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By Igor Ledochowski

General Q & A

April 4, 2013

General Q & A – April 4, 2013

2 General Q & A ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved

General Q & A – April 4th, 2013

Part 1

Igor: Welcome everyone. This is Igor Ledochowski from Street Hypnosis, and this is

our Q&A session on pretty much any questions that you have about hypnosis.

For the next hour or two, depending on how many questions we get, I would

like to do my best to answer any and all questions that you have about

hypnosis, and in particular conversational hypnosis, which is one of my

specialties. Hopefully, we’ll see if we can get you using hypnosis in more

situations.

Let’s just start off by opening the lines to you. Let me know what questions

you have.

Phillip: I recently bought your product on profiling, and I was wondering how you

interface the profiling, once you get a sense of what sort of profile a certain

person would be, how you alter your conversational hypnosis accordingly.

Igor: In terms of the profiling, it gives you several different tools at the same time.

It’s just a fun thing to do, but more importantly it gives you an understanding

as to how people are thinking. It gives you leverage, in terms of how people

respond and what they respond to.

We’re looking at basically motivation and language as our influencing tools.

Let’s take the idea of abstraction, for example. We’ve got abstract people and

concrete thinkers. That’s one of the simple dichotomies that make up the

basic profiles. If someone is more abstract in their thinking, you want to

present ideas in more abstract senses. The ideas of love, honor, duty, justice

and so on, will be something that they’ll respond to much more than concrete

details like go tell Janet something and do these six steps right now.

Depending on the situation, the details may need to be included in it but you

also know what level to pitch it at. If someone’s got more abstract thinking,

they’ll tend to need more abstractions in the kinds of words and language

that you use. Those people who have a more concrete style of thinking will

require more concrete information. Do you get the idea so far?



Phillip: Yes I get it so far. In particular because I took the course on the Professional

Conversational Hypnotherapy, I’m just curious about whether you’d tend to

use the mindbending language with the abstract, whereas you’d tend to use

the NAS – Non Awareness Set – with the concrete or something like that.

Igor: Actually that’s not the kind of distinction I would use on abstract/concrete.

It’s still part of profiling. You’re quite right, but I’m making a different

distinction there. The dichotomies that I’d look for are between levels of

consciousness and levels of interference when the problem is there.

If we’re talking specifically about Conversational Hypnotherapy, if I have

someone whose problem tends to be locked into ideas – in other words this

can’t be right and that can’t be right, and I’ve thought about this already and

I’ve thought about that and so on, and they’ve got lots of reasons and ideas

around why the problem should be the way it is – then I personally tend to go

towards mindbending language because it really handles ideas very

beautifully.

By the way, this does not mean that you can’t do work in a different way with

different people. Every single tool that you learn in Conversational

Hypnotherapy should be able to fix pretty much every single problem. It’s

more a question of some tools being more readily disposed to doing it already

anyway.

The dichotomy that I’m looking for here is how much intellectual content is

there that will tend to bias me towards mindbending language, or how absent

from consciousness is it? Let’s take the idea of bedwetting. There may not be

very many ideas that they have about the idea of bedwetting. They just do it

and they don’t like it.

At that point, I’ll go towards something more like the Non Awareness Set or

maybe even a symbolic induction because it’s going towards more and more

unconscious territory where there is no conscious involvement. They’ll quite

happily admit to you this is bizarre, I don’t understand it or it doesn’t make

any sense, but it’s still there. Do you get the idea?

Phillip: Yes.



Igor: As a rule, the other thing that makes me choose a Non Awareness Set is if it’s

physiologically oriented. In other words, if it’s a physical idea – for example

pain control – if I’m going to be using one of the processes…

Phillip: Yes, mindbending language.

Igor: Actually mindbending language is great for the introduction part – the bits

where you are setting up the reframes and so on – and then the Non

Awareness Set is great for the actual teaching of the pain control element.

You can have something like the dreaming arm and having the arm lift only as

quickly as it can go numb or something like that. That’s a very simple process.

When I think about it now, I do tend to do most of my pain control more in

the position style because it takes the least amount of time. You can just say

by the way, has that pain started changing already? As soon as they say yes to

that, in my experience 90% of the time I’ve been pretty much home free at

that point.

I’ll pull out the symbolic induction or the symbolic process Dynamic Mental

Imagery when they have no idea what to do or what direction to go in or they

have no conscious access to the information but there’s some clear symbolic

content going on. I tend to use the Non Awareness Set more when it’s

focused on bodily processes or again when the problem is somewhere in

consciousness that they have no real access to.

Mindbending language will tend to be more conversational for me. It’s the

one that I’ll tend to roll out when someone is convinced that they know why

the problem is the way it is and why it can’t be any other way. Does that

answer your question or do you have a follow-up to that?

Phillip: With respect to the profiling, it’s almost sort of irrelevant at this point then.

Igor: It’s irrelevant in terms of the tool that you choose, but it’s very relevant in

terms of how you work with that person. If you recall, the basic four profiles

are earth, fire, air and water. Each of them gives you slightly different

predictions about people.

For example, the air type people are more abstract thinkers, but they also like

to resolve problems. They like to tinker with intellectual ideas and so on. In

terms of trance style, I’ll give them puzzles to think over and hypnotic



conundrums so that their intellect is slowly grinding away at that in the

background whilst the therapy is taking place.

Now let’s take the example of the water type, which as a slightly crude profile,

people tend to be more altruistic and they’re more involved in some kind of a

crusade or a mission of some sort – in other words, how can we help the most

amount of people, so it’s global but it’s more abstracted into the idea of

people versus a specific person.

You can build that into your suggestions and into your frames because now

you can use reframes along the lines of when you can do this, how many

other people can you help in your life? That will fit that person much more.

If you have a more fiery type of personality, you’re looking at someone who’s

more specific people oriented, so then you have to actually pull out the

specific individuals. With a water person, you might say as you’ve made this

change, think of all the other people that you can help. That’s motivation for

that person.

With a fire person, I’d be more specific and say as you’re making this change

now, which of the people in your life do you want to help the most? It could

be your parents or it could be your children, etc. I know they need a more

concrete example of it than the water people would. Does that give you more

of a sense of what I’m talking about here?

Phillip: Yes, so you’re telling me that it really tells me how to tailor the suggestions

and the reframes.

Igor: Yes, exactly. I call this leverage. It tells you what the person is likely to be

motivated by in terms of both language and motivation in general. That

means you can then tailor your reframes and your suggestions to fit within

that context, that frame of reference – in other words, whatever ends up

motivating that individual. Do you get the idea?

Phillip: Yes, thank you very much, Igor.

Igor: You’re very welcome. Thank you.

Jake: This is Jake.



Igor: How can I help you?

Jake: It’s really more of a general question. Your training via DVD’s is great. Do you

have plans to have certification classes for hypnosis down the road?

Igor: Yes. First of all, we’re doing the Advanced Ericksonian Hypnotherapy Training

again, which is a certification training. That will coming again at some point. I

can’t tell you when or where that’s going to be yet, but there definitely will be

one in Australia at some point. There will be another one in Europe at some

point, and there will be one in America at some point. I just can’t tell you

which one will be where and when.

On top of that, we have a bunch of trainers that are teaching the

Conversational Hypnotherapy Training. If you write to us, we have ways of

getting people who ask about live certification programs to get in touch with

other people like that. We’ll also be promoting our own versions again

sometime in the next year or so, and again we’ll just have one of our trainers

come in and teach that.

There will be more certification trainings. Right now I can’t tell you when they

will be because there’s a bunch of organization that has to happen in the

background first. Rest assured that as soon as we know a time and a place,

we’ll email the whole list and you’ll get a chance to know more.

Jake: That’s fantastic. Thank you very much.

Igor: You’re very welcome.

Francois: My name is Francois.

Igor: How can I help you, Francois?

Francois: I have a question related to self-hypnosis. I bought the material on self-

hypnosis, and in most of the sessions I have the feeling that I’m supposed to

speak out loud, and I would like to know if I talk to myself without speaking

out loud, would the effect be the same?

Igor: Absolutely. I think most people do it silently.



Francois: Sometimes I travel on an airplane and I’m starting to talk out loud, and I’ve

seen people look at me and it’s kind of weird.

Igor: I’m totally with you on this, Francois.

Francois: I tried it that way and it was a bit weird. I have the feeling that it feels more

comfortable to me if I can just speak the things inside my mind, but I don’t

know if the effect is the same.

Igor: It is 100%. In fact, I do all my self-suggestions quite quietly, so no one would

ever have any idea what it is that I’m saying to myself in the strangeness of

my own head. Yes, I would totally recommend that you use your mental voice

rather than your physical voice, especially in a public place.

Francois: That’s better because I can use it absolutely anywhere in that way.

Igor: Absolutely, 100%, I totally agree with you.

Francois: That’s fantastic. That actually is a relief because I had the feeling if I don’t

speak out loud that it’s just not going to work. Now you’re assuring me that

it’s probably the best way for me to practice.

Igor: Yes, absolutely. That’s the easiest way of doing it, and then you can do it

everywhere.

Francois: I have a second question. You said that the two best moments, the

gatekeeper would be either in the morning within the first half hour of when

you wake up and in the evening before sleep. What happens when I try it that

way, in the evening I actually fall asleep before I can end my session. If I do

that in the morning, I tend to fall asleep again because I do it right away as

soon as I wake up. Maybe that’s not good then. I don’t know.

Igor: I understand. Here are a couple of ideas around that. First of all, as a rule it

can be quite beneficial to fall asleep in your self-hypnosis practice, at least at

this level, because you’re taking those ideas straight into the sleeping state

and there are a lot of physiological similarities between dreaming and

hypnosis.

It can be very useful to create kind of a bridge across one to the other. Just

make sure that you’ve got enough of your suggestions in before you’re falling



asleep so that you’ve got some momentum built up before you go down that

road. That’s fine for the evening one.

For the morning one, again I know exactly what you’re talking about because I

do the same thing and I kind of fall asleep as well. The question to ask yourself

is how much do you need to be on time for something?

If it’s okay for you to fall asleep again, it’s not a big deal provided you’ve got

your core suggestions in the beginning. Your sleep just becomes a bigger

version of the drifting process that we have at the end of the self-hypnosis

program anyway, so it becomes an integrative phrase.

