Apr 7
The first step towards making change is seeking out someone who has the ability to assist you. If you’re not sure about what hypnosis is, how meditation works or whether or not you need someone to coach you through this passage, please call and together we can figure it out: 212.365.4775 or email [email protected].
During our consultation, we will discuss how hypnosis can help you identify your challenge and work toward your goal. This session is approximately 20 minutes where we can establish rapport and gather information.
When you are ready, we begin our hypnosis training and practice during the second session which is 60 minutes. Most clients are fully conscious while in hypnosis, but are in a state of selective awareness, where the subconscious mind is more accessible and able to be influenced positively and in accord with the client’s proposed goals.
Many clients are able to achieve their goals in 2 to 6 sessions. Together we can determine what is the best course of action for your particular goals, financial situation and schedule.
Hypnosis is a natural state, and there are many levels of hypnosis. It’s not like falling off a cliff—more like a gentle slope, and even in the lightest level of hypnosis it has been shown that suggestions take effect. Most people have been in light hypnosis on their own; for example, when you are driving and suddenly realize you have been daydreaming for the past twenty miles, but somehow managed to negotiate the road successfully. In my experience, anyone who wants to be hypnotized can be hypnotized, and the more you do it—either with a hypnotherapist or by using a self-hypnosis CD—the easier it gets, and the deeper you are able to go.
What scares you? Terrorism? Climate change? Snakes? Germs?
Whether it makes you buy a handgun or hand sanitizer, an electric car or an electric fence, fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.
Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.
This served us well when we were cave dwellers, under constant threat from marauding wild animals or invading warrior tribes. But it can often get in our way in modern life.
By Emily Farris, New York Magazine, November 1, 2016
Sure, I’d lose three pounds here and seven there — except for those diet pills; I looked damn good on those — but I always ended up where I started, or heavier. Slowly, those extra 15 pounds I’d never been able to shake turned into an extra 20, then an extra 25.
Friends, family, and even some doctors had told me to stop worrying and accept my body the way it was. And maybe I didn’t need to lose it — not everyone needs to lose weight. But my issues went beyond the scale. It was clear I had a complicated, if not clichéd, relationship with food.
After more than ten years of working in the industry, I started to wonder if I had become a food writer and stylist to camouflage, or at least lean into, a food addiction. So, at 15 pounds over my oh-shit weight, I started attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings. Based on AA, the program has helped lots of people lose impressive amounts of weight. To my surprise, I was able to get past the religious aspect, and even the hand-holding and chanting. What I couldn’t get over was the overarching theme of coming out of the program “a different person” than the one who first walked through the door.
“But I don’t want to be a different person,” I’d tell my sponsor. “I just want to be a version of me who doesn’t eat an entire jar of peanut butter in two days.”
Pregnancy was a great way for me to slip out of OA. I knew that if I tried to stick to any sort of regimented diet or eating plan while growing an entire human inside me, I’d fail and feel even worse. So I tacked on another 40 pounds throughout my pregnancy — not an insane number, but I’d hoped to gain no more than 25, the recommendation for overweight women.
And, I quickly learned I’m one of those unlucky mothers who doesn’t lose weight nursing. Eight months postpartum, and weighing 209 pounds (my heaviest non-pregnant weight ever), I was feeling down and desperate. I didn’t even want to be skinny-skinny — my happy weight still has me firmly in the “overweight” category on the BMI scale. I just wanted to fit back into my size 10 jeans without a muffin top.
Getting there, I knew, would take a major mental shift.
My brief stint in OA made me realize I’d already accepted (if not overcome) the emotional issues of my youth. I was a genuinely happy adult, doing a pretty damn good job of being alive. There was just this one area where I needed help.
I needed to be able to tell myself to put down the family-size bag of Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles, to put the lid back on the peanut-butter jar after two tablespoons, to not eat cupcakes I’d been photographing when I don’t even like sweets. And then I needed to listen to myself. I needed to change my eating behavior, not my entire emotional state. I needed to break a 34-year-old bad habit.
I’d flirted with the idea of hypnosis before, but repeatedly dismissed it because I just didn’t believe it was legit. Wasn’t it for the same people who were convinced some guy on TV could help them talk to their dead relatives? But desperately wanting something — anything — to work, I read a few articles on mind control and started to feel hopeful. After all, it was my mind, and its penchant for nut butters, that needed controlling.
I found a hypnotist near me — with a Ph.D. in psychology! — whose website suggested I could lose 25 to 30 pounds by having six sessions over eight to ten weeks. I emailed her, sharing my skepticism and desperation, and we decided I’d schedule one session, “just to see if it’s for me.”
