Hi,

Mark sent me a question regarding the last email. He asked:
“In your email “Easiest Hypnotic Deep-Trance Induction Ever” you wrote that one person should use words like “washing machine”, “bookstore employee”, “cruiseship ticket”, and so on. Why these kinds of words? They don’t seem very hypnotic to me.

Short and concise question that get’s right to the point, Mark.

And you are absolutely right: these words are NOT hypnotic. But that’s not the point for that induction. There, it’s about overloading the conscious mind, and it’s more effective to do that by telling people words that instantly create pictures in the hypnotic subject’s mind.

Now, you’d ask me what kind of words are “hypnotic”, I’d list words like:
amazing, astonishing, at last, breakthrough, exciting, fascinating, incredible, phenomenal, quivering, revealing, secretive, stunning, tremendous, tickle, unbelievable… these are “emotionally charged” words. Now, there are MANY more words, and there is no “right” or “wrong” here. We’re dealing with shades of grey, not black and white.

But generally speaking – can you see how using these kinds of words in a sentence INCREASE THE INTENSITY (instensity would be another candidate that I’d add to the list of hypnotic words)?

Let’s see:
I walked down the street and saw a girl.

Now let’s put some hypnotic spices in there:
I walked down the street and saw an stunningly beautiful girl.

These two sentences have a different visceral impact. Now, I said “put some hypnotic spices in there”, and that’s really how you should think of them. Just because they are hypnotic words, that doesn’t mean that “the more the better”. A soup without salt is no fun at all, but if you add too much salt to it, it’s worse than an unsalted soup. Let’s see how much we can overdo this:

At last I walked down the amazing street and saw a phenomenally beautiful girl. She secretively called me over to reveal a shocking and fascinating fact about her amazing family – it was unbelievable.

You see what I mean? This is trying way to hard.

But in case of the exercise – the point really was NOT about chosing hypnotic words. It was about chosing words that instantly translate into pictures in the mind. It’s a lot easier to picture “washing mashine” than it is to picture “amazing”.

When you deal with hypnosis, you have to be aware that a word is not just a word. A word really is magic:

“Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power.” – Sigmund Freud, 1915.

What do I mean when I say “magic”? I mean that words are not just letters, or sounds that carry a meaning. They also resonate. And each word has a different “emotional frequency”. And you need to be aware of that fact. Look at these words:
rainbow
spring
sunshine
love
nightmare
bone-crushing
humiliation
cancer

Now – I used words from opposing ends of the spectrum to get the point accross in the extremes, but this is also true in much “finer” grades where there is a lot more subtlelity involved.

You can’t possibly know how an individual will resonate to a certain word – but you have to be aware that each person DOES resonate in some way to each word, and when practicing hypnosis, you want to monitor that and be aware if there is a word that has a strong impact on that particular person. For someone with a shoe-fetish the word “lick” might have a very different emotional frequency than for a guy who’s selling ice-cream. You can’t know that. But you can observe how people react, and utilize words that have a strong impact for that particular individual.

I hope I’m not losing you here, I know I’m going deep nitty-gritty here. Let me know what you thought of this one – there’s much more to say about this, but I don’t want to go off on a tangent where you don’t follow me.

And let me know what else is on your mind and what questions you have on hypnosis.

Yours hypnotically,
Robert Walsh

Hi,

several people have asked me about the hypnotic induction technique that I used to put the guy in trance who “got stuck” hypnotically.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the founders of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) came up with this method during their wild “experimentation days” in the 70s.

It’s what I call a kick-ass induction, because it works like gangbusters, and everyone can do it.

Here’s how it goes:
1. Find three other people that can join you for this experiment.
2. Decide who’s going to be the hypnotic subject. (I suggest it’s YOU!)
3. Now decide who’s gonna do what. Person A is going to talk into the subjects left ear. Person B is going to talk into the subjects right ear. And Person C is going to sit accross the subject and talk to him straightforward.
Person A: say words like “washing mashine”, “car mechanic”, “shower head”, “bookstore employee”, “cruiseship ticket” and so on. These words should be combinations of two or more nouns, and they should not be heavily emotionally charged words (so don’t say anything like “rapist murderer”!).
Person B: just make sounds like “uhhh”, and “ahhh”, and “mmhhmm” in a pleasureful tonality – the kind of sounds you make when you eat delicious food, icecream, get a massage or engage in certain other pleasent activities (hum, hum…).
Person C: Speak a simple hypnotic induction like “You can allow yourself to relax and comfortably close your eyes and let your imagination take you on a pleasant journey to beautiful places, where the air is fresh and you feel good” and so on and so on. You don’t need to get overly fancy here – just adhere to the basic guidelines of hypnotic inductions. (If you aren’t familiar with them, just shoot me an email by clicking on the reply button now and ask me, and I’ll cover this in a future email for you).

