How To Hypnotize Yourself For The First Time
For the purpose of this exercise, we will assume that you have never been hypnotised before. Even if you have, you should still follow the directions. You may have been given instructions and advice in the past: it may have been good advice, or it may not. Here is a brief insight into what we will be trying to achieve at this first attempt.
Fundamentally, hypnosis is all about achieving the deepest possible state of physical and mental relaxation. The idea is that you ‘switch off’ your responses and reactions to external stimulation, and your conscious ‘critical faculty’, that aspect of your brain which evaluates and analyses things that you see, hear and feel. When you achieve this condition (the trance) you are able to directly access your powerful sub-conscious mind, which is where your learned habits and behaviours are stored and managed. Then you can make changes to the way you do things, and anchor the changes, so that they become new embedded habits and behaviours.
But before you can start to do this kind of work on yourself, you need to become good at the actual hypnosis part. So this first exercise will teach you how to approach Self-Hypnosis correctly and give you an initial experience of how it feels. If you follow the instructions correctly, you will achieve a level of hypnosis which may be deep or shallow. You won’t really be in a position to judge your depth of trance the first few times you do this. In fact you may not even feel that you are hypnotised at all, but as you repeat the exercise you will definitely begin to notice an improved experience each time. Hypnosis is progressive. Each time you decide to go into trance, you will be stripping away your natural resistance and becoming more comfortable and inquisitive about where it will take you ‘this time’.
So in the first exercise we are going to use a simple induction script, similar to that which a Professional Hypnotist might use in a consultation. This script is designed to enable you to achieve a reasonable level of trance very quickly, and if you use it a few times, especially over a short period such as a morning or an afternoon, it will work better and deeper each time you do it. Remember, this exercise is solely designed to allow you to experience the hypnotic trance state for yourself, nothing more. You’ll be going in, hanging around for a couple of minutes, and then coming out again. Next you’ll be repeating it as soon as you’re ready, as many times as you like, until you are completely comfortable with the way it works for you. By the time you’ve done the exercise four or five times, you’ll be well ahead of the script, and you’ll going deeper and deeper each time.