Wellness Institute Blog

Thirty-five years ago I was a young marriage and family therapist seeing a wide variety of clients. Women would come in who were being abused by their husbands or boyfriends, mothers would bring in children who were angry or depressed and refused to go to school, and then there were the families of young sexual abuse victims. On many days, I felt overwhelmed and frustrated about what I could (or couldn’t) do to provide healing.

Traditional talk therapy helped them to understand but did not seem to provide real, long lasting changes in their life patterns. I had done trainings with Dr. Fritz Perls, Albert Ellis and Dr. Eric Berne. I incorporated Gestalt techniques, using a pillow and talking to the other (absent) person in an empty chair. These tools were vastly more therapeutic than just talking, but still did not make lasting changes.

How do I discover what my purpose in life is?

I recently taught a new Six Day Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy class in Los Angeles. Even at my age of seventy-four, after doing these trainings for over forty years, all during the class I experienced a deep sense of fulfillment and gratitude.

There were 26 students of all different ethnic backgrounds, ages and professional skill level. They were from seven different states from Rhode Island to California and from Washington to Florida. A more diverse group of people would hardly be imaginable.

We begin all our groups with sharing our professional information and reasons for attending. As the first day continues, we do several exercises which require closer with each other and differing amounts pf personal contact as the students feel more comfortable with themselves and each other.

Before performing any Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy, subtle energy work, spirit contact, trance work, meditation and before and during sessions with each individual client, it's always important to protect yourself. This is especially important with clients who feel toxic and who have had a lot of trauma in their lives. Also important if you are determined to be an empath.

Since not everyone visualizes, kinesthetic and auditory people may use specific music that creates the feeling of warmth, safety and physical protection.

Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy® is used worldwide as a powerful therapeutic and energetic healing modality. 

How Does Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy differ from other hypnotherapy methods?

Heart-Centered-Hypnotherapy® approaches therapy from a deeply caring and dynamically healing perspective. Our highly trained therapists and practitioners embrace the concepts of self-determination and the belief that every client contains, deeply within their own subconscious mind, the key to their own individual health and healing. 

Our first task as a Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy® clinician is learning how to speak the language of the subconscious mind. In talk therapy or counseling sessions we have spent years communicating with the conscious mind of our abused, addicted, depressed and anxious clients. In speaking with the conscious mind of our clients, we can offer them behavioral solutions, insight, empathy and positive affirmations. We can try to help them understand their difficulties, but this method contains limitations and often does not produce long lasting changes in their emotions or behavior. It does not relieve their anxiety or depression and talking certainly is extremely limited in treating and eliminating addictive behavior.

It is mainly through learning how to access this deeply personal guidance held within each human being that Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy® excels. The subconscious mind contains 90 percent of the mind and within that 90 percent is the deeply held key that unlocks the client’s individual inner guidance.

We have spoken in recent blogs about meta-consciousness, a level of self-awareness that is expansive enough to recognize self outside of normal time and space limitations. For example, I may begin to identify myself with my being that existed before conception, or in past lives, or in parallel lives, or to identify with possible future selves. I may begin to identify self holistically, recognizing the role of the sociopolitical and environmental milieu in the self’s identity. I may begin to experience self relationally, i.e., we, as human beings, grow and develop through relationship and not in individual vacuums of experience. I may identify as an extended self, which includes all of the ancestors, the yet unborn, all of nature, and the entire community. I may begin to recognize myself as community, as a collective of selves within. These tend to be feminist, Afrocentric, and indigenous perspectives.

The first level of exploration begins with the most visible level of consciousness: our projections. What we project onto others on a daily basis, we unconsciously project from our  deepest, darkest shadow parts.

The parts I don't like about myself are referred to as disowned parts of myself. These are the shadow parts that hide and can often be easily seen by others in our life. However, we are often wearing blindfolds and are the last to see them. We mostly see the effects of their presence (like breadcrumbs dropped on a trail) and we are left wondering how those crumbs got there and who left them.

And the shadow forms an archetypal alliance (called an autonomous complex) in order to become more powerful, with the intention of creating a better defense against being hurt, betrayed, abandoned or neglected. Sometimes “the best defense is an offense”, and so my autonomous complex is much more powerful than me, the ego. And more difficult to see because it lives not in the 10% of the conscious mind, and not even in the deeper 90% of the subconscious, but it swims in the depths of the ocean of the unconscious!

We can achieve deep healing in individual sessions or within a group. How do they compare? Here are four distinctions from our experience with both. 

1. In an individual therapy session there is often a lot of transference and countertransference. In the past, before managed care, many therapists spent years analyzing the transference. In other words, he/she was using the client’s projections and dream symbols to be able to see the shadow parts of the client. Here are two problems with that approach:
   
   
   • The first is that just talking about this deeper unconscious material does bring it to awareness, but does not resolve it. These shadow parts and complexes reside in the depths of the unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a major tool that we prefer that takes the client into those depths in a way that is self-directed and involves little intervention on the part of the therapist. Countertransference is significantly bypassed.
   • Often the therapist is doing as much projecting as the client is. In other words, many therapists are not doing their own personal transformational work, which means not working through their own shadow parts.
     
     
2. What a therapist knows about a client is mostly what he/she experiences in the office: a very unnatural and limited environment. No wonder Freudian and Jungian analysis took twenty years, with the client attending sessions multiple times per week! The only interactions the therapist observes are the ones he/she has personally with the client. In Jungian terms, in the office the client presents their persona or their out front personality. So, the therapist knows only one side of the story, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. What the client reports is brought in by the superficial persona or by a shadow part’s one-sided report.

Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy is used worldwide as a powerful therapeutic and energetic healing modality.  

Accessing Metaconsciousness

Many people have interpreted karma as an “eye for an eye” and have come to see karma as punishment. I have often heard people say, “I must have done something really bad in a past life to deserve this.” But that is not really how it works. The concept of karma should not be used to make us feel guilty or shame us. It is simply a natural encounter with the consequences of our previous behavior: