hypnosis & integral health coaching ◊ 347-384-2004 ◊ 292 Fifth Ave ◊ NYC

What is hypnotherapy?

06.07.11


What is Hypnotherapy?

Hypnotherapy is therapeutic hypnosis; Hypnosis has been used for a variety of purposes by shamans, visionaries, and mystics for many centuries; when applied therapeutically it allows you to gain perspective and insight into any underlying emotional reactions that are negatively affecting your life.

During a session of hypnotherapy, your body is relaxed and your mind is fully awake. Whatever it is you are experiencing, imagine what will happen when you approach it with a heightened state of consciousness that allows you to be exceptionally alert, focused and, at the same time, very relaxed. When you enter this state of mind (a very normal state of consciousness that you certainly have accessed at many points in your life), you are open to offering and receiving suggestions for changes that will give you the insight and reflection you need to change what needs to be changed in your life.

Under hypnosis you will never do anything that you don’t want to do. Instead you will be able to overcome mental blocks and emotional obstacles so that you can notice your reactions to emotional triggers, strengthen what you already do well, and maximize the choices available to you in your life.

A hypnotherapist is not an analyst. My job is to work with you to reveal your unconscious strategies, patterns, and maps of the world so that you can make the decision to think and act differently in any situation that is causing you physical pain or mental anguish. Think of it as slowly allowing water in a dam to find new rivulets; or an antenna finding a new signal. As you go about your day, you reinforce these new paths and frequencies, giving you the inner drive you need to reach your goal, or change what you want to change.

Possible Outcomes

It’s possible that with hypnotherapy you will notice that issues you have dealt with for many years – in some cases, the majority of your life – are finally resolved. And clients who have experienced this have reported fundamental effects on their life including:

  • Release from long-held emotional or mental blocks
  • Seeing a path to get out of difficulty
  • Greater relaxation and peace of mind
  • Tangible reduction of stress
  • Living to a more meaningful potential
  • Finding new meaning in relationships
  • Alleviation of physical symptoms
  • Higher self-esteem, confidence, self worth, and sense of purpose
  • Insight into addictions and power to deal with withdrawal symptoms
  • Noticeable results in personal growth and self-improvement

My Approach

I don’t think that all pain and suffering is in your mind because the the world is very stressful place for most people. But I do think that your mind is what we need to change in order to help you get through it. I operate under the premise that you are the healer of yourself, and answers to your troubles are found within you. My role is to employ safe, effective hypnotherapy techniques designed to bring these answers to the surface. I act as a facilitator so that you will leave my office with numerous mental strategies that you can use in your daily life.

I believe in a customized approach that treats each client individually and according to his or her specific needs. During your first 1.5 hour consultation I’ll perform a thorough analysis to uncover relevant information about your health and life history, and we will begin a method of change work that suits your particular case. I continuously evaluate as I go, making changes as needed to maximize the benefits of this hypnotherapy for you.

Category:

Feature Post, MindBody Integrative Studies

Comments Off

Healing Metaphorically

06.07.11

When I teach workshops like “Move Through Emotional Blocks” I focus on connections between metaphors and the unconscious mind. This excerpt from my forthcoming e-book You, Resourceful: Book One of the Creative Rewiring Series conveys the basic idea:

You know about “breaking habits” and have probably heard that it takes 66 days for most people to be convinced that a habit is gone for good. Traumas get “released” and when we can’t “stand” it any longer, we work to “get over” people.

The words we use to describe these aspirations to “break,” “release,” and “get over” are themselves clues to how to do it. Melissa Tiers (The Anti-anxiety Toolkit) describes it as a two-step process: first transform the issue into a visual image; then use your creative mind to elaborate on the story.

For example, if you are trying to “move through a block” imagine the block as an actual object. Then figure out what you need to do to.

I see a wall and I’m breaking through it with a hammer; the pieces fly all over the place like confetti.

And what happens next?

The confetti turns into a light snow and covers the entire landscape.

And as you imangine that the rock has transformed into snow, what do you notice about the issue you were trying to “break through”?

Well, walking through a light snow is certainly easier than running into walls.

How about giving it a try? Think about about something that you would like to “get over.”

Get over, like what? Make it into an image.

Now imagine that wall, river, ocean, canyon (whatever it is) and think about what you will need to “get over” it. A rope to cross the river, a magical power to part the ocean, a hang-glider to make it across the canyon.

Then imagine yourself doing just that and notice how you can begin to get some perspective on the issue.

Butterflies in your stomach? Jello in your legs? Cotton in your mouth?

