Learn Hypnosis In Under An Hour With Dan Jones 

How about hypnotising other people? Did you have a go at kit?

@@claudrebille178 I've never tried to hypnotize someone else. :)

That is because he is British and speaks properly.

Thank you! I always got straight to the comments, on a new subject or channel❤❤

His explanations are beyond top notch. Very good stuff for sure.

Got here from another one, I'm glad as it is pretty complimentary. Now I feel that what I taught myself and which already worked will be much more powerful with this bit of expert knowledge.

your confusing...3 states; physical, mental, spiritual...you may improve all 3, but dont confuse them....hypnosis is a physical process of control

That is one of the approaches taught here and is exactly what I teach in the first five minutes of my courses so that within five minutes all students have experience of doing hypnosis without scripts etc. It is also how I work and what I teach in my Hypnotherapy Revealed: The Ericksonian Approach book, which I also cover in my The Ericksonian Approach: It Isn't Hypnosis Or Therapy, So What Is It? Lecture that I made for the UK Hypnosis Convention, but when that didn't happen I shared it here. Where I feel people over complicate the Ericksonian approach, it is fundamentally about observation, utilisation and having a goal. The important thing is to be observing nonconscious responses and engaging with these with the goal of focusing attention and increasing responsiveness in the direction of the goal - usually some form of therapeutic outcome if you are doing therapy.

That sound more like coaching

so you can hypnotize ? or helped you to get hypnotized ?

Practice is very important. When I started out I had one friend and we would practice on each other, taking it in turns to do the hypnosis, having the person who was hypnotised feedback their experience, what they found helpful, what didn't work for them and what they would have liked from the hypnotist. This would be things like perhaps the hypnotist wasn't matching the ongoing experience of the subject and so the subject felt this disconnect, or they were going too fast or slow and again not matching the subjects experience. There would obviously be things the person just can't do very well, so maybe they were asked to do something but weren't able to and so that didn't work for them, for example, maybe they were asked to visualise something, but they can't visualise, it they were asked to forget their name, but they struggle with engaging with this kind of idea, or they were asked to levitate a hand but the hand was very heavy and relaxed and it would take too much effort for them to do this, or the hypnotist hadn't been engaging in conversation with them and then suddenly asked them to talk and managing to do this pulled them out of the experience etc. All of this is learning and none of this would be a sign the person wasn't engaging in the hypnosis. Hypnosis is focusing and guiding attention, so if you are talking with someone and they are paying attention to what you are saying and perhaps having a response to what you are saying, then you are hypnotising the person. So doing the hypnosis is easy, the challenge is keeping the engagement and focus and finding ways to encourage and evoke things. For example, say you want to encourage an arm levitation, you can just ask for it and they may lift their arm, but others may not do this, so you may talk about things related to lifting the arm before you ask them to lift the arm, like talking about children reaching up to cupboards or a biscuit tin on a shelf, answering questions in class, swatting a fly away in front of your face, scratching your head or nose etc. Doing this will have encouraged the idea of lifting the arm and evoked the potential for the arm to lift so that it is then more likely to happen. Someone may expect things to feel more automatic, so rather than asking them to lift their arm, you talk as if they are an observer and talk about them observing the arm lifting and being curious how it will happen. You learn to notice and use your observations, so if you see a twitch in the back of the hand you mention this and it's this, perhaps asking if the hand will lift with a slight twitch at first, maybe the lifting starts in the back of the hand etc. You are focusing and guiding the person's attention to their experience of the arm lifting. So doing the hypnosis is the easy part, but it takes practice to learn to respond to the way different people respond and to know what might resonate best with different people. For example, one person may resonate with and respond well to a shock induction, someone else may feel really uncomfortable with this and may prefer a long and relaxing induction, and someone else may struggle to hold their attention, may get restless etc and so prefer an induction which moves around a lot of feels more active. And then on top of this, if you end up using hypnosis within therapy you obviously need to have significant training in a form of therapy that you will use the hypnosis with so that you know what you will therapeutically be doing with the person and how you will be integrating hypnosis into the therapy, for example knowing what the person will mentally rehearse when hypnotised, etc... I have a lot of people not take my therapy courses because they aren't interested, saying they just want to learn hypnosis. Then they learn hypnosis and say what do I say once I've hypnotised the person? Because they didn't learn any therapy and so don't know what to do next or before the hypnosis...

Thank you, I'm glad you found it interesting. Over on my @DanJonesHypnosis RU-vid channel I have a video fairly recently posted of me reading the first of my Hypnotherapy Revealed books - Hypnotherapy Revealed: Introduction to Hypnotherapy, which goes into a lot more detail than this here about what hypnosis is and how to do it and helpful ways to think about hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Other books in my Hypnotherapy Revealed series (available for Kindle and Paperback and copies will be available at this years UK Hypnosis Convention in November where I'll be teaching) are The Ericksonian Approach (I have a lecture on this channel based on some of the content from that book, about how the Ericksonian approach isn't hypnosis or therapy) and Hypnotherapy Trance Scripts, which is a comprehensive book of hypnotherapy scripts. On this channel is also a series of videos on the history of hypnosis, from the pre-history, to mesmerism, then hypnotism and then the dark side of hypnosis. There are also other videos teaching and demonstrating hypnotherapy...

Check into Jason Linnett, Freddy Jacquin, Mike Mandel, Scott Sandland, and Jerry Kein online courses if you really want to level up

@@DanTheTortoise anytime 😊🙏 Thanks man, I've definitely been going through alot of your hypnosis content. Very enjoyable and wasy to absorb.

I need healing . It would be amazing if you can help me please

Yes, I've had people drooling and snoring etc, but this is usually more to do with them being relaxed rather than to do with them being hypnotised. While they were hypnotised and not relaxed or when I've hypnotised people without encouraging relaxation this doesn't happen so often.

I have many eCourses teaching therapy which include demonstrations etc...

@@DanTheTortoise links?

As mentioned before, you're not putting someone under something, you are focusing someone's attention, so to encourage name amnesia you would be encourage a state of being where the person doesn't necessarily have immediate access to that information. For some people this may be just presenting the idea and they are happy to engage with that idea, for most you would package the idea, for example you may get a number of successes so that they perceive that they are following your lead. This is the common way it is done, for example, you may get repeated positive responses, including perhaps the hands stuck together, one hand light, one heavy, hands moving together or apart, and other responses that set up an expectation that they will continue to respond, then you suggest name amnesia and they may follow this as well You can just be evoking the relevant state of mind. This is more like the approach I use when eliciting things. So you would encourage a mindset of forgetting or amnesia by perhaps talking about the way the mind works, how we forget so much, truisms about things forgotten, perhaps talking about how easy it is to meet people and despite them telling you their name, within seconds you have already forgotten who they said they were etc, and then once you have encouraged the relevant state and pattern of thinking etc, then you can present the idea of the person not knowing their own name, and they may engage with this. This is largely what you do with therapy, where you evoke a specific mindset to use. So if motivation is needed then you would evoke motivation by talking about motivation and times the person was motivated in the past before then talking about what they need to be motivated about so that they link the motivation with where they need it. If they need to feel confident you evoke the state of confidence and related neurological patterns and then talk about that thing they need to be confident about. So you evoke what you need before using what you have evoked.

Generally hypnotising people without a script is more effective because you are responding to the person, to how they are responding, from moment to moment rather than doing something to a person and not varying this even when the person for one reason or another isn't engaging and following what you are doing. For example, if you are doing the push down on my hand induction and the person is self conscious and is, maybe, laughing, or due to being self conscious or uncomfortable that this induction can feel like you are trying to control them, or seeming to give you a one-up position in relation to them (this just means putting you in a position like a manager or teacher etc, rather than someone on the same level like a brother or friend), then a structured induction done without going off script may fail because the person responds by actively not responding, or perhaps they initially respond but quickly stop responding (like 'taking back control'). So someone may push down on your hand, then you pull your hand away, tell them to close their eyes and sleep, they initially follow this, close their eyes, their head drops, etc, but then almost straightaway they open their eyes again or do something which shows they aren't following what you are saying. Or if they are self conscious, maybe they start laughing when they start responding, etc. Whereas if you are hypnotising the person without a script then these responses from the person are fine, you just accept them as being right for this person in this moment on their journey to being hypnotised and you incorporate it into what you are doing. So if they laugh, you accept this, you give them permission to laugh, but you add on the idea that the laughing is linked to their experience of being hypnotised. So you might say something like "that's it, and you can laugh and enjoy the experience of entering hypnosis in your own way" You may even pose curious questions about the laughing, like "and I don't know whether you will continue laughing yourself all the way into hypnosis, or whether you will relax and find that laughing passes as you drift comfortably into hypnosis, or drift into hypnosis in some other way" so you are giving multiple suggestions for how they can be hypnotised from where they are at in this moment, you are saying they can laugh and be hypnotised, stop laughing and be hypnotised or respond in another way and be hypnotised. Essentially covering most options of behaviour they are likely to do and linking any of these behaviours with being the correct thing to do to be hypnotised. To learn enough to be able to hypnotise people in a very basic way takes minutes. When I was a teenager learning about hypnosis I literally just purchased a self hypnosis book, picked one of the induction scripts and read it to my brother. He used to wet the bed so I also picked the short stop bed wetting script and then read an exit hypnosis script. So with no experience or knowledge of hypnosis other than what I had seen of stage hypnosis on TV (and on UK TV they aren't allowed to show hypnotic inductions being performed, so I had never seen this and had no idea how the hypnosis itself was done), as a 14 year old, I hypnotised my brother within minutes of starting to read the book. On my life training courses I often have all students hypnotising each other within 30 minutes of attending the course, so that it gives them the confidence and realisation that they can do it just fine. And in the 30 minutes, about 15 minutes of this is me introducing who I am, introducing the course, telling people safety information etc, then I say they will be hypnotising each other and spend about 5 minutes explaining this, I get a volunteer, I demonstrate what they will be doing for perhaps 5 minutes, then take any questions before the students will be paired up hypnotising each other. So in a matter of minutes everyone in the room has hypnotised someone and been a hypnotic subject. Obviously this is very basic at this point. They haven't been taught about more complex techniques, or about doing therapy, or about how you can fit hypnosis into therapy or coaching, or how you can work with people who perhaps aren't so compliant and willing to engage with what you are doing, or how to talk about hypnosis with clients etc... But, in very little time everyone in the room has done hypnosis without any script and so they know they don't need one. There are many courses which teach scripted hypnosis, but then when the newly trained hypnotised needs to go off script or they don't have a script for a situation, they can get anxious and not have the confidence to just work without a script What I teach as the first induction of my training courses is for the students to say what they see and have a goal. I tell them to have the goal of the person being hypnotised. I explain they will be observing for signs that the person is being responsive and following along to what they say and that whatever the person does is right for them in their journey into hypnosis, so whatever responses you see, just acknowledge these and suggest what you see when you see nonconscious behaviours, like blinking and breathing and muscles relaxing etc, responses which are associated with the person relaxing and focusing inwardly, and when you see these things, encourage more of them and connect them with the idea of being hypnotised. I find this approach is the quickest way to help someone be confident with hypnosis, because they can have a successful experience of doing hypnosis in minutes of attending training...

