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Although a well-trained hypnotherapist is a fast track to your wellbeing, health, and growth, there are a lot of aspects you can do on your own by self-hypnosis. Here are some examples:

• procrastination
• increase memory
• eat better / sleep better
• public speaking
• before exam
• pain control

Of course the disadvantage of self-hypnosis is that you created the problem you have and now you are trying to solve it on your own. Therefore self-hypnosis is good for goals, not so good for problem solving, especially deep seated emotional problems.

I see self-hypnosis as a way to develop a cooperative relationship with your inner self – a relationship that is likely to lead to healing and greater fulfillment in your life – by using suggestions that are consistent with your highest ideals. This is an approach to work with your subconscious mind and it helps you to plant positive seeds that will grow, without much willpower, into a fruitful future.

There are many ways to do self-hypnosis. One common way is to make a sound recorder and play it back to yourself. The following are two simple ways you can try out on your own.

Keywords Self-Hypnosis

You need first to know what you are working on and have some suggestions ready (use simple words or affirmations). The mind is like muscles, for a good result, change it biologically and psychologically, you need to exercise, build it up over time. The process takes about 20 minutes a time. Do it 5 to 7 days a week for the next month.

When do you not do self-hypnosis?

• When you are driving.
• When you are in a negative state, be it anger, frustration, stress, hatred, etc. Though hypnosis can be done to you by a hypnotherapist when you are in a negative state, doing it alone requires a more peaceful state of mind.
• When you are in bed. A bed is always associated with sleep. Unless you are doing self-hypnosis to improve sleeping, don’t do it in bed. The best is to sit in a comfortable position with head supported. You can try practicing in different places, so your mind is not associated with one chair. Some people would go to their car during worktime lunch break, but please sit at the passenger’s seat if you choose to do so.

The following involves three areas of the mind. Before you start, pick one word to match your physical feeling and one word to match your emotional response, and stick with them for the whole month.

• Physical feeling keywords: Heavy, Floating, Relaxed, Tingling, Loose, Limp, Light, Strong, Warm, Cool, Numb
• Emotional response keywords: Calm, Comfortable, Safe, Quiet, Confident, Serene, Happy, Joy, Content, Peace, free
• Intellectual keyword: Deep Sleep

Here is the process:

1. Sit on a comfy chair. Make sure you are erect enough that you can keep your spine and torso relatively straight. Feet uncrossed. Eyes fixed on a spot in front of you. Take some deep breathes, on the 3rd or 4th exhale, when you are ready, allow your eyes to close.
2. Let all your attention go all the way up to the very top of the scalp. Let the physical feeling keyword move down from there to your whole body: face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, fingertips, chest, back, spine, abdomen, hips, legs, knees, ankles, feet, tips of toes. Let all the body feel deeply that word you’ve chosen. Let all the tension of the day go.
3. Count down from 5 to 0, do it with every exhale. At 0, start to feel the emotional response keyword. Make the word as strong as you can. Feel it with your whole being. Amplify it. Wrap yourself into it… As if you become it.
4. Imagine walking down the stairs. You can imagine the stairway going down to a beautiful garden, a deserted beach, or in a palace hall… whichever works for you. Count down the 20 stairs, 20, 19, 18, 17… down to 0. At 0, say to yourself “Deep Sleep”.
5. Now you can recall the affirmations to yourself. For example, “tonight I’m going to sleep deeply and restfully and I’ll wake tomorrow feeling happy”… You only focus on one thing at a time.
6. Count from 0 up to 5, and at 5, eyes open, say to yourself “wide awake”. Depending on how deep you go, you may count 0-5 a couple of times; or if you really have a difficult time waking up, make a fist with one hand, and open it up.

 

Insight Self-Hypnosis

The Workshop of Self

The wisdom of the unconscious is available on demand. There are many less formal ways to access one’s inner mind. This is David Calof’s “The Workshop of the Self” method for self-hypnosis, useful especially when one faces a particularly thorny problem.

Count the steps as you descend: twenty narrow stone steps cut into the side of a mountain. At the bottom is the door to your mental workshop.

Nail by nail, board by board, build your workshop in your head: a computerized archive of all your dreams, memories, and reflections; a bookcase housing every book you’ve ever read; an easy chair in which to read and ponder; a forge where you can wrestle with strong emotions and bend problems like molten metal until their answers are revealed in newly wrought forms; and, for more complex problems, an elevator that carries your questions to realms where long-term solutions can be found. On the floor below, maybe, unlimited “raw materials” are stored, resources for solving any problem.

This workshop can be used in many ways: for unraveling dilemmas, for examining stumbling blocks, to see what you are not seeing in a situation. You can type the question into the computer, or wrestle it on the forge, and see, after several minutes, an answer, or a new perspective emerges.

We all have the ability to create workshops in our minds. We all hear whispers from our inner wisdom. The workshop is merely a way of giving those whispers a more structured form, a way of bringing them within our deliberate reach.