"First they ignore you. Then they disagree with you. Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Ghandi

The progress of scientific revolutions is less violent, but sometimes no less heated, than political ones. I highly recommend the excellent outline and study guide  for Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 2012),  which has recently been published in its fiftieth anniversary edition. (In my opinion, the outline reads better than the original!) Of particular relevance are Pajares' notes on Chapter V, X, and the chapters which follow it.

As Shakespeare said in his play, The Tempest, "The past is prologue" -- or, as a New York cab driver reportedly phrased it, "Brother, you ain't seen nothin' yet!"

Reference

Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

 

A One-Minute Meditation for the Management of Chronic Pain

The world is too much with us, late and soon.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

==William Wordsworth, 1807

By experiencing one minute a day of mindfulness meditation some significant changes can occur in your life, because the effects begin to multiply as the one minute meditations become a more frequent part of your life. You will feel more calm, resilient, creative, clearer thinking, focused and peaceful without detatching yourself from liife or interfering with other activities., When combined with other applications, for example,  meditation can be helpful in the management of chronic pain.

You can do this one minute meditation with eyes closed or eyes open. If you choose to have your eyes open in the beginning, I suggest you focus your eyes on something that has little meaning such as a doorknob or a speck of dust on the floor. If you are driving, you can use stopping for a red light as a cue to practice your one minute meditation by focusing on the red light until it changes.

Your focus of attention during the meditation is the experience of your breathing in and out. You will focus on some aspect of your breathing that feels natural to you, such as your chest moving, the feeling of air moving through your nose or mouth, your belly moving, your shoulders moving, or any aspect of breath that feels comfortable and natural. As you breathe out, relax any lightness in your body. During the one minute you will likely experience your mind having shifted from focusing on your breath to focusing on something else such as your thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, memories, conversations, movements, and/or other things. You may suddenly notice sounds you had not noticed before. You may find yourself reviewing conversations that you had earlier, or you may find yourself solving problems that you have been working on,or you may notice tensions in your body that come into awareness. When you notice that your awareness and attention have shifted away from your breath, you will mindfully, gently, calmly, and peacefully return your attention to your breath, just noticing the distraction without pushing it away or taking it in, or evaluating, judging, or getting involved in the distraction. Just gently and lovingly return your attention to your breath. You may find yourself doing this from 10 to 100 times during your one minute meditation. Eventually you will find that your "meditation muscle" gets stronger and there are fewer distractions. The distractions are normal and are part of the nature of our minds. Thoughts are like clouds in the sky. If you just notice them without trying to push them away or analyze them, they usually just pass away. The mindfulness practice will eventually bring you more peace, compassion, joy and calm for yourself and for others. 

Don't expect immediate results. The purpose of meditation is not to turn you into master overnight. Meditation works best when it is done for its own sake, without becoming attached to results.

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Becoming Your Power Animal: Hypnosis in Native American Culture

Transmogrification is the hypnotic ability
to turn oneself into an animal.

Many imaginatively gifted people freely change the imagery and content of a hypnotic experience to suit themselves as they go along, in a style which often reflects their own needs and preferences. For example, I once had a client of Native American ancestry who was seeking a source of strength while she was going through a rough divorce. After I hypnotized her using imagery of relaxing on the beach, she told me, “The beach imagery was working, but I decided to change it. Instead of lying on the beach, I saw myself as a little girl, lying between the roots of a large tree that I used to play under.”

I asked her if she would like to feel herself becoming part of the tree and absorbing strength from the earth beneath her, instead of from her own untapped potential, and she agreed. She agreed, and suggestions were provided as follows:

Now I would like you to imagine yourself as a little girl again, playing beneath the roots of that large tree, If you accept each detail of the scene as you describe it to yourself, your imagination will be completely free to allow you to experience the situation just as if you were really there. So just allow all your awareness of the present to grow dim now, as you feel yourself transported backwards in time. You are drifting backwards now, all the way back to the time when you were a little girl, playing between the roots of that large tree.

Now, you are becoming fully aware of yourself as a little girl again, resting between the roots of that large tree. Imagine yourself beginning to cuddle up beneath the roots of the tree, and feel how pleasant it would be just to become part of the tree, feeling as safe and as secure if it was your mother. Feel yourself merging with the tree now, and drifting off to sleep beneath it. As you do, you can feel yourself becoming part of the tree, reaching down through the roots to draw into yourself feelings of peace and calm. Great waves of perfect, infinite, boundless peace and calm are flowing into you from the innermost depths of the Earth.

