Learn hypnosis history from Glasgow Hypnotist Jonathan Clark

“On The Count Of Six You Will Open Your Eyes…”

A 6 Part E-Course revealing the truth about Hypnosis

By

Jonathan Clark

Master Hypnotherapist

Founder & Developer of HGE™

PART 2

A HISTORY OF HYPNOSIS

Let’s go all the way back in time to early China, & Hawaii – Ha Breathing was a technique used to build the chi, the mana (life force), whilst at the same time putting the breather into a profoundly altered state of consciousness.  To this day most martial arts, yoga and meditation techniques start with breathing exercises.  In Hawaii the sacred knowledge was called Huna – and the Kahuna was known for that thousand yard stare that all good gurus have, called Hakalau, the Shaman state.  Instantaneous healing was the norm in Hawaii.  Walking on lava started the fire walking craze that Tony Robbins made modern and famous.  There was the theory of the five elements, fire, air, water, earth, and the last element - the ether, or trance element, which is purple black

In India – there were the Snake charmers,  the Fakirs.  Hypnosis has its roots in meditation, which is Self hypnosis.  Chanting Mantras in your head to drown out and control the internal dialogue.  Eye closure was a sign of you’re going into a trance..

Patanjali’s Yoga sutras aimed for the same state of enlightenment.

In ancient Egypt there were the sleep temples, in which the priest would listen to your problems, touch your forehead and put you into a deep sleep state, and when you awakened the problem was miraculously gone!!  Sound familiar?  There are hieroglyphics in tombs that illustrate these procedures.

The Elber Papyrus describes an eye fixation technique.  The seers of Greeks used it, as did the Mayans in South America.  African witch doctors, Celtic Druids, Persian Magi – in every culture on every continent, trance was used for insight and healing.

Genghis Kahn is reported to have whipped his armies into a frenzy as they saw hallucinations induced by psyched up emotional states and group suggestion.  Throughout history many dictators and leaders used the same approach.

Many argue that Jesus used rapid inductions and suggestion to heal the sick, and to teach his followers.  Read the section in this book on generating therapeutic metaphors for an approach that does just that.

In the Middle ages in Europe there was The Royal Touch.  Touching the King’s robe, usually meant being blessed or being healed.  If you could get past the palace guards..  Usually purple.  You’ll have heard of the tradition of “Laying on of hands”.  To this day celebrities visit sick patients and their health improves…

1500 – Paracelsus – did healing with magnets.  Nikken distributors now sell similar magnetic products 500 years later.

1600  A Priest called Valentine Braithwaite practiced hands on healing.  He became known as the “Great Irish Stroker”

1725 – Vienna, a Jesuit Priest called Father Maximillian Hehl.  Imagine going to see Father Hehl for confession!  He used magnets to heal people.  Later studied by a man called Mesmer whom you’ve probably heard of

1774 – Franz Anton Mesmer – where the name “Mesmerism” comes from.  Inspired by seeing Father Hehl demonstrating magnetic cures, he passed his hands over patients and they got better.  He had them sit in a bath full of iron filings.  He wrote a Doctoral Dissertation called “De Planetarum Influxu” stating that the planets influenced the body of man.  Later, he decided it wasn’t the magnets that helped people, but the person’s “animal magnetism” which is where that phrase comes from.  He studied the Planets and magnetic fields, and postulated that the physical body was like a battery with two poles, and that sometimes those poles could be flipped and become imbalanced.  (This is an opinion still shared today in the EFT technique).  In those days surgery killed people, while mesmerism cured them.  There were hundreds of proven cases documented in writing.  What was really at work, was the clients’ belief, expectation and hope that they would get better.  And so they did.

SOMETIMES THE CONSCIOUS MIND NEEDS TO GO THROUGH SOME SORT OF RITUAL, TO GRANT THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND THE PERMISSION IT NEEDS TO DO THE WORK IT CAN DO.

Encouraged by a man called Mozart, Mesmer set up a public performance in Paris where he invented a special stage that held 30 people, iron rods to hold onto, special effects, dramatic music and highly suggestible subjects.  He was the “Pop Idol” of his time.

Benjamin Franklin investigated Mesmer’s work and concluded that he was a fraud, and that al of his successes were caused by the patient believing and expecting to be cured.  How right he was!

1779 – A Catholic Priest called Father Gassner became known as a Faith Healer, and his parish believed he had God’s authority to heal them.  In the subdued lighting of his cathedral, with candles, incense, suggestions all in Latin (the ancient languages always make for more belief and authority!), Gassner would touch people with a diamond studded crucifix and they would fall asleep, in as little as 7 seconds!