If you do have to be somewhere, like work for example, they may not want

you to be turning up an hour late each day. So, at that point either you get up

earlier so that you have your extra hour of sleep after the session or the other

thing that you can do is just sit up in bed. If the bed has too many associations

to sleeping for you, sit in a comfortable armchair next to the bed.

Because it will be morning, you may want to bring a blanket or something as

well because your body temperature fluctuates throughout the day and in the

morning it tends to be a little bit lower. The fact that you’re sitting in an

armchair will tend to help things again because it tends to keep you a little bit

more alert and more out of the actual sleep side of things.

Francois: I understand. When I wake up, I start the session and in general I’m still lying

down, so that’s maybe why I tend to fall asleep again.

Igor: Absolutely. Experiment. There are a couple of possibilities that you have.

Falling asleep is not a problem just so you know. It’s just that it will take more

time out of your day. If you start doing it and you fall asleep, try simply rolling

over to the other side. The reason for that is biochemically a lot of stuff that’s

happening in sleep gets locked into your physical physiology, which is why

when you wake up in the morning and you stay very still, you can often recall

the dreams that you had quite clearly.

As soon as you roll over to one side or the other, the dream quickly fades

away again. Somehow physical posture is linked in with access to that mental

state, so it could be enough to just roll over. If you still find yourself falling

asleep, try sitting up. If sitting up doesn’t do enough, go to a chair or some

alternative position.



Francois: I understand. Do you mean to say that when I’m lying down, I can be in any

position? I can even be on my side and I don’t need to be lying down flat?

Igor: You can be in any position you want, provided you can maintain the position

for longer. If you like lying on your side in the fetal position, that’s fine. It’s

just that you’ve got to be able to maintain that position without necessarily

falling asleep, unless of course sleep is part of the game.

You’ve got to be able to maintain that position for longer. If you can physically

stay comfortable there, that’s great. If not, you need to choose a physical

position where you’re most likely to stay comfortable. Otherwise your body

will interfere.

Francois: I understand. You’ve answered my two questions. I have another very short

one. I need to understand the duration of a session. Does it have any kind of

influence on the effect whether you do it for five minutes, 10 minutes, 20

minutes or more? Some of the recorded sessions are long and some are very

short. I want to know if it has any impact on us.

Igor: Yes and no. Here are some general rules of thumb. First of all, you’re better

off spending five minutes a day every day than one hour a week. Let’s say you

decide to spend a three-hour block on a Saturday and you do three hours of

self-hypnosis and then forget about it.

You’re actually better off doing five or 10 minutes every day than that three-

hour block. You’re better off doing three five-minute sessions during the

course of a day than one 15-minute session. Again in terms of the actual

session itself, it’s really a question of how long does it take for you to do all

you need to be doing?

Sometimes 10 to 15 minutes should be a nice standard everyday sort of

session. If you really want to go to town, every now and again you might

spend half an hour or an hour, but The Power of Self-Hypnosis Program for

guaranteed results has been specifically designed to get you more results with

less effort so that you can spend most of your time living your life and not

necessarily in doing self-hypnosis.

Francois: The length should depend on what we need to achieve basically.



Igor: Exactly.

Francois: It doesn’t matter if 20 minutes is better than five. It just depends on what you

need to do.

Igor: Exactly.

Francois: And with regularity of course.

Igor: Regularity is the key. Regularity is the most important of all.

Francois: I understand. Regularity is the key point.

Igor: Yes, whether it’s five minutes or 30 minutes. There’s some additional impact

with more time, but just go with your instincts. Start with small things and get

successes with small things to teach your mind how to do it, and then once

you get successes with small things, go to bigger and bigger things.

You may initially spend half an hour setting it up, and then after that you may

need to spend five minutes maintaining it, or you may spend longer each

time. You’ll feel differently each time, so it’s a little hard for me to give you a

precise figure on it.

Something that you can also do if you’re interested is you can ask your

unconscious mind how long it would like for you to spend on these particular

suggestions when you decide on a particular program.

Let’s say you decided that you wanted to increase your reading speed. You

get your unconscious mind to give the instructions. You’re doing a reading

course as well to get other stimulation going on, and then you give your

unconscious instructions to do this better.

Then whilst you’re in trance, you say I have these suggestions and do you

accept them? It says sure. So then you ask, how often should I repeat them?

Should I do it for five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day or 30

minutes a day? Then you can get the pendulum to help you choose the

timing. That’s another thing that you can do as well.

Francois: That’s excellent. Thank you very much.



Igor: The best of luck with it, and I wish you many successes with it.

Mark: This is Mark. I have a question about the creative process and creating

products. I think maybe you talked a little bit about it on the previous answer

to a question about trusting your subconscious. Are there any types of ideas

that you can provide or insights on trusting your subconscious to create

products on autopilot?

Aside from putting in 10,000 hours of work ahead of time, is there a way that

you create a process, like you prolifically create and then take the best of the

best, or do you create and then refine? What kinds of suggestions do you

have for that?

Igor: That’s a very big topic that you just opened up there. The first thing that I’ll

say to you is this. When you’re trying to create anything – it doesn’t matter

what it is, whether it’s a new garden, a piece of furniture for your home or a

product to sell – whatever it is that you want to create is going to require

some kind of work and effort, and that work and effort will probably have to

continue beyond the point where you maybe lose interest in it. It’s not always

the case, but let’s make that an assumption.

The reason for it is because most people get very enthusiastic for a lot of

stuff, and either they can’t get started or they trail out after the initial

enthusiasm has worn off.

The most important thing is to have a reason for doing whatever it is you’re

doing. My reason for doing products is two-fold. One, I love hypnosis. I love

exploring it and experimenting with it, and finding out how the bits and pieces

work, thinking about that and trying it out, getting it wrong and then trying

something different. I just love that.

On the other side, I’m also hugely motivated by all of you. I love seeing that

little light glow in people’s eyes when they suddenly get it and suddenly it

becomes easy. I love seeing that too. Putting those two together, it becomes

very easy. It becomes an instant motivator for more products because I get to

investigate things that I find interesting, and also provide a gift to people that

I consider to be my friends and anticipate the look of delight that they’ll have

when they’re going through it and learning stuff from it.



Yours may be similar, but they may be very different. It might be something

else. You may be more motivated by the cash aspect of it or by the

explorational aspect of it, or to improve your community or something like

that. I can’t tell you what that will be because that’s your motivation, but I can

tell you that you need to be very clearly in touch with your motivation.

Otherwise projects just don’t get done.

The next thing is, believe it or not, the difficulty is not in deciding what project

to do. It’s in deciding which products not to do. Here’s what I mean by that.

Once you start getting a little bit more creative – and it’s actually relatively

easy to jump start that – you have an immense capacity of things that you can

do. There are virtually no limits.

There’s a reason why people need an infinite amount of monkeys typing on

an infinite amount of keyboards to be able to produce the works of

Shakespeare. That’s just random chance. Then you just have one Shakespeare

and he created it all himself.

We have that Shakespeare ability within ourselves in whatever fields we want

to be engaged in, but we have to create the right context to allow that to

happen. One of those things is when you have all these ideas of things that

you could do, you’ve got to knuckle down and say which one of these ideas

will I actually make happen? In my experience, I get a little bit obsessive about

getting that particular idea happening.

There’s a skill that requires a different kind of thought process where you can

run several projects simultaneously but it’s a lot harder to manage that, so

initially I would recommend that you focus on only one project at a time and

work that out until it’s completed and everything else becomes second

nature.

The third thing that will happen is once you’ve done several projects this way

– and this is one of the ways of trusting your unconscious – your unconscious

automates only those things that you’re doing already anyway. You can either

automate an implicit learning, which means that it’s happening outside of

your awareness anyway, and aside from putting yourself into environments

where you run with a lot of creative people where that would be primed in

you more, there’s very little you can do in terms of implicit learning other

than to just keep on doing it.



In other words, if you keep reading and researching and talking to people who

are active in the environment that you’re interested in, it will naturally prime

your mind more. In terms of the explicit learning, which is what your

conscious mind is aware that you’ve learned, the routine for that is you do

some work, you turn that into a habit, the habit becomes unconscious and

then it isn’t so much work anymore. It just becomes a natural routine. Do you

get the idea?

Mark: Yes I get the idea. Are there any metaphors that you can suggest that might

help with this in terms of going into self-hypnosis or going into trance and

seeing these things, any exercises or anything like that?

Igor: Sure. I don’t know if you’ve got the Master Class on Power States. That’s

exactly what I focus on in that Master Class. The Power of Self-Hypnosis

Course can do exactly the same thing. You just have to focus on a specific

thing. Really we’re talking about the project part of preparing yourself for any

meeting, project or task. The preparation is the same for me regardless of

what it is. In fact, I learned this with a much cooler version of self-hypnosis

when I was doing my law degree.

For my finals, I basically started revising a week before my first exam. For the

year leading up to the exam every morning and every evening I went into self-

hypnosis for a few minutes, got my unconscious mind to review the day’s

lessons so that it would be there for me, and then I would mentally rehearse

taking the exam and acing it with a big smile on my face, so it was easy.

Something that you can do in your self-hypnosis practice if you’re specifically

interested in the idea of creating stuff is to think of the end projects in the

context of whatever it is that motivates you. If your motivation is discovering

something, think of the stage at which you really discovered something and

you’ve nailed it because your project has totally proven that to you, and that’s

the magic point there.

If it’s about other people, then imagine their reactions to it. If it’s about your

income level, then imagine the checks coming in through the post or your

bank account rising up. In other words, whatever it is that is motivational for

you to be doing this creative act, attach it to the outcome so that you don’t

just have the work that you’re doing to get there, but you have the final

output of whatever that work is, combined with the emotional payoff in terms

of the motivation that drives you.



This is not the only way to do things. You realize that. I’m just giving you my

particular approach to it and the way that I use it myself. I wouldn’t want to

be as intolerant as to suggest that my way is the only way to do it but, given

that you asked me what I would do, this is exactly what I do.

Mark: I got it. That’s very helpful. Thank you very much.

Sasha: This is Sasha.


Sasha: I’m working with several people now and believe it or not, a lot of them have

the same issue coming to the surface. That is that they have low self esteem

but it manifests itself in a way that when I’m looking for sources and for

something they start to deny it. They would say yes, I’ve done that but it

doesn’t matter because I can do it easily.

Igor: It’s a very common trait. The question then is what, how do you get them past

that point, or how do you get the resource to be acknowledged in its full

value? Or is there something else that you’re asking?

Sasha: Basically, how to make them acknowledge their own failure in full scope.

Igor: There are a couple of things there. It depends on what kind of session you’re

running, whether it’s more Ericksonian, more mindbending, more

conversational or less conversational and so on. Each type of session will

require a different nuance to be emphasized. Does that make sense?

Sasha: Yes, like one of them is on anxiety, so I was doing more of mindbending

language.

Igor: I’ll give you some general principles, and then we can see if we can filet those

out further in terms of therapy sessions. The first thing to realize is where

does this idea of not acknowledging your successes come from? It’s a false

understanding of what modesty means or what humility means. It’s basically

someone who doesn’t want to be considered arrogant, and so they’ve gotten

into a bad mental habit of dismissing everything that they do because they

can’t claim to being great at something.



With those kinds of people, the first thing is to take the pressure off of it

being great and just have it be good – it can’t be that good because it’s easy

for me and I can just do it, so it can’t be that great. However, if it’s just good

and they have absolutely no doubt about their ability to do it, it takes away

their excuse. It’s like yes I am pretty good at riding my bike. They don’t have

to get into this idea of what greatness means.

It becomes a simple preframe where you don’t even allow the problem to

occur by asking about what they’re competent at, what are they good at, or

what have they succeeded at? If they start arguing over it, I’d use their

argument as the main intervention.

For example in terms of mindbending language, it might be a question like,

what are all the things that you’ve succeeded at and then failed because you

trashed them afterwards. What? What are all those things that you were on

the verge of succeeding at but trashed them afterwards in your mind? What

are you talking about? Then you can start unrolling that as an idea. That’s one

approach.

You can take away the humility by not making it a superlative – which is

greatest, best, fastest – and just turning it into a comparative – better, more,

faster or just simply competent. You’ve got to bear in mind that the ideas

they’re presented in trance are different and reacted to differently than the

ideas that they’re presented at the conscious level.

If you want to experiment with this, go ahead and read a book or listen to a

lecture by some interesting person or philosopher that you like, someone

who’s expressing some kind of idea. Philosophy is particularly good for this.

Make it a relatively simple idea just so that you can grasp the different ways

without too much strain.

Listen to a five-minute excerpt of their idea or read a couple of pages of their

idea, and then go into self-hypnosis and go back and re-read the same pages

again or re-listen to the same lecture again, and you’ll hear different things.

You will hear different nuances and it will make a different kind of sense to

you. It’s because when your state of mind changes, your understanding of

information changes.

If they can’t accept it in that state of mind, change their state of mind to the

one where they can accept it. A classic one would be in the self-appreciation



cycles of Ericksonian hypnosis. Think about it this way. The videotapes are

called The Artistry of Milton H. Erickson. It’s a famous bit of therapy that

Erickson did with a woman called Monde and another young man named

Nick.

The resources that he’s gathering are the memory of her as a little girl

splashing in a puddle of water, and then the memory of her kicking in a

window and getting in trouble and then being spanked by her mother. These

are three simple trivial memories that most adults would dismiss.

However, because he’s produced them in trance and she gets to experience it,

when she’s revivifying or regressing to being a little girl chasing ducks and

splashing in the water, she glows with happiness just like a little four-year-old

girl would do. When she’s recalling the memory of kicking in the school

window and getting in trouble over it, she feels the fear of getting into trouble

over it. When he has her close her eyes and re-live the spanking from her

mother, she feels the pain of the spanking.

Then it suddenly becomes more real and it gets used very differently. Now all

these simple little slices of life become very useful therapeutic tools about

living more spontaneously, enjoying your life and dealing with hardships by

dispelling them. You can draw the lessons out of them very easily that way.

The first approach is basically reframing their humility. The second approach

is changing their state of mind. The third approach is to challenge the

underlying assumption or the conclusion that it’s actually not worthwhile. At

that point, you’d want to go more down the mindbending language route in

my opinion, or rapid reframing or something like that where you’re creating

these little mindbending moments about discovering the value in the things

that they have.

By the way, when I say mindbending moment, it doesn’t mean that you have

to be crazy, weird and out on the edges. It can be something very

straightforward. Sometimes just pointing out something to them can be the

mindbending moment – for example telling them a little story about someone

that used to do the same thing. They were a great musician but always played

it down, but what they didn’t realize was all the joy they were giving the

people around them. Even if they weren’t a concert pianist, they were still

spreading more love and joy, and that’s a skill that more people could do

with.



There are all kinds of ways of reframing it post-fact as well, which I guess

you’ve already tried also. Does that give you some more ideas in terms of how

to handle that situation?

Sasha: Yes, absolutely.

Igor: Do you have any follow-up questions?

Sasha: I had one small question. When this issue came up in a case with a girl who

has migraines it seems that she has very strong headaches and basically that

was the core as I see it that provoked them. Something was happening with

her and her mother when she was young and situations that occurred in her

childhood so regression and basically it’s on the way out now, but I would like

to send her home with a good tasking, so I wondered if you could suggest

something on that.

Igor: If I understand you correctly, there was some kind of relationship issue

between this lady and her mother, as a result of which she started developing

migraines, and in the process of dealing with the migraines, you also did a

little regression that cleaned up this underlying relationship to some extent.

Now you want to have a sense of what you can do to follow up on that to

send her home with a sense of something to do.

Sasha: Yes like how to give you a good task to make it a good experience.

Igor: The first thing you need to ask yourself is if a task is really required here or

not? It may be and it may not. Just because you can give tasks doesn’t always

mean that you should give a task. I would definitely be giving her some kind of

comfort in terms of her mindset.

I would want her to have some kind of experience of pain control or absence

of sensations – anesthesia or analgesia – during the session so that she knows

that she has control over pain, and that’s something that she can definitely

take with her and say yes I know this.

Ericksonian hypnosis is perfect for that. The Non Awareness Set is perfect for

that. Actually even the symbolic induction can be quite good for that too.

Even a blitz could work if you wanted to do that. You have lots of tools to



achieve that. That would be one major thing that I would definitely want her

to take away.

Again, if helps if you have more of a sense of what the drivers are. If the driver

is stress, it’s not uncommon for migraines to manifest either as a way of

escaping stress or as a way of escaping situations that could be stressful.

There’s a famous case of a lady who would have these awful migraines

whenever her in-laws came around. It was her defense mechanism.

Erickson realized quickly that if she took away the defense mechanism, it

wouldn’t really work very well for her. Instead what he had to do was develop

blinding migraines only when these in-laws were there and not at any other

time. Coupled with that would be a huge amount of nausea, so she’d end up

basically throwing up all over them and then of course she’d have to go lie

down and clear it all up.

It got to the point where they’d come around for a visit, and knowing that

they were coming for a visit, she’d end up drinking a pint of milk just so that

she’d have lots of gooey stuff to throw up and really shock them with.

Eventually the in-laws started calling ahead of time to find out how she was

feeling. If she felt like seeing them, she’d say I’m fine. Then they’d come

around and spend a very nice visit.

Once they started overstaying their welcome, she’d start making all these

fainting noises and start looking a little bit upset, at which point they would

make a hasty retreat and run away before she could throw up. On other days

when she wasn’t feeling up to it, she’d say I feel a headache coming on, so

they’d take a rain check instead and come to visit another time.

That gave her more power and the symptoms actually gave her control of the

situation. It’s definitely worth checking whether the migraine is giving her

some control in some situations that might still be useful for her to retain

either the headache portion or at least some way of coping with that

situation. That’s something worth checking out.

Other than that in terms of tasking, you can go for a direct task, which could

be things like specifically teaching her how to numb her forehead by doing a

little self-hypnosis technique. Maybe you could teach her an arm levitation,

which would end up creating a cool, numb forehead. Coolness and relaxation



are the two keys for any kind of headache control because they imply less

blood flow to the brain area.

Tension headaches in particular occur when too much blood is being pumped

into the brain, and it gets trapped because the tension in the muscle prevents

it from draining out of the brain again at the same rate that it’s coming in.

Basically you have too much blood pulsing away, which is one of the things

that you sensed there. Coolness and relaxation are two keys to overcoming

headaches, at least in the first stages.

Then of course numbness is another thing on top of that. That could be a nice

little thing that she could practice for five minutes each day so that anytime

she feels like a migraine is starting, she can go through her control pattern

and take it offline. If it persists or if it comes up in different situations, another

task might be to write a diary of when the symptoms come, when it’s strong

and when it’s light to see if you can detect a pattern from that.

Alternatively, if you really want to do this – and this is dependent on your

actually having a follow-up visit with them – you can go for the random

tasking, which basically means that you give them any random task to do and

assure them very meaningfully that they have to really think about how it

relates to their problem.

Basically the random task becomes a symbolic induction that they have to

solve between now and the next session, and then they can come back to you

and report how their life has changed or not as a result of it. Does that give

you some more ideas?

Sasha: Yes. Thank you very much.

Igor: You’re very welcome. Thank you for that, Sasha.

Joshua: This is Joshua from New York.


Joshua: I was listening to tell someone that you can hypnotize yourself by talking to

yourself and that when you’re around people, you can hypnotize yourself by

mentally doing it. I’ve always had a problem hypnotizing myself even with

audio cassettes. I don’t understand why I can’t. I don’t seem to get any results



out of it. I’m trying to learn hypnosis now, but I have the tendency – my focus

and my concentration isn’t there and I would like to know what I can do. It’s

complicated to me.

Igor: I understand. Let’s take this one step at a time. The first thing to do is to

figure out what you’re trying to achieve. When you say I haven’t really

succeeded going into hypnosis, what is it that you think you’re trying to

achieve, and how would you know if you actually achieved hypnosis? What

would be your test for it? That’s really what we need to know first before we

can decide what you can start doing about it.

Joshua: Right now I have the Self-Hypnosis audio to help me to learn hypnosis. So far,

I don’t know if it’s working or not, but I’m studying hypnosis. Another thing

that I find is that it’s difficult to get people onboard about this around where I

am here in New York. A lot of people are kind of leery about hypnosis.

Igor: Let’s just keep focused on one idea at a time. So you’re listening to a tape to

help you learn hypnosis, and you don’t know whether or not it’s working for

you. This is an important step here. First you’re saying I’ve tried self-hypnosis

and I can’t achieve it, even with tapes or talking to myself with the other

method. Next you’ve got the idea that you’re not entirely sure whether or not

it’s working. By the way, this is a very common thing and this is very

important.