Unfortunately a few years back when I was in hospital visiting someone, a member of staff got all nervous and at around me because they thought I was Jamie Oliver. Over my life I've had people mistake me for different celebrities. I think my favourite was about ten years ago when I was on a train back from a Christening where I had dressed smart and was, just by chance, dressed like Simon Baker from The Mentalist and a group of women on the train thought that is who I was and spent the journey talking among themselves about who was going to be brave enough to come over and get a photo with me etc and Street joking about what if I hypnotise them, etc. At the time, I thought it would be fun, if they did come over, to hypnotise them, because unlike the real Simon Baker, I can do what The Mentalist does for real. I got off at a so before they had got the courage to talk to me. I've been revised for being me too. I went somewhere and someone nearly had a panic attacks when they realised I was the actual Dan Jones, author and RU-vidr.

@@DanTheTortoise you are a chameleon! :) I googled Simon Baker, and I see a resemblance too ) btw, I saw a random video on RU-vid of a young boy going round on a beach hypnotizing people. He gave a suggestion to a girl that when she opens her eyes he will look and sound like her favorite celebrity. And she reacted in a way as if he was that celebrity (Beyonce). Hm... do you think it's true? Might be all staged.

It is totally possible that if the person is engaging with the hypnotist and is responsive to the presented idea and comfortable going along with it, that the person could see the hypnotist as being someone else.

You remind me of George Clarke as well ..

It is uncommon due to the nature of catalepsy, which isn't about being tense, however, if someone had a prior injury or did feel discomfort then I wouldn't do that approach and if it became uncomfortable then i would suggest they drift deeper into hypnosis as they lower their arm. The important thing is that although techniques are taught generally as structured processes for learning purposes, in real situations the important person is the subject and the important thing is to be fitting and adapting what you do to them and their responses and what fits them best. It is important to be flexible and hypnotise people in the way that works best for the person rather than trying to impose an induction upon them...

Hypnosis itself isn't therapy, but is the process of focusing attention and increasing responsiveness which then makes psychotherapy using hypnosis more effective than psychotherapy done on its own. Hypnosis is frequently used to help to make OCD treatment more effective and is often used when helping to treat anxiety. My main therapeutic focus over the 20+ years I've been working in therapy is supporting people with depression and anxiety disorders and family therapy and hypnosis has been a large part of the support I've offered. Hypnosis is like removing distractions when parking a car and focusing all of your attention on the parking so that it is easier to park. With hypnosis you are focusing attention on the therapy, reducing focus on dissertations, worries etc, so that the client can do the therapy better.

Hypnosis can help with treating social anxiety. Hypnosis itself isn't therapy and is only the process of focusing attention. So how hypnosis helps is by helping to focus the person's attention more on the therapy they are doing. For social anxiety, you would usually use hypnosis to help the person perhaps focus more on being absorbed in mental rehearsal of socialising while feeling comfortable or whatever the positive experience is the person is wanting to develop, and the person would be absorbed in repeatedly mentally rehearsing situations which helps to make this way of responding more instinctive. The therapist would likely help someone with social anxiety to develop strategies relevant to them specifically, so if they feel anxious they have repeatedly practiced ways to calm the anxiety, which they will also practice during mental rehearsal. If there are things which cause the anxiety, like not knowing what to say, or being anxious about what people may think of them, or anxious because of being overwhelmed by so much going on they may not be able to follow conversation, or worrying that they will say the wrong thing, etc., whatever the specific issues are for that individual, the therapist would help to address this, which could include practicing things with the therapist, like practicing having conversations/being in specific situations etc, and education - teaching specific techniques etc., challenging and addressing unhelpful or incorrect beliefs etc., and teaching the person how to do this for themselves. Setting tasks which can help the person to begin to work towards comfortably socialising, and tasks would also be mentally rehearsed. So, it could be that there is a task of just going to a quiet pub or bar and sitting in the pub near (obviously, relatively speaking potentially depending on Covid safety etc) others, but being alone, maybe then being in a busier pub/bar, but still being alone, maybe then going with one friend, then maybe two friends etc. Obviously, exactly what tasks would be set would be personalised to the individual being helped and directly relating to addressing aspects of that individual's challenges. For example, there was someone I worked with who quit smoking, but found whenever they had alcohol and were offered a cigarette they found they couldn't refuse, so part of the process was to have them experience drinking alcohol without smoking, so a task I set was for them to go alone to a pub a dozen or so times over a month and drink alcohol for a little while and then head home. The idea being that this would break the association between drinking and smoking. This helped them to then be able to go to a pub and be offered cigarettes and to say no to those offering. They were capable of doing this sober, but previously couldn't do this after a drink. This task is definitely not one I would set for many other people and was specific to that individual and their situation. Likewise, to help someone quit drinking, who said they didn't want to quit but their dad had said they would stop paying for their flat if they didn't seek treatment. I asked them if we could do an experiment so that I could learn more about their drinking habits (they used to go to the shop, buy a bottle of vodka, go home, drink the bottle, pass out and repeat). They agreed they would do this. I explained that the pub down the road is closer than the shops, so would they go to the pub instead and gulp back three pints of lager, then head home and if they decide later that they want to go to the shop that is up to them, but every day, go to the pub and gulp back three pints of lager. After a few weeks they had stopped drinking. So, a therapist may use hypnosis as a part of the therapy, but its use is to enhance the effectiveness of the therapy by helping to increase the person's focus on the therapy. A bit like turning down a radio in a car and stopping talking to passengers before parking a car in a difficult parking space, because removing distractions, even if those distractions are in other senses - like hearing the radio, when you are parking using vision, helps to increase focus and absorption in the task you are doing, meaning that you do better at it. This is the role of hypnosis, you aren't thinking about what time you have to get back to your car, what you need to do after the therapy session, thinking about things which have happened before the session, being self-conscious perhaps in the session, noticing distractions like the sound of traffic or people banging or being loud upstairs or in another part of the building etc, all of your focus is just on the therapy you are doing, so you do better at that therapy and at internalising the therapy. If the social anxiety came about due to something traumatic, like perhaps a negative experience in school in front of others which means when you are in front of others, for survival, you feel anxious, as your body's way of telling you to get out of or avoid that situation, or if something had happened in some other situation that lead to the anxiety, then a therapist would likely treat this trauma first, as often, if the anxiety is driven by trauma, then once you treat the trauma, the anxiety disappears because it isn't needed anymore. There may still be skills etc which need to be taught, or other bits which need doing, but the person shouldn't then have the anxiety like they did. A bit like, years ago I worked with a woman who had agoraphobia for about 15 years. She hadn't left her house in all that time. Now her son was ill in hospital, she needed to address the anxiety because she needed to see her son. Within 30 minutes we were sat on the beach eating ice cream, discussing how things will be different now she can leave her house. This meant she could see her son, but she still needed more support. Just because the trauma which lead to the agoraphobia had been treated, didn't mean she was problem free. She hadn't driven her car in over 15 years and so she didn't know if she would be able to, she hadn't driven on roads in that time, and so was overwhelmed with all the traffic etc which she hadn't experienced for years, she hadn't been in shops for years (at the time, since about 1993, so how bank cards were used in shops had changed and other changes had happened she had never experienced), so we had lots we needed to work on for a number of sessions, but she no longer had the fear stopping her, it was now sensible anxiety over the uncertainties of many things. So, treating trauma underlying social anxiety, may still leave work to be done, like practicing conversation starting and ending, etc...

What have you joined and who is taking part in something? All the best Dan

It helps to have knowledge inside to be good at hypnosis, knowledge on the outside just happens to be a byproduct in my case to my getting knowledge from the outside to the inside. Obviously the thousands of books is just the physical stuff, I have far more digitally than physical that has contributed to my inner knowledge...

1) Studies have shown that post hypnotic suggestions can likely last a lifetime, they definitely last many decades. This isn't surprising as post-hypnotic suggestions are something we respond to every day of our life, you learn a stimulus and response and generally once established, it sticks, so you see a red light, you stop, you don't think about it, you have learned the post-hypnotic suggestion 'when you see a red light, stop'. You also have negative post-hypnotic suggestions which can stick in the same way and then be difficult to overcome. Like with the red light thing, you don't have to follow the suggestion, you can decide not to (like with any post-hypnotic suggestion) but the automatic behaviour is to carry out the response, so the automatic behaviour of seeing a red light is to stop. You can think about stopping and perhaps go to stop but then decide not to. You can have a coffee and automatically find yourself lighting a cigarette. Again, you can decide not to, but the 'urge' is to carry out the suggestion. 2) Many suggestions we follow, we have forgotten or are perhaps unaware of the triggers. This for example, can happen with side effects from traumatic events, say someone was mugged by a man wearing black, it could be that when they see people wearing black, they don't consciously make the connection, but something about this person makes them feel uncomfortable, maybe they don't trust the person, or are scared of the person, but can't explain why. This kind of thing happens all the time. In hypnotherapy sessions I may look in a certain way or make a gesture or move my head or change the tone of my voice etc, when presenting certain ideas so that in the future, if I repeat that the person responds to the idea, even though I'm not presenting the idea now. So, I could use a certain tone of voice while presenting the idea for 'going into hypnosis', then in a future relevant context I change my voice, despite seemingly just continuing on the conversation we are having and the person's eyes start flickering, they start glazing over and gazing off, their facial muscles relax and they comfortably drift into hypnosis. Or at a party, perhaps every time a specific person laughs I tap a spoon on a glass gently so that the idea of laughter (post-hypnotic suggestion) is linked with the tapping on the glass, then at a different party some months later that person is also present and I tap the glass and they start laughing, but they are unsure why, they never consciously perceived me tapping the glass initially and don't necessarily notice that is what I am doing now. You can also link presented ideas with a specific word (as you mention) and encourage amnesia for that word (if the person really thinks about it, they can often 'find' the word and you can make the person more likely to remember the word by telling them to forget the word, which can sound like you are trying to manipulate or control them and so they are more likely to remember it rather than forget it, you can do things like setting up the post-hypnotic suggestion in a compartmentalised section of the experience, so that they are less likely to remember, just through natural forgetting, you can suggest they can remember this as easily as any dream, as a way of suggesting forgetting without saying forgetting, etc) and then when you present that word, it can trigger the post-hypnotic suggestion and they are likely to notice why they have responded a certain way. In many of the post-hypnotic suggestion studies, they do things like telling people 'when I pick up the pen from the table, you will go to the window and open it'. Then at a later point, often during a time when it seems like the experiment etc is over, the person will say something like, 'okay, I just have a few final questions to ask for our records' they will then pick up a clipboard and pick up a pen from the table and the person will get up, go to the window and open it and then return to their seat. When asked why they opened the window, they will often give a rationalisation for it, like 'I was feeling very warm and just needed some air', and won't realise that actually they did it because the person picked up the pen.

@@DanTheTortoise Thank You.

