Hypnotist in Training

I’ve heard some hypnotherapists say that love is a form of self-hypnosis. When you fall in love you learn to overlook the negatives and believe in the relationship beyond all reason. Love is part of the primitive mind, part of the reptilian brain.

I thought I’d share one of my favorite TED talks on love today.

Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love — and people who had just been dumped.

People are highly suggestible in their thought patterns. There have been a number of recent studies where salient but unconscious cues have affected how people act or think.

For example, did you know that there is evidence that the height of a room can influence they way you think about and process information? Joan Meyers-Levi and  Rui (Juliet) Zhu published in their paper “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use” details of their experiments where people where given either a  room with a high or low ceiling and asked to perform a number of tasks on a computer for five bucks.

They found that rooms where the ceiling was low prompted feelings of confinement and thinking in concrete terms. On the other hand, rooms with ceilings that were high prompted feelings of freedom and abstract thought. One of the ways they proved this finding  was by asking the test subjects to categorize objects. When in rooms with low ceilings the subjects place objects in numerous, concrete categories like, “bats, balls, and gloves.”  However, the subjects placed objects in fewer, more abstract categories like “sports equipment”  when in the rooms with high ceilings.

But it’s not just our surroundings that can affect they way we think. continue reading…

Since hypnosis is a natural state tied to the human nervous system it has been most likely used throughout human history in some form. Over 40,000 years ago in Egypt people sought treatment at sleep temples which were under the influence of the high priest Imhotep.  A bit of a rock-star of the ancient world, Imhotep rose to fame as chancellor to the pharaoh Djoser excelling as a physician, architect, and High Priest to the sun god Ra at Heliopolis.  Beloved so much by the Egyptians, he was later deified into a god of healing.

During his time sleep temples were a refuge for the sick. continue reading…

I’ve recently enrolled in a year-long course in hypnotherapy. The school I’m attending seems like it will offer a good education and training in practicing hypnotherapy and starting my own business. Classes start in less than a week and the anticipation is building. One activity I’m really looking forward to is getting to know other like-minded people in the area interested in hypnosis.

I figure it’s time to start managing my online reputation and to learn about marketing myself.  One of the blogs I follow, Lifehacker, has a lot of good advice on managing your online reputation that I’ve been trying to heed.  I’ve never really been able to sell myself strongly to strangers, but in the modern age marketing strategies usually include blogging and engaging in social media which are activities tend to do naturally and enjoy.

Eventually this blog will be replaced by a webpage offering my services as a professional hypnotherapist. But for now, it is merely postings from a hypnotherapist in training.