This is a clip from David Spiegel, MD profile looking at hypnosis at Stanford University from a scientific angle.

About depression in Breast Cancer patients

About Hypnosis

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By Bhaskar & Rajni Vyas

Take this as a parody; take it really seriously: Fact of the matter is Hypnotherapy is a Science is a parody.

This may sound to be a platitude for those who are learned and practicing hypnotherapy with demonstrable results. However, for those who find them novice to the field, it does come as a surprise. Any idea that is novel, fascinating, luminous, dazzling or may be even, bizarre, – like a girl in the magic box being cut into two and jumping alive as one – produces a specific response from the observer. That also is common sense: One gets dazed and at times aghast! Hypnotic processes and magical demonstrations both appear extraordinary and yet, there is no magic about it: and, both are based on certain psychodynamic processes that are just being discovered – though such phenomena are a part of our every day life! Even noting certain details at a murder or terror scene and forgetting some is based on functioning of certain neurons and genes (!) at such times.

People mistakenly say; with the advent of quantum physics, Newtonian physics is outdated. They forget we are talking about an apple falling from a tree to the ground and the planets going round the solar system – even stock market functions as per the law of cause and effect! But did not Newton say that give me a long enough stick and make me stand in the solar system outside the earth and, I shall lift up the earth with my stick!” For those who take a cue from this and try to use the law of gravitation for pulling money out of stock market through self- hypnosis – thinking themselves to be great telepathic  programmers of the markets forget  the elementary principle that in gravitational pull mass is the important factor. The gravitational pull of greed can be like a black hole so that huge finance institutions across the world also get sucked, shrunk and disappear. This is also science as the hypnotic process is: if you do not believe it, wake up some corpses that commit suicides following stock market crashes, and ask. They would tell you that stock market cast a hypnotic spell on them and, they likened themselves to Napolean Bonaparte – out to conquer the world.

So science is all about cause and effect, that cause causality to change the environment; results and variables, predictability and certainty. If physics and mathematics are such high precise sciences conforming to the principles of deductive logic, believe us when we say, hypnosis will also confirm to those principles. If you do not believe us, ask; but do not ask us; ask politicians! They will go a step further to prove that bluffing is also a science and, holding shares and not holding shares in IPL is all a make believe! Did not Sankaracharya say about the world being a mirage? Brahmam satyam: jagan mithya!  If all the world is a stage and we are but players in a drama, was Shakespeare not a great hypnotist to create such illusions that Romeo and Juliet still exist?

Some innocent genuinely nice people –  to be innocent genuinely nice people is a hypnodrama being played most frequently by good, bad and ugly; all across the band – ask us: do you believe in the ghosts? We refer them to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is pathetic to see that Mr. Hyde hides in most of us, most of the times – and some of us secretly love him too! and several expert psychiatric doctors Jekylls cannot exorcise him. Yet it may take a fresher in Clinical Psychology who has just walked out of the hypnosis workshop, a few sessions of cold fusion with hypnosis that the pathological ego states fuse into one forever.

Life is like that! Did not Meera Bai sing about the fools being rewarded with kingdom and Pandits going a begging? Even Freshers in hypnotherapy will crack the psychodynamics of a schizophrenic by just cataloguing the few years backwards of the  young man to discover when was it that he was bit by a scorpion girl – vishkanya to be precise– that left him beaten, battered and perceptually blind so as to have disorientation in time and space. Most high profile psychiatrists will ravel in uncovering the schizophrenic gene and keep changing molecules after molecules for this young man. Yes, they are right in ridiculing psychoanalysis as the pursuit of lazy nineteenth century psychologists. Who has the time today to browse, read and mull over Romeo and Juliet!  All the world is a stage, and we the doctors are just the actors in the melodrama that is played about: let us do our role to prescribe and change from one molecule to another.  Never mind that it may be an ordeal for most mentally wrecked! However, do not be surprised that a naïve hypnotherapist age regresses empathetically this wreck if a human being so as to erase the traumatic memories by selective ablation of the past event; and, lo and be hold, schizophrenic is restored to normalcy. Even beyond, it is astonishing to see the post hypnotic suggestion work so that the boy passes his final examination with distinction. That should remind us of the fact that Jonathan Nash won a Nobel Prize: It  is a real life story.

Yet, if some credit is to be given to quantum physics as some kind of hypnodrama, it tells us about every particle changing its action with presence of an observer. Einstein refused to believe that a mouse looking at the Universe does change it. He said, God does not play dice. The hard core psychopharmocologists and psychiatrists would not believe that a tiny-mini clinical psychologist can look into the psychodynamics of a ravaged mind and, through the cyclic rotation of time dimension, can bring about a cure that would very soon be drugless.

Neil Bohr’s reply to Einstein was : let God do his work and physicists their own. Let psychopharmocologists and psychiatrists not agree and keep doing what they well know that they imperfectly know: hypnotherapists when committed to what they know they are doing and do it perfectly; will help schizophrenics with lasting support.