“That was better,” she told me later. “But while I was beneath the tree, and before I joined it, I turned into a series of animals first. There was a wolf, and a mouse, and a moose, and a crow, and I think there were one or two others.”

At the start of our next session, I asked her if she would like to use the tree imagery again, and she agreed. “Don’t go through all the animals, though. I’m not sure what I’m going to do.” She completed the induction procedure, after first mentally turning into a crow (which was her personal power animal) on her own before merging with the tree.

If hypnosis is viewed as a form of experiential theater, turning into a tree or an animal (transmogrification) need only be suggested  in order for sufficiently imaginative people to develop a sense of strength and empowerment as an eagle soaring over valleys and mountaintops, or to de-stress by cavorting among a school of dolphins as if they were one of them. Numerous other applications, using imagery derived from the animal kingdom or from other aspects of nature, are also possible.

How to Get a Good Night's sleep

Don't just toss and turn in bed when you are having trouble sleeping. Get up and do something Boring!  

When I was working in the New Jersey State Prison system, each of us in the Psych Department had to meet with one group of prisoners per week to teach a class in "sleep hygiene," because as you might imagine, it's easy to get your days and nights mixed up in there. We were able to trade notes freely among each other, and over time we accumulated quite a bit of useful information which I'd like to share with you.

The most important thing keeping people awake at night is probably worrisome thoughts. The following video by Eckhard Tolle shows how to turn them off.

Here are some other things that will help.

•  Make sure you get enough daylight so that your body will be able to establish a daily wake-sleep rhythm. Some people have found commercially-available light boxes to be helpful, especially if you live in a location where there is less sunlight during certain seasons of the year. This lack of sunlight can lead to a condition known as seasonal affective disorder  (more popularly known as "cabin fever"), characterized by periods of depression and interference with regular sleep patterns.
• Keep the bedroom dark and quiet. Darkness causes the body to produce melatonin, a natural sleep-inducing agent.
• Your body remembers what it feels like as you are falling asleep, but the memory is stored directly in your muscles. Get into a comfortable position and bring that memory back into conscious awareness. Hold  onto it, and let it fill your mind completely..
• Don't play on the smartphone, the computer, or watch television. They all give off light which suppresses the melatonin in your system and overstimulates the brain,   
• Most people need between seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Trying to get by on less than this biologically-determined amount builds up a sleep debt which  cuts into your well-being and efficiency, and becomes harder and harder to repay.
• Establish a consistent sleeping schedule. People tend to become sleepy 24 hours after they last went to sleep, and awaken 24 hours after they last woke up. Significant changes in either time -- especially shift work schedules which frequently change -- disrupt the sleep-wake cycle.
• If your sleep is troubled by nightmares, or if you have personal problems which prevent you from getting the sleep you need, you may want to consider seeking professional assistance.
• Have a set ritual before going to bed. 
• Limit the amount of food you eat for the last two hours before you go to bed.
• Limit your daily use of caffeine, or eliminate it entirely.  One or two cupsc of coffee or tea  is probably okay to get you going in the morning, but using coffee, tea, or other drinks which are high in caffeine throughout the day only makes it harder to repay your sleep debt.
• Exercise regularly, preferably in the morning. .
• If possible, adopt a life style which reduces your total amount of stress.
• While most of us prefer not to use prescribed sleep medications, millions of people do use them regularly without ill effects. Melatonin, the favorite of many, is available without prescription. Others prefer nutraceuticals such as St. John's Wort.
• We frequently do not notice the "aches and pains" in our bodies because we have grown so used to them, but they can still interfere with our sleep.  Many prople find that taking a couple of aspirin, ibuprophin, or Tylenol works well before going to bed, particularly when they do not wish to feel groggy from sleep medication the next day. 
• Perhaps most importantly, use the bed only for sleeping and for sex. Instead of tossing and turning, find  something boring to do until you get sleepy. This helps you to avoid a conditioned association between not sleeping and being in bed.
• If it takes you a while to get back to sleep after getting up to use the bathroom, consider allowing yourself an extra hour or so in bed so that you can still get all the sleep that you need. 
• You can tell your virtual assistant to play soothing music or background sounds such as ocean waves or falling rain to lull you to sleep -- or you can even ask it to tell you a bedtime story!