A week later, as I settled into her Eames-knockoff lounge chair, I explained that, for the most part, I had my shit together in all other areas of my life, but I had no power over food. I’d gotten to the point where I stopped believing I could actually lose the weight — at least without my magic meth pills.
We talked about nutrition, and metabolism, and that in the weight-loss world, there are three categories of body types: endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph. She explained that my particular type, endomorph, just can’t burn through carbs like other bodies can. Having someone look at my body, describe my type, and pretty much tell me that pizza is my enemy — it felt like a welcome diagnosis. After all, I’d once badgered a doctor into testing me for celiac disease hoping a positive result would force me to adopt a gluten-free lifestyle.
Together, we decided that along with portion control and not eating out of boredom (or sadness, or joy, or anxiety, or exhaustion, or stress), my hypnotherapy would center around my eating the right foods for my body — a high-protein, low-carb diet — when I’m hungry. She said we’d work to “put food in its place”; food I was styling or photographing was not food to eat. Work was work, and meals were meals.
Before “putting me under,” she explained that hypnosis is about accessing subconscious parts of the brain while the conscious mind rests. I didn’t think my conscious mind was capable of resting, but I closed my eyes, anyway, and focused on her meditative music. She counted backward from 10, and told me to imagine warm, golden massage oil running over my head, down my back, and then all over my body. It sounds like the hook for a bad R&B song, but it worked and I immediately felt my muscles start to melt into the chair. Next, she told me to picture myself writing numbers on a chalkboard, beginning with 99, then erasing it, and writing 97, then 95, then 93 …
I have vague recollections of her talking about compartments of my brain. There were stairs, and duct tape, and doors, and an affirmation that I knew exactly what I should (and should not) be eating. She took me to my happy place, a cold lake in the mountains. More than once, I lost count of my numbers. I was definitely still aware of my conscious thoughts, but they were deeply relaxed, almost as if I’d just smoked really good weed. If I’d wanted to, I could have snapped out of it at any moment, but I had no desire to. I can’t remember ever feeling so chill (and I get a lot of full-body massages).
After “waking” me, she laughed at my original skepticism. Apparently, I appeared more relaxed than any of her patients had ever been in a first session (I posited it was new-mom sleep deprivation). Still, she warned me I likely wasn’t fully hypnotized yet — it could take a few more sessions — and to not feel bad if I couldn’t follow my eating plan right away.
That night I ate chicken breast and sautéed vegetables for dinner and was perfectly content. It felt a little like the familiar mania of starting yet another new diet, but somehow also calmer. I ate the right stuff the next day, and the day after that. I could hardly believe it when I made it past the three-day mark without a Taco Bell detour. By my next session, I’d stuck to my plan for an entire week and lost three pounds.
A month and three appointments in, I was ten pounds down and felt good about my progress, so we switched to maintenance sessions. They’re a little shorter and cheaper than regular ones. But we still talk first — about how I’ve eaten, how much weight I’ve lost, what I’d like to accomplish next. She even throws in little bonus categories (this week, I asked her to encourage me to curb my online shopping). As always, she starts her counting, and I get the imaginary, not-at-all-kinky massage oil and sink into the chair.
I don’t know if continuing my sessions is doing me any good at this point — I don’t feel a burst of enthusiasm for nutrition when I leave her office or anything like that — but I do know that I now have control over food. I eat when I’m hungry, and, most of the time, I stop when I’m full. (And I haven’t bought anything online since my last session.)
Maybe it was the hypnosis, or maybe it was the newfound knowledge about my body type (I tend to think it’s a combination of the two), but after ten weeks and five sessions, I’ve lost 21 pounds. I still have nearly 30 to go, and I know my weight loss has to slow down at some point, but for the first time I can remember, I truly believe I will reach my goal. And I’m sticking to my eating plan.
Sure, I have a cheat here and there (four of my husband’s fries, one bite of his ice cream), but it’s almost always a conscious decision, and it doesn’t derail my entire diet. In fact, it doesn’t even derail my day. I’m able to get right back on track — something I’d never been able to do before.
Mar 25
FEELING down? Smile. Cheer up. Put on a happy face. No doubt you’ve dismissed these bromides from friends and loved ones because everyone knows that you can’t feel better just by aping a happy look.
Or perhaps you can. New research suggests that it is possible to treat depression by paralyzing key facial muscles with Botox, which prevents patients from frowning and having unhappy-looking faces.