Yes, the goal with the demonstrations was to try to stick as purely as I could to just demonstrating what I'm talking about. So the 8-word induction, someone on a training course or during a demonstration etc is likely to follow along and just wait for the next instruction, normally they have seen it demonstrated before they pair up to do it, so they have seen what is expected of them etc, but in real life situations it can come as a bit of a shock, the person can respond and then depending on the context etc may think what just happened and open their eyes or may suddenly feel manipulated and open their eyes or may feel like an extended period of time of nothing happening has passed and they feel they need to open their eyes to see what is going on (in the video of me doing this with my best friend you see I continue talking almost straightaway, but he asked me afterwards why I didn't talk for many minutes, that he was about to open his eyes to see what was going on when I started talking again. I told him I spoke almost immediately and showed him the video. The induction had caused significant time distortion for him). Generally it isn't so much about deepening but more about making sure you are keeping attention going in the right direction. So it is enough to do the induction and follow it up with something like "that right, and as you continue to drift deeper into the experience..." And then say what will be happening next, like "I'll just talk to you in the background" or "you can begin to have a sense of...(whatever it happens to be)" etc... You don't need to do a 'deepener' as in a technique specifically for deepening the experience, like counting down etc, you just need to make sure you continue to have the attention of the person.

Thanx , DAN , 4 ur elaborate answer Much appreciated CLAUDE DUPONT REBILLE PARIS

What happens when you have done the induction? The things that make it most successful are making sure you are being attentive to the subject and so are timing the eyes closing with when you see that they want to close, another thing is frustrating the response, so pausing slightly longer than expected just before asking a subject to open or close their eyes so that they start to do this but haven't been told to yet so they fight themselves and then respond even stronger when you give them instructions to follow, another thing that can make responses even stronger is to throw in some additional suggestions when the subject codes their eyes and enters hypnosis, like 'deeper and deeper' and 'all the way' etc, as well as acknowledging when the subject responds well and is displaying nonconscious responses and is responding hypnotically, but saying something like 'that's it' or 'that's right', and you would say this perhaps on eyes closing or on out breaths, or on noticing facial muscles smooth out or shoulders relaxing, etc. The thing I like about this induction is that it is fail proof, as long as the subject is engaging with it then it ends up working because from the start they are responding hypnotically, they are being responsive, following presented ideas and they are being attentive and so responses become automatic and in most people it doesn't take long for the person to want to just keep their eyes closed and continue to be absorbed in the experience and there is very little for someone to feel manipulated by etc, which is often something that makes people uncomfortable with being hypnotised, you aren't giving covert commands etc., and even with people who take a bit longer to start to respond automatically, or who perhaps try to be a bit more challenging, for example who make a conscious point of opening their eyes and doing what they can go demonstrate that they can't be hypnotised - which in a real session almost never happens if the person has said they are okay with giving hypnosis a go because get are delaying their own therapy by not engaging with the process, but when hypnotising friends or family I've had people do this to try to prove a point that they can't be hypnotised and yet they offered to be hypnotised, so I either just say 'you are right, I can't hypnotise you' and leave it at that, I've got nothing to prove and no reason to waste my time on people like that, or I hypnotise them but know we may be doing this for the next 30 minutes with me having them open and close their eyes, throwing in frustrating their responses, telling them not to keep their eyes closed too soon, suggesting to them to resist the urge to respond for as long as possible, really try to fight being hypnotised. This sets up that if they resist they are following my suggestions to be hypnotised now as I've made resisting part of the process for responding and being hypnotised, so they either follow my suggestion and resist me to be hypnotised or resist my suggestion to fight going into hypnosis and enter hypnosis faster now. The second thing I like with this induction is that it is a great induction for teaching self hypnosis because it is an easy structure, it is easy to follow and understand and learn, so you can have the person follow along and then tell them to do the induction to themselves while you just offer reassuring and supportive responses like mentioned above with deeper, all the way, that's it, etc, then the person has something they can do for themselves after the session. All the best Dan

@@DanTheTortoise thanks, i did it to my friends and i noticed that he sometimes blinked when he opened the eyes, but I couldn’t make him hard to open the eyes, later, when i finished the “session” he told me that he open and close his eyes automatically when i said three or one, as if he was somewhere else in his mind.

I still don’t know if I actually put him in trance, but he told me that he was very relaxed.

@@DanTheTortoise do you think i am doing good?

Sounds like you did. Hypnosis is the process of absorbing attention and increasing responsiveness, so although you can also help people feel relaxed, feeling relaxed isn't hypnosis and someone could just as easily not feel relaxed because relaxation isn't being encouraged. What you are looking for us responsiveness, so signs that when you say for example "3,2,1..." You notice they are already responding as if they want to close their eyes, perhaps with faster blinking or eyes twitching slightly etc even before you say to close the eyes, so they are demonstrating that they are hypnotised by demonstrating that they are responsive to what you are communicating. You are looking for this kind of responding where the person is going from responding because they are deciding to follow along because they are being asked to do something, to following along automatically to where you don't even have to say close your eyes for them to show they know that is how they have to respond and so they start responding before you say it.

What leads to you describing it as not working? Knowing this will help me to give any ideas for the specific issue you are experiencing. Generally that specific induction is straightforward in terms of the instructions, but timing gives you the best results, timing it with when you observe the person go inside their mind and obviously like all hypnosis the subject has to be prepared to follow along and exchange with what you are guiding them through. If the person doesn't want to follow along then they don't have to, so you want to make sure they understand what is expected of them and are happy to do what is expected. There is also the issue of knowing what you will do next. If you hypnotise the person and then do nothing, then in a minute or so, sometimes quicker, they will often just reorient back to the room, so you will often follow it up by presenting ideas for continuing to drift into an inner experience and then on to whatever you are doing with them.

@@DanTheTortoise When they go into there mind and ask what else is needed, I swipe my hand away, snap my fingers and say “sleep” all at once, after telling him what to expect, he then sorta closes his eyes and smiles and then admits he’s pretending to fall into hypnosis, I think it’s because he doesn't believe it’s going to work, is there any way to avoid this?

It sounds like he is responding and also nervous. When I first did this induction on my best friend over twenty years ago we would follow along but always end up giggling. We never said to reach other we were pretending because we weren't and were both practicing on each other so had no reason to do anything other than follow along. So part of it depends what his definition of pretending is? What does he get out of pretending Vs following along and just engaging with the process and doing as he is being asked to do, but then rather than moments later opening his eyes to tell you he is pretending, just keeping his eyes closed so they he is still following along to what you have asked and then following whatever you ask next? With my best friend and myself it took weeks to get over giggling and not following along because moments after the sleep moment we would just instinctively laugh and open our eyes, but this was because we knew each other. During the same time period I had done the induction on training courses and with clients, people who aren't friends and only know me as a therapist and so they don't have the 'you're acting weird' type of reaction that a close friend has. There is a video on my Slumberland RU-vid channel that I made in 2020 as a tribute to my best friend after he died that starts with me doing a handshake, gang to face rapid induction. This had the same issue, that we kept laughing as shown in the clip I used, which was from about 2003. There is also a clip which I used in my 15 years on RU-vid video the other day of me doing this induction we are discussing on my best friend in about 2006 by which time we were comfortable doing all these different inductions on each other, we knew each others abilities and so didn't laugh etc, we just engaged and followed along. Obviously, as mentioned in this video, the difficulty with structured inductions is that they are structured. So if he doesn't want to engage with this induction and follow along to it then given that this induction works by having the person engage and follow along, that wouldn't be the best induction to do. It would be better to find out how he would like to be hypnotised, perhaps sharing the different ways you can do it and choosing one of the other ways. There are many people who dislike being hypnotised by an induction like this because of its nature with it being abrupt and shocking and involving touch etc and preferring a slow, gentle induction like a body scan induction or staircase induction or eyes open eyes closed induction or a more conversational induction taking about their interests etc. When practicing, like if you attend a live hypnosis training course, you obviously practice all the inductions on each other and you will have those which suit your style and personality and resonate more with you and which you just perhaps find easier to do and you have those inductions which feel uncomfortable and unnatural and not something you can imagine yourself doing and so you may prefer certain ways of hypnotising over other ways. But in real life rather than on courses or when practicing with a person who is helping you practice and engaging and following along to what you are doing, and you are being practiced on and doing the same so that you know what the experience is like from a subjects perspective, you would be using the approach you feel is right for the individual and the setting. So if you were doing stage shows you may do some more rapid inductions which look visually impressive and which fit what those involved would expect, whereas if you are doing therapy you may just say "okay, just take a moment to allow your eyes to close as I talk to you" and that may be your whole induction. So it might be here that this isn't the induction to use, that they are more comfortable just being asked to close their eyes and imagine something in their mind. Hypnosis is just the process of focusing and guiding attention to gain responsiveness, so however you do it, that is your goal, to say or do something that the person then demonstrates they are paying attention to you and that they are following the presented ideas and over a period of time are becoming more responsive to you, like following how you are breathing, whereas initially perhaps you are matching their breathing, responding to subtle presented ideas, like picking up that you are about to say to breathe in and as you pause you notice they pause ready for that breath, or if you say "close your eyes on the count of three" and then count to three but pause slightly longer between two and three and you notice their eyes twitch or want to shut, you know the person is now what someone would term hypnotised, they are responsive and responding well to your communication. Initially they were usually deciding to engage with the communication, but now they are responding automatically. It is like the game Simon Says. Initially people follow along on purpose doing as asked each time someone says Simon Says, but then, without the person usually realising that it has happened, the person becomes hypnotised, they become responsive and when you give a suggestion without saying Simon Says, they respond automatically. This is what you are aiming to achieve...

@@DanTheTortoise Thanks for the advice, I’ll reach out again if nothing works

The best ways to find people to practice with are interested friends and family and attending practice groups as well as frequently attending short training courses. There are usually many practice groups, so it should be possible to find a local one to attend, or you can use social media etc, join online hypnosis groups etc and arrange to meet with others locally/set up your own practice group

The research in relation to hypnosis and COPD is that a 15-minute hypnosis session reduces anxiety and lowers respiratory rate (immediately after the 15 minutes session which would be repeated as and when needed). Improvements in anxiety were correlated with an alleviation in respiratory strain. Results imply that hypnosis can contribute to the improvement of anxiety levels and breathing mechanics in severe COPD patients.

On my live training courses all students have hypnotised each other within 20 minutes of the start of the course. 5 minutes of that time is my introduction and welcome to the course, 5 minutes is a quick demonstration of what I want the students to do and answering any questions, then 5 minutes is half hypnotising the other half, then the next 5 minutes is the other half doing the hypnosis. The next ten minutes is discussing with the students how they got on, what that was like etc. So to learn hypnosis takes minutes. As a teenager I just opened a self hypnosis book and read that to hypnotise one of my brothers, then just read a different script from the book to hypnotise another brother, then my mum etc, so there was no learning just doing and then learning by doing. Here, you could watch how to do one of the inductions and then do it and that would have probably taken less than ten minutes. Obviously to master it and be able to respond well to variations in subjects responses and be more flexible takes time and is something learn for ever...

@@DanTheTortoise ok thank you so much for responding and being so detailed you earned a subscriber thank you.