Most people don’t know what to expect of hypnosis. They don’t actually

realize that they’ve succeeded when they have. I’d like to illustrate this with a

quick story if I may. Years ago when I was first starting to learn hypnosis, I was

doing pretty much the same thing that you’re doing, Joshua. Actually at the

time, the kinds of materials available were very poor compared to what’s

available nowadays.

I had a book and in the book was an induction. I basically just read the

induction out loud to a friend, and I tried to get her arm to stick to the chair

that she was sitting in. It was some simple little suggestion. What I didn’t

realize was that I was basically so blown away that it stated working that I

kept suggesting that she really try to lift that arm. Eventually after about five

minutes of my bullying her in this way, she ended up lifting her arm. Then my

whole confidence crashed and I felt that I’d failed completely and miserably

because obviously her hand wasn’t stuck to the chair after all.



Here’s the mistake that I made. I thought just because the arm lifted that I’d

failed at hypnotizing her. Looking back on that situation now knowing what I

know now, what I didn’t realize then is that I had succeeded more wildly than

I had realized. What happened was the suggestion took and for five minutes

she couldn’t lift her arm.

Then a separate set of suggestions started taking effect, and that was the

suggestion that she would lift her arm and that was inherent in the doubt

implied in my voice. I kept saying go on and really try, really try to lift your

arm, really try to lift that arm. I was essentially suggesting that she lift her

arm. I failed not because the hypnosis wasn’t working, but actually I’d

succeeded twice. My suggestion for the arm to get stuck succeeded, and my

subsequent suggestion for the arm to lift had succeeded. I just didn’t realize

that I was doing it.

How does this apply to self-hypnosis? In self-hypnosis most people don’t

know what they’re looking for, as a result of which you don’t know when

you’ve already achieved it. Because the working range of a self-hypnotic state

is so normal because you’ve been in and out of many natural trances

throughout your life, it feels so normal and natural that most people miss it

when they’re there. They have no idea that they’ve achieved it.

Here comes the problem part. The problem comes when they say to

themselves I’m trying to do this thing, am I in the right state, I don’t think I’ve

done this yet or I can’t be doing this right and this can’t be working, so now

they’re in the right state of mind, they have the right kind of focus and they’re

giving themselves suggestions along the lines of it not working.

Essentially they come to believe that hypnosis isn’t working for them through

the act of self-suggestion, through self-hypnosis. They’ve created a paradox

for themselves. I don’t know what method of self-hypnosis you’re using, and I

don’t know what your measurements are for knowing whether or not it’s

working.

Joshua: In my mind, I think everything is supposed to fade out in the background, and

when you go into an induction to the deepening and then everything is

supposed to fade out somewhat, not completely but you still hear things

around you and everything.



Igor: That’s exactly what hypnosis is not. There are times when you can get

background or extraneous information to fade away and become

unimportant and sometimes not even be heard, but that’s not the case

typically. Typically the opposite happens. Your senses tend to get sharpened,

so as soon as you go into self-hypnosis you’ll often find that, at least in the

initial stages, you’ll hear more of what’s going on around you. That’s actually

one of the signs that it’s working.

Here’s what I recommend that you do. If you’ve got a copy of The Power of

Self-Hypnosis Program, just listen to that because we’ve fixed a lot of these

stages within it. If you haven’t, I’m going to give you a quick fix to do right

now.

Before you do any kind of self-hypnosis whatever it happens to be, you can

listen to your tape or you can do it to yourself – it doesn’t really matter how

you do it – but before you go down the route of having a specific plan that

you want to resolve, whether it’s learning hypnosis better, being happy in a

certain situation or changing something in your life, go through a little training

phase.

The only thing that I want you to train is your ability to change or alter some

part of your body in a small way. I emphasize small because if you’re looking

to do visual hallucinations straight off, you’re going to have to do a lot more

training before you can there, and then the method becomes a bit clumsier

because of it.

If you do something like making your arm feel heavy or making your leg feel

warm, these are simple things to do just by suggesting it to yourself. You have

some kind of actual conscious control over that too, so you can start helping

the process along a little bit.

Then when you do your self-hypnosis session, just start off by saying to

yourself my right arm is heavy, my right arm is heavy. As soon as it starts

feeling heavy, even if it’s only a small amount, that suggestion has succeeded

and you know that you’re in self-hypnosis. Even if you could be “deeper” or

could do it better, it’s irrelevant. The fact is that you’ve achieved the state.

Joshua: Do you do it verbally or mentally?

Igor: It doesn’t matter.



Joshua: The books say to say it to yourself.

Igor: Personally I talk to myself mentally. In other words, it’s done inside my mind.

Some people prefer to speak it out loud so that they actually hear the sound

in the room. I have no problem with that. I think that works just fine. Just bear

in mind that if other people are hearing you, it might sound a little odd at that

point. Otherwise by all means do so.

When I say speak to yourself or tell yourself these things or visualize

something, you can use words, you can use intention or you can use mental

images. You can use any process that works for you. The way that I do it is I’ll

literally just talk to my unconscious mind like it’s another person in the room.

I’ll say okay unconscious mind, please make my arm heavy. I’d like it to be

heavy now. Make my arm heavy right now. That’s it, a little heavier than that.

That’s good, a little heavier than that. Oh there you go. That’s it. That’s

perfect. Thank you for making it heavy. Then I’ll make my left arm heavy. Let’s

make the left arm heavy as well now.

I’ll literally have that conversation with myself inside the privacy of my own

mind as my preparatory stage. I’d say spend a couple of weeks just doing that

with no other outcome apart from that because then you’ll know whether

you’ve reached the state or not.

The next step then becomes how do you actually make the state work for

you? How do you know it’s actually working in terms of the goal that you have

in mind? Just because you’re in self-hypnosis doesn’t necessarily mean that

you’re not asking for a dirty goal, which is where the unconscious mind and

the conscious mind want things that conflict with each other. At that point,

the unconscious mind will win anyway. That leads to another set of problems,

which again The Power of Self-Hypnosis resolves.

To give you a quick two-minute version of it, one of the simplest ways of

avoiding dirty goals – it’s not a perfect solution but it’s a pretty good one – is

by having decent goals or what I would call true goals.

There are different kinds of goals that you can have. There’s a loose goal, like

learning hypnosis better. That’s one where you’ll never actually know

whether or not it’s working because all you have to do is remember one extra

fact, and you’ve learned more hypnosis.



You’ve got to have some kind of specific outcome like I’d like to be able to

hypnotize 10 people in one week using this kind of method and getting these

kinds of results. That’s more specific. You need some kind of a goal-setting

process to be specific so that you have something that you can measure

afterwards to see whether or not you succeeded. More important than that

though is what do you think the payoff behind that will be? The true goal isn’t

just to hypnotize someone. It’s to feel a certain way or be a certain way as a

person.

Hypnotizing someone would just be one of the ways that you could feel this

way or be this way. You always include that element in your session so that

even if it doesn’t come out as hypnotizing 10 people, it may come out in other

ways so that you actually get your true goal all along anyway. If the actual

goal that you had falls out because it gets replaced with something better,

your life just got better as a result of a whole bunch of things at the same

time.

Without going through the whole self-hypnosis method, which of course we

don’t have time for here, does that give you more of an insight in terms of

understanding your self-hypnosis practice and what you can do to fix some of

the issues that you talked to us about?

Joshua: Yes. It helps a lot.

Igor: Good luck with that, Joshua.

Joshua: I have The Power of Self-Hypnosis course. I’m going to go over it. I have a lot

of your materials. Like I said, sometimes I find things a little complicated.

Igor: I understand. Take it easy. This is not a race. When you go through the self-

hypnosis program, you’re better off listening to the same CD five times in a

row to really understand it, than to feel like you have to go through the whole

program and not really understand it altogether.

Some people like to listen to the whole program at once to get a sense of it,

and then they’ll focus on each individual CD to really master each step. Others

will just focus on each step and not go onto the next step until they’ve

mastered one step. I really don’t mind how you do it, but please don’t be in a

rush.



There’s an expression in England. I’m not sure if they have it in the States as

well. It’s something along the lines of more haste less speed. Rushing is

something that happens inside your mind, not necessarily in real time. If you

take your time, what may initially feel like is taking more time ultimately will

end up saving you a lot of time because you’ll get a lot more done with it. Do

you get the idea?

Joshua: Yes, that helps out a lot. I’ll keep all of that in mind and work on it.

Igor: Good. Thank you, Joshua. Do you have any follow-up questions?

Joshua: I think that covers it. I want to be successful as a hypnotist. What do you think

I can use to increase my focus and concentration?

Igor: How do you know that focus and concentration are actually what’s missing?

What are you trying to achieve?

Joshua: I’m trying to learn this stuff and it’s complicated. Sometimes it gets

complicated. Like you said about listening to The Power of Self-Hypnosis

about five times until you understand it. It just seems like you have to do

some simple stuff. I’m 53 years old and it’s difficult for me to focus on things

and read. I haven’t done it in a while, so it’s almost like going back to school.

Igor: Here’s a very simple suggestion for you. I suspect that one of the reasons why

this all seems so difficult for you is because you’re trying to learn it all upfront

before you start doing it. Am I right about this? In other words, you haven’t

started practicing this with anyone yet, have you?

Joshua: Yes. It’s difficult to find other people that want to practice with me.

Igor: I understand. One of the things that you can do is join online forums with

other hypnotists and see if they want to do practice sessions over the phone

or over Skype or something like that. There are lots of different ways you can

find hypnotists. If you’ve already got the How to Practice Hypnosis Without

Fear, I go into more details on how to actually get volunteers in your local

neighborhood and how to make it less frightening to them and less pressure

on you as well.



If you don’t have that program, the simple solution right now is to go online,

find some hypnosis forums and ask people on there to practice with you. You

can do a lot of practice over the phone or over Skype, and if they happen to

be in your local area, so much the better.

You can also go to social media places like MeetUp.com and set up your own

practice group where people get together once a week or once a month to

practice with you. That can be a very useful thing also, or you can just join

online forums. There are lots of hypnosis forums. Just get together with

people either virtually or physically and start doing some practice.

I guarantee that at least 50% if not more of the problems that you’re currently

having studying will disappear as soon as you regularly start using hypnosis.

When I say regularly using hypnosis, I mean an induction that’s as simple as

close your eyes, go into a trance, go deeper and deeper, and now feel good

and come back.