What this is all about is really just overloading the conscious mind to the point where it gives up and says: all right then, Kansas is going bye-bye, let’s see how deep the rabbit hole really is.

I could give you more detailed instructions, but try it this way first and get back to me with your feedback about the results you got. That’s called “accelerated learning”. You get incomplete instructions, do the best you can with what you have and then you get the missing pieces to the puzzle. This way, you will integrate the knowledge on a much more viszeral, deeper level because it’s based in real-life experience, not just abstract thinking. (I know some people – specially sequential sorters who like to have things structured and planned – have problems with that, but if you’re one of those people, I really urge you to give it a try this way and then send me your feedback. I promise I won’t let you down and help you to get this working).

With this method, you can really zap people away to alpha-zentaury real fast and do all kinds of cool deep-trance phenomena. Some people say: when starting out, take it easy. And that’s good advice. But have a bit of fun every once in a while too.

The best way to learn how to put people into trance really is Igor Ledochowski’s conversational hypnosis, and while it’s not the cheapest thing out there, it’s definitely the one where you get the most bang for your buck. I don’t want to push you to buy this thing – but if there is anything I can do to convince you that this is the best way to learn how to hypnotize other people, let me know what it is.

Again – if you have questions, just shoot me a quick email and I’ll get back to you in a future issue of this newsletter.

Yours hypnotically,
Bob Walsh

Hi,

Elias from the Netherlands (hello there!) asked:
I have panick attacks about every second month. The panick attacks usually overcome me when I am alone. It starts with the feeling of presure on my chest and I have trouble breathing. And then my vision changes and I develop a sort of tunnel-vision and feel like I am rotating. I don’t know what is the reason for it. I have it since I am 17 years old, but I don’t know why it started. Can hypnosis help me?

First of all, let me say this is not medical or therapeutical advice – I’m not a doctor and don’t consider myself a therapist.

But I’m pretty confident hypnosis can help. You can find a qualified practitioner, or you can even start out easy and try yourself at self-hypnosis.

I’ve met many people who overcame panic attacks with self-hypnosis, and I even helped some to do it myself.

It’s really not that big of a deal, because basically what a panic attack is is a program, and once you can get “in” to the code you can re-program it pretty easily hypnotically.

I don’t like the analogy of a human brain equaling to a computer – but in many ways, computers are MODELLED after the human brain, and thus some of the ways in which they function are identical. And for panic attacks, that definitely is the case.

If you suffer from panic attacks, then there’s two things I can recommend you: one is NOT “hypnosis” in the classical sense – but it works.

If for some reason you want to use hypnosis though, I suggest you get your hands on this one:

Elias, I’m pretty sure that you can get over this quickly and painlessly. I don’t know what the underlying cause is – but from what you are saying, my guess is the underlying cause is long gone and your brain just made a connection in the wrong place, and now that thing is going on autopilot. You surely could go into analysis, but I doubt “understanding” the root would help you. Smokers with terminal lung cancer understand where their problem came from, but that doesn’t help them. And even though with psychological issues it’s often different, it also often is not.

Again, no therapeutic advice here, just my personal opinion that’s based on lots of studying and lots of hands-on-experience.

Yours hypnotically,
Robert Walsh

Hi,

thanks for all the people who submitted questions – I promise I’ll get to them one by one, so if you haven’t received an answer yet, it’s in the pipeline

Michelle sent me an email and asked about “getting stuck” in a trance.

I am interested in hypnosis and I want to get in better touch with my subconscious. I believe it could help me to solve some of the problems I face. But I am concerned what happens if I can not get out of trance? I know it might sound funny, but I am one of those people who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning and I heard that hypnosis makes you feel very comfortable and calm and safe and cosy. And I feel that way at morning in bed when I don’t want to get out. And I am afraid, that maybe when I get hypnotized and the feeling is even stronger, maybe my mind likes it so much that it doesn’t want to leave. What happens then? Is it like being in a coma? Sorry if it’s a stupid question, but I don’t know.

Ok, first of all Michelle: no, it’s not a stupid question at all, and I know that many people are concerned about that at first.

From the way you write, I think you might be a introvert person who has a few good friends, rather than lots of aquaintances. I don’t want to get all psycho-analytic here, but your language reveals somethings about your personality, and opening up to others more might be a good way to balance out some of your strengths a little more. Just see if that makes sense to you – if not, don’t worry about it.

