Association for Transpersonal
Hypnotherapy
Suite 306, Kemp House, 152-160 City Road, LONDON EC1V 2NX United Kingdom
The ATH is an organisational member of The General Hypnotherapy Standards Council
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Hypnotherapy is theater
"Hypnotherapy is theater, hypnotherapy is play (play is inherently creative), and hypnotherapy is ritual. Hypnotherapy is the appreciative use of pretense, and so it offers tremendous opportunity to explore space, time, language, choice, perception, thinking, sensing, relating, actions, cause and effect, feelings, memory-all aspects of the vast freedom of play and learning that makes up a human-being-in-process.
Our problems and limitations (as well as our resources and skills) are theatrical; they are inherently play (although all the playfulness has been more or less frozen, which, in itself, is a playful act). Our problems are rituals, however inelegant and painful, that give meaning and structure to the vast, unpredictable nature of the open space of reality.
As you prepare for a client, ask yourself: "What am I going to do in this session and how am I going to play with the space? How am I going to help the client regain awareness of their playfulness?"
That vast, unpredictable open space includes your office and you. Most of us are so habituated to the process of filling up the space, moment by moment, that we have lost all recognition that we do this, as well as all recognition of the significance of our doing it. Therefore, we do not recognize how we do it, or the significance of how we do it. In other words we have forgotten that we are playing...with our mind (it is all we really have to play with).
So how are you going to facilitate this playfulness-in a way that (a) helps people remember they are playing and (b) gives them back the power over the control panel of their play? In other words, how are you going to help yourself and others come out of the trance of "egoic minding," and regain the power to use trance states (our "toys") for greater benefit and enjoyment?
"Brahma's creative activity is not undertaken by way of any need on his part, but simply by way of sport, in the common sense of the word." (Brahma Sutras. Emphasis added. )
Our goal can be to become so playful that we can make use of anything at any time...and teach our clients to do the same."
Copyright, Jack Elias, October, 2003. All rights reserved.
Contact: Jack Elias, Author, Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP
American Institute for Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP, P.O. Box 17229, Seattle, WA, 98127, jack@FindingTrueMagic.com , www.FindingTrueMagic.com