"Covert Hypnosis" and "Ambush Hypnosis:" It's Mostly a Hoax, Folks!

In spite of the numerous advertisements encouraging you to learn how to do just that, don't just sidle up to someone at the mall, or someone who is asleep, and try to hypnotize them on the sly!

Though not impossible, it is extremely difficult to hypnotize someone without their prior knowledge and consent. Although covert hypnosis (sometimes referred to as "ambush hypnosis") can work occasionally with an unsuspecting person who is caught by surprise, much more often than not, people will catch on to what you are trying to do. They will either laugh at you, or become angry for insulting their intelligence, and/or suspect that you have an ulterior motive and report you as a suspicious person -- that is, if they don't decide to take the matter into their own hands.

How to Eliminate Late-Night Snacking

Being overweight can be caused by a number of factors. When it is simply due to the habit of making bad decisions concerning food, then a cognitive-behavioral approach such as the one described here may be useful. 

A client came to my office requesting hypnosis in order to eliminate his habit of waking up for two hours every night. He was retired, and simply slept later in the morning to make up for the two hours he had lost. We examined all the usual causes: he did not drink too much coffee or tea, there was nothing worrying him, and there did not seem to be any organic cause for his middle insomnia. Finally, he admitted that his real concern was that he was gaining about a pound a month because he would get up and have a snack of cheese and crackers before going back to sleep. Further discussion made it clear that this snacking habit was what was providing the primary reinforcement for his insomnia, and this was what we would have to work on.

Suggestion-enhanced experience does not always have to involve an induction, and experiences enhanced by suggestion need not always be positive ones. Since he did not seem to be a candidate for hypnosis, I instructed him on how to use the Best Me Technique to visualize, or picture in his mind, the cheese and crackers in the refrigerator having spoiled -- but to enhance this image in as many ways as he could imagine, using the grossest possible imagery, in order to totally destroy its incentive value. In cognitive-behavioral terms, this would be described as converting a positive reinforcement into an aversive stimulus. 

The best time to do this, of course, what just after he had awakened in the middle of the night, while he was still lying there before he had arisen to get his usual snack from the refrigerator. Using all six dimensions of the BEST ME Technique, he was instructed to mentally experience the previously-coveted food as having spoiled or become infected with fruit flies, drenched in urine, or floating in a pool of -- well, you get the idea. 

A follow-up telephone call one month later indicated that  practicing this exercise during his periods of middle insomnia seemed to be completely effective. He was no longer snacking, and, except for his usual bathroom breaks, he was sleeping through the night as well.  

You can apply this same technique to eliminate any food from your routine which will help you lose weight. Eating 3,500 calories more than you burn results in a one-pound weight gain. Pick one food that you like, find out how many calories per serving it contains, and do the math. See how many extra pounds that one food will add to your weight during the  course of a year. If you are like most of us, cutting out only two or three such foods using the cognitive-behavioral dieting procedure just described, combined with a little patience, should make your ideal weight goal easily attainable. 

 

How to THINK Like a Thin Person

Most diets simply do not work for most people most of the time, because they have not learned to think like a thin person. After we have been on a diet for a while and lost some weight, our body reacts to the diet as if it were a famine. Our metabolism slows down, we stop losing. and eventually we begin to eat more, in order to return to what our body had previously considered as our "normal" weight. Here's how to break the cycle.

Cognitive-behavioral psychology is the study of the relationships between thinking, feeling, and behavior.  Unless we develop the habit of taking all three of these into account, in the same way that thin people habitually do, we will continue living on a perpetual yo-yo of dieting to lose weight and then gaining it back to the level that our body has become used to. 

Cognitive-behavioral therapists often use a form called a thought record in order to examine just what goes on in the mind when we make those habitual decisions that keep getting us into trouble by eating the wrong things. You can obtain them at www.getselfhelp.co.uk. You can make copies of their sample form for your own use by using the print command on your computer, and you can also obtain different versions of the thought record for a host of other purposes. In addition, they have a free online self-help course and other materials on how to use the thought record effectively.

Here's an example of one way that a thought record might be used to counteract one common stressful situation which causes people to consume too much food. Let's suppose you are putting in long hours and having to do more than your fair share at work because other people have been laid off, and your boss is driving you crazy. You start to gain weight because you have gotten into the habit of consoling yourself by eating too much, and then you cannot keep the weight off for the reasons just mentioned. The thought record first asks you a series of simple questions about the thoughts that occurred when you gave in to the temptation to overeat, asks you how appealing those thoughts were, and helps you to think of more appealing thoughts, as illustrated below.  