But what you really wrote me about was: is it possible to get stuck in hypnosis?

And my answer: yes, it absolutely is. I’ve seen it happen, and it was quiet scary at that time. This was during an hypnosis workshop, and we split up in groups of 4 to practice an hypnotic induction technique. One person was the hypnotic subject and sat on a chair in the center. One person left, one person right, and one in front, and then each of the three “hypnotists” has one simple task to put the subject into a deep trance. It’s quiet a hefty method to go deep fast, and this was exactly what happened there. The subject went into a deep somnabulistic trance fast. The eyes rolled to the back of the head and you could only see the white part of the eye, no pupils (that’s always kind of freaky…). We induced an arm catalepsy and the right arm was hanging high up in the air above the guys head. We installed subconscious fingersignals and experimented a bit, and everything went really well. When the time came to end, want wanted to “get him back” and gave him suggestions like “and with each breath, you can slowly return to the here and now, in a relaxed and consciously aware state”, etc, etc. And then added “and I’m gonna count backwards from 10 to 1, and on one you’re gonna wake up, open your eyes and feel refreshed and alert” and did the counting thing. 3, 2, 1… nothing. Did the finger snapping thing. Told him: “It’s all right to come out any time you please – now, in 5 seconds, or even 10 seconds, or if you really want to stretch it out, make that 12 seconds until you wake up”… nothing. tried all sorts of things. Nothing. That guy still had his eyes rolled back. Now it got kind of spooky, so we called the seminar leader. He too tried some things – to no avail. Finally he said: “Ok, he just needs to take his time. Just stay with him and let me know if something happens. He’s doing fine, the subconscious is taking care of him, but just be there for him.” And then went on with the seminar. Now, I was sitting there and got kind of upset about that. Obviously the teacher couldn’t get him out of trance neither, and now he just went on with the seminar and put me in charge of being responsible for this zoomed out guy. 30 minutes passed… nothing happened. 45 minutes passed… nothing happened. And I got seriously concerned. The guy still had his arm above his head, and if nothing else, I was sure he’d end up with a hell of sore muscles. Finally, he nodded his head, his eyes went back to normal, breathing changed, he looked at his arm, smiled and put it back down. Then he looked at me and I asked him if everything was ok. He replied: “Sure, why? Where are the others?”

I have no idea what that guy did, being stuck in a trance for almost an hour, not noticing a thing with his arm up above his head and eyes rolled back, but he was perfectly fine afterwards.

Later I learned that these things can happen – but in fact, what the seminar leader said was really true. The subconsciousness “takes care” of these people, and it really does a better job than the conscious mind ever could. Sometimes the subconscious mind may decide that there is something that it needs to resolve, and doesn’t want the conscious mind to interfere, but that’s ok. The only dangerous thing about is that THE OTHER people – the people who are still conscious see what is happening and freak out about it. But that’s about it.

So yes – you CAN get stuck in a hypnotic trance. But no, it’s not a bad thing, or a dangerous thing. Your subconscious will keep track of the time and if you have an appointment coming up, it will even wake you up on time. I know it sounds funny, but the subconscious mind really is the world’s best personal assistant – so trust her!

Hope this clarified some things for you. You absolutely can learn and experience hypnotic states, all it takes is the right approach – and once your subconscious has taken over, it will do what’s best for you.

Yours hypnotically,
Bob Walsh

I asked a friend of mine to share her opinion on hypnosis, because she too has been exploring this wide open field in the past couple of years, and I don’t want HypnoDepot.com to be an “only my personal opinion website”, but I want to you really be able to find all kinds of opinions, theories and tricks about hypnosis. So, with thanks to Jacqueline, here’s her article:

While many people look at Hypnosis as a form of magic or something mysterious, it really is neither. Some people have performed hypnosis on themselves without even knowing it. No special tools, magic words or wands are needed, just simple knowledge of the inner workings of the human mind.

The secrets of hypnosis have been sought after, feared and even caused persecution for a variety of reasons. The Ancient Greeks referred to “hypnos” as sleep, though hypnosis is not really sleep. While different states of hypnosis can be achieved, it need not be a mysterious process brought on only by so called “trained professionals” or traveling money makers.

Many people seek hypnosis to deal with pain. In the 1800’s, before the invention of our modern anesthetic techniques, hypnosis was widely used by medical professionals to help with things as serious as amputation. Extreme pain will challenge the mind to find ways to deal with it. At times a person will lose consciousness because of this type of pain. While in this unconscious state the person is more open to suggestion, and as they wake up from this state of relaxation, these suggestions can become a reality.