In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, Eric Finzi, a cosmetic dermatologist, and Norman Rosenthal, a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School, randomly assigned a group of 74 patients with major depression to receive either Botox or saline injections in the forehead muscles whose contraction makes it possible to frown. Six weeks after the injection, 52 percent of the subjects who got Botox showed relief from depression, compared with only 15 percent of those who received the saline placebo.
Great article by Lesley Alderman in NY Times Health section April 15, 2011:
Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control Over Your Illness
KIRSTEN RITCHIE, 44, is no stranger to surgery — nearly 20 years ago, doctors removed four tumors from her brain. She remembers the operation and its aftermath as “horrific . . .”
Check out this article I just found:
Melinda Beck’s “Medical Hypnosis: You are Getting Very healthy” in the April 9, 2012 Health section of the Wall Street Journal:
Check out this very interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Review by David DeSteno on July 5, 2013:
What is anxiety? Where does it come from? When you have first hand experience of it, you might also ask, why is this happening? Is there a genetic component? Is it physiological or chemical? Is it a reaction to some hidden or apparent trauma from the past? Is it purely psychological? Is it an existential or spiritual rumbling, reaction, crisis?
Paraphrasing the words of the renowned Tibetan Lama, Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, “ . . . it doesn’t matter if something is true or not, what matters is whether it’s beneficial (for you and others) to believe it or not, or whether it works (meaning it heals you) or not.” A good question to ask yourself is, “which reason is true?” And you might find that your anxiety, fear, panic, phobia has components of all of the above. I suggest then, that it’s most beneficial to approach your fear from all angles or from the angle that works best for you.
It’s important to begin the healing process asking these questions with our conscious mind or intellect so we begin the process of investigation and movement toward greater understanding and fearlessness. I believe that everything we think (say and do) on the intellectual, conscious, or surface level sends a message to our deeper, subconscious, or subtle mind. And in turn those deeper levels inform our conscious behavior as well. It’s a loop and anywhere in the cycle we can add positive reinforcement. In the process of hypnosis, we strategically change those messages to accomplish our wish to be healthier, happier, more connected, more loving and compassionate. Are the messages true? If I send a message, “calm and relaxed” – is it true? Maybe we aren’t experiencing that state of mind right at the moment, but does it work? Is it beneficial? Absolutely! Are we lying to ourselves? Are we lying to ourselves when we send a message, “you are a failure, you are worthless; there are threatening people and situations everywhere and no one can be trusted”? Which message is true?
The word anxiety comes from the Latin word, anxietatem, which means anguish, angst, solicitude. Others define it as a state of distress or uneasiness, apprehension, psychic tension, fear of danger, foreboding, worry, disquiet, and even more interesting, an earnest but tense desire; an eagerness. From a purely scientific point of view it’s believed that when we experience excessive stress (anxiety)—whether from internal worry or external circumstance—a bodily reaction is triggered, called the “fight or flight” response. This response corresponds to an area of our brain called the hypothalamus, which—when stimulated—initiates a sequence of nerve cell firing and chemical release that prepares our body for running or fighting. Interestingly enough, when we experience excitement, the body responds in much the same way. It’s just that we interpret it the feelings or sensations differently and so experience the event as pleasant rather than as fearful and unpleasant.
The important thing to remember, no matter how we understand anxiety, is that it can change. If it can come and go, this means it can go . . . forever, with practice and understanding. The mind has the power to effect change on a physical level. The mind can change the body/brain!
Anxiety in all its forms is painful. Some highly sensitive people experience it as utterly agonizing, even in its relatively subtle forms. Having come from a family vulnerable to anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias and earlier in my own life, suffering from these myself, I truly understand how uncomfortable, painful, and stressful these very difficult emotions can be. They can rob us of our joy, our work, the goodness of our relationships, and they can constrict and diminish our very life.
Still, I feel that those of us who experience these states are on to something. We have discovered a tip of a certain iceberg that once addressed (even lightly) can remove a huge resistance giving rise to a much fuller, richer, braver, more productive, more interesting and lived life. The other more positive way to reframe anxiety and all its forms is to think, “I am experiencing this, it is happening. What am I going to do with it? What are my choices? I can either run from it, try to escape from it, resist it, get very busy, take drugs, drink and eat too much, hide away, and never really reach safe ground or . . . I can acknowledge the tip of the iceberg, give it some compassionate attention and understanding and then begin the melting process.” The melting process, by the way, takes care of itself once we set it in motion. We don’t ask the sun to melt the snow and ice, it just does it because that’s what it does. As we bring understanding and a loving acceptance to our experience of fear, it just has to go as it no longer has the power it had when we were resisting it.
