The Exclusive Night Club That Is Your Mind

One of the reasons I became fascinated with hypnosis is due, in no small part, to my fascination with how the human brain and mind functions. The hypnotic effect is an intimate bedfellow with many of our core mental faculties. It can tell sordid tales of how you really think and process information.

Let’s say your unconscious mind is an exclusive night club. All of your knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and skills hang out there. Not just anyone can get into this club. There is a formidable bouncer, a mental filter called your critical faculty, who screens new ideas and decides whether or not they are worthy of admittance. He flexes and intimidates and gives any undeserving idea the boot. Who he considers deserving is heavily influenced by who is already in the club. A new idea that doesn’t play well with the VIP guests won’t likely be seeing that dance floor anytime soon. For example, a health nut is likely to reject any advertisements by McDonalds.

If I wanted to die slowly from the inside-out, I’d listen to Nickleback

There are a few ways past your mind’s hired muscle. The most common way of getting past your critical faculty is repetition. If an idea shows up enough nights in a row, without pissing off the bouncer, that idea might be allowed in, after many attempts. So, if you go to the gym every morning, even if you hate getting out of bed, after a while it will become second nature to always go at that time. You’ve built it into your lifestyle and it’s now become a habit that your mind and body both expect and enjoy.

Hypnosis is a clever shortcut to accessing your unconscious. It’s like showing up to the club with Scarlet Johannson on your arm. The Bouncer is practically obligated to let you in for at least a night, and give you particularly great service. You are ushered ahead of the line, just as an idea can be hypnotically given more importance than any other ideas and programs in your mind.

In the case of the participants that come up on stage during my shows, this is how I am able to slip absurd ideas into their heads, such as the belief that they can only speak Martian. These ideas, however, don’t last very long — they are eventually dragged out of the mind and rejected. However, in the context of hypnotherapy, wherein a patient is actively trying to make a permanent change, such as quitting smoking, hypnosis can be an invaluable tool that allows someone to sneak past that bouncer and reorganize established behaviors for the long haul.

Ideas, behaviors, and associations become real in the unconscious. One way or another, if you want to learn or adopt new behaviors or ideas, they have to be accepted by the unconscious mind. Hypnosis is one of the fastest ways of doing this, whether it be for real world life change, or exploring hilarious hallucinations fueled by your imagination during one of my shows. It’s all about getting access to that exclusive night club that is your unconscious mind.