How it works Overview

How it works

Our mind is what our brain does.

Conscious mind

The conscious mind is anything that you are consciously aware of and paying attention to. The conscious mind is limited in that you can only pay attention to a limited number of things at one time (7 plus or minus two depending on the person). In hypnosis we overload the conscious mind encouraging it to pay attention to more than 7 things plus or minus two. This tires the conscious mind until it hands over the control momentarily to the uncounscious mind.

Unconscious mind

The unconscious mind works like a giant tape recorder. Every experience we have recorded in our lives is stored there. The unconscious mind controls those bodily functions over which we do not need to exercise conscious control like heart beat, breathing, digestion, and so forth. Habits, too, are controlled by the unconscious mind and this is of major importance to us. The unconscious mind is also the seat of we need to be abale to gain access to the unconscious mind in order to effectively change those responses.

Critical mind

The critical mind is a sort of bridge between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and acts as a sorting station of all types of information we receive. It prevents unacceptable information from entering the unconscious mind.

Beliefs control who we are now and who we will be. We create them and enable them to empower us or to limit us and imprison us.

When we were born we did not have any beliefs. Everything that we saw and felt was stored as true. After a while we started to compare and associate events to past experiences and began to label them. Beliefs are, simply, clusters of associated experiences or labels.

Once a belief is installed the unconscious mind uses it to filter off other ideas, to form a pattern of behavior and response (habit), to form a reference base for our judgments and decision making. Hence the unconscious mind will fight to keep it there forever because change of beliefs could mean a drastic revision of these patterns.

Hypnosis allows us to bypass the critical mind so that we can work with the negative beliefs and decisions that our unconscious mind has stored. Effective hypnotists understand that we need to do this in a way that is still logical and makes sense to the unconscious mind in order for the programming to work.