I no longer pathologize fear in the forms it takes in people who are not psychotic (I’ll leave that discussion to other healthcare practitioners). Rather I see it as a kind of messenger indicating that something needs to be investigated on a deep level. Does something need to change? Are we angry about something and do we feel we shouldn’t be? Did something happen in the past that at the time we experienced as very frightening and yet if we look again with our adult, wise mind, we’d see was really misunderstood or misinterpreted? Or perhaps there was some known trauma and if we look deeply at it now, we can begin to understand we do not need to be afraid of it any longer. And is there some physiological imbalance that’s related? Is this imbalance causing the painful thoughts and experiences? Or is the content of our life and our reaction to it causing the physiological imbalance? It’s useful to ask these questions, letting go of needing an answer. The subconscious mind will always give us what we need to know, so we can relax in asking these questions, knowing the answers will come eventually.
Now this isn’t to say I do not encourage reducing, and eventually eliminating anxiety in all its forms. I take my job seriously. But the first step is to clearly identify it by listening to what it has to say or looking it straight in the eye. The big scary monster often turns out to be . . . not that big of a deal. In The Wizard of Oz, the terrifying Oz turns out to be a little, insecure man behind a curtain. As with many of the other issues I work with, I believe we first need to know our opponent before we are able to defeat him/her/it, and understand it as not an enemy at all. We need to touch it, understand it, appreciate it for what it is helping us learn, see that it has no real power over us and then let it go. I don’t believe we can let it go unless we first have a very close look.
We are whole beings and it’s useful to walk all the paths that lead into (and out of) our anxiety. Why not address it on all levels? With this in mind I take a two-lane path approach using hypnosis to recognize, reduce and eliminate anxiety. By “two” I mean from the side of the body and from the side of the mind. Approaching from both sides effectively changes the brain’s neural pathways. Think of them like highways that have been created simply through habit. Every time you change a habit, even a little bit, the neural pathways begin to change. So you are actually changing paths, you are moving in a different direction.
Refer to Fear, Anxiety and Phobias for more information.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Everyone is going to believe their own senses before anything I tell them. Unfortunately our senses are deceiving us almost from the first moment of experience. While painting this new painting, I found myself considering our sense of sight and some of its deceptions.
If you want to measure something, you hold a ruler or some other measuring device right up to it to take your reading. In the same way, if you hold your little finger as close to your eyeball as you dare, you can see that your visual field is at most three or four finger widths. Normally what we would think when doing this is that our little finger is blocking our whole, vast visual field. But actually you will realize it’s true that, if you want to put an actual measurement on the visual field of one eye, it’s about an inch or inch and a half. (Think about why we never think this way if you want a deeper impression about the way our sight deceives us and why.) So all the complex and large things we see, elephants, complex patterns, trucks, subtle details, lakes, are all squeezed onto a screen that is an inch or so big, and the greater size that we attribute to it (and don’t even know we are doing so) is part of a narrative coming strictly from our mind and which we apply to the sensation. It is not in the sensations themselves.
All our seeing and all our senses are relative not absolute or ultimate. We only know the size of something in relation to the size of something else, even if sometimes it is a “standardized” measure. We might be willing to admit that we don’t really comprehend the extreme measures, like the size of stars, or galaxies, which have several billion stars, or the measurable universe, which has several billion galaxies. And similarly we might admit difficulties with smaller dimensions like atoms. But we think we have a handle on the earthly dimension. But in fact, except as a vague, indefinite idea, we don’t really understand what any kind of extension in space is. And our seeing is always partial, seeing one side of something at a time. Real seeing is more like what we might attribute to a god, for whom nothing is ever hidden, one object cannot block another, and who sees an object from all sides and who is not foiled by distances. But oddly, though we don’t have this type of seeing, what we somehow arrive at conceptually is as though we did see like this. We think we grasp objects in our world from all sides and completely.
To include my painting in this explanation, even briefly, at the place when interpretation shifts between seeing a giant red amoebic monster swallowing a living room and just an ordinary flower, at this place there is a door that leads from the relative world we ordinarily inhabit to the ultimate world. Is there a reason to take the trouble in the raging and blinding tumult and excitement of relative reality for us to search for this speck-sized door?
-Charles Wesley
November 8, 2012
Pain
And a woman spoke, saying “tell us of pain.”
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen.
And the cup he brings, though it burns your lips, has been fashioned of the clay, which the potter has moistened with his own sacred tears.
-Anonymous
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