Magical Metaphor

I’m over the moon to be writing about metaphors. You know – metaphorically speaking.

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

Metaphors are also described as figures of speech, allegories, parables, analogies, word pictures and symbols.

They creep into our everyday life without most of us even noticing.

Have you ever really been as sick as a parrot? (I didn’t even know parrots were particularly prone to sickness).

Do you ever get run off your feet?

Have you ever actually been on cloud 9? (or clouds 1-8 for that matter)

Does your head get foggy? (or rainy, snowy or windy?)

When was the last time you said something was amazing or awesome? When was the last time you were genuinely amazed or in awe?

Is the world a stage?

Have you ever drowned in debt?

Metaphors are everywhere.

Personally I rather like looking out for them? When you start to spot them you can start to notice the language people are using with regards to their metaphors – it can be quite revealing.

As a hypnotherapist I deal a lot with metaphors and symbolism. The subconscious mind is much better at changing things if you give it symbols to work with.

You might want to give this little exercise a go.

Let’s imagine you have something coming up that you feel uncomfortable with. Maybe it’s a test or exam, maybe it’s a meeting that you are worried about, maybe it’s a conversation you are not looking forward to having. What ever it is try to think of a symbol that represents how you feel about it at the moment. The symbol can be a shape, a colour, a character, an object – whatever works for you. Now think about a symbol that represents how you would LIKE to feel about it – easy, relaxed, confident – whatever is best for you.

Once you’ve got the new improved symbol in your mind, make it destroy the other, less useful symbol. It can squash it, rub it out, fade it away, blow it up, burn it down, screw it up and throw it away – what ever suits you – just make your new improved symbol the only one that left afterwards.

Now – ask yourself how you feel about the thing that you were concerned about….

…better?

Using this technique along with hypnosis can and does make powerful changes for people – you should give it a try – it could leave you feeling on top of the world!

(metaphorically speaking of course)

Everyone said

Here’s my weekly poem – I hope you enjoy it

It Couldn’t Be Done

BY EDGAR ALBERT GUEST

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done

      But he with a chuckle replied

That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one

      Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.

So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin

      On his face. If he worried he hid it.

He started to sing as he tackled the thing

      That couldn’t be done, and he did it!

Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;

      At least no one ever has done it;”

But he took off his coat and he took off his hat

      And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.

With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,

      Without any doubting or quiddit,

He started to sing as he tackled the thing

      That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,

      There are thousands to prophesy failure,

There are thousands to point out to you one by one,

      The dangers that wait to assail you.

But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,

      Just take off your coat and go to it;

Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing

      That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.

Be nice to yourself.

I was with a client yesterday who told me that they were annoyed with themselves for not having done hypnotherapy earlier.

It’s something I hear quite a lot.

I felt the same way when I gave up smoking.

I was incredibly pleased with what I had done, but then became annoyed that I had smoked for 17 years.

Personally I believe the skills hypnotherapy teaches should be taught at school.

But they’re not.

Don’t focus on what you’ve struggled with before, be happy how easy it will be in the future.

Have a great day.

🙂

Confused? You will be!

Have you ever been frustrated and unhappy because you were confused?

It can be really difficult when you don’t understand something, whether it’s Maths homework, someone’s behaviours, why your computer isn’t working or something completely different.

If you give up at this point, then all you have is your confusion.

The way to work through this is to learn. Learn about whatever it is that’s confusing you. Sometimes this will take time and thought to achieve, sometimes it will take lessons, sometimes it may just take a good nights rest – it’s amazing how often sleeping on a subject brings clarity.

Your subconscious can do a lot of processing for you whilst you sleep. Dreams are your brains way of ordering and reordering information, tidying the filing cabinet that’s in your head. If you are confused about something or someone, try not to make any decisions until you have had time to work through it a little. It can be impossible to take some things back, so make sure you give it time before you react.

Lastly it’s worth mentioning that it’s OK to be confused. My Hypnosis teacher once told me that from the greatest confusion comes the greatest understanding. I think he was right about that. If you think you understand something straight away then you tend not to examine it and  look at it in different ways. When you are confused by something you tend to analyse it and look at it from lots of different angles before you make sense of it.

That’s how you truly understand.

Embrace the confusion, learn and enjoy the understanding.

Can you see what you think?

Do you see pictures in your mind?

As a hypnotist, I often ask people to visualise things in their minds eye, but some people have real problems doing this.

Part of this comes down to how we perceive the world.

There are 3 basic categories

Visual – People who connect with the world via images

Audio – People who connect with the world via sound

Kinaesthetic – People who connect with the world via feelings

Understandably, visual types are often the best at ‘seeing’ things in their mind, but anyone can do it.

The trick is to start small.

If you can describe your front door, then the image is in there somewhere.

What colour is your door? Where is the handle and what is it made of? Is there a letter box? Where is it placed? Which way does it open? What do you see when you open your door?

Another thing you might want to ‘see’ is your morning routine – what do you do? What do you see as you do it? What does your bathroom look like?

