Does anyone recognize this – seven plus or minus two?
Put your hands up if you do not.
This is a little bit of research from the 1990’s or earlier.
It talks about what we in hypnosis can think of as your conscious attention, but in traditional
psychology it’s called your short-term memory.
That is how many items of information your mind can hold at a time.
If I asked you to remember five items, you could do a pretty easy job of it.
If I asked you to remember seven or eight items, most of you wouldn’t be too taxed.
At nine items, some of you will start sweating a little bit.
With every item that gets added to the list, there will a significant increase in the level
of attention that I would be evoking.
We’re not going to go past the magic number seven, but I do want to play with the number
seven for a little bit.
In a moment we’re going to do an exercise, which I think you’ll have a lot of fun with.
To do that, we want to talk a little bit about hypnotic language.
I want you to do something very simple.
It’s a concept called Linguistic Bridges.
It’s a very simple way of creating very smooth hypnotic language.
We want our language to be smooth because every time we create a disturbance in the
ideas that are presented or the chain of ideas that are presented, that disturbance alerts
the conscious mind or a part of the conscious mind, which we will now call the Critical
Factor for a while, to pay attention and analyze again.
That analysis, that judgment-making mechanism can arrest the development of hypnosis or
can inhibit the unconscious responses that you want to bring out if it’s done in an
inappropriate way.
We want to be able to talk very smoothly, purely so that we have the option of not alerting
them that we’re doing something when we are, so that they think they’re not doing
something long enough to actually get some work done.
The language for that is very simple.
What we’re looking for are Linguistic Bridges.
As most of you already know, these Linguistic Bridges we tend to call Power Words because
they’re just simple words that we can use to make our hypnosis more powerful and smooth.
Each one in itself has a specific psychological reason for being there.
We’re not really worrying about that right now because we’re more interested in creating
that flow.
In time we can start stretching some of the nuances out as to what kind of language you
use when and where.
You have good enough instincts to allow those to arise to begin with.
Right now we just want to have that general flow and then we can shape it as we go along.
The next thing we’re going to talk about is something we call Hypnotic Themes.
There are certain experiences that tend to correlate with something more hypnotic.
Again, whether or not it’s trance, we don’t need to make a judgment at this point but
there are definitely certain experiences that will augment whatever that is.
I’d like a volunteer please, someone who would enjoy going into a pleasant trance.
Give them a round of applause.
You may as well just close your eyes and focus inside.
That’s good.
It’s even better now.
That’s it.
Really enjoy the experience because you have the capacity to enjoy many things, which means
that you can enjoy comfort as much as relaxation.
That’s it.
You can breathe and know you’re breathing.
Every time you breathe, isn’t there more comfort there and more relaxation?
Because you’ve come all the way up to this stage to volunteer for something, I’d like
your unconscious mind to memorize this experience of comfort thoroughly.
Memorize it thoroughly so that you can use it to learn comfortably all aspects of hypnosis
and learn anything of importance to you.
That’s right.
There are changes that occur and you can enjoy those changes as much as you enjoy learning
when you trust your unconscious.
I don’t know if you realized yet that all the time I’ve been talking to you, you have
been learning something about who you are and how you function in an altered state,
in a hypnotic state.
You’re learning it without really knowing how, although you do know that it’s getting
deeper and stronger, is it not?
That’s it.
There you go.
This means that your capacity to learn comfortably must be increasing too and you know this.
There’s an experience you’ll have that will convince you of this thoroughly.
Maybe it will be a strong emotion, a pleasant one.
Maybe it will be a memory to remind you that you’ve mastered something previously.
Maybe it’s some other signal that lets you know that it’s time for you to open your
eyes and come back outside, but only with all those capacities to learn comfortably
and quickly that you’ve started to develop now.
Let those eyes only open when you just know that something’s happened, and whatever
that is it’s got to be good.
How are you doing?
Good.
Give him a round of applause.