Hypnosis: A Comprehensive Guide [Hardcover]

"An excellent introductory text for studetns beginning to study the art and science of hypnosis. For those already knowledgeable about hypnosis, there are many nuances that will enable you to increase the elegance of your work."

I love this book. Highly satisfying.

This is definitely a book I will be revisiting and recommending to
colleagues, both new and experienced.

Makes three radically different types of hypnosis easy to utilise in daily hypnosis work. The book examines in detail the techniques of Erickson, Estabrooks and Elman and explores methods that employ Direct Authoritarian and Indirect Permissive approaches. It incorporates scripts for the various types of hypnotic induction and inlcudes inductions for producing deep-trance phenomena.

Tad James M.S., Ph.D. is one of the world's most influential trainers, and a respected authority on hypnosis. He teaches and appears before audiences for over 200 days every year, and is president of The American Board of Hypnotherapy, one of the world's largest hypnotherapy organisations. Tad is also President of Advanced Neuro-Dynamics, a leading NLP firm, The American Institute of Hypnotherapy, the world's leading hypnosis institute, and American Pacific University, a Hawaii-based institution offering alternative degrees in Hypnosis, Psychology, and Esoteric Studies.

The doorway to success in hypnosis is the Unconscious Mind. Your Unconscious Mind not only holds information that is outside your consciousness, but it also manages sensations and body functions. A moment before reading this sentence, you probably were not aware of the feeling of your feet against the floor, or your back against the chair. You have sensations coming to your body all the time, but you remain unaware of most of them. In addition to managing all these sensations, your Unconscious Mind keeps your heart beating, your blood circulating, your digestion working, and your lymph system operating and makes your eyes blink without your conscious awareness. It is exciting to know that your Unconscious Mind manages all of that with perfect precision. A prime concept that we are going to explore is that your Unconscious Mind can communicate with every cell in the body. Until the mid-1980s, people could plausibly say, "Hypnosis is just in your Mind! It's not real." But recently, due to the pioneering work of Dr Deepak Chopra, scientists have begun to realize the full extent of the Mind/Body connection. Not only does information from the Mind affect the body, but there is now scientific evidence that your mental processes, mental states, and mental behaviours affect all the cells in your body all the time. Information is carried within the body in the form of electrical impulses that pass through nerve cells, or neurons. Between any two neurons, there is a gap, or synapse. In order for impulses to travel along a continuous path of nerve cells, something has to carry the impulses across the gaps. This essential task is performed by neuro-transmitters, which are chemicals that conduct electrical impulses across the synapses between nerve cells.

When neuro-transmitters were first discovered, scientists thought they were found only in the brain. Later, it was discovered that neuro-transmitters actually connect all neurons in the body, forming vast networks of 'electrical circuits'. More recently, quantum physics and quantum biology tell us that neuro-transmitters bathe every cell in the human body. This new knowledge is the key to the Mind/Body connection.

The Unconscious Mind not only manages sensations, movements and body functions, but it also actually sends information that travels to and affects billions of individual cells throughout the body, giving us health or dis-ease according to our Unconscious beliefs. Chopra describes this as your immune system constantly eavesdropping on your internal dialogue.

From the point of view of hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, your immune system is also eavesdropping on the pictures that you hold in your head the sounds that you remember or pay attention to the feelings that you have and the concepts that your mind considers. Through the conductivity of the neuro-transmitters that surround all cells, your immune system is constantly affected by the activity of your Unconscious Mind.

There are many things we are conscious of, but the operation and health of the body is optimally a function of our Unconscious. Hypnosis allows us to begin reaching the Unconscious Mind and utilizing the Mind/Body connection. This is the beginning of our ability to manifest a number of wonderful things.