I would obviously recommend three of my own books (especially the first two of these, the third one is just a collection of dozens of scripts) - Hypnotherapy Revealed series: Introduction to Hypnotherapy, The Ericksonian Approach, and Hypnotherapy Trance Scripts. I would also recommend: Essentials of Hypnosis, by Michael Yapko, Foundations of Clinical Hypnosis, by Edwin Yager, and The Induction of Hypnosis, by Jeffrey Zeig.

I started learning when I was about 13/14 years old. I have spoken about it in more detail in many other videos, but I picked up the only two self hypnosis books in my local bookshop. I read them and then hypnotised people by just reading the scripts straight from the books, looking at the books and not the people I was hypnotising. It worked fine, but a few years later where I had only ever read to people I eventually encountered people where the scripts didn't fit with the people and I started to have what I saw as failures, mainly due to a lack of understanding based on learning from books which at the time just said 'read this', so I hadn't learnt about reading the subject instead of a book. Therapeutically my first failure was trying to help someone stop smoking. Obviously I now know that it was in part because at that point I hadn't trained in treating addictions and so was just reading a script and was under the false assumption that hypnosis was therapy and that it was possible with hypnosis to use suggestions to make problems go away. Secondly, I wasn't aware that despite many claims I had seen on training courses about ways to help people stop smoking that were 99% etc successful, that this is very likely incorrect, that the research is that a very good success rate would be perhaps 20% over many sessions, that there is no research concluding 99% success in a single session, or even over multiple sessions. I used to think I should be successful with everyone all the time in a single session and from just telling people to get better, a belief which is entirely false and very inaccurate... I've been a professional psychological therapist since I was 23. Technically no qualifications or experience are required in the UK, but I didn't start professionally advertising as a clinical hypnotherapist until I passed my first diploma training in 2001. By then I had about ten years of experience with hypnosis and four years experience working in mental health. That first diploma, the trainer's were shocked at my knowledge and abilities. I was already very comfortable with hypnotising anyone, but wasn't yet confident with doing therapy, as I had little therapy training other than what I was getting in my work in mental health. Most people on diploma's for the first time are usually on their first experience of hypnosis, whereas I was there ten years into my experience. Over all the years I've found people to practice with, whether it is family or friends or at practice groups or meeting up with others interested in hypnosis or therapy, and also practicing in any situation I can, like in cafés, in staff meetings, in any social interactions, etc. My big breakthrough of confidence and significant leap in results and ability etc, was realising that nothing was technically failure, just part of that person's journey, that you just have to focus on accepting and utilising observations and go with the flow, and just be client centred rather than doing things like following scripts etc. Hypnosis takes perhaps 20 minutes to learn to do without scripts so that you can then hypnotised anyone, never needing scripts. What takes time to learn is therapy. The favourite diploma I've taken had almost no hypnosis taught during the whole diploma because the expectation was that the two weekends training you have to do prior to being allowed to attend the diploma has taught you all you need to know to do hypnosis and more, so there is no need to cover hypnosis again during the diploma. So hypnosis itself is very quick and easy to learn to do...

If you could mention the books,it would be a great help.thank you!

@@DanTheTortoise in fourteen and wanna learn so bad

@@bkahandawala7525they are all standing behind him

I've got a few copies of his book (I showed one of them, a signed first edition of his self published version, during my livestream a couple of weeks ago). It doesn't really matter about what induction is chosen, there are an almost unlimited number of ways to focus attention. It isn't the induction he is using to alleviate pain, the induction focuses attention, then he presents the ideas the person wants to engage with. You can do the same in a dentist's office by pinching the cheek as if the person is receiving a pain medication and then telling them the area will numb out the pain with pass on a minute etc. You can direct focus of attention to details or suggest the pain will be gone in a period of time etc (this is to focus of attention or hypnosis), or as I mentioned the other day in my language patterns video you can do something like presenting the idea that 70% of discomfort is comfort, or encourage relaxation, or external focus or focus on sensations rather than feelings, etc. None of it has to be complex and doing hypnosis/focusing attention can be basic.

It isn't so much about putting someone under. Hypnosis is just the process of absorbing attention to increase responsiveness, so the eyes being open it closed doesn't matter. You often all people to close their eyes because it will usually help them to better focus on what you are helping them to focus on. So whether their eyes are open or not isn't the important thing, it is whether you are continuing to help them maintain focus where the focus should be. For example, you can watch a tense film, this hypnotizes you but your eyes are open. You remain with the same focus with your eyes open fine, but if the film changes focus and you now find it uninteresting or not engaging, the film loses your focus and responsiveness and you may begin focusing on other things. This is what you don't want. So it isn't about whether the eyes are open or closed and people technically aren't under something, they just have a focus and are experiencing things from the perspective of that focus and are responsive in relation to that focus. If for example, you are trying to help someone hold their focus on imagining or mentally rehearsing future events, then there will be a number of people where opening their eyes will make it more difficult for them to hold their focus on this, so you would likely not ask them to open their eyes and if they do for some reason then you would gently guide them back to closing their eyes and focusing on what they were focusing on. If they are focused on their ongoing situation/experience, then they may well be able to continue to do this with eyes open or closed as it may not be reliant on something which is easier to do with the eyes closed.

If those loved ones are happy to practice with you then practice with them. When I started back when I was about 13 I practiced on my mum and brothers. When I was in my 20's training to be a therapist and was practicing hypnosis I practiced with one of my brothers and my best friend. I know someone who wanted to practice with one of their relatives but that relative just laughed at them and told them they are stupid and was always negative with them and intentionally being oppositional, so if he asked them to close their eyes, they would fight to keep their eyes open etc, so that type of relative or friend is very unhelpful and can really knock your confidence... Especially in the early years of practice I would practice everywhere, on public transport, in cafes, in parks, with friends and family etc...

You can set up a trigger word. It is common, especially when teaching someone self hypnosis to do that so that they can have the trigger word to say to themselves. I don't usually do that, as I prefer to just use 3,2,1 instead, so instead of doing a hypnotic induction, then saying something like "whenever you hear me say this word you can go back into this state" and then saying the word and then having them practice by having them open their eyes, then saying the word and acknowledging them re-entering hypnosis and repeating this a number of times so that it is embedded as a response and then perhaps having them open their eyes and then asking them to hear me say that word in their mind etc and going into hypnosis and then acknowledging this etc. The induction itself would be also setting up the trigger. I would say 3,2,1 close your eyes and see them responding and then if we are reaching them to do this for themselves I can say "now hear my voice countdown in your mind" and they can imagine me saying 3,2,1 and I can watch as they respond and then acknowledge them responding. This works very well and generally I find fits more naturally with therapy and with the flow of things rather than using a random word. In terms of re-hypnotising, there usually isn't a need to set up a trigger word in that sense. People are very good at just responding. So people I've hypnotised, when I use the voice I use when hypnotising them and when I say the first few words I perhaps usually say, they instinctively follow the pattern and drift into being hypnotised. There are many comments on my sleep stories from people saying about having this experience, where as soon as they hear the intro they are knocked out because they are conditioned to respond in that way. But you can set up any trigger, whether it is a word or a head movement or a certain breath, or a smile, or lifting a glass or pen etc. Literally anything you can probably think of could be linked as a trigger for re-hypnotising someone, or could be linked to getting a specific response. For example, you could be in a bar with friends and every time a specific friend laughs you could do a specific action, whether it is tapping a glass, taking a sip of drink, doing a hand gesture or head movement etc, or saying a specific word. And you can link this then with the laughing so that doing that thing triggers the person's laughing. It is often taught on hypnotic seduction courses to do this same kind of process but when someone is feeling love/attraction etc. So the person would encourage talk of loved ones, hobbies and activities someone enjoys, things they are attracted to etc, and would link a trigger to this state so that setting off the trigger evokes the state and the goal is that the state is evoked while the person is thinking about and interacting with them so that it gets linked to them.

I think you have body dysmorphia ?

Are you wanting to do self hypnosis to change yourself, or use hypnosis to change someone else? A skilled hypnotist was able to make some significant changes in my height, but I am told I am much more receptive than most people.

Ideally I wouldn't use any script. Back when I was 14 I hypnotised my brother to stop wetting the bed. It was a very basic, very poorly written script from a self-hypnosis book. I just read the script in the book for a body scan induction, then read the script for stopping bedwetting (which was just a basic 'you will not wet the bed' type of script, so the least effective you could get) and then read the script for ending the session, all from the same self-hypnosis book - one of the first self-hypnosis books I bought, and he stopped wetting the bed. I think I probably have a bedwetting script in my scripts book. But, I teach people not to use scripts, because scripts are rigid, they aren't targeted to the individual client, so they are usually very unlikely to work and if they work, you got lucky. To work with someone who wets the bed, to help them stop wetting the bed, you would do therapy, rather than reading. You would be engaging with the person, you would be gathering information about their problem, like when - what time, what nights, etc., when doesn't it happen, when doesn't it happen when they would expect it to, when does it happen when they wouldn't expect it to, etc., how does it happen, what is the process, for example, do they dream they are going to the toilet and discover they have wet the bed, do they get a feeling and then wet the bed, is there something about the process of sleeping those nights, etc., what is their routine at night-time, do they do things which increase the chances of wetting the bed, is there anything underlying wetting the bed that needs addressing, whether psychological, behavioural or medical etc. When they have dry nights what will be different, etc. Then you would hypnotise them in what ever way is right for them and the 'bedwetting script' part would then be you using this information you gained to feed back a helpful way forward. So you would have them mentally rehearse the 'dry bed' pattern (whatever that was that was identified), with things like them not drinking a certain time period before bed, them using the toilet before bed, maybe the do some relaxation shortly before bed and before they use the toilet, to help them to be calm when going to the toilet and so less likely to perhaps feel they can't go. Then maybe the mental rehearsal progresses to their bedtime routine and through to them falling asleep, maybe it includes a signal for if they need the toilet during the night, and them responding automatically to this signal by getting up, going to the bathroom and using the toilet (not just saying something like 'and when you notice that signal, you can go to the toilet', because here in the UK and I assume elsewhere, that would be suggesting that when you notice that signal you can wet yourself (go to the toilet), rather than implying getting up and going to the bathroom to go to the toilet). Then the mental rehearsal may end with waking up dry, what that experience is like and how that makes the day go differently etc. You may also decide to drop in a few suggestions to add to what you are doing, like demonstrating curiosity and suggesting something like 'I don't know whether you will have a dry night at some point this week, or whether you will have your first dry night next week. I would imagine that you will have had a dry night within the next four weeks, and I don't know when you will have your first full dry week, I wouldn't expect you to achieve this for at least a couple of months' etc. And what you are doing is suggesting that they will have dry nights and will achieve stopping bed wetting, but you are stating that you just don't know when this will be, implying that if you don't know, then they must know and it is just a matter of discovering when that will be. But you are also giving the suggestion in a way that allows them to be a polarity responder, someone who doesn't like doing as they are told and does what they want. So, you said one dry night, so they may decide to go with more, to go against what you said, you said week one, two and four, not three, so they may decide to go against what you said and go for week three, you said they won't have a first week dry until month two or later, so they might go against this and decide to have a first dry month before two months. Under hypnosis, people are often less likely to follow suggestions, so it is helpful to give the opportunity for people to not follow suggestions by actually following what you are suggesting (like 'not following the suggestion to have a dry night in week 1,2, or 4, by having a dry night in week 3, and being dry for a week before 2 months, rather than following the suggestion to be dry for a week after 2 months', but you meta-suggestion, the kind of overarching suggestion you were giving was 'be dry', so they are choosing not to follow your suggestions by following what you didn't say, which is also options you are happy for them to follow to achieve the overall goal).

