When you flip a light switch you can go from darkness to light in an instant. Such an amazing change all brought about by an invisible force that most of us fail to understand.
Hypnosis can’t work as fast as electricity but it is still a very quick way to quit smoking, often in under 90 minutes. This is remarkable especially for those people who have smoked for decades and perhaps believed that they could never quit.
The force is again invisible and also very powerful and also hard to understand for most people. Some think it’s a kind of magic, some religious groups even claim it to be the work of the devil.
Given that therapeutic hypnosis always seeks to help people to improve their lives it would be a strange strategy on the part of the devil to help people out.
In my mind and in my experience and that of thousands of hypnotherapists over the past hundred years there is no spiritual or even evil component.
It is simply a normal function of the mind to have a completely conscious aspect of living and in the words of a famous hypnotherapist, an other than conscious aspect.
Most of our lives are run on near auto pilot in the unconscious mind, breathing heart etc, but also most of our actions on a day to day basis. Virtually any actions you do where you have a level of unconscious competence will be managed automatically by the unconscious mind.
If we only had conscious awareness we would burn out quickly trying to take in all the information in the world around us. We are protected so that we only need to see seven to nine pieces of information at any time, knowing that we naturally understand the rest of what is happening in our lives.
In hypnosis we use a safe gentle relaxation to access your unconscious mind and help you re-write your history from being a smoker to a non-smoker. This is done in hypnosis by making a series of subtle direct suggestions, plus by the use of stories and metaphors, and in addition use strategies to turn the person off smoking.
A part of the process is the pre-talk, even here certain phrases and words are used to begin the hypnotic process and to start the clients’ unconscious to make a shift in the right direction.
The end result is that you become a non-smoker, and just like the light switch it happens and you don’t really have to know how it works.