That’s not a particularly good induction, but the very fact that I’m doing it and

I’m waiting for some kind of response from you and then I’m going to start

building it up means that all the stuff I’ve been learning has somewhere to go

now. It has somewhere to hang. I’m beginning to create a mental framework

to hang all this information off of.

If all you do is just study it without any attempt at doing it physically, I can

guarantee that it’s going to be almost impossible to learn this stuff because

you’re missing the vital reference experiences to make it work. At first,

practice in a way where you don’t care about the results. The results should

not be of any consequence to you when you’re first starting off.

You’re better off attempting to hypnotize 100 people and going through a full

induction and failing with those 100 people than spending all your time with

one person and succeeding and not having those 100 other interactions. Does

that give you some more ideas in terms of how to start doing this?

Joshua: That helps me out a lot. I’ll take everything you said under consideration.

Igor: Excellent.

http://www.meetup.com/



Part 2

Jasper: My name is Jasper. I have the Conversational Hypnosis 2.0 Program and I was

wondering about certification.

I know the people who took it during the filming obtained a certification. Is

there any chance that I can become certified?

Igor: The answer is yes and no. We do not certify by mail for any hypnotherapy

style program because I strongly believe that certification needs to be earned

in person. Part of what makes certification work is the whole week that we’re

with the group we get a sense of people’s character, their personality and so

on, so we know whether or not we can certify them in lots of different ways.

That’s one reason why we can’t do it by mail.

What could happen is you can contact one of our trainers, and when they do

one of their live programs they may be willing to allow you to join in just on

the certification part of the program when you pay your fee for that, but then

they may not because part of it is still that they have to get a sense of your

character to be able to judge whether or not you’re not just technically

competent, but also that you’re an individual fit for this sort of role.

It’s up to the individual trainers whether they’ll do that or not. You may find

that you have to take the whole course so that they can evaluate you at each

of the stages. I can’t answer that for them. In terms of virtual certification,

unfortunately the answer is no that won’t happen. You do have some other

options, and you’ll just have to negotiate with the instructors as to how many

hoops you’ll have to jump through for that.

Jasper: That answered my question.

Do you have any books or anything on treating specific issues like maybe the

more difficult issues to work on?

Igor: First of all, it depends on what issue you’re talking about. There are lots of

books, and many of them specialize in certain niches. There are some great

books out there and some awful ones also. If you have a specific niche in

mind, I can tell you if I’m aware of anything. I’ll happily do that now.



Otherwise, if you’re asking more generally speaking, I can’t generally

recommend books. I can tell you that the Conversational Hypnotherapy

Program is designed so that you can deal with 80% of the kinds of problems

that you’re likely to see as a hypnotherapist, and the other 20% are specialist

things that you’d want to get more training on anyway. That other 20% are

things like alcohol abuse, pain management, counseling abuse victims or

trauma victims. I include PTSD inside of that. It’s some of the heavier stuff.

It doesn’t mean that the skills that you have from the Conversational

Hypnotherapy Program don’t apply there. They absolutely apply. I don’t know

if you’ve watched my pain control DVDs, but they were filmed right after the

Conversational Hypnotherapy 2.0 with the same audience. The same skills

were still being applied. It’s just the thinking behind the pain control was

being elucidated in a slightly different way.

Unless you have a specific question in terms of a direction that you’re

interested in going, I don’t know if that answered or question or if there’s

something more concrete that you’re after, or if you just want some examples

of books in different niches. What kinds of things are you looking for?

Jasper: Maybe example of books or maybe a book that helps to give a bit of

background on everything. I don’t know if that’s possible or if it exists.

Igor: Yes the theory of everything. That’s the Holy Grail. I’ll give you some possible

resources. There’s a book by Hammond called The Handbook of Hypnotic

Suggestions and Metaphors. Essentially there are a whole bunch of entries in

there, including I think Erickson’s written a lesson in there as well, for every

kind of condition under the sun from pain control to bruxism, and different

clinicians who specialize in those fields teach their favorite technique or their

metaphor that they’ve used with people in that particular field.

There are some very interesting ideas within that. It’s not technique in the

sense that you just pick up the technique and just do it. It’s a big heavy book

and it’s a nice reference book. You might enjoy just browsing through it. It’s

not a book that you study. It’s a book that you browse.

If you have a client coming in with something interesting, you may browse

through it just to get an idea of what others may have done, and invariably I

end up doing something completely different anyway, but at least it gives

your conscious mind something to hang onto in the meantime.



Another thing that you might find interesting – and this may sound like I’m

contradicting myself, but I’m not necessarily doing so – and that is there are

various books of scripts out there that are designed for everything from

bruxism, which is people who gnash their teeth at night, to bedwetting,

insomnia and all kinds of other stuff. I don’t believe in taking someone’s

scripts and just reading it out to your patient and that’s it. I don’t think

hypnosis works that way effectively or efficiently.

However, what is interesting is if you find an author that has a decent

background and decent track record, you’re basically reading their thoughts,

ideas and frames of reference inside of their scripts and you might pick up

ideas, movements, maneuvers, concepts, preframes, reframes or suggestions

that you like and that you wish to adopt as well. That means that you don’t

have to follow the session the way they’ve done it, but you can borrow some

of the structure behind that session.

If you have the Master Class on Power Loops, you’ll find it particularly useful

to listen to that first before diving into a script because what power loops

teach you to do is to deconstruct any hypnotic process into systematic steps

that someone has to go through, so you can basically boil down a script to a

set of steps in a technique, and then later on you can boil down the technique

to a set of principles, and then you can carry those principles around and

basically use them for pretty much anything, especially in that particular

niche. That’s another nice little trick that you can play with.

Finally, you can just look at different authors who have specialties in their

fields. For example, Michael Yapko wrote a book that I believe is called

Taproots. He specializes in using Ericksonian hypnosis for depression. That’s a

great book if you’re interested in depression and finding out more about that.

There are all kinds of books like that. If you want to do family therapy,

Uncommon Therapy is a book by Jay Haley, which talks a lot about Erickson’s

family therapy approaches, which is very interesting.

Does that give you more of a sense of where to go out there with those

things?

Jasper: Yes, that’s great. I’ll take a look at those. I just have one other question. With

respect to pain, I have bought a number of your products and I know you

mentioned there’s a pain course. I’ll have to take a look at that.



I was wondering is it possible to actually make it so that someone is

permanently pain-free? I have a CD that I use, which you didn’t create

someone else created it. I wouldn’t say the hypnosis is that great on it but it

does work. The thing is it’s not permanent. Is there a way of actually doing it

so it’s permanent?

Igor: There are a couple of different answers to that question.

First of all, let me make the following suggestion. The pain control can be as

permanent as the pain used to be. Here’s what I mean by that. This is an idea

that I got from John Overdurf. We are constantly changing. That’s part of

being a human being. Whenever we’re stuck it’s because some part of us is

trying to resist change, so we’re still changing but we’re just changing in the

opposite direction that we desire.

As soon as you want to make something permanent, you’re basically asking

someone to stop changing and that’s not going to happen. The solution can

be as permanent as the problem was. Which means the solution can last a

whole lifetime whilst still growing and evolving along with the person.

The second idea is that even if you succeed with the pain – let’s take an actual

case history. I had a gentlemen come to me in one of the mentoring groups

who had a workplace accident that crushed the lower vertebrae in his back. It

was basically pulverized. I think they were fused together with a metal rod,

and he was in constant pain for the next three years to the point where he

was basically drinking himself to sleep every night to dull the pain. That’s not

the healthiest way of looking at life as you can imagine.

He came in with a doctor’s certificate and we did the pain control session. It

took about 10 or 15 minutes to do. It was very quick. Here’s something that I

usually leave with a lot of people, especially if I have a sense that they’ll do

something stupid. It’s something along the lines of the deal is that you don’t

need to have the pain as long as you’re paying attention to the signals. That’s

something that we talk more about in the pain control method.

You’re reframing the idea that pain is the unconscious mind trying to get your

attention. As long as you give it the right kind of attention, you don’t need the

pain anymore. That’s really been my experience so far as well. Whether it’s



true because I’ve suggested it or it’s actually true, who knows, but it seems to

be working for me either way.

The problem will come if the person wants to do something stupid and

reinjure themselves or exacerbate whatever the problem is if it’s a physical

thing because now they’re ignoring it, which is not so good. You don’t want to

take away the pain permanently. You just want to take away the pain when

it’s there needlessly. If they injure themselves in other ways, they should

absolutely be experiencing pain because it’s a signal saying be careful, you’re

doing some damage here.

Let’s say someone has a broken shoulder and they start playing tennis

straightaway. That’s not a very smart thing to do. At that point, trying to make

the pain go away would be very dangerous because it would encourage a

person to do something physically harmful. Again, you’ve got to leave some

room with pain control for the pain to return with a purpose but then to stay

away when the purpose has been satisfied.

In my experience, provided you set it up in those ways, the pain relief stays

permanently whilst they’ll still experience pain from time to time in different

contexts because it’s appropriate and important for them to do so.

Thirdly – and this just another general caveat – there is no 100% to anything,

especially with things like pain control. I think I’ve only failed with a couple of

people, and a few have just had a result where I diminished the pain from

very high to very low but there was still some background pain that they

needed to hold onto for whatever reason.

For the most part, I’ve gotten people down to a zero so that there was no pain

sensation at all so that they could live comfortably with it and basically forget

about it and get on with their life. As I said, it’s been as permanent as the

problem used to be. In other words, when the injury is healed they’ve

forgotten about it. Up until the injury heals they have no issue with it. For

those who had chronic pain – in other words things that are ongoing – again

there have been no issues with that.

In fact, one of the gentlemen on the pain control DVDs came up to me during

one of the recent seminars and said that even now – which is about 18

months down the line – he’s still pain free. Every now and again he gets a

twinge – for example when he’s had a long day and he’s been abusing his



back – and his back tells him that it’s time to rest. As long as he pays attention

to that twinge, he’s comfortable again. If he purposely ignores it because

something more important is going on, he’ll pay for it with pain because he

was ignoring the message.

Jasper: That really helps. My last point is that I read somewhere that Milton Erickson

would often do something with his neck, choking himself in order to relieve

his pain, and he would have to redo it. That’s why I was wondering whether or

not your unconscious mind basically will not allow you to permanently have

pain relief when it knows that maybe you should know that you have pain but

that it’s just a matter of controlling it.

Igor: That can be the case. Hence, all manner of possibilities are possible with it.