If you can answer these questions the images are there – you just need to relax and let yourself access them.

When you have a few minutes to relax, just close your eyes and let an image or a colour appear – you can try to manipulate it or you can just let the images flow and see where they take you. The better you get at this, the more you can notice the random images and see what they tell you about what you are thinking.

It’s a bit like dream interpretation – the meanings can be a bit obscure, but they are there.

Which reminds me – if you dream, (which you do, even if you can’t remember them) then you can create images – because that’s how you dream. You see pictures almost as though you are in your own personal movie.

Have fun exploring your subconscious.

Self Hypnosis – The Betty Erickson Method

Betty Ericksons’ self hypnosis method

Betty Erickson was Milton Erickson’s wife. For those of you that know about hypnosis, this will be a very familiar name. He is often considered to be the most influential hypnotist of all time and was studied to develop other techniques such as NLP. His wife, Betty, describes this method for inducing self hypnosis.

---

Find a comfortable place so that you can sit or lie and relax.

Breathe slowly and focus your attention in front of you. Relax and let your body feel easy and lazy.

Decide how long you want to practice hypnosis for. When you tell yourself, “I want to practice hypnosis for (your choice of time)”,your subconscious becomes aware of this and will nudge you when the correct amount of time has elapsed
You also decide what you would like to achieve with this hypnosis. Write down a statement about the results you want after hypnosis. Doing this will help your subconscious mind to focus on that issue. One way to do this is to write, “I am practising hypnosis so that my subconscious mind can focus on issues like _________.”
The blank is for you to fill in. Speaking the sentence to yourself and writing it down helps you to tune your subconscious mind towards the results you want to achieve.

Now, focus on three things in front of you. Give each of them a reasonable amount of your time. Small things like a shadow or a photo will be good to focus on. Some people even speak out the object they are focusing on to help the mind tune into that mode and mood.

Now focus on what you hear. Separate three things that you can hear. This will help you differentiate the sounds from the surrounding.

Next think about three things that you can feel.Feel each of them for a reasonable amount of time. Subtle feelings like the weight of your watch, the temperature of your ankle or how heavy you feel would useful for your sensations.

Repeat the process of thinking about the things you see, hear and feel but only for two things each. When you have completed this do it again, but with only one thing each time.

This brings to end the “external” things that you need to take care of to hypnotize yourself. Now beings the internal hypnosis.

Shut your eyes. Remember an image. Make it an easy image to imagine – hypnosis is for relaxation, not to bring in stress. Accept whatever image comes to your mind. Don’t be judgemental – accept any image. If no images comes up, then try to think about something you would like to think about.

Next, let your mind acknowledge some sound and pin a name to it. Though the hypnosis is internal, you are allowed to hear sounds that are external to your body. The point is to accept whatever comes to you.

Do the same thing with feeling. Feel a feeling and name it. Use you visualization to do this. It could be a sensory experience, like feeling the breeze of wind, or it could be an emotion that arises. Accept whatever you can feel.

Continue the same way as you did with the external hypnosis. Use two images, two sound and two feelings and maintain this cycle.

When you are done or your subconscious gives you a nudge, open your eyes. You might feel out of place and bit fuzzy, but you will come back into the real world as per the time you had decided. Take a few deep breaths and have a good stretch. You may find that you just feel relaxed, but depending on what you wanted to achieve at the start of your self hypnosis, you may find yourself in a much better place, or closer to the solution you were looking for.

---

If at first you don’t succeed – it’s fine. Try again another day. As with all things, some people are better at this that others, but we can all get better with practise.

May you find peace, harmony and all the answers you are looking for 🙂

Work to Live or Live to Work

How’s your Work / Life Balance?

Do you think you’ve got it about right?

If not, what can you do to change it?

Firstly you need to establish what’s important to you – If you lost your job tomorrow how would you feel? If you lost your family and friends tomorrow how would you feel? It’s much easier to get a new job than new loved ones. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say your job is not important. It’s good for you mentally as well as financially to have a job that you are invested in and have a passion to do well at, but it should only be a part of your life. If you won the lottery tomorrow and were rich beyond your wildest dreams, would you continue to do your job? If not, then you are doing it for the money. While that’s understandable, it’s not a reason to let it infringe on the whole of your life.

With most jobs work should start when you get to work, and end when you walk away from it. It is important to leave work at work. If you come home and spend your evenings complaining about what you had to put up with all day, or constantly on your ‘phone or computer dealing with messages or emails then you are extending your working day and ruining your free time. If you find it difficult to do this you might like to try this little exercise…

This is most effective if you use a method of self hypnosis first.

Imagine something that represents work for you. It might be a tool that you use as part of your job, a symbol that you associate with it or something else entirely. Whatever it is, see it clearly in your mind’s eye and link your working day to it.