1800 – Marquis Chastenet de Pusseguyr – wrote about Mesmer, coined the phrase “Somnambulist” or sleep walker.  He believed the magnetic power came from the magnetiser, not the client, again feeding the belief about being controlled.  He would magnetise a tree, and people who touched that tree would get results.   Sometimes, even if they touched the wrong tree, change occurred.  But then it would…

SOMETIMES THE CONSCIOUS MIND NEEDS TO GO THROUGH SOME SORT OF RITUAL, TO GRANT THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND THE PERMISSION IT NEEDS TO DO THE WORK IT CAN DO.

Now at this point in history, Pusseguyr and his contemporaries started exploring ESP and other unacceptable theories, which again did Hypnosis no favours, scrutinised and decried by the scientific community.

1815 – Abbe Faria approaches Hypnosis from a scientific standpoint, and developed his “eye fixation” approach, still used to this day. His career ended when some jealous physicians publicly humiliated him.

1838 – Professor John Elliotson – London, started openly using Mesmerism for surgical purposes, despite conventional belief at the time that healing required pain!

Despite carrying out major operations with large audiences of younger, eager to learn doctors, he left the medical community after a huge bust-up, and a specially selected committee was employed to remove all records and traces of his work.

1838 – James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, set out to debunk Mesmer and his work as old wives tales, and ended up writing a book extolling all the virtues of Mesmerism, which he now renamed “Hypnosis” which from the Greek means “nervous sleep”.  This term still exists today, although sometimes disguised as “group meditation”, “closed eye process” or “guided imagery”.  Yup, its all Hypnosis.  He also wrote about the learning state and published a book called “Neurypnology” in 1843.  Specialised in vocal suggestions and using bright light to induce trance

1850 – Up until this time the bulk of the Medical community had shunned hypnosis because it lacked proven research.  A Scottish Surgeon called James Esdaile did thousands of minor operations, hundreds of major procedures, including painless amputations,  by inducing the Esdaile state, a coma like state in which he could operate on patients,  without the use of any anaesthetic.  He wrote a book called “Mesmerism in India” which explained how he cut the post-operative mortality rate from 50% to 8%.  Note that India has a long history of the occult and esoteric, thus the patient largely already held all the belief and expectation needed.  Funnily enough his success rate in Great Britain at the time was dramatically reduced – funny that.

1860 – In France Pierre Janet and Alfred Binet could create diseases and take them away again using hypnosis

1864 – A country Doctor called Ambroise Liebault in Nancy, France develops his own system of Hypnosis and suggestion, and does a free 10 minute consultation with every patient.  He was trained by a man called Charcot

1865 – A man called Hippolite Bernheim teams up with Liebault & forms the first ever hypnosis clinic at  the Nancy Medical School – the worlds most acclaimed centre for healing using hypnosis

1873 – Dr James Charcot attempts to revive Mesmerism, including a scientific classification of various trance depths.  The challenge at this point in history was that Hypnosis was used to make symptoms disappear, without any regard to addressing the underlying causes.

1880 – Dr Joseph Breuer uses Hypnosis to uncover the root cause of a girl’s inability to drink water form a cup.  In trance she recalled being disgusted to see a dog drinking out of her cup, hence the ongoing reaction.  As soon as the root cause was made conscious, the problem disappeared.  Thus was formed the basis of most psychoanalysis.

1890’s – Sigmund Freud studies with Charcot at Nancy.  He later declared Hypnosis didn’t work and devised the talking therapy cure instead, promoting Psychoanalysis as more effective than Hypnosis.  He openly stated that the Unconscious Mind was evil and dirty and perverse.  Interestingly Freud was a cocaine addict and he used to rub it on his gums.  His gums rotted and he had some false teeth made but they were so uncomfortable and ill-fitting, it was very hard to understand him when he spoke.  So instead he started sitting behind the patient, and got them to do all the talking.  Needless to say, in one stroke, Hypnosis was set back by decades, just as it was starting to get somewhere…

Emile Couet was another figure of interest at this time, promoting self-suggestion without trance.  You probably know his work from the phrase “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better”

1890 – William James, an American professor of psychology, creates what becomes formally known as Psychotherapy.  He also talks about Submodalities and Time Lines, two areas greatly expanded and extended in the field of NLP

1895 – Michel Chevreul a French chemist uses a pendulum to detect elements in chemical compounds.  This is the same technique used by Uri Geller to detect oil and gold for big companies (with little success)

1898 – Boris Sidis “Psychology of Suggestion” wrote about difference between indirect (choices) and direct  (command) suggestion

1900 – split between two factions:

 – Freud and Psychoanalysis.  “Not for the poor”.  He also said it would take 100 - 300 hours to fix a problem.  I wonder how much he charged per hour?  Or how much cocaine cost back then?