Where were you?   Watching television on the couch at home.

Emotion or feeling.  Fatigue. Lethargy. Craving for a snack.

Negative automatic thought.  I want to go to the kitchen and get some pretzels and beer.

Evidence that supports the thought.  I will enjoy them after a long hard day at work.

Evidence that does not support the thought.  I'm becoming a couch potato.

Alternative thought or autosuggestion. "I'll find other activities to enjoy.

Emotion or feeling. Relief (rating:60%); discomfort at having to get up (rating: 40%).  

Of course, you don't have to chronicle every decision this way in order to learn to think like a thin person. It only takes a few such exercises to the hang of it. But it is necessary to make a good beginning for cognitive-behavioral psychology to help you to keep your feet on the right path As Confucius said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step!" 

 Print Sources

Barlow, D. H. (2008). Clinical Handbook of Psychological Disorders: A Step-by-Step Treatment Manual, 5th ed. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Beck, J. S. (2008).  The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person. Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor House.  (Judith Beck is the daughter of Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and one of its most widely respected leaders in her own right.) 

Moss, M. (2013). Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.  New York, NY: Random House.

 

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Viirtual Reality Hypnosis? Throw Away Those Goggles!

Most people are familiar with Charles Dickens' story, "A Christmas Carol," in which the miserly Scrooge is sited by three spirits who "scare the Dickens" out of him and he becomes a lovable old gentleman who "knew how to keep Christmas better than anyone."If Dickens had been writing in the twenty-first century instead of the nineteenth, he would probably have had Scrooge make a few visits to an experiential hypnotist who, as Kelley Woods and I have been doing, would use hypnosis guide the client to a series of parallel universes, in which things would turn out differently i-- except we know now that we should use love and happiness rather than fear as an incentive to make the point. We don't need to use 3-D glasses to use virtual reality hypnosis. We use a combination of Kelley's mindful hypnosis and Don's BEST ME technique to allow clients to project their entire being into another Universe -- and it works!

Virtual Reality Hypnosis: Adventures in the Multiverse extends Dickens' approach to the modern era, often with dramatic results., Clients have been saying things like, "I can't thank you enough!" and, "I'm at a point in my life now where I think I can accomplish anything!" The changes which they are reporting in their lives seem to bear this out.

How to Use Meditation to Identify Life Goals -- and Deal with Stress Along the Way

There are four basic stages of problem solving:

Preparation, in which you become familiar with the elements of a problm by turning it over in your mind;

Incubation, or letting it "sit" for a while as your right brain or "unconscious mind" works to come up with a solution; 

Illumination, or a sudden insight which presents itself as a solution; and 

Verification, or actually checking the solution to see if it is really going to work.ted  

Meditation is an excellent way of stoking your mental processes to speed up the incubation stage when you are seeking a solution to a problem or a life goal which has been which has been eluding you.  Although the process may still take some time, meditation is also an excellent way of dealing with the strong emotions which may arise while you are awaiting a solution and, eventually, while you are pursuing it. The following WikiHow article on meditation has been by edited by nearly 700 people and read by over 1-3/4 million. In addition to its other uses, I heartily recommend it as a means of identifying aims and purposes which then can be formulated into winning goals.

How to Meditate

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Meditation is a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the conditioned, "thinking" mind into a deeper state of self awareness. To free one's awareness from associating solely with the mind and its soul. There are many different meditation methods. At the core of meditation is the goal to focus and eventually quiet your mind, thus freeing your awareness. As you progress, you will find that you can meditate anywhere and at any time, accessing an inner calm no matter what's going on around you. You will also find that you can better control your reactions to things as you become increasingly aware of your thoughts (letting go of anger, for example). But first, you have to learn to tame your mind and control your breathing.

