In the early 1960’s, my friends and I went to see the hypnotist Reveen, when he was beginning his concert tours in Canada. This was about 50 years ago at the Winnipeg Arena which had 4400 seats. We would go up on the stage to participate in the hypnosis show. Reveen had filled every seat for eight shows in seven days. When the show ended, I had been on stage for about three hours performing all the acts that he instructed me to follow. I felt that I had remembered everything I had done, and as a young boy, just beginning my study of hypnotism, I still felt that I had not been hypnotized.
The next day I went back to my high school and I told my teacher that I had been on the stage for three hours. I further told him that I knew exactly what I was doing on the stage, and I did not think I was hypnotized at all. The teacher then said to me: “So you were on the stage for three hours, you did everything Reveen told you to do, and you don’t think you were hypnotized. Then why did you do everything he told you to do?” I said “I felt like it.”
In fact, that is how hypnotism works. You feel like following the instructions of the hypnotist. Most people do not know if they are hypnotized. At every live seminar I do, I ask the audience to raise their hands if they know anyone who lost weight or stopped smoking after my seminars, yet they thought they were not hypnotized at all. Hands go up every night!
So, it is extremely common for people to think they were not hypnotized, when in fact they were hypnotized. People often need convincers, or what professionals call “trance ratification” to help them to believe and know that they were hypnotized. Sometimes this can be as simple as a hypnotist proving to the client that his arm has become stiff upon instruction, or his hands have locked together, or to look at the clock and notice that the time in hypnosis was actually much longer than the client believed. Generally time passes quickly in hypnosis. It feels good, and you let yourself become “lost” in the “imaginary dreams” presented by the hypnotist.
Other hypnotists sometime stick sterilized needles into the skin of the client to prove that they feel nothing at the instruction of the hypnotist. If someone strongly believes that they have not been hypnotized, even though they have been hypnotized, their doubts and negative thinking can sometimes cause them to talk themselves out of the benefits of their sessions. Such pessimistic thinking can cause people to hypnotize themselves to go back to smoking, to go back to overeating, or whatever else they overcame.
The more times someone is hypnotized, the more clearly they understand that they really have been hypnotized. Being hypnotized is a skill and the more someone practices this skill, the better their ability. I always recommend either repeat hypnosis sessions for reinforcement, or using my recordings for reinforcement.
Perhaps the most common misconception about hypnosis is that people believe they need to see me live and in person. Thousands of people all over the world have been helped with my hypnosis recordings alone in areas such as stopping smoking, weight loss, stuttering, stress control, self-esteem building and many, many other areas.
If you have the opportunity to come to a live seminar and then use the recordings after the seminar, that is the best approach. However, many people cannot attend my seminars because of distance or time pressures. If you feel you can use hypnosis, take action and use my hypnosis recordings to get started to a brand new life right away. So many clients say to me, “I wish I had done this years ago”.