- Behaviourists – no such thing as an Unconscious Mind or Hypnosis, it’s all conditioned response

1902 – Bill Twitmyer notices that when he approaches patient with small hammer, their knee jerks, hence the term “knee jerk reaction”.  Publishes his findings to the American Medical Association who say “ho hum”

1903 – J. Milne Bramwell lists a whole bunch of hypnosis techniques at the back of his book which calls Hypnosis a load of nonsense

1904 – Ivan P. Pavlov makes his dogs salivate with steak and a tuning fork (not a bell).  Combines this with Twitmyer’s work and presents his paper called stimulus response to the Russian Medical Association who go wild over it.

1933 – Harvard University in the US,  man called Clark Hull trains a young medical student called Milton Erickson

1936 – Pavlov’s work “Conditioned Reflexes” is published.

1943 – George Estabrooks prevalent in the field.  During the Second World War, Hypnosis was used extensively in POW camps for dentistry, dermatology and other procedures, mainly because they had no drugs.

1920 – 1980 Milton Erickson, MD, the one man mainly responsible for getting hypnosis recognised by the AMA as a legitimate form of medical treatment in 1959.

At about the same time Carl Jung brings out work on his psychological archetypes – actually lifted from the Tarot Card deck!

1950’s – Dave Elman, arch rival of Milton Erickson, practicing Hypnosis

1957 – Andre Weitzenhoffer writes “General Techniques of Hypnosis”

1964 – Leslie LeCron writes about Ideomotor Signalling, communicating with the Unconscious with finger signals, twitches, etc

1960’s – Fritz Perls invents Gestalt Therapy.  His work is edited by one John O’Stevens.  He later changes his name to Steve Andreas, who later figures greatly in the field of NLP and was one of my first teachers in the subject

1970 – Jeffrey Zeig creates the Erickson Foundation

1972 – California Student Richard Bandler teams up with linguistics professor Jon Grinder and create Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), largely based on Erickson

1975 – Ernest Rossi writes 10 books with Milton Erickson, some after Erickson died!

1979 – The Hypnotic Patterns of Milton Erickson MD volumes 1 and 2 released

1986 – Dr Everett ‘Tad’ James produces Time Line Therapy ® based on Erickson

1994 – Tad James trains David Shephard in NLP, Time Line Therapy & Hypnosis

1997 – David Shephard trains Jonathan Clark in NLP, Time Line Therapy & Hypnosis

2005 – Jonathan releases HGE

TODAY – you join this esteemed lineage!

Congratulations!  Welcome to the family.

STATES FOR LEARNING & TRAINING

The best state for the Hypnotherapist to be in is ….. guess what?

Trance!

You go into trance and they’ll follow.

I often come off stage or out of a therapy session and I have no idea what happened…..at least not consciously.

So I take lots of written notes…….to remind me

Bothered about limiting decisions or bad events in your past?  See the Hakalau segment on the next few pages of this book.  It’s a techniques used in Hawaii to expand your awareness & your consciousness.   “Hakalau” means to focus in and spread out at the same time – how can you do that?  A form of peripheral vision – where you pay more attention on the peripheral than the focussed

In all traditions Kahuna (learned ones) or Shamans can access expanded states of awareness quickly.  A Trance state – focussed, expanded and able to access it rapidly.  THIS IS How to achieve & stay – relaxed, focussed & centred

Wouldn’t it be useful to be calm most of the time, more often?  To do that you need some way of staying externally focussed.  All negative emotions (anger, sadness, fear) require that your attention is on the inside.  So to be calm, relaxed, your attention needs to be on the outside. 

Imagine being able to learn more, and more quickly.  What if there was a way to make negative emotions vanish at will…  Or maybe you used to get nervous presenting?

Would it be useful to be calm?

Want the secret of all learning? Here it comes: All learning is state dependent.  That’s it.  The state you are in when you learn something is the state you need to be in when you want it back out again.  And the best state to learn in is trance…

YOU MIGHT WANT TO WRITE THAT DOWN

– the state you’re in when you learn is the state you need to be in when you want to recall.  That’s why when you get sad, you’re sad about all the sad things in the sad file.  Or you get angry and all the things you’re angry about all come up at once.

This also keeps you safe on a dark night.