Lingering, hovering, hanging out, causing you to feel a certain way. And when you imagine those butterflies flying in formation or that jello turning into something solid, you can begin to feel better. Or at least be in a better position to channel insight and inner resources to solve an issue or glean some insight.

So, what’s happening as you take a moment to check in with your metaphors and transform them?

Like Wallace Stevens does all the time:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—

- from “The Motive For Metaphor“

Category:

MindBody Integrative Studies

Leave a comment

Tagged with:

Guided Neuroscience: Visualizations Rewire Your Brain

06.07.11

I read a lot of books about the brain, and it’s exciting to see how neuroscience is substantiating what healers, hypnotists, shamans, etc. have known for the past 4000 years (give or take a few).

A good example is Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightnment (Perlmutter and Villoldo) — an interesting conversation between neuroscience and shamanic practices. I wanted to share a couple ideas from this book that I think really clarify the work we are doing with hypnotherapy and other kinds of mental healing work. The first is the idea that:

Your limbic brain (which operates by influencing the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system) cannot distinguish between a painful event that occurred 20 years ago and the memory of that event triggered by a similar situation today. This means that unless we do something to convince the brain that it doesn’t need to constantly keep referring back to that old response, we’re going to continue to experience our lives as an infuriating series of patterns and habits.

The second idea is that:

Visualizations allow you to pave the way for new neural pathways that can allow you to perceive people and situations in a new way.

So guided visualizations are rewiring those old responses by inviting your creative mind and all the images, colors, shapes, and ideas that it holds to come forward. When this happens, the normal chatter of everyday life (which often includes a lot of unproductive self-talk) eases into focused awareness, a kind of expansion of perspective that, when put into action, can lead to powerful insight and the potential for change. And your body relaxes, which allows healing to happen at both the cellular and the mental level.

So as you practice interrupting habitual thoughts with visualizations and breathing throughout the day, keep in mind that you’re doing more than just imagining yourself swimming in that ocean or walking through that amazing landscape. You’re communicating to your brain that you’re safe and in a different place in your life — so there’s no need to conjure up that old response any more.

Happy rewiring…

(Imagine your own neural pathways firing and clustering like a cascade of matches — not into a dangerous fire… 

but into a silent luminosity… )

 

Category:

MindBody Integrative Studies

Leave a comment

Your Mind On Data: Self Tracking

06.07.11

Lasercut of Upset Stomach by Laurie Frick

Two weeks ago I attended the conference in Amsterdam  of a new movement in healthcare called “Quantified Self” whose logo is  ”Self Knowledge Through Numbers.” It’s a provocative notion — that we can take control of our health care by tracking data on a daily basis, and analyzing that data over a period of time in order to make adjustments and figure out ourselves what is working, and what isn’t.

I was most interested in the  presentations around behavior modification and “mood tracking.” As a hypnotherapist,  my work  is more in keeping with healing traditions that bring unquantifiable but real awareness of unconscious and intuitive insight to behavioral change. And yet, I was struck with the possibility that data-tracking (although it might not be useful to everyone) gives people access to a similar kind of expanded awareness, although through a different channel.

I co-presented a session with my partner Richard Ryan who is obsessively tracking his insomnia with a Zeo, while at the same time using hypnotherapy and acupuncture. My question for this movement is: What makes the change? Is it the data, or the fact that tracking interrupts a habitual pattern? Or the fascinating simultaneity of the two, in rare collaboration and synergy.

Here are a few resources in case any of you are interested in experimenting with self-tracking.

I’ve been experimenting with  Moodscope and Moodjam, two sites that track fluctuations in mood over time. Moodscope allows you to  write a few sentences about what influences are contributing to a particular mood. It’s a great way to track mental strategies like self-hypnosis or EFT. Moodjam gives you a beautiful, color-coded chart. For a beautiful example of data in action, check out visual artist Laurie Frick who synthesizes art, neuroscience, and moodjam data.

The health-care system is so demoralizing, but CureTogether is a really great site that puts symptoms and diagnosis in perspective and allows you to be pro-active in relation to your own health — in part because you are able to see your condition in relation to other people who are suffering from the same set of symptoms.

If you’re interested in all this there are QS meetups all over the world where people are presenting very creative and innovative approaches to self-tracking (not all are tech-centric.)

Category:

MindBody Integrative Studies

Leave a comment

Tagged with:

On Boredom and other Meaningful Things

06.07.11

My Zone A (flood zone) apartment in Brooklyn has a nice view of the East River, and there’s a part of me that wishes I could have stayed to watch as Hurricane Irene sent surges up and down the streets that meet the river’s shore. But this thrill-seeking urge was put into perspective when my downstairs neighbor’s ceiling collapsed and the antique store next door flooded; when I heard and read the reports of hard-hit areas upstate and in other states.