Here (although the formatting for embedded suggestions etc has been stripped out by pasting is as a RU-vid comment) is the bedwetting script from my scripts book (Hypnotherapy Revealed: Hypnotherapy Trance Scripts), which you would use after at least the induction, although, as mentioned, I wouldn't use a script and recommend all anyone uses scripts for is to get a few ideas of the way things could be done or metaphors or techniques etc that could be used, but to then do as I suggested and be client-centred, rather than just reading and hoping the client can fit what you are reading to their real-life situation, interests, understandings, language they like used to describe things etc: Overcoming enuresis (bedwetting) That's it…and as you listen to me, your mind can sort out that old problem in its own way…and you can begin to think about how life will be different once you have overcome that old problem…and I don't know when you will have your first totally dry night and whether you will have four or five nights where you stay dry most of the night before that first full dry night…and I don't know when you will first have two dry nights one after the other and whether this will be followed by a few wet nights before having another dry night or whether it will be followed by a few more dry nights…and I don't know when you will have a whole week of dry nights…and whether these dry nights start next week or the week after or maybe they start in a months’ time…or sooner…and you know when children learn to write they hold a pencil in one way and as they begin to…get used to controlling those muscles…they get better at writing and as a child learns to colour in pictures they start by going over the lines and as they…practice more and more…they gradually get more and more of the colouring done inside the lines…and children learning musical instruments make many mistakes and gradually they learn how to perform all the movements correctly and link all the actions and…learn to control the muscles…and they improve and play better and better…and children that…enjoy learning…a sport have to learn how to make their body respond correctly instinctively…if someone learns football they have to master muscle control in the legs to make sure their foot is in the right place at the right time to kick the ball in the right way and with the right strength and in the right place…and someone learning baseball has to master muscle control in the hands and arms making sure they know where to move their hands to and when to close their fingers around a ball and how to get the strength of throws and direction correct…and you know how you would respond if you were using the toilet and someone walked in…you stop peeing…and this happens by itself without thinking…and you can now take as long as you need to learn from all that I have been saying, making it a part of who you are…and I will be quiet in the background for a few minutes to allow you to make all the changes honestly and fully…(pause for about 3 minutes)…

@@DanTheTortoise thank you so much for your response. You are clearly very skilled at what you do and generous enough to share your knowledge. Thank you.

The idea is I'm asking the person to push harder and harder, but there is only so hard someone can push which creates confusion. Once I notice the person go inside their mind to think they can't push any harder, this is the point I say sleep. If I just kept saying pushing down, pushing down, pushing down. They are already doing this, they can keep doing this and they will be following the instructions waiting for something to happen. For me personally it also sounds like an odd thing to say, so although for someone else that wording may resonate with them, it doesn't resonate with me, so I would likely not use it. The important thing is understanding how to do hypnosis and then using whatever way works and resonates best with you. For example, most people do body scans from the the feet up. This feels odd to me. I always do body scans from the head down. Both work fine. With staircase instructions I usually say someone will be at the bottom of the stairs by the end of counting rather than counting each step, because that way the person is able to imagine any number of steps and speed of descent that is independent of my counting. So if the wording pushing down resonated with you, then as long as what you are doing is focusing attention and increasing responsiveness you should be successful. You don't necessarily have to do this through focusing attention and responsiveness on trying to push harder and creating confusion followed by a direct suggestion the person can follow to escape the confusion...

@@DanTheTortoise Wow you are a gentleman. Thank you for your generous responses

It can work on anyone of any age as long as they can understand and follow the induction and are willing to engage with it. I've only ever used it with people down to about 14 years old, but it could work fine even with people younger than that. What happened that led you to feeling it hadn't when you did it? If you can't share what happened I maybe able to identify what does it working. Obviously one important thing is that no one approach works with everyone and there are many reasons for that. For example, with the push down on my hand induction there is a higher chance that the person doing the induction can feel self conscious or anxious or unconfident etc, so that will be communicated and make it less likely to work, the person being hypnotised can be more likely to feel uncomfortable, to be less settled into the experience, to feeling like you are trying to manipulate them etc, so there are reasons with them why it may not work for them. Since people go into it with an attitude of expecting something magic to happen or something to be done to them, rather than engaging with the price, following along to the instructions, closing eyes when asked to etc, sometimes they perhaps haven't understood what is expected of them, perhaps it wasn't explained clearly etc, but that can reduce effectiveness because they don't know what to do or how, or don't follow along for some reason, for example good friends can sometimes be very uncomfortable and may laugh or not feel comfortable with the unusual relationship expected during the induction, for example I remember practicing this with my best friend when I was first learning it and we just kept laughing and getting uncomfortable and took weeks until we were comfortable enough to do the induction and that was with two very keen people taking this seriously with me at the time having 9 years experience with hypnosis and people thinking of me as very proficient and my best friend had 4 years experience, but all the training we had was in standard inductions, not shock inductions, we were both new to shock inductions. Another thing which can make it less effective is if the hypnotist is just going through the motions and not being attentive to the subject. With this induction, timing is important, you want to be looking for the moment the person goes inside their mind so that you are timing the suggestion for them to close their eyes and sleep with them already inside their mind, you are then expecting them to do as you ask and as you told them you will expect them to do, to close their eyes and focus on relaxing and listening along waiting for your next instructions. Something which can happen is that the person gets hypnotised but the hypnotist doesn't continue it so that just open their eyes again a few moments later, it can also be common for the person to experience time distortion and some times this can lead to them opening their eyes again. For example, in a video of my hypnotising my best friend, afterwards we were talking about the experience and he asked why I paused for minutes between saying sleep and continuing to keep him engaged in the experience. In the video he saw that I actually started talking within a second or so of saying sleep, he just had time distortion and that second felt like minutes. If you don't continue after the induction to give a reason to stay hypnotised then the person will likely just open their eyes to find out what is going on. Obviously what you are looking for is responsiveness, so you want to see that they are engaging with you, see that when you tell them what you will expect of them, that they are acknowledging they understand and will do as asked, then when you tell them to push down on your hand, just going to put your hand out, you want to see that your movement triggers their hand to automatically respond and start to come out to your hand, when you suggest for them to push on your hand you want to see they are totally focused on and are doing this, to the point that they realise they can't push harder and so go into their mind to tell themselves they can't push harder and then you say code your eyes and sleep, and you want to see that as you are saying close your eyes, they are doing this, when you say sleep, you have obviously explained you mean relax your whole body and mind, let yourself go loose and limp and relaxed, you want to see that when you say sleep, this is then what they do, they let their whole body go loose and limp and they remain in that position with their eyes closed waiting for you to guide them as to what you would like them to do next, then you suggest what is next, most likely starting with 'that's right' or 'that's it' to acknowledge that they are doing the right thing and to continue to do the right thing, then you may suggest they imagine walking on a beach or in woodland or imagine a relaxing light passing down through their head and down through their body etc, or whatever your plan is for continuing to keep them absorbed in the experience, and you are observing that they are remaining comfortable to continue to engage and follow along to what you are asking of them and that they are actually doing this. Obviously, at any moment if they are uncomfortable with the experience they can decide not to follow along...

@@DanTheTortoise oh I was trying to do it with my younger brother whos only 10 but thanks that actually helps ill make sure to inform him of everything and if he is willing to try thanks

That depends on the person, some people are incredibly good at self-hypnosis, others find it easier to be guided by someone, others are terrible at being guided by someone but good at self-hypnosis, or good at being guided but not very good at self-hypnosis, some struggle with both. It varies from person to person and from approach to approach and with practice. The more you practice, generally the better you get. That is the idea in hypnotherapy sessions behind using fractionation (the process of repeatedly hypnotising and re-hypnotising people, often in a single session), so some people can do incredible at altering their perspective of reality (if that is what they are trying to do) straightaway, others might take weeks or months or repeated practice, or week or months of testing out different approaches to see what resonates best with them to absorb their attention etc. Generally, when hypnotising yourself, you are more direct, because you have no reason not to be, you can just tell yourself what you want to do, whereas when someone else is hypnotising you, they may be a little less direct to make sure they don't mismatch your experience. Some things are much more difficult than others for most people to achieve, for example, generally for changework etc, you may just tell yourself something like 'I would like to be pain-free by lunchtime' and then carry on with your day and it may happen (this is similar to what Milton Erickson concluded worked best, just telling yourself what you wanted to achieve and the realistic timeframe for this and then carry on with your day and it will usually happen in that timeframe). Doing complex things yourself can be more challenging because you are trying to guide yourself and follow what you are saying at the same time. So, to 'tell yourself' to see a dragon flying in front of you, while being so absorbed in the experience that you can follow the idea presented to see a dragon flying in front of you is a difficult thing to do, because you need to not be absorbed in the experience enough to guide yourself, but then you aren't necessarily absorbed enough in the experience to be guided. It is generally easier to have someone guide you, or to record a track to follow that can guide you, although, with the track, you may need to redo it as you test it out, because you may discover that your pacing is wrong and you needed to give yourself more time, or make other changes that a real person in real time would be doing. There is also a difference between how something appears and what really is happening. For example, you could hypnotise 10 people to experience being elsewhere, 8 of whom may respond as if they believe that they are elsewhere, but when you question them afterwards, 2 of the 10 may say they never experienced anything, of the remaining 8, 4 of them may say that they believed they were elsewhere, but they were aware of the hypnotist speaking, aware they were sitting where they were, etc, but none of that mattered, in their mind they felt like they were elsewhere, like being absorbed in a vivid daydream, or in a dream just before waking in the morning, where they know they are in bed and that they are dreaming, but they feel like they are in this inner world and that they could see/hear/experience things in this dreamlike world (this is often the most common experience). Another 3 may say that they had this feeling like they were elsewhere, but it wasn't very vivid, it was more like a feeling of going along with the ideas being presented, while still being aware of the hypnotist and the surroundings, but feeling compelled to answer and respond a certain way. They were aware they could decide not to respond that way, but they felt comfortable going with the flow and responding and following along. Then the final person may say that to them it was as if the experience was totally real of being elsewhere. That on some level they were aware of what was going on but they were so absorbed in the experience it was as if, in the moment, it was real. Generally about 5-10% of people are highly responsive like this, but again, not at everything, so that 5-10% will be people responsive, but not necessarily good at everything, they may be good at hallucinating, or at disassociation or at visualisation, or at time distortion, etc, and a very small percentage of these people may be good at a few of these things and naturally respond well to a wide range of different phenomena. These people would often be termed hypnotic virtuosos. When I attended a secret Derren Brown show where he was selecting people to be on a TV show he was doing, he had a room of perhaps 400-500 of us (and was going to be repeating this with a number of rooms of hundreds of people), he had selected us from applications, so we were already people who to some extent may be responsive, we were also fans and so that was going to increase our responsiveness. He hypnotised us all and was obviously looking for people who responded in a specific way, so as the hypnotic 'tests' progressed he was obviously using tests which would narrow down to people who responded as required for the show, for example, people who could develop amnesia and who could hallucinate. As people failed the tests (which isn't the same as them 'not being hypnotised'), they were asked to remain in their seats, until he got down to just 12-15 people, who he then had come up to the front where he could work directly with them. Out of those 12-15 people he did tests with them with perhaps 4-5 of them seemingly responding as he would like, the others were sent away, out of these 4-5 people, he spoke about how people experience things (like I just did) and asked them for their experiences and a couple said they felt compelled to follow along but knew what was going on and the others said that they experienced it as if it was real, like being in a dream, but were also aware that it wasn't real etc (as mentioned above), none said that they experienced it as if it was totally real with no awareness of 'reality'. So out of about 400-500 people, only about 4-5 people responded to his last presented ideas as if to the audience they were responding like what he was suggesting was real and on talking with them, none of them actually experienced it as if it was real, they all commented that they were aware that it wasn't, and this is with the odds stacked heavily in his favour because of who he is, because of his experience, because he selected us from tens of thousands of people who applied to be on the show. I suspect he held perhaps 3 or 4 rounds like this to find the person to be in the final show. So, he probably selected about 2000 people from about 30000 people and had an audience on the final show of about 50 people (probably many of the people who ended up in the final selection from each of the selection shows) with one of them being chosen for the actual show, who he likely already knew who he was going to choose out of those 50 or so people on the actual show, but made it look like he was selecting someone randomly from those 50 'random' people. I suspect that perhaps 3-5 of those people were suitably responsive that he could choose from, so that is about 5 people out of 2000 people he has hypnotised, out of about 30000 people who applied, so it is small numbers if you are trying to find someone who actually responds 'as if' what they are experiencing is totally real, who even on questioning, convincingly claims that the experience was totally real to them.

