Remember that your clients will tell you that they are not hypnotised. Of course the final piece is your belief. One aspect to check is whether you are convinced that they did not go into trance and maybe also that you were convinced in advance that they wouldn’t.

But I would say first of all is, change your beliefs. Secondly just because someone does not get zonked out does not mean that they are not in trance. Different people have different ways of expressing trance. As we produce the hypnotic phenomena, what you will learn is that different people have different ways of actualising trance. So you could have a client who felt no relaxation and who felt nothing different from normal and yet they might be very good at producing arm levitation or arm catalepsy and you might not have any idea that they are in trance until their arm is suspended in mid air.

Again as the hypnotherapist I would reserve judgement. It may be that you had a subject that didn’t want to go into trance. You nay of heard of people say “I can not go into trance” or “Hypnosis does not work with me”.

You have to think why would anyone be proud of not being able to go into trance. In fact in the early days of hypnosis they assumed that one who would go into trance was weak and of lesser intelligence, but studies in the last 20 years have absolutely proven that is takes a higher level of intelligence to go into trance. The people who do go into trance are actually very strong willed and are in the process of co-operating with the hypnotherapist.

There is any badge of honour about not going into trance. People who do go into trance make better hypnotherapist and the other element is of course is that we have a process of healing for ourselves and others.

Let’s talk a little bit about them before we actually do our trance induction. Erickson’s major approach is described as indirect permissive hypnosis. That is as opposed to direct authoritarian. In the direct authoritarian approach, what we say is uncross your arms and legs. Put your feet on the floor and take a deep breath and go into a trance. What we say in Ericksonian hypnosis is we would be a little more indirect about it, a little more permissive. I wonder as you sit there listening to the sound of my voice can you experience being more relaxed. As you notice you are more relaxed is it easier for you to go into trance.

So Erickson was very, very permissive about it. There are some people who I will need the direct authoritarian approach and there are some folks who will need the absolutely indirect permissive approach. You’re going to have to notice which kinds of people or which kind of person you are dealing with.

Typically however, people who have spent most of their life following orders, such as someone in the military, will respond best to a direct authoritarian approach. But some people especially in our day and age are put off by a direct authoritarian approach. They would not feel comfortable about being told what to do in which case then you will have to use a more permissive approach.

Let’s explore the Ericksonian approach it is a bit of a different philosophical concept about hypnosis than what people generally think about hypnosis. So remember, Erickson said that patients are patients because they are out of rapport with there own unconscious. Patients are people who have had too much programming. So much outside programming that they have lost touch with their inner selves.

He said that his learning over the years was he tried to direct the patient too much. So I would say that Erickson did indirect authoritarian hypnosis for at least from 1920 until 1940 maybe even 1950. So as time went on he began to switch over and became far more indirect. So that by the time of his death in 1980 he was really doing mostly all indirect hypnosis. He might not even mention the word hypnosis. He might just sit down and tell the patient some stories. All of a sudden they would find that they had changed or got better.

Erickson’s approach, according to Ernest Rossi at this particular segment is based on the work of Ernest Rossi. Erickson’s approach was labelled by Rossi as the utilisation approach, and utilisation means that we utilise whatever it is that happens during trance .

It causes your heart to beat, it circulates your blood and it causes your digestion to work. It makes your lymph systems circulate and among other things it makes your eyes blink. So, the unconscious mind is in charge of all of that. Another very important assumption that you should make is that your unconscious mind can communicate with every cell in the body.

Until the mid eighties, people could say to you, oh you are doing hypnosis training, well that’s just in your mind. So yes hypnosis is just in your mind, it’s not something that’s “real.” But since about 1985, science has begun to realize with the pioneering work of Deepak Chopra, who is a medical doctor in the US, science has begun to realize that not only does the information from the mind affect that body, but there is now scientific evidence that mind is available to communicate to all of the cells in the body.

Originally when the neurotransmitter was first discovered, neurotransmitter is by the way, the chemical that is in between the synapses between two nerve cells. Originally they thought the neurotransmitter was just in the brain and later they decided that neurotransmitter was actually between every neuron in the body. More recently quantum physics and quantum biology, now tells us that the neurotransmitter bathes every single cell in the human body, which means that mind can communicate with body in any given moment.

Now you are probably aware of the amount of time that it takes for the information to go from one part of the body to another. If it was totally instantaneous it would move very quickly, but when you get into your bath or shower, do you test it with your hand or you test it with your foot. Did you ever notice that when you test it with your hand, that it takes less time for the information to get to your brain, than when you test it with your foot? If you didn’t notice that, next time you take a shower or bath stick your toe in first and wait till the information gets to your brain, and then stick your hand in the wait for the information to get to your brain and what you will notice is there is a discrete amount of time between the hand going into the hot water and the amount of time it actually takes to get to your brain.

What that’s indicative of is the amount of time it takes the neuro transmitter to go between the synapses and the synaptic aphesis as well as being a transmitter from one cell to the next, to the next, one neuron to the next as the information goes from your hand to your brain. So it’s your unconscious mind that becomes the means of working with the mind body connection. So the second major assumption that we will be making, is that it is the unconscious mind that is our key to the mind, body connection. What we are essentially saying then is that there are many things we are conscious of but the function of the body and the operation of the body is pretty much unconscious and we are not really aware of that function at the unconscious level until we bring it to awareness. It’s hypnosis that allows us to begin and stimulate, and working with the mind body connection, to begin to accomplish many wonderful things