Hypnosis Practice Workshop
Facilitators: Brian Cullen & Brad Deacon
We’ve been thinking for a while of setting up a hypnosis workshop for people with a real interest in developing their hypnosis skills more fully.
What is hypnosis?
There are many different definitions for hypnosis. In our view, we see it as something that everyone does naturally all the time as we move from one state of mind to another. Richard Bandler talks about the trances that we live by: our morning trance, our work trance, our television-watching trance. Most of the time, we are entering these altered states without any awareness, and practicing hypnosis skills allows us to gain much more control over those states within ourselves and others.
Why practice hypnosis?
Hypnosis is a great tool for helping yourself and others to enter into more useful states in order to enjoy life and be more effective in many ways.
Professionally
If you are a teacher, for example, educational hypnosis will enable you to get your students into an appropriate state for learning – a state in which they are curious and motivated towards learning. In any other job, too, being able to use hypnosis more effectively will really help your communication and allow you to achieve your professional goals more effectively.
Personally
In your personal life, hypnosis can not just help your relationships, but also give you much more fun in every aspect of your life by allowing you to enter into the appropriate state for the activity that you are carrying out. How much more enjoyable does music become when you can completely immerse yourself in it, perhaps allowing the musical sounds to naturally bring up images and feelings in your body that enhance your enjoyment?
Helping Others
Practicing your hypnosis skills can help you to help the people around you that you care about. Many of the problems that people face in life can be solved when they realize their own resourcefulness, but these same problems prevent them from entering a resourceful state. Through hypnosis, you can help them to enter a more resourceful state when necessary and to access these resources.
What will we be doing in the hypnosis practice workshops?
The name says it all, really. We’ll be practicing hypnosis – and we’ll be doing it in a safe, confidential environment where you can develop your skills easily. The participants will act as practice subjects for each other. All people are different and pass between different states in different ways, so you will have the opportunity to practice different skills as you work with people in the workshop. Of course, we’ll also be having fun while we practice. If you’ve heard of Bandler and Grinder’s original workshops where they wanted to have fun learning about the possibilities of hypnosis, then you’ll know exactly the kind of spirit of fun experimentation that we want in the workshops.
How will we practice?
There are a large number of books/DVDs etc. available to learn hypnosis, and there are many different schools. One of the most straightforward and clearest books that we have found is Hypnosis for Beginners by Dylan Morgan. Apart from being very well written, it has the added bonus of being available as a free download from the author’s website:
http://www.hypno1.co.uk/BookHypnosisForBeginners.htm
We would suggest that all participants get a copy of this book and read at least the first few chapters before the workshops begin. It will give you a very clear idea of the simple exercises and exploratory approach that we want to promote in the workshops. Clearly, many of the participants are not beginners, but we have all come from different backgrounds and revisiting the basics in an open-minded and exploratory style will certainly be of benefit to all. It will help us all to practice tools of hypnosis that we may not even have been aware of yet.
We will prepare exercises based on this book. Initially, we’d like to work through those exercises and then later, we can open up the workshop to a wider range of ideas from participants and other sources.
Who will the participants be?
We envision a group of 6-10 people who have a serious interest in learning more about hypnosis and improving their skills through practice over an extended period of time. If you recognize yourself in this description, we would be very happy to have you join us. Also, if you know of like-minded people who are curious and willing to learn (even those who have no background in hypnosis), we welcome them as long as they respect the confidentiality and exploratory focus of the workshops.
When, where, how often?
Currently, we are thinking of holding the workshop once a month, probably on a Wednesday evening from 7-9pm. Weekends are busy for many people with family and other activities, so we have deliberately made it a weekday night. The location depends somewhat on the participants. We have several possible locations including Shinsakae (Brian’s house), Fukiage/Tsuruma (Nagoya Institute of Technology), and Yagoto (Nanzan University). Once we have a good idea of the participants, we will choose the most convenient location.