this book with an openly sceptical attitude to the whole subject will end it thinking, "Well, I can now see what it is all about. It is not that different from things I have met in life. I can now see that it is just a matter of taking some of those things and working with them skillfully. Wish I had the time to learn the skills." My next principle is that I do not want you to take anything I or anyone else says on trust. I want you, as far as possible, to check things out for yourself. To my mind the fact that this is possible makes hypnosis a wonderful field of interest. If I am learning almost any other subject I have to accept the facts and opinions given me by other people 99.9% of the time. In this field you do not need any expensive equipment to check things out for yourself. You do not need to spend hours in the library mugging up on what all the authorities have said down the centuries. All you need are some people - friends or family or colleagues or fellow-students - who will give you some of their time and you can find things out for yourself. Since other people are nearly always the most interesting other objects in the universe, as well as being pretty common, you will find yourself doing the most fascinating of things. Because of this emphasis on finding things out for yourself this book is filled with ideas of things to try, each taking between a few minutes and perhaps half an hour. Some of them you can do by yourself - your brain is just as good as anyone else's for this purpose - others, of their nature, need a second person. In some cases you can, with a little ingenuity, be both people by using a tape recorder. You can at one time record in your own voice the part of one person and later play it back to yourself in the part of the second person. But on the whole most of the book will be more interesting if shared with at least one other person. Those readers who are using this book as part of course on hypnosis will have the advantage of large numbers of interested fellow-students to work with. They will very easily be able to verify conclusions of mine regarding the wide variation in responses from different people. The third principle around which the book is constructed is the only element that I am taking from established science. It is that the brain and nervous system are organised into complex subsystems. One system deals with movement, one with vision, one with sexual activity and so on. Each system commonly has subsystems. Thus the part of the brain that deals with sensations from the body has separate areas to deal with sensations from the tongue, sensations from the hands, and so on. I regard this general principle as non-controversial, though I have not, of course, been able myself to check all the century or so of research which has gone into arriving at this conclusion. But I find that if I start with this simple idea then it makes it possible to structure all that I find in hypnosis in a very natural and satisfactory way. You will find out if it also does this for you. It might seem natural to start this book with a definition of hypnosis, but I think it is better to leave it until the final chapter. By then the reader should have acquired a good idea of what the definition means. top Chapter 1. Simple Connections. Summary: We explore some basic facts about the way in which the brain and body work. Specifically the reader is encouraged to discover by actual experience how words and images can activate other systems in the brain which relate to feelings, muscles, senses, sense of balance, etc.. These are compared with "tests of hypnotisability" and "hypnotic inductions". They are also linked to our common experience of learning a variety of other things. ENTERTAINMENT hypnotists love to make hypnosis look dark and mysterious and complicated. They love to pretend that they have special powers that no-one else possesses. I love to make things bright and clear and open, and I do not claim any special powers. Throughout the book, starting a few paragraphs ahead, I am going to ask you to try out various things and to think about them. These things are simple and everyday, and will turn out to be not at all mysterious, and yet they are a foundation on which much of hypnosis is built . We understand new things best by relating them to familiar things. We understand complicated things by relating them to simpler things. This chapter contains simple and relatively familiar things. In later chapters the understanding of this chapter will lead on to a deeper understanding of hypnosis. We also learn best by doing . So this book is full of things to do . If some of them seem to you to be rather elementary things, it is worth remembering that on most courses that teach worthwhile things you have to start with some very elementary things.A mathematics course may start with simple addition. A dressmaking class may start with just a series of simple stitches. A football course may start with some simple fitness exercises and so on. But if you master these elementary skills then you are in a position to do very much more complex and worthwhile things. Words can trigger pictures in your mind. This must seem a pretty obvious fact. You need only think of reading a novel, and remember the pictures that come to mind as you do so, to confirm it to yourself.