People also deal with emotional pain through self hypnosis. Most people do not even realize that they are doing this. It may be as simple as repeatedly doing something different to break a bad habit, or as complex as actually using recorded messages to influence ones daily behavior.

All methods will work if the individual is open to the power of suggestion used to change the mind into believing the reality that they want to believe. Smoking, weight loss, and pain management are some of the most popular areas that people wish to be hypnotized for. The fact that they have accepted the “problem” as something that needs to be changed makes them a prime candidate for hypnotism. When a person realizes that their is a problem, they are on the first step to finding the solution. It’s like realizing that you need to add 2 and 2. As a child this may not seem easy, but as you go through life you automatically carry out this simple task. As we grow and develop, we also increase the ability to overcome more complex situations whether they be physical, mental or spiritual problems.

Some of the techniques of hypnosis are as easy as repeatedly carrying out a task that will lead to a new habit. An example of this is when a person would like to quit smoking. Every time they have a desire to smoke, they need to find a new task for the hands. This is why chewing nicotine gum is only partially effective. The gum continues the chemical dependency and ignores the fact that the person has a desire to change their reality. The reality for the individual is that they want to be free of the nicotine addiction. When the person is free of the nicotine addiction, they will have less desire to suck toxic smoke into their lungs.

Other hypnotic techniques are those used to heal painful memories. As people go through the journey of life, they collect memories that will attack them at the most inconvenient moments. These attacks lead to anxiety, worry and sometimes even physical ailments. Because of this awareness, some people will deny the existence of a disease that has become a reality for a person, which further hurts the individual plagued with the dis-ease. When we are not at ease, or dis-eased, our body does not function at its best and a multitude of negative ailments can physically alter us. While we can change this, it is not always a process that we can accept because of fear and sadly, lack of the sharing of this knowledge of how our body works.

The complex and powerful human mind is able to carry out so many functions, that if we listed them all we would grow weary just thinking about the thousands of tasks our body involuntarily carries out daily. Changing a thought process to achieve desired results, is a simple task compared to the many other functions that our mind controls. Hypnosis whether used in simple forms or complex, is just a part of who we are and who we have always been as a human race.

Hi,

I just want to remind you to send me your questions on hypnosis – this newsletter lives and dies with your questions, so if you don’t send me your questions, there’s gonna be no more newsletter, and you don’t want that to happen, because I have access to some VERY respected people in the hypnosis field that I can grill with your questions too…

Maybe you heard of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. – he was arguably the greatest hypnotist of all times (at least that’s what most of todays greatest hypnotists think, and I agree with them).

When people came to him with something like a tick, or some kind of obsessive behaviour they couldn’t control, first thing he did was put them into a deep trance – without them even realizing that the hypnosis already started. He was THE master of conversational hypnosis.

And then, he’d tell people to amplify their tick or obsessive behaviour, to make it stronger.

The funny thing is: they could do it!

Then he told them to speeden it up or slow it down. They could do it too.

And from there, it was as easy as 1-2-3 to have them end their tick or obsessive behaviour. Because what he did is he hypnotically put them down a greased slide: first, he put them in control of their tick. Since they could make it stronger, that demonstrated to them that they actually COULD influence their tick. And then he made them do other things, and a the end, he made them establish so much control over their ticks that they could end it. And even if they weren’t able to “end” it… they could slow it down…
so much that….
it was…
really…
ended…

Now, that already was a story. And stories are hypnotic by nature – unless they’re boring. I can’t stress enough how much easier it will be for you to put people into deep trances when you master the art of storytelling.

And as a first step, I suggest you get a good copy of 1001 nights – which is really nothing but a collection of masterfully interwoven hypnotic stories.

So, send me you’re questions and I’ll get to them in a future edition. And coming up in the next edition is a story of how I once put a guy in trance and then couldn’t get him out… he got stuck in hypnosis. (Thanks to Michelle for asking that question).

Yours hypnotically,
Bob Walsh

Hi,

first of all I just want to thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. You’re up for a real treat – I know other guys in the industry are charging subscribers $97 a month for comparable newsletters, and you’re getting it all free.

This is really not a “pre-done” newsletter (except for this very first and the next edition). It’s interactive. I know you are interested in hypnosis, but there’s so much too it, you gotta let me know what interests you the most.

So just send me an email and ask me a question. I’ll answer it in one of the upcoming newsletter issues.

In tomorrows email, you’re gonna find out more about the hypnotic power of stories, so stay tuned…

Hypnotic regards,
Robert Walsh