Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I enjoyed Paul McKenna’s TV show “I Can Change Your Life” when it aired here about a year ago. I did find him a bit stagey, but that’s his background; the work he was doing was very impressive. His approach is to work intensively with someone in a long session rather than take several shorter sessions.

I’ve just finished reading his book from about 15 years ago, The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna (224 pages, Faber and Faber, 1993). It’s a good little book in McKenna’s trademark upbeat style. It certainly doesn’t give you comprehensive training in stage hypnosis, which is what several Amazon reviewers seem to think it should have done, but it’s a good introduction for someone who’s reading about hypnosis for the first time, as well as having some tips and techniques that a more experienced hypnotist can learn from. He gives you enough information that you could certainly hypnotize yourself, and probably someone else, and do some basic therapy of simple issues.

One technique he mentions that I’m planning to try is “nested images” (p. 126), which he credits to his colleague Michael Breen. It’s an induction (a way of creating a hypnotic state), but as he says, it could easily be used to get you into any state, step by step. You start out in a comfortable position, eyes closed, and create a mental image of yourself as you would look if you were really relaxed (or whatever state you are going for). Then you step into that image, taking it from third-person to first-person – look out of those eyes, hear with those ears, feel that body. Once you are there, create an image of yourself as you would be if you were twice as relaxed, and repeat the process until you have reached the state and the level of the state that you want.

There’s also a good stress-control technique. We naturally find ourselves drifting a little about every hour and a half; it’s called the “ultradian rhythm”. His advice is, when you find yourself getting a bit daydreamy and zoned out, go with it and relax for a few minutes. You’ll feel a lot better and be able to concentrate better as a result. I already do something like this; I use a little program called Workrave on my computer to remind me to take a break every hour and relax for 30 seconds, and it does seem to help reduce my daily stress and free up more energy for productive work.

Another good technique for making you aware of your own states is to spend some time watching your thoughts, and labeling each one with the name of a trance phenomenon: “regression” if it’s a memory, “positive hallucination” if you’re creating an image, “post-hypnotic suggestion” if you feel compelled to do something, “negative hallucination” if you don’t notice something that’s going on, “amnesia” if you can’t remember something, and so forth. The next step, once you are noticing these things, is to assert your control over them. If an image comes up, label it “positive hallucination”, mentally create several copies of the image, look at them and release them. You will learn that you are the one creating your states and you are the one in control of them.

Next week: some quotations from the book, with my commentary.

Have you tried any of these techniques? What were the results?

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