Forget what you saw in those grade-B movies! Hypnosis is now academic and scientific. Hypnosis and hypnotism are studied in major universities in such fields as psychology and cognitive science, with papers on hypnosis regularly being published in major scientific and medical journals. Several academic societies have been formed to study this unique, powerful, efficient, and fascinating mind tool. It’s used in medicine, dentistry, law enforcement, and all the branches of the armed forces. Of course the spectacle of stage hypnosis for entertainment has not disappeared, nor should it, because it’s entertaining, and it generates interest in this valuable instrument of human liberation and growth.

Hypnosis is not counseling or psychotherapy. The primary aims of hypnosis are rapid self-healing, self-change, and self-control over damaging impulses, which is to say human improvement and liberation from compulsive patterns which are currently controlled from outside your awareness. The hypnotist’s role is to assist the subject to achieve those natural states of mind where control, healing, and change can most easily occur. Used correctly, hypnosis is especially useful for tapping into the awesome power of the human mind—your human mind!

How Hypnosis Feels
Hypnosis is experienced as deep physical and mental relaxation and as attention focused on a single point. In hypnosis, most people are fully aware of events around them and remember what has occurred. People have various responses to the experience of the hypnotic state. Chances are that it will feel fairly familiar to you (but very good). It’s like being entranced by a television program or being engrossed in a task or a good book. But, in this deeply relaxed and focused meditative state, your unconscious mind–which controls habits and patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior–is quite surprisingly open to beneficial suggestions to implant more willpower and to access your own natural inner strengths. Here are a couple of definitions of hypnosis:

In hypnosis you’ll feel deeply relaxed, and very, very good. Here are comments that hypnosis clients have made about what the state of hypnosis feels like:

“It was more relaxed than I’ve ever been!”
“It felt like universal love.”
“The state of hypnosis is almost spiritual.”

How Hypnosis Works
Although hypnosis feels somewhat ordinary, it can be used to produce quite extraordinary results. In hypnosis, the part of your unconscious mind which controls learned and patterned thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is especially open. In hypnosis, we give information to your unconscious mind in a language and form it can accept, in order to restructure thoughts, feelings, and behaviors into more positive patterns. Hypnosis is also used to increase willpower. As a result, you can alter mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns which have controlled, enslaved, and maybe even devastated you!

“My upset over my weight finally got to be bigger than my fear of hypnosis.”
“Your hypnotist cannot make you do anything you don’t want to do.
Hypnosis gives you control; it does not remove it.”

Many people have an unfounded fear of hypnosis because they think they will be controlled. Hypnosis gives you control; it does not remove it! Hypnosis is utterly incapable of making you do things you don’t want to do. In fact, people come here because they are already controlled—sometimes viciously—by deadly habits such as overeating, smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling and other compulsions. Or they may be enslaved by unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories, or attitudes-which often result in death or serious physical problems, such as obesity, abdominal problems, irritable bowel, high blood pressure, arthritis, ulcers, heart abnormalities or other conditions.
The idea of being controlled by hypnotists was created by the movie industry in order to entertain people and to sell tickets. Think about it. You’re probably reading this page because eating or some other behavior is controlling you, perhaps with devastating health, social, or spiritual consequences. If continuing to smoke or to overeat in the face of obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, cancer, emphysema, and/or heart disease is not being controlled, then there is no being controlled. Modern, well-executed hypnosis is designed to put you in control of your life again HYPNOSIS GIVES YOU CONTROL. IT DOES NOT REMOVE IT FROM YOU!
“If overeating and compulsive eating, drinking, drugging, and smoking don’t represent lack of control, then there is no lack of control! It’s amazing how people will tolerate enslavement by food, nicotine, and other substances for years and not consult a hypnotist for fear of being controlled.”

Beware the Vagabond Hypnotists!
Many wandering hypnotists visit our area each year. They rent conference rooms at hotels and motels and, in theatrical performances, try to do mass hypnosis. Later, a lot of audience members complain that they weren’t hypnotized. After a year, only a tiny percent of the smokers have quit. An even smaller percentage of people have lost any weight, and many are even heavier! The real purpose of these fly-by-night operators is to hawk (usually) poor-quality hypnosis recordings and/or food supplements which are supposed to bring about weight loss or other results. Hypnosis is much less efficient in large groups. (And weight loss cannot be accomplished in one session!) It’s regrettable that this practice is allowed, because the many failures of mass hypnotism, by association, give both the technique of hypnotism and the highly-trained, caring, ethical local clinical hypnotists undeservedly bad reputations. When well done individually by highly-trained hypnotists in a comfortable, caring professional clinic, hypnotism has proven to be able to be a quick and powerful agent of change.