The energy, which is unknowingly being provided by the consciousness of the observer in quantum physics, seems to be playing the same truant in the relationship between the subject and the therapist, particularly in severe illness like schizophrenia . The charisma of therapist influences, at times, so greatly that one sees God when none exists.   Poor hypnotherapist is trapped with the difficulty of studying the human behavior which changes its route with presence of each different observer. There may be more interpretations of psychodynamics than the number of therapists and, Thomas Kuhn and Karl Pribram will back us with this that none can be proved wrong! Knowing the real self, what lies deep within, what stirs up and stimulates unconscious mind with every new experience; such questions  can be innumerable! Like they say, knowing Shiva is enough for many, but for few it is the search of Mahadev, and for even fewer, it goes up to the search of Mahakaal.

As such, who would and who would not dare to discern the darkness which is lying deep within the realms of Unconsciousness? Once again, hypnotherapist will answer such questions most humbly that he is just a scientist: a poor scientist:  for him the success of such probing lies in restoring his subject to functionality.

Humans are the most trainable species, and we train our minds with everything that we see or listen or just experience. Why would the Panch Tantra or Anderson Tales be so effective in teaching a child about morals and discipline? Story telling being one of the oldest arts is enough to explain suggestibility and also to predict when someone is highly suggestible. We do not need to quote Milton Erikson. We can easily find the references of ill/well effects of the daily televison soap operas on the families following them. With the women having greater difficulty in finding peace and being content, and the men having trouble of searching the satisfaction with uncontrolled drive of ambition, we are talking about a society which is very high on indulgence. So, when a hypnotherapist cures a long history of infertility in just a few sessions, it is not miracle. It is a hundred percent science, that restores the milleu interior to normal natural pulsatility that some one out there programmed the female since the times of Eve. It sounds incredible. So let us take a simpler case: What happens when a women is humiliated for her good looks? Very simple, she develops twitching of face. It is wonderful to see hypnotherapeutic suggestions work and the women being rid of her six years long abysmal trouble in just sixty days!

After all this persuasion, if the reader is now convinced that hypnotherapy is indeed a science as much is surgery, beware that we might just be fooling you as much as when we tell you we are sure that rebirth exists! Only a few centuries back, surgery was done by barbers: British respect that tradition even to-day! And if you respect British for all the imperial glory that they once had, how ingenuinely incongruent they may might be to carry on with the tradition of Royalty? Ask Milton Erikson. He will carry on the tale till such times that you will end up convinced that any barber may become a surgeon but it requires a real creative genius to paint a Mona Lisa.

We agree. Milton Eriksons are not made: they happen as the flowering of the creative upsurge of a huge human potential. So, in the end, may be, we were just fooling you: hypnotherapy is not  science: it is an art at its excellence: no Large  Hadron Collider will ever produce a Leonardo da Vinci or a Milton Erikson!

Kumar Venkatachalam

Psychotherapy per se would not have flourished a lot in India pre 2000 time period. But that has changed a lot. Even now people in villages may not come for it. Urban and sub urban do. 15- 20 years back when I started my hypnotherapy practice I could still manage a decent practice. Most of my practice was 2 – 5 sessions even though there were a few I could not do much for, (my failing) but who had nowhere else to go since there was no one else in my whole state who was practicing psychotherapy. But I think with hypnotherapy things can be brief and also impress people that something is being done. otherwise people discount psychotherapy in India, as talk therapy. They would not go for it. They get enough counseling and advice as part of the community interaction, extended family etc. and they say they do not need more of the same from a professional and also pay for it.

Kumar Venkatachalam

When I first learnt hypnosis I learnt it from a person “with a different background” only. He was a retired manager from a rubber company, But he did much better hypnotherapy than a psychiatrist that I knew. I used to spend hours and hours of time with him, watching his sessions etc. till almost his death in 1993. Then I continued his practice in the same place till 1997. It is the nature of hypnosis practice even now in India, a lot of people with no formal health or psychology background have a lot of interest in hypnotherapy and do a lot of good work. Madras Hypnotic circle of which I used to be a member had about 95% folks without formal training in medicine or psychology but good therapists nevertheless. I certainly believe that healing is not just for physicians. Healers can come from any background.

Two of Indias greatest Hypnotherapists, Dr Bhaskar and Dr Rajni Vyas, authors of the Indian Handbook of Hypnotherapy are conducting a unique “once-in-a-lifetime” workshop in Stockholm October 6-7 with the International Hypnotists Guild.

We have the incredible fortune to be able to present this opportunity thanks to a coordination with a large workshop for Hypnosis in Bremen.

If you are involved in hypnotherapy, curious about Indian Philosophy in combination with Western Medicine and prefer hands-on example taught workshops this is The One. If you need to travel from anywhere in Europe to Stockholm to attend, rest assured it is shorter than going to India.

Sat-Sun 10.00-17.00 (6.900 kr plus moms).

Apply here for one of the last slots: APPLY HERE

P.S. If you can’t attend this workshop, come thursday to the introduction at the NLP-society in collaboration with IHG: NLP-Society of Sweden