@@DanTheTortoise Thank You for the reply Dan, I am new in this. Your videos are very helpful. I have queued the "History of Hypnosis Documentary Series" to watch later. Thanks

It is a complex question. Generally it would be highly unlikely the person continues to not know their name once the context changes and they are no longer in the hypnotic context. The experience for the hypnotised person is interesting. Only an incredibly small percentage of people would honestly claim that they genuinely didn't know what their name was, some will claim that they knew what their name was, but in that moment, they just couldn't recall it. This kind of experience has likely happened to most people, where you know the word for something or the name of someone, or even your own name, but in that moment, you just can't recall it and the more you try to recall it, the harder it becomes to recall, so often the best thing to do is to forget about it, do something else and it will come back to you, or to think about related things to give your brain a chance to make the connections. This is perfectly natural and happens to everyone with no hypnotising required and this is one experience people describe it as when asked for honest feedback after the experience. Many will say they knew their name, they just had this feeling like they didn't know it in that moment and were going along with the experience, others will say they felt like they were just playing along, but not on purpose and they knew their name the whole time. With my best friend a couple of decades ago, I hypnotised him and he said afterwards that when I said to give me some information, which was incorrect with what he really knew (like being asked what your name is, knowing your name, knowing you know your name, but being told that you don't know your name), he said that he knew the answer and so stubbornly was going to tell me the answer, but when he opened his mouth, to his surprise, the wrong answer came out of his mouth. So this is another kind of experience someone may have. The experience of those in street hypnosis or stage show videos is often very different to the perceived effect. For example, I have applied to be on Derren Brown's TV shows a number of times over the years, getting various lengths of the way through the auditions each time. One time I got through to the stage where Derren held a secret stage hypnosis style event with short-listed applicants, we were all hypnotised as an audience, just like at a stage show, he then asked the audience to do certain things, those who did those things remained standing, those who didn't had to sit down. He had people walking among the audience tapping those on the shoulder who needed to sit down. He kept asking the audience to do things until there was only about 20 people left standing. He then got those 20 people up at the front and continued to work with them - all fairly standard stuff for a stage hypnosis show, you whittle it down to those who are responding best for what you want. He continued on to the point where he did things like making himself invisible and having his eyeball's floating in space. By the end he had perhaps 10 out of a room of a few hundred who followed the presented ideas this far, so these were the 10 most responsive people in the room in relation to what Derren had been asking of everyone. He then shared as I did about how everyone's experience is different, some people will genuinely believe they saw floating eyeballs, others will have responded as if this was their experience, but on questioning will say they were aware he was there and it was his eyes but in the moment it felt like he wasn't and his eyes were just floating, others will say they were aware he was there but felt compelled to play along, others will say they just played along, etc. He asked the ten or so people what their experience was, explaining to them and everyone in the room that there is no right or wrong and none of us know what he is looking for in a subject for his show, etc, and only a couple of people responded that they genuinely experienced just floating eyeballs, and this was out of a room of hundreds of already short-listed (and so people already identified as being responsive) people, and Derren held more than one of these events for short-listed people to get a handful of people most responsive to what he was doing, with the plan for one of those people to be chosen for the show. So, with forgetting your name, even the experience of forgetting your name isn't as clear cut as it seems. There are studies carried out on post hypnotic suggestions that show they can persist for decades, probably whole lifetimes, but hypnosis isn't about controlling etc, you can have a post hypnotic suggestion in place and due to a context, you don't follow it. For example, it is very common for hypnotists to set up a post hypnotic suggestion for rehypnotising people, like 'when I say sleep, you will drop deeply and comfortably into hypnosis' and in films it is always portrayed as the hypnotised being able to trigger this in any environment. In reality, although in rare cases and with incredibly responsive people this can happen, for most people, if the context isn't right people don't respond, or they start to respond, realise what is happening and stop themselves. So there is a lot of complexity to the answer. There will be rare times when if a hypnotist said that someone no longer knows their name, that if the person interpreted the suggestion to mean you will never know your name again (which it is unlikely they would interpret it that way, normally it is accepted for what it is, a suggestion to mean right now, in this context, you won't remember your name), they may not remember their name in the future, but for most, this won't stick, so it is likely to be very rare and even more likely to be something a hypnotist has little ability to cause on purpose, because they would have to do it to that one rare person who would respond in that way and most hypnotists aren't selecting to that extent generally, like the example of Derren Brown, he had tens of thousands of people apply, had a thousand or so short-listed, and whittled it down to a handful of people, all over many weeks of working with people etc, to get to those few highly responsive people, rather than it just being some random person at a stage show or in the street.

I've got about 16 eCourses available for people to take, from short courses of about an hour long, up to about 18 hours. Until 2019 I was also teaching my in-person clinical hypnotherapy practitioner diploma that was about 120 hours of face to face tuition, followed by about 20 hours of training and support via Zoom or similar platforms and the training was a total of 450 hours that the student would have to put in, and I teach short workshops and hold talks etc about hypnosis and therapy from time to time (I used to do a lot more), for example, I'm teaching at this years UK Hypnosis Convention in London in November.

It can be quick to hypnotise people. The Elman induction involves telling people to close their eyes until they know they won't open and then try to open them. In many cases if the person is happy to engage then it can take seconds for them to test opening their eyes and discovering they can't. Depending on the purpose for doing hypnosis hypnotists often select who they work with and in some cases prehypnotise people. For example if you watch Derren Brown's TV shows in many cases 'random' people are preselected, so when you see someone randomly walking passed a ringing telephone, they answer it and become hypnotized, that person has been preselected, for his stage shows etc anything requiring specific responses he hypnotises the whole audience and selects the most responsive people from perhaps 3000 people, for some of his street hypnosis stuff he often tries to pick those who seem like they would be most responsive, like people lost in thought or those who with minimal interaction can already be observed being responsive...

Unless you have someone in an MRI scanner or something similar you never 100% know but hypnosis is about responsiveness, so if you say something like "you can head forward into that situation" while the person is hopefully having a sense of something like walking through woodland and you add a little more emphasis to the words 'head forward' you can watch the person and see if they are being responsive, do they follow the covert suggestion to move their head forward by nodding ever so slightly over the next few minutes. In most situations it doesn't matter if the person is playing along or not and it defeats the point for them if they are pretending. So in therapy, if you are engaging the client in a process that will hopefully help them overcome their problem, like having them mentally rehearse doing things differently in the future. If they play along, that is fine, they are engaging and focusing attention on the task at hand and so are engaging in hypnosis but perhaps not to the level where they are responding automatically, so they are actively and consciously engaging. This may not be so effective for them, but hopefully they will get benefit and with practice over a number of sessions they will get better at doing this automatic so that they don't have to consciously play along. If they are pretending, so you are guiding them through a process, but they are just sat there with their eyes closed, pretending that they are following along and engaging but actually they are focused elsewhere, perhaps on what they will be doing after the session or how boring this is etc, but they aren't doing what is being asked, they just assume you will think they are engaging, then they will likely get no benefit from the process because they didn't engage with it. In stage hypnosis etc, it rarely matters as long as the person is doing as asked. If they are doing this because they just want to be on stage and they feel like they aren't doing so automatically but are deciding to do behaviours then as long as they continue to decide to do the behaviours that is fine. If they are falling with the intention of proving on stage that they aren't hypnotised then that would be annoying and you may not know until they are on stage that they are pretending with the intention of showing you up Obviously there are things you can do, live giving subtle suggestions, either verbally or physically etc and if someone doesn't follow these then you wouldn't use them. Obviously with hypnosis, hypnosis doesn't technically feel like anything and at any point people can decide not to follow presented ideas, so someone who is responding incredibly well could suddenly decide not to follow some presented ideas, just like someone pretending or playing along could suddenly decide not to keep pretending or playing along. And it is common that because hypnosis itself doesn't feel like anything, it is just being so absorbed in relation to something that you respond automatically in response to that thing without having to think about it, that it is common for people to say they weren't hypnotised, that they were playing along or pretending, when they were perhaps seemingly very hypnotised. On a training course I taught I have a doctor say they enjoyed my courses, had attended many, but didn't believe they could be hypnotised or had ever been hypnotised. They volunteered to by hypnotised in front of her group and maintained that it wouldn't work, they feel like they are just passing along so the person doing the hypnosis doesn't feel bad. I said "in a moment in going to reach over and lift up your arm and you don't have to go in to hypnosis any quicker than that arm lifts" I then reached over and suggested by placing my hand very close to the top of their hand as if I was about to lift it, that I was going to lift it. Their hand started moving a little in anticipation of me lifting it, so I moved my hand up slowly and kept moving my hand as theirs lifted, never touching their hand. I spoke with them while their arm was in the air, I asked them if they were hypnotised, they said no, I asked them how their hand got to where it is, they said I lifted it there, I asked, if they aren't hypnotised why is their hand in the air and why are they keeping it their. They said I lifted it, they let that happen to play along with me and are keeping it in the air to pay along with me. I asked the audience if I lifted their hand, the audience said no. The person argued that I did, I must have done, if I didn't hire did their hand get in the air? The audience could clearly see they were hypnotised, they had responded very well and the person couldn't explain what happened if what they thought happened isn't correct.

