You are in a trance right now. That’s right. Consider the possibility that on some level everything is hypnosis. Rather than being in or out of a hypnotic trance it is much more accurate to describe people as shifting from one trance to another all the time. This is normal and to a large degree necessary as trances help us to function. These are called waking trances, and believe it or not, they comprise the better portion of our daily lives. We have many trances such as the driving trance, the reading trance, the watching a movie trance, the eating trance, the shopping trance and many more.

A trance is basically a pattern of thinking, feeling and behavior learned through repetition. If you remember anything you’ve ever learned from tying your shoes to driving a car, you’ll realize you went through a few definite stages during the learning process. At first, you didn’t know how to do something, then you had to practice it but had to focus and think about each step as you did it. Finally, you were able to do it without even thinking about it anymore. You just did it.

Of course you were thinking on some level, but what happened during the learning process is that the skill was transferred from your conscious to your subconscious mind through the repetition of the learning process. This is a natural function of the mind that starts after we’re born and allows us to continue learning our entire lives, especially as things are changing around us all the time. The mind is like an iceberg where the tip of the iceberg is the conscious mind and the other 90% of the iceberg below the water is like the subconscious mind. If you think about all the things you’ve ever learned and then consider each one of those thinking-feeling-behavior patterns as a kind of trance you begin to realize how many trances are stored in the subconscious and are operating at any given moment in your life.

In a computer, information is input into the system that programs it to do certain things. Until that program is changed, uninstalled or overwritten, it will continue doing the same thing the same way over and over again. In our case, our trances are our programs. Most of our trances are beneficial. Problems arise when one or more trances conflict or no longer serve us in the we way desire. As we grow, we change, and trances that once served us well, may no longer be the best possible solution. They become outdated or outmoded and we need to upgrade to a newer better version.

The wonderful thing is that as human beings we have, to a great degree, the ability to reprogram or upgrade our own mind-body system. We can change. We just have to know how. We have choice and we have free will. For many of us, though, we try and try to change something about ourselves or our life and we find ourselves stuck in the same old pattern. Albert Einstein defined insanity as, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” When we are stuck in one of our trances or programs things can get pretty insanely frustrating and even lead us to giving up.

The reason we stay stuck isn’t because we’re bad or broken. The truth is we are fine just the way we are. In fact, if you think about it, the thing you’re doing that you don’t like is probably something you do quite well. For example, people who smoke or drink heavily or overeat do it extremely well. We just need to know how to do stop doing what we’re doing and choose something better.  And we can begin doing that by simply understanding the way specific trances are created. Once we know how our limiting trances are constructed we can begin uninstalling the ones we no longer want and start upgrading ourselves to new ways of being and doing that we truly desire.

One of the best way to make those changes is through Hypnotherapy and NLP. For more information or to schedule an appointment call 310 883-3994.