Steps

1. Make time to meditate. Set aside enough time in your daily routine for meditating; early morning and in the evening are often most preferable. The steadiness of mind meditation is most noticeable when you do it regularly; some people like to end the day by clearing their mind, and some prefer to find refuge in meditation in the middle of a busy day. The easiest time to meditate is in the morning, before the day tires your body out and gives your mind more to think about. Just take care to avoid spending too long meditating––start with around 5 to 15 minutes a day.
2. Find or create a quiet, relaxing environment. For the beginner, it's especially important to avoid any obstacles to attention. Turn off TV sets, the phone or other noisy appliances. If you play music, choose calm, repetitive and gentle tunes, so as not to break your concentration.
   • Meditating outside works for many meditators. As long as you don't sit near a busy roadway or another source of loud noise, you can find peace under a tree or sitting upon some lush grass in a favorite corner of the garden.
3. Sit on level ground. Sit on a cushion if the ground is uncomfortable. You don't have to twist your limbs into the half lotus or full lotus position or adopt any unusual postures. The important thing is to keep your back straight, as this will help with breathing later on.
   • Tilt your pelvis forward by sitting on the forward edge of a thick cushion, or on a chair that has its back legs lifted off the ground 8 to 10 cm (3 or 4 inches).
   • Starting from your bottom, stack up the vertebrae in your spine, so that they are balanced one on top of another and support the whole weight of your torso, neck, and head. Done correctly, it feels as if no effort is required to hold your torso up. (A small amount of effort is in fact required, but with the right posture, it is so small and evenly distributed you don't notice it.)
   • Relax your arms and legs. They don't need to be in any special position, just as long as they are relaxed and don't interfere with balancing your torso. You can put your hands on your thighs, but it might be easier at first to let your arms hang at your sides––the hanging weight helps reveal where things are out of alignment.
4. Relax everything. Keep searching for parts of your body that aren't relaxed. When you find them, (and you will), consciously relax them. You may find that you can't relax them unless you adjust your posture so that you are better aligned, and that place doesn't need to work anymore. This commonly happens with muscles near your spine. You may also notice that you are twisted a little and need to straighten out. Little muscles in your face often keep getting tense, too.
5. Let your attention rest on the flow of your breath. Listen to it, follow it, but make no judgments on it (such as "It sounds a little raspy... maybe I'm getting a cold?"). The goal is to allow the "chattering" in your mind to gradually fade away. Find an "anchor" to settle your mind.
   • Try reciting a mantra (repetition of a sacred word). A single word like "om" uttered at a steady rhythm is best. You can recite it verbally or just with the voice in your mind. Beginners may find it easier to count their breaths. Try counting your breath from 1 through 10, then simply start again at 1.
   • To circumvent images that keep intruding on your thoughts, visualize a place that calms you. It can be real or imaginary. Imagine you are at the top of a staircase leading to a peaceful place. Count your way down the steps until you are peaceful and relaxed.
6. Silence your mind. Once you've trained your mind to focus on just one thing at a time, the next step is focus on nothing at all, essentially "clearing" your mind. This requires tremendous discipline but it is the pinnacle of meditation. After focusing on a single point as described in the previous step, you can either cast it away, or observe it impartially and let it come and then go, without labeling it as "good" or "bad". Take the same approach to any thoughts which return to your mind until silence perseveres.