It depends what specifically you want to learn. This video explains the approaches to hypnotise, including inductions you can learn, as well as explaining what hypnosis is/the science behind it, I have written many books including currently writing a series about hypnotherapy taking you through everything from the start. The series is called Hypnotherapy Revealed: - Book one is Introduction to Hypnotherapy - Book two is The Ericksonian Approach - Book three is Hypnotherapy Trance Scripts Book one teaches everything you need to know about what hypnosis is, how to do it and how hypnosis fits into therapy. Book two teaches about the Ericksonian approach, things like hypnotic language patterns and how to use storytelling in therapy, book three has dozens of hypnotic induction scripts, deepeners, dozens of therapeutic scripts and details about how to do hypnosis and summaries of research about the use of hypnosis in treating various conditions. I also have about 15 eCourses available. I rarely teach face to face now and no longer teach my practitioner clinical hypnotherapy diploma. Other books I would recommend would be: - Essentials of Hypnosis by Michael Yapko - Induction of Hypnosis by Jeff Zeig - Foundations of Clinical Hypnosis by Edwin Yager If you want to get into stage or street hypnosis there are books focused on this areas, and if you want to get into clinical hypnosis then there are books focused on this, but most are about three or four times as expensive as the books I've recommended. I also have many videos on this channel including my History of Hypnosis series which teaches what hypnosis is and its history, teaching about pre-history of hypnosis, things like ancient healing practices etc, then a documentary on mesmerism, sharing about the history of mesmerism, which is the precursor to hypnosis, then a documentary sharing about hypnosis, what it is etc., and then a video on the dark side of hypnosis. This series will explain how hypnosis has been understood over the centuries and what the current scientific thinking is about hypnosis.

@@DanTheTortoise Thanks for the extensive reply. These days you can rarely get a response let alone such an elaborate answer. I really appreciate that keep up the good work.

Hi, hypnosis is just about focusing and guiding attention. You can do that in any language and even using no language at all. Some techniques don't work so well in some languages, or at least the examples given in English don't work. The most obvious one being using words with multiple meanings or words which sound similar, like using the word run in multiple contexts with different meaning in each context, but choosing to use that word because someone is looking to lose weight and so you want to convey the idea of being more active, so you may say how someone can run a bath, run through the paperwork, run over a few points, etc and none of these contexts are talking about weightloss but the brain recognises run keeps being used and starts to notice the pattern and responds by the person being more active. And words similar sounding can be things like wander and wonder, and so you may use the wrong word on purpose. When talking about walking through woodland you may say wonder instead of wander to encourage introspection. Or words like you're and your, so you may say you're unconscious, to mean to be unconscious, instead of your unconscious, to mean we are taking about their unconscious. So some of these exact examples don't necessarily work in some languages and sometimes there are alternatives that do work, other times people tell me they can't think of alternatives in their language. But these are just specific technique developed to focus and guide attention around ideas, hypnosis can be done fine without them, and in other languages there may well be techniques not used in English because they don't fit the English language that only work in the another language.

Because that is the response being set up, so I frustrate the response and pause for a moment and he is desperate to close his eyes but I've not said it, so when it just happens I can then reinforce this by saying something like that's it, to let him know he is doing something right. It is a good sign of someone responding well that they expect the pace to be the same and so start responding to the pattern, and close their eyes in the pause where I should have told them to close their eyes. Often the person has internal dialogue and this can also complete the sentence you didn't complete, so they give themselves the suggestion to close their eyes. This is what I want when I'm teaching this for the person to use it for self hypnosis so that they can sit at home on their own and say to themselves 3,2,1, close my eyes and then do this, because they were doing this for themselves in the session. By pausing the suggestion was implied as it was what follows next, like if you say in the nursery rhyme voice, a,b,c,d, people say to themselves e,f,g. Or ba ba black sheep, and people say to themselves have you any wool, or you whistle or say Rudolph the red nosed reindeer and people say to themselves had a very shiny nose. So people complete the incomplete pattern as it is implied it is there...

Pfft five minutes is ages, I can't sit through five minutes of video! I have things to do! Places to be! He should be teaching this in 60 seconds! 😁

@@EruzaSky 😆

He did, so I didn't tell him to. I want to see the signs of the person going inside their mind, normally people just glaze over for a moment as they go inside their mind to think something like 'i can't push harder' etc, where they have some confusion set in because they are being asked to do something and to respond in a way they can't do because they already are as best as they can, normally when I see that they are inside their mind I say to close their eyes because their eyes are normally open. In this situation when he went into his mind to try to make sense of what was going on and to tell himself he can't push harder he closed his eyes already so I just used your and said sleep without needing to say close your eyes and sleep. Structured inductions obviously have an idealised structure, but in reality the client is the most important person and the one you are responding to and so you adapt to them rather than trying to make them adapt to you. I wasn't going to asking him to open his eyes again so that I could tell him to choose them, I also wasn't going to wait for his eyes to open again so that I could tell him to close them, because once he opened his eyes he would be back outside his head focused on me and his hand etc, not inside his head telling himself he can't and trying to make sense of the situation. Timing is very important, so it was more important to just use that moment and say sleep than miss the moment so that I could tell him to close his eyes and than say sleep, but perhaps not be successful because he is then in a different state of mind, not naturally focused inwardly on his experience and being in a slightly confused state, responsive to direct suggestions etc. You always work with how a client presents, so it they open their eyes, fidget, smile, laugh, show anxiousness, extreme relaxation, etc, it doesn't matter, you accept it as part of their way of having this experience. Here is another example of the same induction where the subject closed their eyes when they went inside their mind (ru-vid.comTtx0XyoBJtA?feature=share), so like here, I just used it and said sleep, I'm going to try to find an example I have previously shared on my other channel where the person didn't spontaneously close their eyes. If I find it I will share a link to that as well... Here is a link to me doing this induction with someone where they didn't spontaneously close their eyes... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-984cn1Ukq4M.html

Hypnosis is just the process of focusing attention to increase responsiveness to help the person being hypnotised to be able to do better at what they are doing. So if you watch a horror movie and your heart rate increases etc, then you have been hypnotised by the movie, the movie has focused your attention and increased your responsiveness. For some people they may even go to bed turning on lights or being uncomfortable in the dark even though they just watched a film and know it isn't real or even related to their current situation, yet they have been hypnotised by the movie, focusing their attention and increasing their responsiveness to the point they are still responding to the presented ideas after the movie has ended. Hypnosis itself doesn't feel like anything, what people experience depends on what they are encouraged to experience if they decide to engage with that. In most cases hypnotists encourage relaxation, so people often experience this, but being relaxed isn't the feeling of being hypnotised. There are obviously some things people often get wrong about hypnosis. One is that hypnosis is therapy, when hypnosis is just focusing attention and increasing responsiveness which helps to enhance therapeutic outcomes because the person is more focused on the therapy and less distracted. Another is that hypnosis makes people more suggestible and people expect to follow suggestions almost like they are powerless not to follow the suggestions, when hypnosis usually makes no difference to suggestibility and can reduce suggestibility because of the fact people are more responsive and so pick up better on ideas presented, which can lead to them picking up on anxiety or doubt communicated by the hypnotist making the subject respond to this doubt or anxiety etc which makes the overtly presented ideas less likely to be responded to...

No, although back in the day and even before he named himself Dantilion Jones I had work of mine on his blog etc...

Then I wouldn't clock my fingers. I just don't it helps with emphasis when specifically doing that induction, but there are almost endless ways to hypnotise people, so if something doesn't fit or resonate with you, or you can't do something then that is fine, you can do things differently. So just pulling your hand away after focusing attention and building responsiveness is likely to cause confusion/shock and then presenting the idea 'sleep' is enough to be followed, so there isn't a need to necessarily click your fingers even doing this induction. It is the same as me gesturing etc during some of the instructions where the person has their eyes closed and can't see me gesture, but I do it because it helps me be congruent. If I talk about someone seeing something and I look at it and gesture to it etc, that helps me to be communicating as if what I'm saying is real, which is what I want the person to pick up on, whereas if i just sit stationary and talk in a monotone voice, then i don't feel I'm conveying what i am trying to convey so authentically etc. The idea of this video is for viewers to go beyond technique, to understand that hypnosis is just about focusing attention and increasing responsiveness and having a goal, and so understanding this means you can then create your own inductions which resonate with you, whether it is pushing on a hand and pulling your hands away, gently lifting a hand, holding a hand and then jolting the arm and saying sleep, tapping the hand or arm, passing your hand in front of the person, or left to right, or asking them to look in different places, or to take a few breaths, or to think of a memory or to imagine something, or to talk about the problem or solution, or to describe the problem or solution through a metaphor, or to look at or between their fingers, or to lift or lower a hand etc. Pretty much anything you can think of you could build an induction drill as long as you are focusing attention and engaging the person so that they are responding and ideally to the point that are responding automatically, and having a goal that you are directing responses towards, like going into hypnosis, increasing confidence, reducing anxiety, being relaxed, feeling happy, reducing a problem of some kind, etc. Like "as your hand begins to lower to your lap, so you can begin to... feel more confident/learn how to reduce anxiety in those situation/drift deeper into hypnosis/become more relaxed/make the necessary changes to reduce the addiction, phobia, PTSD, depression etc

What do you mean sleep with a smile? Hypnosis is focusing attention and increasing responsiveness, so not sleep. There is no reason why someone hypnotised won't smile, move around, open or close their eyes, scratch itches, etc. Children often fidget a lot, so do some adults, it is common for people, especially new to being hypnotised or when they feel surprised, to smile, like if they suddenly notice automatic movement happening, it is very common that they smile, or if the experience is suddenly pleasant and perhaps feels good etc, all these evoke positive feelings in the person and so they are more likely to spontaneously smile. So it can be common for people to smile as they are being hypnotised or just as they orient back to the room...

@@DanTheTortoise well he “went to sleep” with a smile? Not doubting I’ve seen people be hypnotized I know it’s real I’m question was really just a question.

I still don't think I understand the question? As mentioned, hypnosis isn't sleep. That is what is confusing me, because I can't tell whether you are mentioning a subject falling asleep and smiling (and no-one slept in my demonstrations), or smiling during hypnosis? I responded to explain about smiling during hypnosis as that is what I assumed you might be asking - about a subject entering hypnosis while smiling. If this isn't what you were asking then I still don't understand the question?

There isn't any real difference between hypnosis being used therapeutically and meditation as it is used in things like mindfulness based CBT. Nowadays it is commonly recommended that people who do hypnosis drop the word hypnosis and use the word meditation instead as the term hypnosis comes with a lot of baggage from its history and from misconceptions people have about what they think hypnosis is. Even batch in the 1800's with the start of hypnosis James Braid who coined the term wrote about how the East had discovered and was already using hypnosis, but in the East it is called meditation... Many professionals use hypnosis but call it meditation or similar. For example CBT includes a process for calming anxiety and grounding yourself which is like the Betty Erickson hypnotic induction where you focus on three things you can see, three you can hear, three you can feel, then two, then one, etc. They incorporate mindfulness and use it in the same way as hypnosis is used, they often use progressive relaxation, which for the last 200 years or so has been commonly used, mainly by clinical hypnotherapists to hypnotize people, as has focusing on a single spot, word, sound, light, flickering flame etc...

