As You're Healing

Combating Stress with Hypnosis

2010-06-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

There can be many factors contributing to poor health, but one major cause is stress. When we are under stress, our autonomic nervous systems switch into survival mode, slowing down functions that are not essential to surviving. These include the immune, digestive, and reproductive functions. This is why people who are chronically stressed get sick more easily and heal more slowly, develop ulcers and digestive problems, and experience irregular menstrual cycles, infertility, and sexual dysfunction. A form of hypnosis called guided meditation can be an effective means of combating this stress.

Few of us experience true danger in our daily lives, but our nervous systems react to traffic, time constraints, loud noises, and other stimuli in the same way that we used to respond to bears, battles, and other dangers. Stress causes the body to prepare for fighting, fleeing, or freezing, not growing, eating, and reproducing. To bring these normal, healthy functions back online, we need to shut off the survival response. We can do that by relaxing, but many people find that to be more easily said than done.

True relaxation requires mental and physical relaxation. Most of us know how to relax physically but many of us find it hard to relax mentally. Even while receiving a massage, for example, our minds might be active. A mind full of worries or woes is triggering all the same physical stress responses that a massage, a bath, a game of golf, a beer, etc., is trying to remedy. Unless we can quiet the mind, the body cannot achieve complete relaxation.

The best way to quiet the mind is meditation. While there are many different styles of meditation, most people find it easiest to begin with a guided meditation. Most forms of meditation focus on clearing the mind of all thought or focus the mind on a single concept or mantra. In guided meditation, the thoughts are directed. Because the imagination is engaged, guided meditation is actually a form of hypnosis rather than true meditation.

Guided meditation combines progressive relaxation with positive imagery. The progressive relaxation induces a hypnotic state, thereby switching the nervous system out of survival mode into growth mode. The positive imagery then redirects the mind away from obsessive thoughts towards peaceful thoughts, such as imagining a beautiful garden. Since it addresses the needs of both the mind and the body, guided meditation helps you relax both mentally and physically.

By consistently practicing guided meditation, your body will gradually learn what a normal, healthy state feels like. If you have been stressed for a long time, you body may have become stuck in fight or flight mode. Guided meditation will help you to retrain your body to switch out of survival mode so it will become less responsive to stressors and recover more quickly when exposed to them. Your mind will be more peaceful when you replace an active mind with a peaceful mind. Between the mental and physical benefits of guided meditation, you'll feel calmer and more in control of your life, and your immune, digestive, and reproductive functions will flourish.

Quiet Time

2010-05-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

In a crazy, hectic world, many of us find it challenging to carve out time for ourselves. When we do make time for ourselves, we fill up the time with activities rather than using it for quiet time. Quiet time for ourselves is often undervalued and overlooked, but it's essential for developing and maintaining good health and a calm, centered mind. Time spent reading, listening to music, watching TV, or exercising does not count as quiet time. These are activities that stimulate the mind, rather than quieting it. Quieting the mind can best be achieved by reflecting, meditating, or praying.

If you choose to reflect, this does not mean judging yourself. Reflection means recalling pleasant memories, noting progress or achievements, or dreaming of the future. If you choose to meditate, this does not mean you follow your thoughts when they intrude. Instead, you just notice them as they arise, then let them go and return your focus to your breathing or mantra. If you choose to pray, this does not mean focusing on what you lack and begging for assistance. Prayer means expressing gratitude for prayers answered and then turning your problems over to God.

By making time daily to reflect, meditate, or pray, you will come to know and understand yourself more fully. As a result, you will find it much easier to remain true to yourself. You will develop the confidence of knowing that you are on the right path and obtain the peace that comes with that knowledge.

Quiet time is as essential for our bodies as exercise and as essential for our minds as activity. Without it, we cannot know true peace. Make sure your personal time includes quiet time to help you along your path towards peace.

Afformations

2010-04-21T16:50:00.000-07:00

There are all kinds of therapy available to help you change your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors: hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, art therapy, music therapy, and more. One kind of therapy you can do by yourself is bibliotherapy. Perhaps you know how wonderful it feels to read a good book and escape into another world for a little while. That is one kind of bibliotherapy, but I am talking about self-help books.

You may think self-help books are not for you, but even business books can be considered self-help. Anything that helps you achieve your goals, that teaches you tips and secrets to get ahead or to approach challenges in a new way, is a self-help book. By reading a good self-help book, you can learn how to transform and release your perceived or actual limitations.

There is no shortage of self-help books on the market. Many of them are repetitive or insubstantial and some are even damaging or absurd, so it takes some wading through to find a good one. I am currently reading The Secret Code of Success by Noah St. John. The "secret" St. John presents is the concept of afformations. Afformations is a play on affirmations. In hypnosis, we use affirmations (positive statements) to change the way we think about ourselves. For example, if you often think "I'm a failure," you use the affirmation "I'm a success" to reverse that thought. Every time you start to think "I'm a failure," you substitute the affirmation. This can help over time if there is no benefit to thinking you're a failure. If there is a perceived benefit, then that belief would need to be examined through hypnotherapy or other means to release it. For example, being a "failure" may mean not having to try again, not having to change, not having to work, not having to move or leave home, not having to succeed, not having to maintain success, not having to be visible/responsible/independent/etc. There could be lots of subconscious benefits to being a failure. Until those perceived benefits are exposed and transformed, affirmations will never work.

In his book, St. John talks about afformations, which are questions rather than statements. Afformations are positive questions stated in the past tense, as though the goal has already been achieved. When we ask ourselves a question, our brain starts looking for an answer. For example, what did you eat for lunch yesterday? Your brain is looking for that answer now. By asking yourself an afformation, your brain starts looking for the answer. If there isn't an answer yet, then your brain will try to come up with a solution, like solving a riddle. This is how inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other creative people work. By asking afformations, you are using your own creative subconscious mind to find solutions. St. John compares this to typing a few words into a search engine, like Google, and sending the query off to the internet.

So, to relate this to the example above, if you ask yourself, "Why am I such a failure?" your brain will start looking for answers to that question. Any answers you get are sure to be negative. If you transform that to a positive question, you would ask, "Why am I such a success?" and your brain would start looking for answers to that question instead. To make this an afformation, you would state it in the past tense or state it as if it were already achieved, such as "Why did I become such a success?" or "Why does success come so easily to me now?" This will get your creativity flowing so you can come up with even more answers. You might surprise yourself.

This is not all you have to do. Afformations is the "secret" in the book, but there are several steps that St. John outlines in his book to help you achieve your goals using afformations. It's a clear and handy self-help book with an interesting twist on the use of affirmations. If you like affirmations, use afformations to see if you can go even further. If you like to read, check out The Secret Code of Success. If you'd like to become a success, read the book, use afformations, and work through the action steps.

Positive Thinking

2010-03-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

There are many benefits to positive thinking, but negative thinking has it benefits too. For example, when you design a product or launch a company, you need to believe it will succeed, but you also need to think of everything that could possibly go wrong so you can prepare for and prevent it. That's a good balance of positive and negative thinking.

Unfortunately, for many of us, positive and negative thinking can fall out of balance. Some people might be overly optimistic when some negative thinking would be useful. Fortunately, optimistic people bounce back from problems easily because they know the next time will be better. On the other hand, pessimistic people who encounter problems find it harder to bounce back because they expect the next time will be the same or worse. This can lead to further negativity.

Negative thinking can lead to excessive self-doubt and self-criticism. Self-doubt can be useful. If you think your public speaking skills aren't up to par, you might be motivated to work on improving them. Self-criticism can help you refine your techniques. But excessive self-doubt and self-criticism can lead to an erosion of self-esteem and self-confidence. Negative thinking that continually undermines your ability to value and believe in yourself is not productive and can lead to depression. You can halt and repair the damage by replacing negative statements with positive statements.

This may sound too easy to you. It may sound like it would never work. The fact is you may have already spent many years telling yourself negative messages or hearing them from someone else. Repetition bypasses our critical thinking and gets ideas into the subconscious. This is why commercials and nursery rhymes are repeated over and over. The good news is that repeating positive messages to yourself can override and rebuild the confidence that has been eroded. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy can speed up the process considerably.

Mind Control vs. Thought Control

2010-02-21T16:48:00.000-08:00

Many people associate hypnosis with some kind of mind control. Hypnosis is often depicted as mind control in cartoons, movies, and television shows. The hypnotist swings a watch or spins a psychedelic disk in front of a subject's eyes and then suddenly has total control over him or her, like a kind of puppet master. If you have seen a live hypnosis stage show, you may have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. However, like watching a magic show, what you think you saw and what you actually saw were not the same.

Hypnosis is about controlling the mind. However, we all control our own minds. Even when you are in hypnosis, you have control over what information you will tell a hypnotist and what suggestions you will accept from the hypnotist. The participants in a hypnosis stage show are carefully selected. Anyone who resists the hypnotist's suggestions will be asked to leave the stage, and those that remain on stage are choosing to accept the silly suggestions and perform for the audience. It's like someone pretending to be drunk so that they can get away with behavior they might otherwise be too inhibited to do. However, it is not like being drunk-- you are always in control when you are in hypnosis. If you hear a suggestion you don't accept, you will either ignore it or come out of hypnosis.

