our conscious awareness or agreement.
How does Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy interface with and enhance these Jungian concepts to make them more therapeutically available to our clients? First, with hypnotherapy we can actually slow down long enough to drop into the unconscious mind, to be able to hear the unconscious dialogues that play in our heads like a radio left on. These internal dramas, akin to soap operas, take on a life of their own, uncensored and uninterrupted. When we, the client and the therapist, enter into the dialogue through hypnotherapy, we become aware that this radio program has been playing for a long time. Through the wisdom of the unconscious mind, we can regress to the origin of this dialogue and discover the age of the child part that is hiding in the shadows, i.e., the blind spot of our rear view mirror.
Second, with hypnotherapy we can resolve the infantile, unresolved conflicts that gave birth to the immature parts of us that felt unsafe and had to hide in the shadows and recesses of our consciousness. As children, if we grew up in families where we were criticized instead of encouraged and loved only if we performed to an impossible standard, we had to develop some defenses in order to survive and not become completely hopeless.
It was a strong survival instinct that created our internal shadow parts that knew they could not be seen or we could have been punished to the point, in some families, where the abuse would have been even more devastating.
Without the tools of hypnotherapy, we are limited to using only 10 percent of our minds, which is the conscious mind. Like the blind spot in our rear view mirror, the limited, conscious mind can think, analyze and talk about the concepts of our deeply hidden shadow parts.
With Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy, we have complete access to use the full 100 percent of the mind. Having increased access to the unconscious mind allows us to drop down into our memory banks in order to expand our full awareness of when and how these young shadow parts and complexes were created. These complexes can be untangled so that the intertwining issues that were suffocating our human development can be resolved.
Through hypnotherapy, the client as well as the therapist is gifted with the ability to hear these shadows, determine what they truly need for safety and encourage them to emerge from their hiding places to be seen, loved and transformed!
THE BODY IN BODY-MIND-SPIRIT HEALING
The body is an integral aspect of our work with clients. The body, through symptoms and specific sensations, provides valuable diagnostic information about what needs to be resolved and healed in psychotherapy. By tracking changes in these somatic experiences through the course of therapeutic intervention, we can assess our effectiveness.
In a Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy model, people often discover emotions that they never knew they had or that they did not have language to express. With hypnotherapy, we can teach clients to identify their emotions and then to put an appropriate label on these feelings. It is surprising how many adults have no language to describe or express their emotions. The most effective way for them to have a surefire way of knowing that an emotion is, in fact, present is to bring their awareness down into their body and notice what is happening. Many people try to “think about” what they are feeling, which brings them into their heads and their conscious minds. The problem with this is that the feelings are not located in the head, nor are they located in the conscious mind. Emotions are rooted in the unconscious part of the mind and physically in the body. This is why hypnotherapy is so effective for mind-body work. Every emotion that we experience has a corresponding reaction in the body.
So, for example, when you begin to feel sadness, your eyes may begin to tear up and you may have a slight pressure in the center of your chest which is called the heart center. The heart center is not your physical heart, it is your emotional heart. When you experience joy, you may feel like laughing or smiling (a physical reaction) and you may feel a warm feeling in your chest, your heart center. Some people experience anger in their chests with a pounding sensation, rapid breathing and tightness, perhaps in the stomach. Fear often expresses as tightness or burning in the stomach or chest. Shame or embarrassment usually causes the person to put a hand over his or her eyes or cover his or her face.
The body never lies and is the most consistent reporter of our current emotional status at any given time. In Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy, we always ask clients to bring their awareness into their bodies to find the place where the feeling or emotion is located. Then we use the Gestalt Therapy approach taught by Dr. Fritz Perls of “giving that part of the body a voice” and letting it express to us our deeper emotions of which we are usually consciously unaware. What are your clenched fists saying? What is the pain in your neck telling you? What is the message of your indigestion? Give it a voice and let it speak.
Many people hold their emotions inside their bodies, which is what many of us were taught to do as children. When this holding in of powerful emotions has become a lifelong pattern, it can certainly lead to disease and chronic pain or illness. With the Heart-Centered type of therapy, the stressed person can learn to identify and release these powerful emotions in a healthy way so that the internalized stress does not lead to a fatal illness such as cancer or a heart attack.
Other people have not learned how to express feelings in a constructive manner and may hold them in until they explode and become abusive to those they love. Some folks express feelings in another unhealthy manner, with snide remarks, sarcastic allegations and rude behavior. They frequently use the statement, “I don’t get mad, I just get even.” This is an example of expressing emotions in a non-direct, abusive manner, and is what psychologists call passive-aggressive.
When clients are in a hypnotherapy session, they have much more direct access to their emotions located in the unconscious mind. Clients in the trance state are much more aware of their bodies and can be easily directed to notice and express in a healthy way the feelings that have been stored within the body. This release of emotions is like opening or loosening the valve of a pressure cooker. The steam can then be released slowly without exploding. This, then, is how hypnotherapy heals the mind and the body through the information revealed, expressed and released from the client’s energy field. This is also the reason why hypnotherapy can be so successfully used by psychologists, clinical social workers, licensed professional counselors and school counselors, as well as by doctors in the field of integrative medicine.
THE SPIRIT IN BODY-MIND-SPIRIT HEALING
How does spirit fit into mind-body-spirit healing? While the person is in the hypnotherapeutic trance state, perhaps toward the end of the session, he or she often experiences a warmth, a sense of forgiveness, of compassion, of a love that extends out to humanity itself. This phenomenon occurs with such frequency during the hypnotherapy experience that we have not been able to ignore it. It seems to be a natural result of someone making intimate contact with his or her heart center.
We have learned after more than forty years of experience that many people are longing for some type of spiritual connection—a real, felt, deeply personal experience of spirit. Many times we have heard ministers, rabbis and other actively religious people say, “Right now I feel closer to God than I have for many, many years.” This connection allows clients to reclaim what may have been missing in their lives since they were children: the deepest and highest parts of themselves. We use the term “soul retrieval” for this miraculous spiritual healing.
Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy is a particular approach to the use of hypnosis in psychotherapy for mind-body-spirit healing which, taken together, we call personal transformation.
We transform first physically, changing the structure and functioning of our bodies. We begin to understand the subtle energy of which we are composed, and learn to manage it for optimal health and growth. We gain conscious influence over many of the processes once believed to be autonomic, such as our sleep cycles, recovery
