I was sitting at the Flying Goat Coffee shop (typing my blog), and a gentleman approached me and struck up a conversation. He eventually asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was a hypnotherapist. I’ve noticed that this tends to receive very similar responses. Most people ask me (in defiance): “Well, can you hypnotize me?” as if daring me to try to push against all of their resistance. My natural response is, “I don’t need to. You’re already hypnotized.” People are always a little startled by this. Let me explain what I mean. You have had an entire lifetime of experiences that have caused you to form opinions about the world around you. Those opinions will either lift you up or drag you down in your life. Just by forming those opinions, you have automatically begun to limit your own potential as a human being. The catch is, you formed many of those opinions when you were younger than 10 years old (often the tender age of 3 or 4) and were completely lacking in an adult viewpoint of the world. My question to you is: do you want to be driven by the decisions, emotions, opinions and tantrums of that 4-year-old for the rest of your life?
The subconscious mind is responsible for directing our energy that drives us toward our goals in life. If you don’t set a goal for it, it will either choose its own, or choose a goal that someone else has suggested. And that means — you guessed it– our subconscious mind often chooses the goals that were programmed in us by the things that happened in our childhood (often by our parents). At that point in our lives, we were too young to filter out the destructive messages from the constructive messages, so we took them all in. No wonder we walk around so often in a state of confusion. We are so used to giving ourselves mixed messages that we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Here are some examples for you. You say to yourself, “I would really love to go to the gym, but I never find the time.” Your subconscious mind is working very hard to not find the time to go to the gym, just like you directed it to. Here’s another one. You say to yourself: “I shouldn’t eat that piece of chocolate cake, but I really can’t resist it.” Your subconscious mind is working very hard to drop all resistance to the chocolate cake. Or how about this one: you say, “I want to be in a loving relationship, but no one ever seems to notice me.” Your subconscious mind is working overtime to make you INVISIBLE, just like you requested. The subconscious mind is like the genie in the lamp. It says, “Your wish is my command,” and goes out of its way to make that wish come true. Be careful what you ask for, because your subconscious mind will manifest it for you (in all of its dysfunction). It doesn’t seem fair, does it?
The solution is to get clear on what your actual goals are and to drop the mixed messages entirely. Hypnosis is a great way to go directly to the subconscious mind and upgrade the system software. You can actually grow up that 4-year-old inside of you and bring them with you into your adult perspective. You have more control over what you choose to manifest in your life. How about that? In my previous examples, that would be: 1) Go to the gym regularly; 2) Eat healthy foods; 3) Manifest a loving relationship and be VISIBLE to the world. Now, doesn’t that sound way more fun than what you were doing before?
Using hypnosis and hypnotherapy for pregnancy and childbirth is fantastic! I love to work with pregnant clients. I have been teaching the Mongan Method of HypnoBirthing® since 2001, and I have seen many transformations from fear to confidence in my HypnoBirthing® students, as well as hearing amazing, inspiring birth stories. I see pregnancy as a fantastic time to work on all of your emotional baggage so that you don’t bring that with you to your birth or to your parenting skills. Some of the many topics I’ve worked with over the years include:
