What is Your Definition of Hypnosis?

Process by which one becomes open to influence - to thinking and imagining differently.

What do you means by processes? That is, from the subject position, why does hypnosis work at all? What's going on inside them?

What is going on is called trance state. Hypnosis is nothing but concentration and imagination.

Can you explain "trance state" further? I'm not trying to put you on the spot I'm just curious

Here's my understanding. For complicated reasons, which I won't go into right now, we are all driven to be skeptical of ideas unless we feel they have come from us. If we feel a belief or argument or imperative has come from someone else and does not seemingly relate to our own beliefs or thinking, we are driven to question or even reject it.

Note: I use the word "feel" because it doesn't matter whether the idea comes from us or not. (Indeed, most, if not all, ideas we encounter have their roots outside of us.) What matters is that we feel that an idea comes from us - that it resonates with who we think or feel we are.

Hypnosis, then, is the process of engaging a person's mind in such a way that she becomes more open to accepting a certain idea. She becomes, in effect, suggestible.

When a person's mind is engaged, she infuses her imagination into the idea. She starts to read between the lines, so to speak. This is why, when we are watching an exciting movie, we are able to "forget" that everything in the movie is set-up, contrived, scripted. Instead, we put ourselves in the world, acting as if the world of the movie is real. We become, in a sense, "hypnotized."

This is what I mean by "influence." When a person becomes open to your influence, such that she is engaged and actively considering what you have to say, she is becoming hypnotized.

Hypnosis can also be quite succinctly described as a method of accessing and influencing the subconscious mind in order to change or remove limiting and/or damaging beliefs relating to a wide range of issues, confidence, health, fears and phobias, psychosexual problems and more.

darmos653 wrote:Hypnosis can also be quite succinctly described as a method of accessing and influencing the subconscious mind in order to change or remove limiting and/or damaging beliefs relating to a wide range of issues, confidence, health, fears and phobias, psychosexual problems and more.

How and why does the "method of accessing and influencing the subconscious mind" work?

MetronomeWhispers wrote:

darmos653 wrote:Hypnosis can also be quite succinctly described as a method of accessing and influencing the subconscious mind in order to change or remove limiting and/or damaging beliefs relating to a wide range of issues, confidence, health, fears and phobias, psychosexual problems and more.

How and why does the "method of accessing and influencing the subconscious mind" work?

That is perfectly well explained here:

betawarrior wrote:Here's my understanding. For complicated reasons, which I won't go into right now, we are all driven to be skeptical of ideas unless we feel they have come from us. If we feel a belief or argument or imperative has come from someone else and does not seemingly relate to our own beliefs or thinking, we are driven to question or even reject it.

What does it mean to "feel they come from us" How would a person know the difference? And how would you get them to feel your ideas are their ideas?

1) When I said that we must feel that the idea comes from us, I mean that the idea must resonate with our thinking or worldview (often subconscious). It must feel as if we could have created the idea. Here, I am distinguishing between the idea itself and its iteration.

2) A person wouldn't necessarily "know" the difference, but feel it. The idea will resonate. He'll find it attractive. Acceptable ideas are attractive; unacceptable ideas are repulsive. For example, to a liberal, universal health care sounds attractive. To a conservative, it might sound repulsive. (Note: This "feeling" is not necessarily rational.)

3) Getting people to feel your idea is their idea is a matter of positioning your idea within their thinking. An idea cannot be pounded in from the outside; it must be fostered from within their mind. There are many different ways this can be, more than I can elaborate on in a simple forum post. After all, this is essentially what hypnosis is about.

What I can say is that your success at hypnosis is based on your ability to get a person to see your idea as attractive - based on their subconscious thinking, not yours. Most people can consciously agree that overeating and low self-esteem are bad, but subconsciously, that is not the case. Hypnosis is successful only insofar as you can understand how your subject's subconscious interprets the world.