Tips

• It is easy to lose track of time while meditating. Being concerned about time can be distracting to meditation. Some people find it liberating to set a timer and let it be concerned about how long you have to meditate. Choose a gentle timer. If it is too jarring, the anticipation of the alarm can be distracting.
• Some other benefits that are less observable for most people include: falling asleep more easily, more ease in fighting addictions, altered states of mind (which are most prominent in people who have spent over 10,000 hours meditating such as Buddhist monks), and most recently discovered is that meditation on the concepts of calmness and relaxation can turn off genes within every cell in the body that cause cells to become inflamed when you are under a lot of stress.
• If you find it difficult to meditate for the length of time you have chosen, try a shorter time for a while. Almost anyone can meditate for a minute or two without experiencing intrusive thoughts. Then, as the ocean of the mind calms, you gradually lengthen your meditation session until you have achieved the desired length of time.
• With good posture, it will be easier to breathe as your lungs will have more space. In fact, you may notice how most of the muscles in your torso work to help you breathe, from the muscles in the base of your pelvis to the ones in your neck, centered on the main breathing muscle, the diaphragm. They work just a little, assisting the diaphragm. If you notice this, it's a good sign you have established a good posture. The right posture is easy and comfortable. You almost feel like you are floating.
• You should be comfortable enough to concentrate, but not so comfortable that you feel the urge to fall asleep.
• Set aside a specific time each day for meditation, but don't overdo it. If 20-30 minutes in the morning isn't enough, add another session later in the day instead of trying for a single, longer session.
• Make some effort to be mindful of your mood and thoughts when not meditating. You may notice that you feel calmer, happier, and sharper on days when you have meditated, and notice a decrease in these qualities when you have not.
• Meditation practiced over a long term period of time have been shown to have many beneficial results and is well worth continued practice. Benefits include: Increased mindfulness and awareness, reduced stress, calmer and more relaxed moods, improved memory and focus, and increased in grey matter (brain cells) in various parts of the brain.
• It may be beneficial to mentally review or replay the previous day at the start of your sessions, if you can do so in a relaxed, passive way. This often happens naturally, and sometimes it's best to allow this to happen, as long as you don't get emotionally wrapped up or let it go on too long before beginning meditation. This procedure is known as "processing" of recent events, and becoming skilled at performing a non-judgmental review of events does much to increase awareness and emotional well-being.
• Do what works best for you. What works for some people might have other techniques that might not work for you. Don't let that get you down. Remember to relax!
• The benefits of meditation can be experienced long before the practitioner has been successful in maintaining focus or clearing the mind, simply as a result of the practice.
• What you do with a silent mind is up to you. Some people find that it is a good time to introduce an intention or a desired outcome to the subconscious mind. Others prefer to "rest" in the rare silence that meditation offers. For religious people, meditation is often used to connect with their God(s) and receive visions.
• For some people, focusing attention on a point or object does exactly the opposite of what meditation is all about. It takes you back to the life of focus, concentration, strain. In this case, as an alternative to the above techniques, some meditators recommend un-focusing your attention. Instead of focusing attention on a point or an object, this type of meditation is achieved by attaining a state of zero. Take your attention above all thoughts to a point where you lose all attention and all thoughts.
• Do not force yourself to meditate. You should want to meditate before think about trying.

Warnings

• Don't expect immediate results. The purpose of meditation is not to turn you into a Zen master overnight. Meditation works best when it is done for its own sake, without becoming attached to results.
• If you find your mind is wandering, try not to scold or beat up on yourself about it. Wandering restlessly is the normal state of the conditioned mind. This is the first lesson many people learn in meditation and it is a valuable one. Simply, gently, invite your attention back to your breath, remembering that you've just had a small but precious "awakening." Becoming aware of your wandering mind is a success, not a failure.
• Some people find it's difficult to meditate immediately before bedtime. If you're very sleepy, you may find yourself nodding off. Conversely, meditating may energize your mind, making it more difficult to fall asleep.
• If your posture is good, you will almost certainly feel a stretch on the back of your neck, and possibly in your shoulders. Just relax. If the stretch is so pronounced that it is painful, work on stretching and relaxing that area when you aren't meditating.
• As you meet other people who meditate, you may encounter a few who will boast about their endurance for long meditation sessions, even hours and hours at a sitting. Don't be tempted to change your practice to "keep up." Meditation is not a competition––it's a way of life.

Related wikiHows

• How to Practice Grateful Flow
• How to Meditate With Your Inner Voice
• How to Find the Light at the End of the Tunnel
• How to Relax With the Sun Meditation
• How to Relax Your Mind
• How to Maintain Your Calm in Difficult Times
• How to Do Nothing
• How to Become a Taoist
• How to Sit During Zen Meditation
• How to Sit Like a Zen Master
• How to Enjoy Cleaning Your Home
• How to Reflect
• How to Use Autosuggestion

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Meditate. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.


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See also the following Print Sources 

Gibbons, D. E. (2001). Experience as an art form. .New York, NY: Authors Choice Press.

Gibbons, D. E. (2000). Applied hypnosis and hyperempiria. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press (originally published 1979 by Plenum Press).

Gibbons, D. E., & Cavallaro, L (2013).. Exploring alternate universes: And learning what they can teach us. Amazon Kindle E-Books. (Note: It is not necessary to own a Kindle reader to download this e-book, as the Kindle app may be downloaded free of charge to a standard desktop or laptop computer and to most cell phones.)

Gibbons, D. E., & Lynn, S. J. (2010). Hypnotic inductions: A primer. in S. J. Lynn, J. W. Rhue, & I. Kirsch (Eds.) Handbook of clinical hypnosis, 2nd ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 267-291.

Which Hypnotic Induction is Best for Your Client?

