Hypnotherapy and Mindfulness are awesome when combined. Here’s why!
How often do we slip into patterns of daydreaming about the future, imagining how we’d like it to be and wishing that we could make it happen? How often do we slip back into the past, replaying scenes of yesteryear and wishing we’d made different choices?
So many of my clients spend their lives living in hope of a better future or in regret for what happened in the past.
Neither activity is helpful. The past is done. We can certainly change the past, since it is merely a matter of perception and perspective, but we cannot change the facts. The choices we made in the past cannot be undone. We can change how we feel about it but we cannot change what happened.
The future is within our control, to a degree, and yet it is not now.
Now is all we have. Get the now right and the future is rendered more under our control. The future, after all, is no more than a series of nows.
Hypnotherapy, combined with fully qualified psychotherapy and hypnosis could help you to secure a better now. A better now could help to provide you with a better future.
Living in the past cannot help you to live a better now. It cannot provide a better future.
Constantly looking ahead will never help you to live a better now. It will prevent you from building a better future.
Give me a call if you don’t understand. I will help you to understand why living more in the here and now will neutralise both your regrets and your fears of the future.
Mindfulness is NICE approved
Many of my clients have been introduced to mindfulness by their CBT therapists, the therapists whom they have finished with before coming to see me. They have been given the impression that mindfulness is all about breathing in a certain way or else thinking of nothing else but the food that they are currently eating.
It’s not about listening to a recording, feeling relaxed at the end of it and then getting back to normal life and the same old habits. Mindfulness, at its best, is learning to embed its approaches into everyday life to such an extent that it becomes an unconscious habit.
It becomes a way of being which helps you to become more aware of what you’re doing, feeling and thinking to such an extent that each action, thought and feeling becomes a choice.
When we are aware of what we’re doing we have a choice. Do we continue doing it? Is there a better option? If we make better choices over time then those choices become a new and better habit.
Hypnosis can accelerate the process of mindfulness. The two approaches when combined are more effective than either alone.
I could teach you to employ strategies based on mindfulness, hypnosis and other forms of psychotherapy. Together these have helped hundreds, thousands, of former clients to achieve their goals. You could learn to do the same thing too. Give me a call and we’ll discuss how to help you do the same.
Mindfulness is so much more than a bit of breathing.
It is being aware and accepting of everything within and around us. We so often react in a certain way to a certain stimulus and think that this is the only way to react, the correct way to react, that we have no choice. Mindfulness can teach us to observe things without emotion, in order to be free to decide how best to react.
As an example, a person came to see me a few months ago because of the manner in which their marriage had ended. They felt awful and felt awful about feeling awful. It was a spiral down into depression.
I taught them (in one session) to observe how they felt, to accept how they felt and so to end that death-spiral. They acknowledged, in session two, that allowing themselves to feel awful had helped them to feel a whole lot better.
Anxiety and stress is a little bit like electricity. If we accept it and let it go we can have it flow through us without doing any damage.
If we resist it and tell ourselves that we “shouldn’t” it can burn us out like a light-bulb. Once we feel better about it it will begin to fade away.
Allowing emotions is so much easier than resisting them
A week later this client came back and told me (paraphrased) that “it’s amazing how allowing yourself to feel so sh*t can make you feel so much better.”
That person had learned to allow her emotions to come and go. They had learned how to forgive herself for having these emotions to begin with. They had learned how to relax around negative thoughts and feelings. Wouldn’t you like to be able to do the same?
Mindfulness isn’t just about learning to be all zen with feelings of depression or anxiety. Mindful approaches are also enormously helpful when it comes to learning how to deal with chronic pain, tinnitus, the urges and cravings surrounding addictions and so forth.
When pain rages, tinnitus blares and cravings gnaw, our response to those experiences is as important to how we cope with them as the original sensation itself. If we rage against the feeling, hate it, think of it endlessly and focus upon it, it merely grows worse. Mindfulness can help people to adjust their focus, change their response and learn how not to feel it.
Does this sound unlikely? I understand that. It is, however, true. It can be done and I have hundreds of former clients who can attest to its truth.
You can learn to live in the present whilst hypnotherapy prepares a better future and resolves past unhappiness
Mindfulness allows you to live now rather than in the past or else wishing your life away, waiting for a future time which never seems to arrive. You’re good enough as you are, right now, and mindfulness can help you see this for yourself.
Mindfulness, combined with a little hypnotherapy and a dose of counselling / psychotherapy saw this woman rediscover her strength and beauty within three sessions.
That person didn’t need me after that and was able to continue on their own, free of self-doubt and self-dislike. They were, in her own words: her “back to normal again.” They had a clear vision of how their future might unfold and they had dealt with the pain from the past.They were free and you could be too.
Give me a call, send me an email, use my contact form. Let me know what it is you’d like some hep to achieve and we’ll discuss how hypnotherapy, combined with UKCP accredited psychotherapy, mindfulness and other approaches could help you to achieve your goals.
You needn’t continue to feel like this. Things may seem impossible right now and yet the future needn’t prove to be a continuation of the past. Learn to live a better now and the future, day by day, will take care of itself.
We cannot change the facts of the past. We cannot control the future. We can, however, decide how to live in the now.
Mindfulness needn’t mean sitting around meditating for hours on end.
With a little practice it can become the habit of a lifetime. It gets in the way of nothing and enhances so much of life. You’ll appreciate things more, let things go more easily and forgive yourself for simply being human. After a short while you’ll be able to be mindful whilst going about your daily business.
Michael Yapko in ‘Mindfulness and Hypnosis’ (2011) argues that mindfulness and hypnotheerapy are very similar states of mind.
One can take a mindful state and turn it into something deeper and use that state of mind on which to project calmness and other positive developments into the future. One might argue that the state of mind induced by mindful meditation is taken and supercharged by hypnotherapy, turned into something useful.
Mindfulness and hypnotherapy, when combined with counselling and psychotherapy, is a strong therapy. Many people from Reading, Wallingford, Didcot and Oxford have used it to resolve their problems and are now living happier lives as a result.
What would you like to change?
By the way, I’m writing this post because mindfulness has just been accepted by NICE as a valid therapy and is recommending its use by the NHS. The NCHP, my training organisation, promotes mindfulness as a part of its training. We’ve known about it for ages. It’s nice for NICE and science to catch up. You can read more about it here:
Get in touch to find out more
Please do get in touch if you’d like to learn more. You can contact me by calling 07786123736/01183280284/01865600970. You can email me at paul@resolvedhypnotherapy.co.uk. You could also use the contact form at the bottom of the page.
Best wishes