That’s absolutely possible. It may be that it was a personal limitation of Milton

Erickson. It may just be that the amount of pain that he was going through

was so immense that there was extra effort required to deal with it. I don’t

know. I can’t really speak to that.

I can say that for most things, I’ve managed to bring relatively intolerable pain

– I’m talking about a nine to 10 on a scale of 10, and chronic pain that’s lasted

for several years – down to a zero. That’s been relatively permanent as far as

I’ve heard. There will be some cases where they need to learn to do it for

themselves so that they can reapply it for whatever reason. Basically you deal

with each individual as you need to.

Jasper: That’s great. Thanks for your time.

Igor: Thank you very much.

Kevin: This is Kevin.

Igor: How are you Kevin?

Kevin: Good. It’s very difficult to get on the call. You’re very popular. I have a

question about your CHPH course. I’m working with people on anxiety, and

one of the things that I’m finding is that they seem at times to re-infect

themselves, that’s how I put it, in that they go out into the world and they

start going back into old habit patterns. While they say they’re changing and

things are looking better, they’re still having some of the symptoms coming

back.



Igor: Do you want me to speak to that in general, or is there a specific question?

Kevin: How can I prevent someone from doing that and give them new options?

Maybe you might have other strategies of some sort.

Igor: Let me take you through a couple of different ideas that will be important

here. The first idea is one that our industry and some branches of it like the

NLP part of our industry – I mean the hypnosis community in general – has

done somewhat of a disservice here. Even the legends of Erickson have belied

some of the realities of the ground.

Here’s what I mean. Somewhere along the lines this idea has crept into our

field that you should be able to resolve all problems in one session and that’s

it, the person is done and doesn’t need your help ever again. Whilst that is

absolutely something worth striving for – and with a lot of issues is also very

realistic and something that you can achieve – there are some people or some

issues that simply require more time.

If you’re stuck in the frame of mind that you can solve everything in 30

minutes or an hour, you’re robbing some people of an important part of their

learning cycle. Anxiety in particular lends itself to this and I’ll explain why.

Anxiety, which is different from a phobia, is a mental habit to a large degree.

It’s not exclusively so, but to a large degree someone’s thinking style is

causing the anxiety to be there. They’re looking for dangers in their

environment, and they’re over-looking for them, which is causing more and

more anxiety. Of course, each person will fixate on certain kinds of dangers

more than others.

A very common anxiety, which is sometimes mislabeled as a phobia but it isn’t

actually a phobia, is the fear of flying. Fear of flying is actually a classic anxiety

because what people are thinking about is crashing, turbulence and all the

rest of it and it terrifies the daylights out of them. Of course it does.

Whereas a true phobia doesn’t have any cognition involved. A plane phobic

would see a plane and be terrified whether he’s on it or not. Just seeing a

plane flying in the sky would give them a phobia attack. Seeing a plane on a

runway would give them a phobia attack. Just standing on a plane would give



them an attack whether or not it’s going anywhere. Seeing an airplane movie

would give them a phobia attack.

Most people who think they’ve got a phobia actually have an anxiety because

seeing those objects doesn’t necessarily trigger it. They have to be thinking

about being in the actual experience of it for the anxiety to be triggered. Can

you break it in one session? Absolutely, but one of the things that you then

need to test is not just has the fear gone, but have the thought processes that

led to the fear also dissolved?

One of the ways that you can test this is by getting them to tell you how they

think of it differently when they’re placed in those situations. Let’s use the

plane anxiety again as an example. I’ll ask someone beforehand would you get

on a plane and they say no way, I can’t do it. Then I talk them through it and

they say I see images of me crashing and it’s terrifying and it reminds me of

when on was on a plane and this happened.

Once we’ve done the work in whatever direction we choose to take it in,

when I’m doing the testing phase I’ll specifically put them in that situation and

say just think about getting on a plane now. How does that feel? It actually

feels alright. How come? The why is getting them to create new thoughts

about the experience of flying that they haven’t had before, and those are the

thoughts that they need to rehearse.

They might say the plane is safe and I feel okay, the pilot’s well trained, the

plane’s well engineered and it’s the safest form of travel. They’ll start telling

you all the stuff that most flyers already believe in. Then you need to build in

what’s called a recovery strategy. What if it fails? What if you’re in a plane

and there’s turbulence? What if you’re in a plane and there’s bad turbulence?

You’re basically pushing the test out into more and more confrontational and

more possibly painful situations. As they pass each level of the test, they’re

actually reinforcing and rehearsing thought processes that will maintain and

support the new attitude rather than the old one.

As part of this, I would also want to inoculate them against their peer group,

especially if their peer group shares an anxiety, because that can really suck

them in. Even if they don’t show the anxiety, they may still disbelieve that

they’ve resolved it and want to test it for themselves. Again, you need to be

able to inoculate against people doing or saying stupid things. I’m thinking



more about things like a smoking session when other smokers will try to

tempt the smoker to smoke again.

That’s something that they need to be confronted with so that they can

develop strategies on how to deal with those things and rehearse those things

mentally again. Another layer at which this would work is that a true recovery

strategy allows them to go home, fail for a period of time and then get back

up and do it again.

Allow me to give you an example. Let’s say someone wants to get physically

fit. They go to the gym every day and they start doing the right things, it starts

working and it’s great. Then they have a hard week at work and they take a

day off from the gym because they’re just too tired. Then they take off two

days and by the third day they think oh forget it, I’ll catch up some other time.

Before the habit of going to the gym has built up, he’s giving himself an

excuse to escape the habit and so he’s going back to an old habit, which was

the avoiding of it. If you want to build a recovery strategy into this, you

actually give them the sense that they should fail. You may even want to give

them a task of failing. For example, they’re going to the gym and everything is

going well, and then purposely they get too busy or forget to go one day. That

way they can learn to recover from it.

Now they’ve had this busy week and they’ve taken the week off. They just

haven’t been able to go to the gym at all. Come Monday morning, they turn

up anyway to restart again. I don’t know if you know this, but to use a

different example most ex-smokers will have smoked another cigarette after

their official quitting date.

The difference between people who have started back up again and those

that have remained nonsmokers is that the people who remain nonsmokers,

after they’ve had a cigarette they’ve kind of woken up mentally and said I

don’t want this. I’m glad I stopped smoking. They put out the cigarette and

carry on with their day.

Whereas some people light a cigarette and say darn it, now I’ve got a

cigarette in my mouth again, so I must have failed. Their mental attitude is

basically what’s getting them to fail. Do you get the idea?

Kevin: Yes it makes a lot of sense.



Igor: The recovery strategy sets up the idea that just because you fall off the

bandwagon once doesn’t mean that it’s failed. It stills leaves the other avenue

free to be re-trodden until the path sets in even further. With all these

different things in mind, the final idea is going back to the first idea again. This

is the idea of why give yourself a time limit within which to succeed? What

makes you think that you have to help them to resolve the whole anxiety

issue in one session?

It could be very useful for you to actually set them up with one session, send

them home, let them fail a bunch of times and succeed a bunch of other

times, and then come back again and discuss the failures and the causes of

those so that you can then go back in and train them even further. Then you

condition that in.

Some people, especially if they’ve got major anxieties, will require very small

baby steps. Even the idea of eliminating their anxiety may be too much at

first. Just making them more comfortable with the anxiety might be enough of

an initial step with someone who has some very severe anxiety issues.

I’ll give you an example of this in a non-hypnotic field, although it’s a very

interesting example. Dr. Schwartz is a neuroscientist who treats obsessive

compulsive disorder. These people are not your average OCD people who

have to lick the window pane several times before leaving the house. They

have very intense versions of OCD to the point where they will literally

paralyze if they don’t complete their rituals. They’re more extreme versions of

it.

His treatment takes a while. I think it takes about six months or so, which in

terms of hypnosis seems like forever but in terms of standard therapeutic

treatments, especially psychotherapy treatment, it’s actually a pretty short

time. It consists largely of a support group where he tells them to go home

and try to resist their compulsion. When he says try to resist, he’s really saying

distract yourself with some other task for as long as possible. If you have to

finish the ritual anyway, just try to hold off as long as possible before doing

so.

In other words, success is not part of it. Trying is enough. This is the key thing.

In the hypnosis industry, this idea of do or do not and there is no try – there is

truth to that but there’s also a lot of falsehood to it, and this is demonstrated



by Dr. Schwartz. These folks go home and they try for a week or a month to

resist their OCD. Of course they fail day after day but they carry on trying

anyway.

Then after a week or a month, they come back to their next session. At that

session, Dr. Schwartz takes a brain scan where he shows them different parts

of their brain lit up. The brain lights up very differently in an OCD person than

in an ordinary person. That’s part of why they get stuck in the compulsion.

He shows them what a normal brain looks like, he shows them what their

brain looked like when they first turned up and they had the classic OCD

patterns, and then he shows them what their brain looks like now with just

some very small changes starting to occur.

Week after week just by trying to avoid the OCD, those portions of their brain

that look more normal start increasing. Those portions of the brain that are

OCD classic symptoms start reducing until eventually they have enough

control over it that they can actually distract themselves and successfully not

complete some OCD ritual. It proves that trying actually does count as long as

you try honestly, with real intention.

This brings me back to the anxiety group that you’re talking about.

Remember, they spent a lot of time practicing the mindset that caused the

anxiety. Who’s to say that just because they go home and have some

successes and some failures that it “has failed,” when really they’ve

succeeded in eroding it and all they need is a little bit more time to reinforce

the correct mindset for it to vanish entirely and for them to be immune to it.

Kevin: That makes a lot of sense.

Igor: You could do that all in one session, or you may need to split it up over

several sessions of learnings so that they can get supported over a period of

time. That really depends on the individual and the nature of their anxieties.

Does that help you?

Kevin: Yes, one of the things that was coming to mind also was having someone

journal about their successes and failures as a means to track their progress.

Igor: Yes.



Kevin: It’s also interesting that I never thought of it as a thought pattern versus an

emotionally-driven behavior. When you’re retraining someone’s thought

patterns in a session, you’re essentially bringing them into imagined situations

and then asking them how that feels and having them justify those feelings.

Igor: There are a couple of different ways that you can do this. I’ll use my favorite

approach, which is the mindbending approach because it’s just a nice way of

doing it. The first thing I’d go after are the ideas that are causing the anxiety.

Let’s take the example of someone who’s got a social anxiety that people

won’t like them.