 Still, the day after the storm people in my neighborhood were complaining about how “boring” the storm was. “I was expecting so much more” said the mother of two children who I was talking to at a local playground. This got me thinking about what “boredom” means. Is the muddle of daily life really so boring that we crave catastrophe and destruction even though we know how they tear other people’s lives apart?
  
For my newsletter (my apologies if you’ve received this more than once!) I decided to reflect on a few insights from writers who have thought about boredom. (Click here and scroll down to read the article and check out the newsletter.)I hope you find the piece interesting and if you do, would be happy to hear from you. If you have any links or ideas, please send them along to trancepoetics@gmail.com

- Be safe, Kristin

   

Category:

MindBody Integrative Studies

Comments Off

Pain: How to think about it

06.07.11

"Mynd" by Brian Lucas

I teach my clients many different techniques for managing pain, so I was intrigued to read several articles published last week about how French and Belgian hospitals are offering hypnosis to surgery patients– and they successfully performed 8000 non-anesthetic surgeries! And an article published today in abc News cites that “those who underwent hypnosis with a local anesthetic experienced a faster recovery, a shorter hospital stay fewer painkillers.”

So last week I decided to put my practice where my mouth is (literally) and used hypnosis for a dental procedure (preparing a crown impression) that normally would have required Novocaine.

I learned so much from this experience that I decided share the three tried-and-true self-hypnosis techniques that helped me during this procedure, and that can help you or someone you care about to manage pain.

(Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. The techniques below are not medical advice; they are an introduction to mental strategies that might offer you a new perspective on pain.) 


1) Neutralize the fear. When we react to pain it is often with a fight or flight response — and while this may be useful for outrunning hungry tigers, it is not at all useful for pain and inevitably makes it worse.

Wherever you are, stop what you are doing and breath. Notice where exactly the pain is located in your body. Notice its movement. Now focus on how you are really feeling about this pain. You may be completely freaked out about it but is there any part of you that is calm and unafraid? Allow this part of you to speak directly to your brain saying: “I’m going to be ok. My body is still functioning. My heart is still beating, my blood is circulating, my eyes are seeing, feet walking, etc.” (Fill in whatever body parts are working for you.) As you think these thoughts, do what you need to do to pay attention to the fact that you are breathing, and feel yourself calming down.

One of the most effective ways to neutralize fear is through a technique called EFT. Learn about how to do it by reading this:
http://www.eftuniverse.com/images/pdf_files/eftquickstart.pdf

2) Lose interest in the pain and focus on something else. What happens to a mother’s migraine as she sees her child falling? It disappears, in that moment. And I’m sure you can think of times in your life when you’ve been in pain and then forgot about it, only to have the pain minimize or disappear.

If you can’t bring yourself to sweep the floor, take the dog for a walk, call a friend, or organize your plastic containers, sit down and use your mind’s eye to think about doing something that you really love to do. This could be an activity that unfolds over time like a sports activity or your favorite walk; it could be making a mental home movie of you and someone you love doing something fun or silly; it could be reviewing an intense scene from a movie that really stuck with you. If you like music, get lost in it because it will give you something else to focus on. When I was in the dentist’s office I wandered in and out of many different mental movies while listening to Matt Jones’ new album– but any music you like will work.

3) Transform the pain into a metaphor or image. If your tooth is “throbbing like a jack-hammer,” begin by imagining the jack-hammer throbbing in as much detail as you can. Then imagine the image that will feel better now. Maybe you’ll turn the hammer in to a soft mist, or a waterfall; maybe you’ll imagine a cool cloth surrounding the area with comfort. Imagine whatever you see, hear, or feel as vividly as you can. And then imagine how great it will be when that pain is gone for good.

(This post is an introduction to techniques I have learned and implemented in both my life and in my work with clients. For more information on these techniques read Melissa Tiers’  book Integrative Hypnosis (available from Amazon) and Dr John Sarno’s book”The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mind-body Disorders” which you can order from your local bookstore.)

