Hocus Pocus & Hypnosis

Have you ever been to one of those hypnotism shows where they pull people up on stage and make them do outrageous things? I’ve always found hypnotism quite mysterious and intriguing and started to really believe there was something to it when my rather reserved friend was pulled on stage at a show and did foul things to a phallic lollipop in front of a large crowd. Hmmm, clearly there is something going on here.
Over the past six months it seems that information about belief systems keeps flooding into my awareness. It started with Brian Klemmer, a life coach that talks about changing your perception and belief systems to change your life experience. Then I read the Presence Process, then The Nature of Personal Reality, The Go-Giver, Psycho-Cybernetics, Full Catastrophe Living and The Celestine Prophecy. I picked up each of these books in a different manner, some were recommended to me, some randomly grabbed off a shelf. The striking thing is that they’re all talking about the same thing. They’re all talking about how our view of the world shapes the way we experience it. For a simple example, think of how waking up “on the wrong side of the bed” sets the tone for the rest of your day. You’re grumpy and in turn people are less friendly to you, more confrontational, and you have a rotten day. If you wake up in a good mood you smile at people, they smile back, things seem to fall into place easier, challenging tasks are less annoying, the day is smooth. The common thread here is your internal state and the way the outside reacts to it. Of course our state changes from day to day, but there are underlying themes or tones to our life experience, whether it is one of melancholy and drama or one of anxiety and fear or one of ease and gratitude and joy. Are we born with these tendencies? Can we change them? That is what all of these books talk about and I’m learning more and more that we can absolutely change them, and for me it has been worth every effort and quite the adventure to work at doing so.
So back to hypnosis. Is it hocus pocus? When you think about its really not that mysterious. We have a belief system that makes us view the world a certain way, and rather than reading these books I’ve been reading and going through the work to change them, an expert in hypnosis changes our perception instantly through specialized techniques and the power of suggestion. Suddenly we are not nervous to be in front of a crowd, we are uninhibited. Our beliefs are not holding us back. Our mind is open. Phallic lollipops aside, it is pretty amazing what we can do once the mind is out of the way.
The more we can explore why we think the way we do and what assumptions we make about the world, the more we can start to change the way we view what happens to us. Its not mystical or metaphysical, its just a lens we’re looking through that makes the same situation look different to us than it does to someone else. And wouldn’t it be best to use that to our advantage? To believe that we’re awesome and that we’re all in this together and that other people are inherently good. How can you start changing your mindset today?