By challenging the idea that people won’t like them and getting them to the

point where they admit yes I could actually feel comfortable in their presence

or I don’t know and I’d have to find out, then you get them to justify that idea.

What do you mean you’d have to find out? Well, I’d have to go and talk to

them. What would talking to them do for you? Well, it would let me find out

what’s really going on. How would you find out? Well, I’d ask them these sorts

of questions. What if they really don’t like you? Well then at least I’ll know.

I’m judging their emotions now based on their attitude. The way to think

about emotions as a guideline is that all emotions have a purpose. They come

to the surface automatically when the unconscious mind believes that it

recognizes a certain context being present. With fear, the context is of some

future danger or unpleasantness and it’s trying to motivate you to avoid it

through fear.

The way that you remove fear is either to remove the expectation of an

unpleasant activity or experience in the future or to remove all hope. In other

words, if the person knows an unpleasant event will happen and they accept

that it’s going to happen no matter what and so they may as well just deal

with it, then invariably all fear will disappear.

I’ll give you an extreme example. Let’s say that someone is on death row,

they’ve been sentenced to death and they have to go through that whole

unfortunate ritual, so they’re going to be thinking about it. Some people will

be afraid and some people will be very calm. Why is this, since there’s no

chance of them having a reprieve?

The people who are very calm have accepted the fact that they’re going to die

and that’s it. They’re dealing with it. The people who are afraid know that



they’re going to die but they haven’t fully managed to accept it yet. They’re

still trying to reject it and find some desperate way out of it, and that’s what’s

keeping the fear going. Sometimes it’s not so much what they’re doing, but

sometimes it’s also what they’re not doing that can be part of it.

Coming back to this idea of emotions, yes you can intervene at any level. You

can intervene at the level of behavior. If someone behaves differently, they

will think and feel differently. You can also intervene at the level of ideas. If

they think differently, they will feel and behave differently. You can also

intervene at the level of feelings. If they feel differently, they will think and

behave differently. Each of them offers you a doorway in, and there are other

doorways as well.

Can you deal with anxieties just at as emotional thing? Absolutely. Can you

deal with it as an intellectual thing? Absolutely. Who’s to say that you have to

prefer one over the other? You just choose what the client in front of you

needs, and then you get them to rehearse the support mechanisms.

Even if you’ve done an emotional change, you may still want them to have

thought loops about the change to help support it in. If their change is more

with intellectual processes, you may still want to gather emotional evidence –

for example, how do you feel about that – to help cement in the more

cognitive style of changes. Do you get the idea?

Kevin: So you can do the opposite for a feeling by saying what do you think about

that feeling?

Igor: Yes.

Kevin: Good. That actually answers a lot of my questions.

Igor: Good. Do you have any follow-ups, or does that cover it for now?

Kevin: Just to recap, working with someone with anxiety, it’s important to help them

measure success as not absolute to relevant and so you help them build

success over time, and it may happen in one session or in multiple sessions.

Igor: Yes. The longer the anxiety has existed, the fewer coping mechanisms they’ve

developed for dealing with that. They’re going to have to come up with some

things on the fly, which means that initially they may try out some things that



don’t work so well. They’ve got to be given the opportunity to actually learn.

Everyone else did. You learned. I presume that you don’t spend your entire

life anxious, but then there are other situations where you do get anxious.

You’ve learned how to deal with your own anxiety up to a point. Depending

on how complex your life is, it may be enough and you’re generally free of

anxiety, or it may not be enough in which case you may need to learn more

strategies for dealing with, avoiding or averting anxiety. These people are no

different. It’s just that they haven’t been in a position to deal with it before,

so they’ve got a bit of a catch-up period compared to everyone else.

Kevin: Would storytelling be an ideal way to do that?

Igor: Storytelling is an excellent way of doing that. Storytelling is a great way of

doing the testing phase at the end of your hypnotherapy process. Future

memories and hypnotic blitzes are great ways of doing that. Sometimes just

giving them a task like telling them to go home, live a week and come back

again can be enough because the expectation is that you’ll have highs and

lows, and we want to see what’s happening so that we can actually fix what

actually needs fixing. That gives the person the freedom to surprise

themselves with being successful in areas where they didn’t think they could

be.

Kevin: This is slightly unrelated, but you mentioned future memories. Is one of the

reasons to use a future memory to have someone solve their own problem

and look back on the solution?

Igor: Yes, that’s a classic way that you can look at it.

Kevin: To me it almost seems like it’s very rare that you’re able to use that, unless

someone has absolutely no emotional block to resolving the issue. Maybe I’m

wrong about that.

Igor: You’ve got to bear in mind that there are different ways of looking at this.

First of all, future memories can be used for many things. The situation that

you mentioned is one of them but it’s not the only one. It can be done to

basically set patterns for them in the future, to create thought loops, to

create expectations and all kinds of stuff like that.



Basically the idea of this comes from an Erickson paper that he wrote, where

he basically had no idea how to help someone. He called it a pseudo

orientation in time. He had them progress to a year in the future and he had a

chat with them about all the things they did to resolve it.

Here’s the key to doing that. It requires a relatively somnambulistic level of

trance with a little consciousness involved. If you do it in a light to medium

sort of trance, you’re going to have too much interference from the conscious

mind that says I can’t do it, so of course I’m not going to have a solution to it.

Asking that very question is going to invite the critical factor to jump in and

start blocking it and saying this can’t be it or I’m not sure that it’s going to

happen and so on.

If you’re going to use that as a method for finding the solution – and you’re

right that it’s going to be more of a rarity than an everyday example, but it’s

an interesting thing to do – the first thing you want to do is to be able create

amnesia so that the person has no idea about what’s going on.

You test them for amnesia and then you want to see how fully they can

regress into something so that they’re losing a sense of their future because

that’s a skill that they’ll need. They’ll need to be able to immerse themselves

in a situation so totally that they forget that another situation can exist.

Then you can start having them progress to a future moment and get

immersed in it so fully that they forget that the intervening time didn’t occur.

That means that you’ve got to talk to them a little bit about their memory –

where are you now, what are you doing, oh that’s amazing, what else is

happening, how have the last few days been, what did you do yesterday, what

are you doing right now?

Initially they’ll find it difficult to answer some of these questions because

they’re not fully oriented in that time sphere. It may require a little bit of

extra effort to get them there. Eventually when they’re fully immersed in that

reality, you can ask them questions about their past, starting subtly with

nonessential things like what kinds of things have you been up to since the

last time we saw each other? Oh I did these things and these things. How did

you end up resolving that problem we discussed? Well, you told me to do

these things and I ended up doing these things.



Now it becomes a natural part of the whole interaction, as opposed to just

saying go into the future, are you in the future, look back and now tell me

how you fixed it. That’s a much harsher way of doing it, and I doubt very

much that many people would be able to respond to something as

minimalistic as that. Do you get the idea?

Kevin: Yes that makes a lot of sense. So have them build a life around it and then

bring them back. That’s perfect. You’ve answered all my questions.

Igor: That’s great. Thank you for your questions.

Guest: I have one follow-up question to the previous one. The question is how do

you handle the relapse expectations because a big part of therapy is what you

as the therapist expect from the person or make them expect?

How do you handle them expecting that there is a possibility of relapse? How

do you handle that without them destroying the therapy consciously or

actually making the relapse happen?

Igor: It depends on a couple of different contexts. There are a couple of different

approaches that I like to use. One might be the paradoxical task where you

actually get them to try to fail on purpose. There are several reasons for this.

One reason for them to fail on purpose is that there are times when you’ll

know that by trying to do it on purpose, they’ll fail and so it cements in the

idea that the problem can’t exist anymore.

You basically activate the Law of Reverse Effect to get them to fail at failing on

purpose, which means they fail at creating the problem, which means they

can no longer have the problem. That’s one of the ways you can handle it.

Another way to handle it is to get them to do it on purpose, but then by doing

it on purpose even if they can carry out the task, it defeats the purposefulness

of the task and so it no longer comes only unconsciously, but they’ve got

some conscious inroads into it and some abilities to control it because of it.

The way that I most often handle this idea of relapses is to talk to them in a

casual sort of way about how we never know what’s going to happen in life

and so what if you fail? What if you relapse? It’s worked for a while, you’ve

been very happy with it, but then one day you wake up and you have a really

bad day and the problem is there again. What are you going to do now?



The important thing if you’re going to do something like that is the initial

version of my test will be relatively lighthearted because they’re sitting in this

glow of I can deal with this, and they’ll say I’ll be alright. Then I’ll get them to

describe to me how they will forgive themselves for their mistake and get

back on the success ladder.

If they will be devastated by it and they don’t know how to cope with it, then I

know that my therapy isn’t done yet and I’ll go into the second phase of

therapy where we’ll deal specifically with creating a mental robustness

around the idea of relapsing and recovering from the relapses.

Either they convince me that they know how to dig themselves out a relapse

or they fail, at which point they create the context for the next piece of

therapy, and the therapy is their faith in their own unconscious mind and in

themselves to be able to handle dusting themselves off again when they’ve

slipped and fallen down.

If your session time runs out, they may have to come in for a second session

or a third session or a fourth session for the other approach to it. If there is

time, you might be able to deal with it then. I remember doing this once with

a friend of mine. He was a doctor who had just started his own business. He

was asking me a business question, so I used some mindbending language.

It took five or 10 minutes to fix the problem that he was having. Then it took

me another 45 minutes to fix his doubts as to how permanent the solution

was. Believe it or not, his real issue wasn’t so much what he thought it was.

The real problem was his general lack of faith in his own abilities to cope with

things.

The problem that he came in with was fixed in five or 10 minutes, but the real

problem was his lack of trust in his unconscious processes and his own ability

to cope. That took 45 minutes to fix – in other words, four times longer than

the original piece of work – but that really is the one that did the most good.

Hence, if I need them to come back for another session, I’ll happily make sure

that that’s there because for some people that’s exactly where the therapy

takes place, and the other stuff was just the warm-up act. Do you get the

idea?



Guest: So do extensive testing during the therapy, and then depending on how that

testing goes, you decide if you’ll ask them to try to fail on purpose.

Igor: I used to not test enough when I was starting out and my results became

much more haphazard. My rule of thumb now is when I think I’ve finished a

session, I’ll carry on for another 10 or 20% again and just carry on testing

regardless just in case. If they get so annoyed and bored with me that they

want to leave, that’s great. If they stick around and we continue exploring

things, as long as nothing comes up I’m happy because I’ve spent a lot of time

retesting this.

