In utmost excitement I booked on to James Tripp’s Hypnosis Wizardry weekend due to happen in August
To my delight, he’s also included a whole load of free audio, video and PDF resources to go with it, including his “Hypnosis Without Trance” audio book. Now, I’ve been dying to get my hands on this for some time, so, with a couple of longish train journey coming up, I was relishing the thought of plugging in and getting to grips with hypnotic loops, the hypnotic partnership and the whole HWT thing.
I’m writing this on one of the said train journey’s (thanks to WordPress for iOS) and I have paused the book after only a few chapters.
Why? Because a throw away comment has completely changed my thought and frame of hypnosis and I am brimming with excitement at what this new understanding might mean!
James says that with the idea of traditional hypnosis comes the requirement to have a trance state that you must “deepen” and that this idea limits what hypnotic phenomena you can achieve because certain phenomena require a certain “depth”.
I think that any hypnotist who has actually hypnotised anyone will agree with me that some people don’t need as much depth to achieve things like hallucination while others can’t achieve the relatively simple phenomena of arm levitation despite great depth of trance.
The thing that has got me all excited is the idea that maybe the trance itself is a hypnotic phenomena.
Let that sink in for a moment…
When I consider that as a possibility all sorts of doors that I didn’t know were even there open up!
If trance is a phenomenon, then when we achieve other phenomena, we are actually stacking them together? What if some people can’t stack like that?
What if achieving trance is a convincer for the subject that they’re hypnotised? Or how about the other way round: that because they’re not feeling “tranced” that it’s not working…
If we dispense with the idea of trance as being a required milestone on the way to hypnosis, then engaging in what James calls the “Hypnotic Partnership” with the subject (although clearly I’m going to have to find another word to describe them now) becomes so much easier!
I bet that if budding hypnotists started with this as the frame around which to learn hypnosis, they’d find learning, practicing and engaging people in hypnosis sooo much easier!
I really can’t wait for the course and might have to start practicing this stuff before the date!
Right, I’m nearly back at Gravesend and I still haven’t gotten past chapter 2!
It was interesting to hear Anthony Jacquin’s podcast with Jay Noblezada where he said that James struggled to demonstrate his model at Change Phenomena because the subjects kept going into trance.
What about the possibility that without trance, it is just compliance?
Hi Nick
Why not, with trance, it’s compliance?
No one went into trance at Change Phenonena, they went into a neurologically generated experience that matched their personal idea of hypnosis/trance.
I know this because Trance doesn’t exist any more that Thor the Thunder God does. If you think you have evidence for Trance that is any more robust than the evidence for the existence of Thor, I’ll change my opinion.
Compliance is a tool of the hypnotist, not hypnosis itself.
J
You know, I once had a heated discussion over beers and curry with a retired Cannon from the Church of England. He said that “God” was a theory. The same as any other kind of scientific theory (e.g. string theory). He argued that there is just as much proof of a God as there is of the universe being made of all sorts of inter-connected strings. Maybe you’re both right?