An article in the Reader's Diigest compares the effectiveness of hypnosis and meditation and comes out in favor of hypnosis. However, Richard Nongard once observed that hypnosis was the same thing as meditation, and I agree; for both involve the actualization of the expressed or the implied suggestion that your conscious processes are beginning to function differently. It's just that the set of assumptions which you use when you are going into hypnosis is more efficient than the set of assumptions which you use when practicing meditation.
Research has found that the brains of meditators change with long-term practice; and many students of meditation seek out a respected guru for long-term training and personal growth. The aim of hypnosis, on the other hand, has been, "Find 'em, fix 'em, and forget 'em," although we might keep clients on your mailing list and send them a newsletter once in a while so that they will remember to tell their friends about you and consult you again when another problem arises in their lives.
Lisa Brown, who many of you will remember as a hypnosis virtuoso and frequent poster on HT before she migrated to Facebook as so many others have done, has continued to regularly work with practice partners in order to develop her hypnotic abilities even further. I have a long-term retired client who, when she leaves my office, is forced to return to the "toxic soup' in which she must perpetually swim. Her mother in law is slowly becoming more and more demented. She only speaks Italian and refuses to learn English. She has stopped showering and will not allow herself to move to a senior care facility; her husband has had six strokes, and is not too much better than his mother; and her sister, who has a husband and children of her own, refuses to be of any help. She comes in to vent once a week, and I take her on a tour to the Multiverse where she dissolves in a lake of infinite, unbounded love, using time distortion so that it seems like she has been gone for an eternity. On the way back, borrowing from Rumi, I tell her, "We have been to Heaven. We are higher than the angels. And we will go back there, for this is your eternal home beyond the stars." Then, as she is about to emerge from hypnosis, I tell her, "You are among a gifted few, on the cutting edge of evolution, whose life is not limited to living in one universe at a time," and, "The lessons of these experiences will remain with you."
I am helping her to re-define herself. She now sees herself as an advanced being on the cutting edge of evolution, with the ability to pre-experience the joys of Heaven and take these lessons back with her to bolster her life in the present.. Was she really there? Since I don't pretend to know what "truth" is, I have no way of telling But I believe that my job as a therapist is to help clients construct a reality that will help them to live better lives, regardless of whether it is true or not and regardless of the reality that I may construct for myself. She is certainly able to live her life more effectively with this type of long-term hypnosis, which essentially the same asf long-term meditation..
You can find more information, as well as a script for multiversal travel, on my Blog, www.hyperempiria.blogspot.com.
Don