If something does come up, if there’s time we can fix it. If there isn’t time,

that’s when we agree to have another session. Since working that way, my

results have increased significantly – in other words, the relapses have gone

down significantly because of that.

Guest: Thank you.

Igor: You’re welcome.

Donna: This is Donna.

Igor: How are you?

Donna: I’m all right. I’ve been listening to the Master Hypnotist Seminar Series and

I’ve heard multiple people talk about things like regulating bleeding during

surgery, resetting people’s metabolisms, healing inflammation and things like

that.

How do you communicate your desire to change or adjust internal processes?

Specifically I’m interested in how to speed up the metabolism for weight loss

but other things as well.

Igor: Are you talking about yourself or are you talking about other people? There

are slightly different rules that apply. In other words, are you going to do self-

hypnosis or is this for hypnotherapy?

Donna: Both, but if I have to choose one, I choose myself.



Igor: For yourself it’s going to be a little bit trickier because you have your own

limitations of your mindset to overcome that are active whilst you’re sitting

there telling yourself about it. I’ll give you the hypnotherapy version first, and

then we’ll have to make a special case of that for the self-hypnosis version.

In hypnotherapy, depending on your toolkit that you have available, I would

turn towards something like the Non Awareness Set, the dynamic mental

imagery induction or some Ericksonian style process. By the way, you can do

the same thing with finger signals also. Essentially I would establish some kind

of communication with the unconscious, explain what we want to achieve –

for example, the idea of increasing the metabolism – and describe situations

in which this happens automatically.

For example, when it gets cold and the person needs to heat up, they will

actually increase their metabolism. Heat is the primary output of an increased

metabolism. Energy is as well. In other words, people feel more physically

active and so on. Give the unconscious mind examples of a particular activity

in action.

In this case it’s the metabolism, but it could be the same thing for healing. If

you’re healing a cut and you want it to heal more quickly, you can remind

them of all the times that they’ve healed cuts in the past – in other words, it

knows how to do this stuff.

The next thing is that I would want some kind of verifiable test. You can do

something as simple as finger signals. You can say are you willing to do this,

and they say yes. However, if I can have something more tangible to prove it,

the more proof that you have the better.

For example with a metabolism specifically, I would look for a specific change.

The simplest change that tends to be correlated with metabolism is an

increase in body temperature. If the person starts feeling hot, their

metabolism will be increasing because they’ve got to generate that heat

somehow.

In terms of hypnotherapy, we have lots of tools. You can use a symbolic

induction where you use a symbol that symbolizes the switching on of the

metabolism. My preference is not to go for the classic hypnosis route, which is

here’s the control room of your mind, here’s the button that turns up your



metabolism, turn it all the way up and it’s nice and hot now, that’s great and

off you go.

That can work great for people whose unconscious mind buys into the

symbolism that you’ve created for them. Personally, I prefer for them to come

up with the symbolism that surprises them, one that they don’t know about

but actually fits the situation because then the unconscious mind is truly

responsible for it.

I’m talking about the classic dynamic mental imagery induction where they’ll

go to some other place and, in this case, find a symbol that will teach them

how to increase their metabolism. It might be something that they don’t

understand. They might see a rubber duck and have no clue what it’s about,

but over a period of time when you do the whole dynamic mental imagery

process, they might suddenly realize that it’s just like when they were a kid

having a bath and they suddenly heated up.

That’s what the feeling is like, so now that they’ve got the feeling, they can

turn it on and off whenever they feel like it. Now they’re burning hot. That’s

great and the metabolism is now running the way it should be. Then you can

finish up and they can have some control over it. That’s the way a symbolic

induction might work for that.

I might use a Non Awareness Set and use something that I call the dreaming

arm. The arm can lift up as the unconscious mind makes the adjustments to

increase the body temperature and the metabolism with it and then returns

when they actually put that into action in their daily life. All around, you’re

teaching them how to access natural times that they’ve done this – in this

case change their metabolism – and just do it on purpose in different ways.

How do you apply this to yourself? This gets trickier here. You can still have

the same interaction with your unconscious mind. You’re still having the same

dialog, but you have to do it in a way where your conscious doubts can be

eroded around it. One way might be through the classic self-hypnosis protocol

where you’re making your arm heavy and warm, so you’re know you’re doing

self-suggestion.

Then you do the same thing. You remind your unconscious mind that it has

the capacity to do it and you invite it to do so. The main thing is that you may

want to give yourself some time. Maybe start off by being a little bit warm



and then get a little bit warmer over time, and eventually you get hot enough

that you know your metabolism is really going at all levels. You’re giving

yourself time to adjust and make the learnings. Does that make sense to you?

Guest: Yes, it’s helped a lot. Thank you.

Igor: Excellent. Do you have any follow-up questions?

Guest: I don’t.

Igor: Thank you for that.

Glen: This is Glen from Tucson, Arizona.

Igor: How are you?

Glen: My question has to do with past life regression/metaphysical practices.

The first part is as far as going for a past life hypnotic regression, do you have

some recommendations as far as books or information that I could

investigate? I have some clients that are asking me to do these kinds of things,

and I just wanted to get some better information before I start going in that

direction.

Igor: There are many sources for this, but the classic in the field is called Many

Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss. I think he’s written a whole sequence

of books, like three or four of them. There’s one or two other authors that

escape my mind right now that have done similar things, but just by reading

him you’ll get a good starting point in the field. Do you have some follow-up

questions?

Glen: Since I started doing hypnosis, I realized that it’s also helped my metaphysical

practice and things of that nature, which was kind of surprising. I look at

hypnosis now as a gateway drug to metaphysical practices and that seems to

be a recurring theme for me.

I was wondering for yourself in your whole life, how do you incorporate that

or do you try to keep those two items separate when you’re dealing with a

client?



Igor: That’s a good question. The first thing I’ll say is that with a client my mindset

is not important. What matters is their mindset. If they have a spiritual

mindset or a metaphysical mindset or a purely magical mindset, I’ll accept

that because as long as it’s working for them, why not? Why impose my

standard of living on them?

There are plenty of people who have lived very successful, happy and

rewarding lives involved in metaphysics, spirituality, magic or whatever you

want to call it. They just have to find a way of being able to live within their

lives. Really what matters to me is what is their mindset and then treating it

either symbolically – or if I think it’s real it doesn’t really matter because to

some degree all mindsets are symbolic anyway – then you can work with that

and fix it on the level of their understanding of the problem.

I’ll give you an example of one of these. Many years ago, a lady came in who

was convinced that some guy she’d met at a party 10 years before had

hypnotized her. Even though they’d never met again afterwards, she was

convinced that for the next 10 years he was trying to control her with his

thoughts. Remember, she’s had no contact with him. She hadn’t talked to

him, and she hadn’t phoned him or met him again. This was all happening

inside of her mind.

Is there some hypnotist out there trying to control her thoughts? Maybe or

maybe not. Is she imagining it? Maybe or maybe not. Either way the fix was

the same, which was basically to block the face and the voice that she was

seeing inside her mind so that it was no longer troubling her.

The moment it was blocked, she was re-empowered and she could keep that

out. Whether that was part of her own psyche or part of someone else’s

psyche at this point becomes irrelevant for us for practical purposes because

the fact was that she left happy and she could get on with her life.

It’s not my job to educate my clients into what is “real” or not real because,

along with pretty much every other human being, I believe I’m eminently

unqualified to talk about what is actually real. We can only talk about what is

real enough to be useful to us. Do you get the idea?

Glen: Definitely.



Igor: I’d say the client’s mindset is the key. Follow their mindset. People have asked

me to do past life regressions, and I haven’t really done any just because most

people who have asked me are more casually interested in it, and I haven’t

had enough of an interest in it to take the time out to do it.

If I ever have a regression that turns spontaneously into a past life regression

in a session, I’ll happily take that past life regression as symbolic of the

problem at the very least, if not a natural metaphysical resolution. It doesn’t

matter at which level it works. The point is at the end of this whole process,

does the person get relief, does their problem go away and do they live a

happier life? Beyond that, it matters very little.

In terms of my personal practices, whether you want to call them spiritual or

not again it depends on your point of view, hypnosis is a platform that

amplifies things. All things that you can do that have some kind of mental

element to them – actually even physical elements – can be augmented with

hypnosis.

Whether its sports, metaphysics or self-knowledge, in the more classical

psychological sense or the philosophical sense, it doesn’t matter. All these

abilities will become enhanced with hypnosis, so I’m not surprised that you’re

finding it an interesting gateway to help your own practices. Do you have a

follow-up question or does that cover it?

Glen: That covers it. Thank you very much, Igor. I really appreciate your time.

Igor: You’re very welcome. Okay folks, thank you very much for your time. I think

these two hours have flown by rather quickly. Hopefully I’ve answered all

your questions. If not, I’m sure we’ll do another one of these again at some

point in the future, and I’ll happily take your questions then.

I’d like to leave you all with one little bit of advice, and particularly those of

you who are just getting into hypnosis rather than the old hands. This goes

back to the question that Joshua was asking earlier on, and this is a very

useful mindset to get into.

I wish the world had more hypnotists in it, and in particular more

hypnotherapists. I think we’d live in a much better community that way, or at

least a healthier community. In the hopes of doing that, I’d like a lot more



people to actually practice it. The problem with practicing it is that people get

shy and don’t do it.

Here’s the general rule of hypnosis. Do something no matter how minor it is

as often and as regularly as possible, ideally once a day. If you have a partner

or a spouse who’s willing to tolerate it, just do a little five-minute trance

induction just to make them feel good. Very quickly people will look forward

to these sessions just because they make them feel good.

The key is not to try to achieve too much with it. There’s no need to stick

someone’s hand to the floor or anything like that. Sure you can do that if it

interests you, but it’s more interesting just doing a regular practice to keep

your hand in the game so to speak because then you’ll naturally start evolving

over time.

Once you have a little bit of practice behind you, it suddenly opens up all the

doors for all these other styles of hypnosis that we’ve been talking about

today, but it all rests on the seeds of actually doing something. If you’re not

currently practicing hypnosis but are really interested in hypnosis, get online

and get in touch with a hypnosis community of some sort or friends or

partners that are willing to play with you.

Spend 5 or 10 minutes doing a quick little induction just for the fun of it and

start doing it now. The more you do it, the quicker this will make sense, the

more you’ll try to use it and the more you’ll make sense of different situations

in which you can use it.

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