Many books have been written on the subject of hypnotic inductions and more are appearing every year, some of which are quire expensive. But how are we to tell which induction is the best one to use for any individual client?
At the British Royal Society of Medicine a few years ago, one woman said that she would lapse into her native Gaelic after an induction and it would  work just fine, regardless of whether or not the client understood what she was saying. This explains why witch doctors and medicine men can also be effective in cultures which support these beliefs, as long as the basic ingredients of rapport and positive expectations for change are present, As Steve Lynn so eloquently put it in his summary of our induction chapter in the American Psychological Association's Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis:   

If proper consideration is given to: a) the personality and characteristics of each individual client we encounter; b) the establishment of rapport and positive expectations for change; and c) the total situation in which the session is conducted, then we might well be successful even if the body of the session was delivered in Gaelic and the client did not understand a word of it.  Perhaps that's why, in cultures that accept it, putting on a mask and dancing around the subject chanting nonsense and shaking rattles at them is often the treatment of choice (Gibbons & Lynn, 2010)

Print Sources

Gibbons, D. E., & Lynn, S. J. (2010). Hypnotic inductions: A primer. in S. J. Lynn, J. W. Rhue, & I. Kirsch (Eds.) Handbook of clinical hypnosis, 2nd ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 267-291.  

Gibbons, D. E. (2000). Applied hypnosis and hyperempiria. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press (originally published 1979 by Plenum Publishing Co.).

Sarbin, T. R., & De Rivera, J. (1998),  Believed-in imaginings: The Narrative Consruction of Reality (Memory, Trauma, Dissociation, and Hypnosis) . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

How to Get Thin and STAY Thin

 

Being overweight can be caused by a number of factors. When it is simply due to the habit of making bad decisions concerning food, then an approach such as the one described here may be useful. However, you should not make any changes in your regular eating habits without first consulting with your physician.  

A married woman in her mid-forties sought my help in order to lose weight. She had obtained clearance from her physician to proceed with a weight loss program, along with a recommend diet; and she was not currently taking any medication. She described her relationship with her husband and children as warm and affectionate, and told me that her life was fundamentally happy, with no major stressors which might serve to distract her from her weight loss goal.    

Her anniversary was some eight months away. She was going to surprise her husband by arranging a getaway weekend for him at a hotel. Her plans included dinner at a stylish restaurant where she would like to be able to once more wear a treasured dress which she had saved from her honeymoon.

I taught her how to to hypnotize herself by using the Best Me Technique and to pre-experience the attainment of her weight loss goal, using the anniversary restaurant dinner as one of the settings in which she could enjoy the multi-modal dimensions of its fulfillment. 

Belief systems involving suggestions of a change in place and time at the completion of the induction prepared her to pre-experience the anniversary dinner as if it were already taking place. 

Suggestions of Emotion included responses to both her husband’s admiring glances and the increasing physical attraction they felt towards each other as the evening wore on. 

Suggestions of many different Sensations and physical perceptions heightened the reality of the experience still further: the lighted candles on the dinner table, the soft music, the sight and smell of a bouquet of flowers, the taste of the dinner wine, etc. 

Thoughts and images included suggestions of the couple sharing their mutual declarations of love as they looked deeply into each other’s eyes. 

Motives became stronger as the evening wore on and their warmth became desire. 

Their Expectations for the rest of the night increased apace as the couple hurriedly paid their check and made their way out the door and took an elevator to the hotel room in the same building which she had rented for the remainder of the evening. . . . 

The client had a rich imagination and that she responded well to suggestion. Once she had mastered the technique of multimodal suggestion using the Best Me Technique for preliminary scenarios such as the one just described. To increase her motivation still more, she was able to devise multimodal autosuggestions for much more intimate experiences during the remainder of their anniversary evening without additional coaching from me. She reported that these were also highly effective in maintaining her motivation to diet at a high level.

Follow-up sessions were scheduled at progressively greater intervals as her self-imposed deadline drew near, to ensure that her progress continued and that her goal was satisfactorily reached, which it was. 

The secret of her success was that she was not just "fantasizing in a vacuum." She was selecting visualizations which would increase the meaningfulness of her life story as it unfolded.  These were changes that she could not merely believe, but that she could also believe in. 

Whatever personal goal you have set for yourself, look for ways to incorporate it into your own life story in such a way that you can believe in it as well as merely believing it.  If you can believe in it with your entire being, using a systematic, comprehensive method such as the BEST ME Technique, you can make it happen!