Now imagine something that represents coming home for you. It could be getting into your car, a train or bus or maybe just opening your front door. When you see yourself doing that activity imagine the thing that represented work for you being blocked in some way. It can’t come in, so you can either tie it down so that it just stays there and waits for you to come back or it can simply float away. Which ever you feel is right.

This creates a mental disconnect from work and home and should make it easier to leave the work at work.

By creating a space for you to be free from work you allow yourself to be present with the people that matter to you and to do the things you want to do. This is incredibly important for you and your relationships, but also allows you to be more present and focussed at work when you’re there.

Enjoy your free time this week – do something amazing 🙂

My Happy Jar

In August I wrote a post about my Happy Jar.

It’s a way to look back on things and remember all the little things that make us happy.

The idea came from a nice story I once heard about a woman who had a jar. Every time she thought of something that made her happy, she would jot it down on a piece of paper and put it in the jar. Whenever she felt down, or fed up, she would go to her jar and find all the things that made her happy. Some things were big things, events that happened that she could look back on and smile, but most were little things that she could cherish and maybe even recreate to make her feel better.

So here are a few things from my Happy Jar this month

Drinking a cup of coffee that’s at the perfect temperature

Watching the rain run down the windows

The feel and smell of laundry straight from the dryer

Chatting with a friend

An unexpected flower popping up in the garden

Puppies (and their ridiculous cuteness)

Seeing my friends pride over their children’s first day of school

Reading a touching poem (Robert Frost – Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening)

Finding a new band that you like

Winning a competition

I know none of these things are amazing, there is nothing earth shattering about them, but all of them have made me smile and brought a least a little joy to my soul.

What will you put in your happy jar this month?

Time flies when you’re having Fun

It’s Sunday – That lovely day when you have nothing pressing to do…

So why does it go so fast? And why do Mondays last so much longer?

Why does 5 minutes between snoozes on the alarm go by in seconds, but the 5 minutes before your lunch break takes an eternity?

Why does a watched kettle never boil?

Because you can distort time! (aren’t you a clever thing)

We all do it.

The problem is most of us are doing it wrong.

We extend the periods of boredom, of discomfort, of sadness or of pain, and we shorten the times of joy, relaxation, happiness and love.

In hypnosis, time distortion is a regular phenomenon. People often say to me that we’ve only been talking for a few minutes, when often an hour has gone by. This is a trick you can learn. When you are hypnotised your mind is incredibly focussed on one thought, usually the voice of the person who has hypnotised you. That focus is where time goes…it’s like you can’t concentrate on time and be completely focussed on something else. That’s why time can disappear when you are lost in a good book, listening to music, or having a great time with friends.

When you are unhappy, bored or in pain, your focus is often on the time itself…so it gets longer. By willing it to go fast, we extend it further and further until it feels like an eternity.

So, if you want time to pass quickly, STOP focussing on the time and START focussing on something else.

Sometimes that’s easier said than done, but that’s where hypnosis is fantastic. Whether you use self hypnosis or go to a clinical hypnotherapist, that focus can be achieved.

Enjoy what’s left of your weekend – I hope your happy moments last a life time 🙂

Know your Talking Therapies

Do you know your Therapies?

There are so many ways that we can alter how we feel, what we think and how we behave, how do you choose the right one for you?

A good starting point is to have an understanding of them and what the benefits they offer.

The following is a brief summary of the benefits offered by some of the more popular talking therapies available…

---

Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy

The benefits of Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy include the speed that it works, its simplicity to understand and its effectiveness as a therapy. There is very little (if any) need to understand the causes or roots of an issue, so can be used very effectively where a cause is not known e.g. a phobia that a client has had for as long as they can remember. C.B.H. works on changing the way the client thinks in order to change emotions or behaviours. It has a huge variety of uses including, but not limited to, phobia cure, Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour modification, habit change, anxiety and confidence strengthening

NLP

NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is the use of language to effect positive change for the client. By examining their use of language, modifying it and using various visualisation techniques the client learns to change their responses. One of the benefits of this therapy is that the client can practice a lot of these techniques on their own. It is commonly used for phobia cure, confidence building, motivation, accelerates learning and habit change.

EFT

EFT or Emotional Freedom Therapy uses tapping to reduce an unwanted feeling. This feeling can be fear, as in the case of a phobia, or a compulsion as in the case of an addiction or obsessive behaviour. As with NLP one of the benefits is that a client can practice this technique on their own, as and when they feel the need. It is also useful for a client who finds it difficult or uncomfortable to be hypnotised.

Person Centred Counselling

Person Centred Counselling can be used for any type of issues. The key benefit is that the client will often dictate the pace. Also if the client is anxious or has confidence issues then they may feel more at home with this as they may feel more in control.

Regression

Regression is a particularly useful technique if the client has a problem which they are aware of starting at a specific point in their life. Regression can help the client to look back and understand things in a different way allowing them to move forward in a more positive way. This is often linked to things like emotional eating or a phobia, but can also be used to help physical issues such as psoriasis.

---

There is so much choice available, there is certainly something that will suit you.

Good luck with your Journey