When you access your subconscious mind it is your inner world, where you can access your inner experience. We all have an inner world, a place inside where we experience the world and everything that happens to us in a vulnerable open way without defences.
We also all have an intellectual world – a way that we see ourselves, other people and the world around us, and a viewpoint which comes from the way that we think.
Hypnotherapy will allow you to access that open part of your mind where your habits are stored, where your true feelings about things reside, and where your memories reside.
Hypnosis will allow you to put your conscious thinking on one side long enough to think and feel in the open uninhibited way that your subconscious thinks and feels, without being guarded, brave, proud or tough.
It will allow you to connect with and communicate with the motives in your mind. This is important, because if you can connect with them and communicate with them, you can literally change them and the behaviour they control.
When in a relaxed hypnotic state, it is also possible to revisit memories of things which have happened to you. How this works in each person’s mind is slightly different – it depends on our individual level of comfort and our individual need to be seen in a particular way according to our self-image.
I will share two experiences here to illustrate this.
The first is my own. I went to hypnotherapy class as the guest with whom the students were going to work. At the time, the teacher demonstrated to her students an example of dealing with a phobia. I was the subject, and my phobia was of loud noises.
The teacher took me into a memory of being a very young child. As I talked to her my bottom lip protruded, just like the bottom lip of any 3-year old child. The point that I’m making here is that I’m an uninhabited person by nature, so I didn’t mind a whole class of students seeing me pout like a 3-year-old.
The other experience was of a gentleman who also had a phobia and who was also worked with in front of that same class of students. His phobia was of heights, and his personality was very different from mine.
When his subconscious was asked how long it would take to fix the phobia, instead of saying ‘instantly’ as mine did, instantly crying like a baby and releasing all the upset that I accessed, it said his would take two days to fix.
He never showed any emotion in class, and it would not have been in keeping with who he was to do so. He had very strange dreams that night and the next night. On the third day, he was completely free of his phobia heights.
His subconscious worked the way his mind needed it to work, and mine worked the way my mind needed it to work. I was quite delighted to experience the child in me with her little sulk. He was quite proud of himself for showing no emotions.
Here’s another story to illustrate this.
When I work with people’s subconscious minds, I often ask them to imagine walking down steps into the most beautiful garden. People have a variety of experiences imaging this garden.
Some see it like a garden that’s well known to them, others imagine a garden just as they would like it. Some see detailed flowers and trees, and some only get a vague sense that something’s there – a hint of colour or the sound of water.
I’ll never forget working with a lady who burst into tears and said, “My garden is broken!” When I asked why she thought this, she said, “All the flowers are made of gemstones and I can’t make it proper!”
I smiled and said, “It’s a perfect garden for you. It doesn’t need to be ‘proper’.”
When you come to using hypnotherapy to help yourself, you’ll find that your subconscious works in just the way you need it to, and that will be just right for you.