Related articles

Hypnosis Before Surgery? Studies Say Yes (abcnews.go.com)
Interesting article on The Gate Control Theory of Chronic Pain
Article about pain control with meditation published in the Wall Street Journal

Category:

MindBody Integrative Studies

2 Comments

Tagged with:

It’s important believe that your brain is on your side…

06.07.11

Dr. Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself is about the fairly recent (last 15 years or so) neurological fact (it’s no longer hypothetical) that your brain is able to rewire itself, even after traumatic injuries. So imagine what you can do to change what you want to change in your life when you put your mind to it…

 

Category:

MindBody Integrative Studies

Leave a comment

“To Say Thank You All The Time” (Gratitude in spite of it all)

06.07.11

                                                     ______________________________________
The greatest perception I know in the world comes from gratitude. Underneath desire, fear, and all the other things… always foremost when we are happiest and at our best is the sense of gratitude and reverence for things around us, for people. To say thank you all the time.

[Robert Kelly’s introductory remarks for his keynote reading at the Logic of the Word: Symposium in honor of Robert Kelly at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), May5, 2011]

______________________________________

There are many words of advice about how to manage this life on earth, among them that we need to “think positive” or view the glass as “half full” or “keep on the sunny side,” etc. But any guru willing to go beyond platitudes will clarify that having positive thoughts will do nothing unless those thoughts are intentionally directed to conjure a tangible change in how you perceive and live in the world. In other words, it’s not enough to “think” positive  because this is equivalent to saying “tomorrow I’m going to change the world!” but then tomorrow comes and you have absolutely no idea how to begin – and probably don’t really believe that such a radical change is possible. Like wearing your heart on your sleeve but refusing love whenever it comes near.

It’s difficult to imagine that thinking positive will have any effect on the larger political, personal, and environmental realties many of us encounter on a daily basis. But as master hypnotist Melissa Tiers once said to me, thinking positive isn’t about daisies and smiles. It’s about a woman suffering from years of depression finally unleashing unexpressed rage against her abusive father; or a man struggling to let go of a 20 year addiction by sitting with the idea that he forgives all the people he has ever blamed, including himself, for his self-medicated way of dealing with all the crap dished out at him for so many years. People cry and shake. They stomp and scream. They turn the inside outside, and confront. They take their heart back into their body and let it breath. And doing this, they are able to alter their perception and fight back (live) differently.

But you don’t have to conjure up your demons and change all your big issues in order to, as Robert Kelly says, be at your happiest and at your best. The wolf that bites is the one you feed and you’ll know when it’s time to stop catering to those angry dogs. In the meantime, if you’re tired of feeling angry or helpless try this: think about all that begrudges, offends, colonizes, and harms you. And then sit for a minute – one or two a day – with an image of five things you’re grateful for in spite of it all. Make a list. And see those things in Technicolor, as vividly as you can, in the front of your mind’s eye.  Then grab your “To Do” list and add several small things you can do this week (starting today) to tend to and to cultivate the things you are grateful for. When (as is inevitable) a thought such as “I never get recognized” or “everyone else has ____ and my life sucks” creeps into your mind, think about what you’re grateful for and pay attention to that instead.

I know many of you will say “blech!” The planet is an environmental catastrophe, unjust wars are being fought, people are being intentionally tortured and harmed, illogical self preservation reins, and working people are under assault – and you want me to be grateful?

But what’s the alternative? To go around pissed off and bitter? Gratitude is one of those core emotional forces with the potential to show real results when acted upon in your life. Political activism and community building are fueled by the passion people bring to their own lives, and it’s important that idealism (what we want from the world) and practice (how we live in the world) be aligned. Of course, cultivating gratitude doesn’t mean that bad people or bad situations are going to disappear – but it might mean that dealing with them doesn’t have to destroy you.

Robert Kelly has a poem called the “Ballad of the External Heart”—it can be interpreted in many ways, yet I think it speaks to the kind of emotional shift that can happen when a person gathers from within parts of his life that had been scattered. Many thanks to Robert Kelly for his ever-present work, and for giving me permission to cite this poem here in full:

I am the giant who keeps his heart
everywhere but in his chest.
Everything kills me. Everyone
who finds it overpowers me.

I have lodged this delicate and persistent
organ in the darkest places,
among the dancers, in the delve
of a tree, in a duck passing effortless

it seems along a stream whose quiet
water shows me as I am:
a man who has locked his heart in things.
And now they’re bringing it back to me,

saying: we have found your living organ
here and there in impertinent places,
out of bounds, at risk, at sea
we heard it when the wind died down.

They bring it back to me and stick it in.
What is this thing inside me all of a sudden
throbbing and sobbing? It feels like death
but is the life of me at last.

From: The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996 (Black Sparrow Press, 1998).

Category:

Hypnopoeia, MindBody Integrative Studies

1 Comment

Tagged with:

Heartfelt Poetry. Literally!