@@DanTheTortoise I mean the word meditation itself is European. Idk how there would have been a conflation in which people from Asia called the practice meditation when that word is European in origin. Think Marcus Aurelius's meditations. As well we have evidence of ancient celtic druids practicing what we would call meditation in modern times as well as a number of ancient european artifacts that depict the same meditative lotus pose used in asia. Meditation largely grew out of Indian yogic practices which come from the veddic people who brought the vedas to india. Veddic people nomads who originally came from eastern europe. This is a guess kinda off subject but my point is people confuse modern practices as "western practices" despite western practices including and being founded on European classical practices. sorry for the tangent

@@DanTheTortoise What sort of hypnotism were people like Freud practicing?

@@DanTheTortoise Would the difference between hypnotism and meditation be that in meditation the one meditating is inducing and in control of the trance state they put their body into to a larger extent? Versus hypnotism is achieving the same trance state but also imposing the illusion of foreign control on the persons conscious or subconscious in which gives the hypnotist more control of the hypnotized person in the trance/meditative state?

@@DanTheTortoise I also want to make clear that I am not saying that Marcus Aurelius was "meditating" in the modern sense of the word but that the word meditation which derives from latin was the word he used to describe the process which brought him to his conclusions and was simply an example I used to show its latin origin. Idk if they used that word in the same sense in ancient Rome as we use today. Maybe he did think of stoic philosophy which he learned from the Greeks while in a trance state. idk. I just think that modern idea of mediation was not foreign to Europe until after certain cultural changes in Europe including the dark ages and industrial revolution.

A very small percentage of people are highly responsive to being able to have significant control over themselves across many different areas of experience and at the other end of the spectrum, there are a small percentage of people who struggle to have this level of control over themselves. The good thing is that people can learn to improve their abilities with deliberate practice, with learning about hypnosis and how it works which can help to find the approach that works best with you and learning what to expect. One thing that is common is people having expectations about hypnosis that are different from the reality of hypnosis and then when the experience doesn't match their expectations they don't think they were hypnotised even if they were actually highly responsive. People also have different skills in relation to hypnosis and different variability based on what they believe and are comfortable with. For example, it is generally easier to have someone imagine they see a book on a table than a dragon in the room. Most people will accept the idea that a book could be on the table in front of them, but struggle with the idea of accepting a dragon is present. Hypnosis itself is just the process of focusing attention around an idea to increase responsiveness to that idea. So anyone who can be affected by a conversation, a film or a book etc can be hypnotised. These all hypnotise you. If you are having a conversation and the person manages to evoke feelings in you then your attention was focused around the ideas they were presenting and you increased your responsiveness to those ideas. If you watch a horror film and engage with it to the point that you become more responsive to the presented ideas, like your palms sweat, your heart rate increases etc because you respond to the tension being communicated through the use of the audio and visuals and perhaps even after the film ends, you are still being responsive, like having a post hypnotic suggestion. You decide to put lights on, maybe you jump at your own reflection and at sounds you hear etc, then again you are responding well to hypnosis. What a hypnotist is looking for when doing hypnosis is whether the person is engaging with the experience and being responsive. As long as this is the case then they are hypnotised. It doesn't mean they can do everything someone else could do, but unless you are selecting people for something like a stage show this doesn't matter. For example in therapy you just want the person to be engaging so that they respond better to the therapy. Pretty much every child learns hypnosis by learning the game Simon Says, where someone tells people to do something and people should only do it if the person says Simon Says. So they will say Simon Says do this, Simon Says do this, Simon Says do this, and people will do what they are being told. But then the person will say do this, without saying Simon Says, and some people will do it and be out of the game. This is what you are doing with hypnosis. You focus attention around an idea, you increase responsiveness by having the person engaging and then at some point this responsiveness becomes more automatic and so people follow it without thinking about it. Simon Says is like the hypnotic technique of linking suggestions (where people follow some true and easy to follow ideas and are then presented with something to follow that isn't necessarily true or apparent to them, or is more experiential that is the thing you are going to encourage the person to follow), where you perhaps say "put your feet flat on the floor (the person does this), and rest your hands in your lap (the person does this), and let your eyes close (the person does this), as you listen to me (the person is doing this) and you can hear some other sounds (the person notices other sounds), and take a few deep and comfortable breaths (the person does this) as you begin to drift deeper into hypnosis (the person follows this idea more automatically because a pattern of following along was established and technically they are already focusing their attention and responding, so they are already experiencing being hypnotised, it is now just a process of absorbing them deeper in the experience so that they continue to be responsive). I taught a course a few years ago where a doctor attended multiple sessions, never volunteered and at the last session said she likes what I do but doesn't believe she could be hypnotised. She said she has followed my group demonstrations, she has worked with other students, she has been on many other courses etc, and thinks she is impossible to hypnotise. I asked her if she was happy to volunteer. She did. I then said 'in a moment I'm going to reach over and lift up your right arm and I'm not going to tell you to put it down as you drift deeper into hypnosis' I then reached over and hovered my hand just above hers. It is natural that people lift their hand slightly themselves when they think you are about to take hold of their hand - they are being focused and responsive to the idea of the hand being lifted. This is what she did. I just kept moving my hand slowly just ahead of her rising hand. She had her arm in the air and I asked if she was hypnotised? She said no. I asked how her arm got in the air then? She said I lifted it. I asked the audience if I lifted her hand or arm? They confirmed to her that I never touched her hand or arm, she lifted it herself. This experience convinced her that she was able to be hypnotised but that she had preconceived ideas of what hypnosis should feel like and what the experience should be. Whereas in reality, it didn't feel like anything because it doesn't have a feel and her views that she should be deeply relaxed or have amnesia or should be able to hallucinate, or should be under some power of someone else etc were also unrealistic expectations and misconceptions.

@@DanTheTortoise Wow, that's pretty detailed explanation. Thank you for taking time to explain all. I hope one day I can be healed through hypnotization which never happened with multiple experts. I'll work on that.

Hypnosis itself is just the process of focusing attention and increasing responsiveness. It isn't a treatment, but something to help treatments get better results. So it is more about what therapy these people were using the hypnosis with and whether that therapy was the right approach for you. For example a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic hypnotherapist would be exploring your past, relationships back then, searching for a root cause for the problem, trying to make the unconscious conscious etc, a person centred hypnotherapist will likely do a lot of listening and feeding back what you say, a solution focused hypnotherapist will try to encourage you to notice strengths, find exceptions and explore what you want things to be like, a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist will help you to learn ways to think and behave etc, and then you occasionally get people who don't really have any training in therapy who say they are hypnotherapists but then all they do is try to suggest the problem away. This rarely works and when it does it usually only works very short term because they haven't addressed the problem, just tried to suggest it away and hope it goes and doesn't come back. So you wouldn't want to go to someone who doesn't have clinical training and experience who might just hope they can tell you to get better and hope that this works and then often blame the client if they don't get better, or just saying they aren't able to be hypnotised...

@@DanTheTortoise That's true, I cannot focus and concentrate when hypnotized at all which is a requirement in hypnosis. All experts say they're the best, wouldn't know who are really the best healer in this field.

As mentioned, it is more about the therapy approach they use rather than them using hypnosis and whether this approach is the right fit for you and the right approach for what you are seeking therapy for. It's not so much about being able to focus and concentrate during hypnosis, it is that hypnosis is focusing attention but how this is done would vary from person to person. For example I had someone with ADHD tell me they had never successfully been able to engage with hypnosis. The problem was that whenever they tried it people just asked them to focus on their breathing and relax their body etc. This definitely didn't work for them, their mind would wander, they couldn't focus with it. This was on a training course so I asked if they wanted to volunteer. They said they liked mountain biking so the induction I did to focus their attention and increase responsiveness was to have them imagine mountain biking. They said afterwards how incredible it was that they managed to experience hypnosis. Because they had ADHD they needed something that was active, engaging and jumping attention around frequently so that they wouldn't get board and have their mind wander but would keep their attention...

What didn't work? Did you have a specific induction you were practicing which didn't work? What happened when you were doing the induction?

This teaches what hypnosis is and how to do hypnosis, not how to do therapy and definitely isn't the 140+ hours minimum you would need to do to qualify to become a qualified psychotherapist or to work therapeutically with people. If someone wanted to integrate hypnosis into their therapy practice and was using this as part of their continued professional development, they would already be qualified and practicing as a therapist and qualified to work with the client group they work with. No-one from watching this video is qualified as a therapist, just like if you buy a book about what hypnosis is and how to do it, it doesn't qualify someone to use hypnosis in therapy.

​@@DanTheTortoiseagreed.

All the demonstrations are genuine. I asked online for people to volunteer to be hypnotised for demonstrations I could use in my eCourses. I had no idea who would volunteer or how they would respond. I only had 4 people volunteer. I was hoping for a dozen or more people volunteering so that I could have demonstrations with a variety of different people and hopefully many different responses. I had about 120 inductions I wanted to get footage of me demonstrating and ended up having to do all 120 or so inductions with just these 4 people. On my live training courses I just ask for someone to volunteer and who ever volunteers is who I work with. I know many trainers, for consistency and to make sure demonstrations are of an idealised version of the technique use actors. I always use whoever volunteers, which means sometimes inductions take longer or I have to adapt to the client slightly, or they respond too well and know what will be expected so are already there before I present the ideas to them - like already levitating their arm when all I've said is in a moment I'm going to ask them to lift their arm, but I've not actually asked them yet. Most people volunteering do love to be hypnotised, I definitely find some of the same people very keen to be hypnotised...

@@DanTheTortoise thx for ur response. When he reacted that fast to your directions, I thought it was a demonstration of method. If its real, then that was so fast man!

Some people react fast to things (as mentioned, for demonstration purposes, some people are so responsive they actually react too fast), other people take their time or barely react. For example one of the four people who volunteered took many minutes to respond to an eyes open eyes closed demonstration because they were being competitive and wanted to prove it wouldn't work on them, rather than just engaging with the process and going with the flow, so I had to incorporate additional bits like disrupting their pattern of response, presenting the idea of responding the opposite, that I want them to keep opening their eyes to go deeper into hypnosis etc. The important thing in hypnosis is getting responses, so I didn't mind how they were responding other than the fact I was making a demonstration video of a specific technique and now, because of their response, I've veered off from the technique so much that the video is no longer a demonstration of that technique. There is a demonstration in this video of a typical response I normally get when doing this induction. The other demonstration has so many other elements in it and takes much longer and so would require a lot of extra explanation which would stop this video being so short. If it happens on a training course then that is just the way it is, but if it happens during prerecorded footage then I can just use footage recorded with a different subject if I have it...

If you do as described then you will know how to hypnotise as soon as you have learnt the first of the processes. What leads you to feel you have been unsuccessful when you have practiced? What occurred during your practicing? How did your subject respond to what you were doing and what about their response led you to feel it wasn't working?