Many of us feel like we can't control our minds. We can't control our thoughts. However, controlling our minds and controlling our thoughts are not the same thing. We all have thoughts throughout the day. Thoughts arise just as surely as blood flows. Meditation and spiritual practices can teach us not to attach to those thoughts-- let the thoughts come, notice them, and let them go. If you can resist attachment to your thoughts, then you are controlling your mind. Unfortunately, it can take years to learn how to do this.

Hypnosis replaces negative thoughts with positive thoughts. This is much easier to do than learning not to attach to thoughts. Most of the thoughts we have throughout the day are repetitive and many of those are negative. What we say to ourselves about ourselves is what we tend to believe about ourselves. Therefore, if these thoughts are negative, we feel terrible about ourselves, and if these thoughts are positive, we feel great about ourselves. This is mind control: controlling the kind of thoughts we have rather than allowing the thoughts to control us.

Expectations

2010-01-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

Long before I became a hypnotherapist, I visited a hypnotist as a client. I wanted to stop biting my fingernails. I didn't have a lot of faith that it would work, but I thought it was worth a shot. Before we began, I asked the hypnotist if this could be fixed in one visit. She said that if it was just a habit, it could be. I settled in and prepared to be cured. Unfortunately, I started biting my nails again within five minutes of leaving her office. When I contacted her later, she said I would stop when I was ready. I was thoroughly disappointed with her answer and gave up on hypnosis. I didn't understand at that time how our expectations influence the results we get. I hadn't expected hypnosis to work, and-- surprise!-- it didn't.

When I was suffering from chronic pain a few years later, I looked for a non-medical way to manage the pain. After quite a lot of research, I developed high expectations that hypnosis would be effective. I had read a number of articles from various mental health journals, medical websites, and newspapers like the New York Times, had watched a number of news programs about hypnosis, and had spoken to a doctor who had witnessed a surgery performed with hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia. By the time I saw a hypnotherapist for pain management, I was convinced that hypnosis would work, and --surprise!-- it did.

This is not to say that the results were instantaneous, but I knew that if hypnosis could work for other people, then it could also work for me. I was also much more motivated to stop feeling pain than I had been to stop biting my nails. I realized I couldn't take a passive role and expect to be cured. I had to be proactive. I had to participate in my treatment by using self-hypnosis and doing the exercises assigned to me by the hypnotherapist I saw. When hypnosis worked for the chronic pain, I realized that I had given up too easily and too early on nail-biting. I hadn't really believed hypnosis would work for that, and I hadn't really wanted to stop. However, I knew that hypnosis would work for chronic pain, and I really wanted the pain to stop. Different expectations--and different levels of motivation--produced different results.

Since becoming a hypnotherapist, I have worked on a number of personal issues. Using hypnosis, I have overcome allergies, asthma, and chronic pain and have set and achieved many other personal goals. Ironically, nail-biting was the most difficult behavior to stop. The main problem was motivation: there didn't seem to be any penalty to continuing a behavior I had been doing for over 30 years. If you don't have a clear reason for changing your behavior, then chances are good that you won't. Finally I thought, "I'm a hypnotherapist, what message does this send to my clients if I bite my nails?" Shortly afterwards, I stopped!

Welcome!

2009-12-21T16:46:00.000-08:00

Azure Healing is a private hypnotherapy practice owned and operated by Karen Mattison, Medical Support Hypnotherapist, Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, and Blissborn Childbirth Educator.

Karen offers:
• hypnotherapy for medical support and pain management
• hypnotherapy for personal and professional development
• training and workshops on pain, stress, public speaking, and more

Karen is certified as a clinical hypnotherapist by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners (#108-054). Karen has completed advanced hypnotherapy training in accelerated healing, pain management, and cancer support. Karen also teaches Blissborn Childbirth Hypnosis courses, Corporate Wellness workshops, presentation training, and study/exam preparation.

Karen became interested in alternative medicine after developing chronic pain in the wrists and weakness in the hands, which required extended periods of rest and increasing amounts of pain medication. She first learned Reiki to promote healing in the wrists and hands. While this also provided temporary pain relief, the pain in the wrists kept returning from overuse.

Karen tried many other alternative therapies for managing pain, including acupuncture, cranial sacral therapy, massage, and Vipassana meditation. Eventually, she found relief with hypnotherapy. Since chronic pain can greatly impair one's life and lead to depression, Karen was inspired to become a hypnotherapist to help others overcome their pain.

Although hypnotherapy is often called alternative medicine, Karen prefers the term complementary medicine. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are best used to complement traditional (allopathic) medicine not as an alternative to it.

In addition to her training in complementary medicine, Karen has a BA from the University of California at San Diego and an MA from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She lived in Japan for more than ten years, where she taught presentation training and academic writing prior to opening her first hypnotherapy practice, Tokyo Hypnotherapy. Karen is fluent in Japanese.