06.07.11

I’ve been to hundreds of poetry readings over the past 15 years. Some have been amazing, some boring, others rabble-rousing. So, I was interested to hear from fellow poet Cathy Wagner that there was an actual clinical study conducted in Germany in 2002 that tested the effects of “guided rhythmic speech” on heart rate variation. And the results of the study indicate that reciting and hearing poetry read out-loud modulates the blood flowing in and out of your heart.

According to Heartmath (a team of cardiologists and doctors who research emotional physiology and stress-management) the heart is more than just an essential organ. It’s an “information processing system that communicates and sends commands to the brain and the rest of the body.” In other words, the heart  activates neurological activity, releases hormones, and produces “an electromagnetic field that permeates every cell in our body and extends beyond the skin out into the atmosphere up to 3 or 4 feet.” Woah.

Henrik Bettermann, the lead researcher of this study, writes that heartbeat & respiration are “vital and integrative to rhythms of life”; they are “border posts” between consciously controllable and non-controllable physiological rhythms.

Bettermann’s study suggests that rhythmic patterns in speech affect physiological time signatures in your body –which I surmise means that a poetry reading can activate much more than thoughts and emotions.

Granted, Bettermann’s study was on traditional verse written in hexameter, and the participants in the study were reading this verse out loud. But I’d be willing to guess that it’s not the meter that matters, but rather the tone and groove of the language. In other words, it’s the “guided speech” that’s important — so wouldn’t rhythmic prose have a similar effect?

Regardless, next time you’re at a poetry or prose reading, try this: relax by noticing your breath. As you listen to the writer, don’t feel any pressure to grasp for meaning. Instead, listen to the rhythm of the writer’s language and pay attention to how the writer is guiding you into the tones and grooves of the poem/prose piece. (The meaning will find its way to you, don’t worry.) And as you listen to that language, imagine that you are breathing into your heart. As you do this, imagine the language circulating in your blood, and permeating every cell in your body.

This might be one way to release the “psycho physiological” effects that put the mind/body integration into activation mode.

Or try this: the next time you’re bored listening to someone read or speak, close your eyes and imagine the cardiovascular regulation that your heart rate modulates simultaneously with your breathing. You might get more out of it than you think!

*The study, called “Effects of speech therapy with poetry on heart rate rhythmicity and cardiorespiratory coordination” is technical. I’d be interested in hearing whether or not my more general application of this study correlates to the statistical results of the study itself.

Category:

Hypnopoeia, MindBody Integrative Studies

5 Comments

Tagged with:

Fred’s Diary

06.07.11

Change doesn’t always happen quickly. It often starts as a thought way in the back of your mind. So far back, there are no words to express it. Perhaps because there is a fear that expressing it will make it disappear. But oddly enough, sometimes people and objects materialize that speak for that submerged thought. That bring it into the world, without you knowing about it.

Three years ago – when the submerged thought that I wanted to work more directly with people in a therapeutic context was shifting around a bit (like an octopus at the bottom of the ocean) – I found a brown leather Eddie Bauer diary stuck between random books at a thrift store. I picked it up and quickly flipped through it. It looked blank, so I excitedly paid $5 for it.

I love fancy notebooks and have quite a collection of them. I put the diary on a shelf, forgetting about it.

Fast forward two years. The submerged thought about becoming a therapist was now out, and actionable. I had enrolled in the certification classes for hypnotherapy and mental health coaching, and needed a notebook that I would use especially for this course. A notebook to represent this transformation in my life.

So I went to my stack of fancy notebooks and grabbed the diary I had found in the thrift store. When I got to class, I opened the diary to the first page, ready to take notes in my fancy leather notebook and be a diligent student.

It wasn’t blank after all. The first 10 pages were quite occupied. They were occupied with notes and a few diary entries that a man named Fred had taken at what must have been an AA meeting. Fred must have bought this fancy diary to represent the major change he was making in his own life.

After a few moments of bewilderment about what I should do (try somehow to track Fred down? Tear out the marked pages?) I decided to go ahead and use the remaining pages for my own notes and diary entries. Fred and I were on parallel tracks: his anxieties, fears, and doubts mirrored my own – although from a different place, time, and set of emotional circumstances.

And Fred’s intense struggles with addiction gave me courage. If he could get through that, certainly I could get through this.

The last page of Fred’s diary reads, “To have something you’ve never had u have to do something you’ve never done.”

And to do something you’ve never done starts with a thought, at first submerged, and slowly realized.

 

Category:

Hypnopoeia, MindBody Integrative Studies

Leave a comment

Tagged with:

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 34 other followers