Exercise I

I'm going to ask you to get into groups of three people. I want one of you, person A, to think of something that fits the following description; a situation in which you become deeply involved, with a limited focus of attention. For some people that's jogging; for others it's reading a book. It might be writing, watching television, going to the movies, driving your car on a long trip—anything which fits that description.

If you're A, I want you to tell the other two in your group, B and C, what the experience is. Give them only the name of the experience: jogging, sailing—just a word. If you give them too much detail, it makes it too easy for them. Just give them a word, sit back and close your eyes, and pretend that you're in hypnosis—it's all pretend anyway. I want the other two people to describe what they believe would have to be there in sensory terms if you were having that experience. The magic words are "have to" because if someone is jogging and you say the bright sun is shining down on your body, that doesn't have to be there. People can jog at night, or on a cloudy day. However, they do have to have some skin temperature. So you're going to have to be artfully vague. I want B and C to take turns saying two sentences or phrases each. One will say "You can feel the temperature of the air on your body, and the place where your foot touches the ground." The other one might say "You notice the beating of your heart. You can feel the temperature of your skin." Those are experiences that have to be there.

I'm not going to give you any more description than that to begin with. I want you each to take a turn, and I want you to observe the person who has his eyes closed, and notice how he responds to what you say. When you are the person sitting there with your eyes closed, I want you to notice which things allow you to get into the experience more, and which things make it more difficult. I'm going to leave it at that and have you use your own experience as a teacher. Let's start. Take about five minutes each.

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I didn't want to talk to you too much in the beginning because whenever I begin to teach a hypnosis course it's a little bit difficult for me to keep from demonstrating at large. I asked you to notice what kinds of things seemed to allow you to go back to the state of consciousness that you were in when you actually had the experience you mentioned, and which things seemed to make it harder for you. Which things seemed to jar you, and which seemed to lead you more into being relaxed? Which things seemed to be disjointed, and which allowed you to forget where you were a little bit?

Woman: Anything that had to with my body put me in deeper, and anything that had to do with my mind, like what I thought about it or my reactions to it, took me out a little.

I want to know exactly what the other person actually did. Give me some examples.

Woman: OK. I was playing the piano. When the person said "You can feel the contact of your fingers on the keys," it made me go deeper. If he said something like "You think the music is you," then I came out.

Man: It was easier for me when the tempo of his voice was the same rate as my breathing.

What kinds of things made it harder?

Man: Urn, when something he said was incongruous with what I had been thinking. I saw myself in an indoor skating rink, and it threw me when somebody suggested something outdoors.

Yeah, you're in an indoor skating rink and somebody says "You look up and notice how beautiful the sky is."

Woman: My partner said to me "You can hear and feel your breathing." That really jarred me, because I couldn't do them both at the same time. I thought "No, just a minute. I can't do that."

OK, what kind of things made it easier?

Woman: When she just said one thing to do at a time, like "You can hear your breathing."

Man: I was swimming underwater when someone said "You can feel the splash of your hand hitting the water." I thought "No, I'm underwater. I can't."

Woman: We were talking about music, and at some point he said something about being in tune with the world, and it just really took me in deeper.

What made it harder?

Woman: He didn't do anything that made it harder. OK, he can go home now.

Woman: there was one thing. If one person had slowed down the speed of his voice, and then the other one speeded up, that brought me back up.

So one of the people would go (slowly) "and you'll feel … very … relaxed" and the other one would say (quickly) "and more and more and more relaxed."

Man: I noticed that my partners used nothing but feeling terms. At first that made it very easy, because I was just using one sensory system, but after a while I heard myself saying "I want to see something." I wasn't seeing anything.

So it was really the absence of something. After a while the instructions became what is known as redundant.

Man: One thing really distracted me and pulled me out after I was in the experience: the phrase "as all other experiences fade." When he said that, suddenly—bang! — I was back.

You had to find out what the other experiences were so they could fade. What made it easier?

Man: Sensory things: feeling the guitar, feeling my fingers moving, looking at the music.

Woman: The omission of something very obvious made it more difficult for me. I was painting a picture and my partners never talked about the feel of the brush in my hand,

How did that make it more difficult for you? How did it cross your mind that they weren't talking about it?

Woman: I kept feeling that there's an incompleteness here; I've got to fill it in. They were talking about mixing paint and looking at the view and how beautifully the picture was progressing.

And that's not what you were doing?

Well, I had to get from mixing the paint to having a brush in my hand and painting before I could stand back and look at the picture. OK. So it wasn't a natural transition for you. It was kind of like "You're standing on the beach, and you feel the warmth of the sun on your body, and you look back at the beach and notice how far you've swum."

'Now what I hope you come to understand in the next three days is that many of the answers to questions about what leads somebody into an altered state have just been described. The difficulty that people have going into hypnosis is not a genetic one. It's not that some people just can't. In fact, everyone does it all the time. The difficulty is that no one really notices. Hypnosis is a very natural process, and hypnosis is only a word that describes the tools that you use to systematically take someone into an altered state of consciousness. People go into altered states all the time. Perhaps at lunch you can get in an elevator and ride up to the top of this hotel with some people whom you don't know, and watch what happens to them. People don't get into an elevator and act the way they do normally. They kind of go "on hold" and watch the floors go by. In fact, if the door opens before they're ready to get out, very often they'll wake up and start out. How many of you have walked out of an elevator on the wrong floor? There's a universality to that experience. Finding things that are universal in people's experience is the key to both inducing hypnosis and using it for whatever you want to accomplish.

Another important thing is making a natural sequence. If somebody says to you "Well, 1 was driving down the road, and I was on my way to Texas, and I was looking out the window and seeing the other cars go by, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and I said to myself 'It's raining so hard!'" that last phrase will jar you out of listening. Usually that's the point at which somebody will ask a question or begin to argue or disagree. Natural transitions lead people into an altered state without jarring them.