Hakalau was the active meditation of the Kahuna, where they were externally focussed, in peripheral vision.  Called Hakalau from Hawaiian Huna, it means literally “To stare at, and to allow to spread out”. You see there’s a difference between Foveal vision vs Peripheral vision.

Foveal vision is when you focus on a point and everything is detailed and sharp.  This is the kind of vision we use in driving, talking, reading, in fact almost all of the time. Peripheral vision is a relaxed gaze, the day dreamy state where you’re not actually looking at anything in particular, you’re just using your eyes to drink in the whole scene, such as when you’re visualising or looking at the scenery.

In Foveal vision you activate the Sympathetic (Stress) response, as in adrenaline, fight or flight, whereas in peripheral vision you stimulate the Parasympathetic (Relaxed)

Response, which is calm, tranquil and externally focussed. In fact the word Na as in “Kahuna” and “Huna” means calm, centred, and quiet.  Other cultures used mildly hallucinogenic substances, rattles, and drums.  In Hawaii it was thought best to be self-sufficient, and not to rely on external props, to just be able to just go into the state at will.  This technique can be a real eye opener!

The steps are almost identical to Patanjali’s description in the Yoga Sutras

If you refer back to the Communication Model diagram earlier in this book, you’ll see that a relaxed state is controlled by a combination of Physiology and Internal Representation.

The Physiology is relaxed, looking straight ahead, breathing deep in the stomach, letting your teeth separate.  Your mouth doesn’t need to be open but you should loosen your jaw.  In 1750 Mesmer stood at your head, would ask you to look up at his eyes as he used “animal magnetism” to heal.

James Braid a Scotsman, in 1843 noticed the upward angle of the eyes, and he developed an eye fixation technique in book called  “Neurypnology” He set out to debunk Mesmer, and eventually ended up singing his praises.  Braid named the relaxed state “Hypnosis” which means “nervous sleep”.

Here’s how to do Hakalau – or go into peripheral vision

1. Ho'ohaka: Just pick a spot on the wall to look at, preferably above eye level, so that your field of vision seems to bump up against your eyebrows, but the eyes are not so high as to cut off the field of vision.  Slightly upward, 45 degrees preferably.  That’s the way you start this, after a while you won’t have to do that again.

2. Kuu: "To let go." As you stare at this spot, just let your mind go loose, and focus all of your attention on the spot.  Stare at it, loosen your jaw, let go – “Brain Dump”

3. Lau: "To spread out" Notice that within a matter of moments, your vision begins to spread out, and you see more in the peripheral than you do in the central part of your vision.  Notice you can begin to pick up information in the peripheral

4. Hakalau: Now, pay attention to the peripheral. In fact, pay more attention to the peripheral than to the central part of your vision.

5. Ho'okohi: Stay in this state for as long as you can. Notice how it feels. As you do it for a while begin to notice the giggly, ecstatic feeling that bubbles up from inside.  It seems to be impossible to feel a negative state in this state

The wise one, the Shaman, the learned one in Hawaii was called a Kahuna.  “Na” means  calm and centred – they spent most of their lives in this state.  Certainly when outdoors in nature – they could see small movements in the woods, the water, in the air. On the ground.  Here’s the challenge – once you’re good, you can get into the state in under a minute, and notice how far out you can see things. 180 degrees?  More than that?

Get in touch with the environment around you, pull it around all the way behind you…..  Think of it like Radar, all the way behind you.  Your awareness fills the entire room.  You may not sense it visually, though you can begin to feel the energy patterns as though you saw them, all the way around you.  That’s why it was so important – to become totally connected to your environment.  This is the process.

This is the neurological equivalent to “there’s no difference between me and the universe I live in” – you have expanded awareness.  Then you can bring your eyes down, but stay in that state of Hakalau.  Once you’ve got that, move around yet stay in that state.  Stand up, walk around, staying in Hakalau, walk normally.  As you turn keep connected to what’s around and behind you.  Stay in this state for 5 minutes.  When you feel you can keep that state well, come back & sit down.

Use this all of the time, until it becomes automatic.  The more you do it the easier it is to let go of negative emotions.  Many Shaman won’t actually make eye contact with you cos it could interfere with their state (actually you should be able to look someone in the eye and still be in Hakalau).

In Part 3 of this E-Course we’ll talk about when NOT to use Hypnosis, and the exact clues YOU CAN SEE that tell you when someone actually going into trance…

ALTERNATIVELY come and join me on my LIVE Hypnosis Seminar April 27 - 28th in Glasgow, Scotland.  Full details are HERE