Hypnotherapy for anxiety, confidence, and performance, with Craig Meriwether

In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we explore what clinical hypnotherapy actually involves with Craig Meriwether. With more than 15 years of experience, Craig explains how hypnotherapy works, the science behind brainwave states, and why many common misconceptions don't reflect what happens in a clinical session. We also discuss the everyday mental and emotional challenges this approach is often used to support.

Drawing from his client work, Craig explores how the subconscious mind influences beliefs, habits, and emotional patterns, why it prioritizes safety, and how hypnotherapy may help uncover the roots of persistent challenges. This episode discusses a practical understanding of how hypnosis works and what current research suggests about its role in personal change.

This conversation is shared for educational and reflective purposes, offering insight into clinical hypnotherapy without suggesting it is appropriate for every individual or situation.

Key takeaways include:

•  Clinical hypnotherapy differs from common media portrayals of hypnosis 
•  The subconscious mind can shape long-standing beliefs, habits, and emotional responses 
•  Hypnosis involves natural brainwave states experienced in everyday life 
•  Exploring underlying patterns may support greater self-awareness and behavior change 
•  Research continues to examine hypnotherapy's role in emotional and behavioral well-being 

Explore how hypnotherapy helps release old mental patterns in Craig's website.

Visit Heallist.com - your portal to holistic healing, connecting seekers and thousands of practitioners across the globe.

Follow @heal_list on Instagram.

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Transcript

Yuli 0:00

Welcome to the Heallist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Heallist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the Heallist Podcast. If this content resonates, please hit subscribe or follow to support us independent content. This episode unpacks what clinical hypnotherapy actually involves, the common misconceptions, how a session works, and the everyday challenges it tends to support. And our guest today, Craig Mer iwether, is a subconscious transformation expert, clinical hypnotherapist, and medical hypnosis specialist with over 15 years of experience helping people break through mental and emotional barriers at the subconscious level. His work focuses on eliminating, limiting beliefs, resolving past emotional patterns, and creating lasting transformation from inside out. I'm really excited for this conversation. Craig, welcome to the show.

Craig 1:06

Thank you so much.

Yuli 1:08

So we haven't done an episode actually on hypnotherapy. So I'm really excited to unpack it and unpack it with you, somebody who's so knowledgeable and appealed. And hopefully we can shed some light into this still, I feel mysterious modality. I think maybe that's where we should start. Like, what would people that come to usually think hypnotherapy is and what it isn't?

Craig 1:31

Yeah, unfortunately, there's a lot of misconceptions and myths still about these uh techniques and tools. And hypnotherapy is this umbrella term under which a lot of different techniques and tools are housed. But really, what we're doing is tapping into the power of the subconscious mind to create healing and to create resolution and to let go of hurt and pain. This is not control, it's not mind control or brainwashing. It's not, you know, turning people into zombies or turning people into Manchurian candidates. Like it's unfortunate that movies and TV shows use it as a crutch to kind of move the plot forward. You can't make people do anything they don't want to do. And what we're using in therapeutic hypnosis is your ability to heal yourself. Now, the main job of the subconscious mind is to keep you safe and protected, is for survival. It just may be using instructions that are uh out of date at this point. If somebody's been holding on to something for years, if not decades, maybe since they were a child, yeah, it may have been the right thing to do in the moment or in that time period to keep themselves safe. If they're going through some trauma or going through some abuse, uh, especially, maybe hide, keep yourself small, keep your voice low. That may have been the best thing the child could have done, but that's not going to work later in life in your 30s and 40s and 50s. And so you just may be using computer code that has been installed unconsciously during a really traumatic event. So change the code. And I don't mean to make it sound so simple and easy, but in terms of mind, you're the one placing new information in your mind all the time. So all we're going to do is do it on purpose. And like I say, it's not, it's not controlled. In fact, if somebody's struggling with anxiety, somebody's struggling with anger or overwhelm or worry or fear, you're already out of control. You may be even, you know, creating a physical response, an actual, you know, physical response of the fight or flight stress response, moving into anger, getting that elevated heart rate, high blood pressure. You may actually changing your physiology through triggers in your world that you're not even aware of. You just all of a sudden are really anxious, you're really angry. Maybe we have people in our lives that we know have that hair trigger and they're just angry all the time. It's like whatever reason they got into that state and practiced it and got really good at it, they may not even remember, but the subconscious mind does because they're trying to protect them from something and whatever they're, however they're and whatever and why they're armoring themselves with anger or anxiety or fear. Those instructions got placed into your subconscious mind. People generally aren't, you know, let's say for like a general one, tests or public speaking. People aren't born with test anxiety or public speaking or fear of flying or smoking cigarettes. You know, yeah, there may be some innate fears of fear of tigers and rattlesnakes and fire and things like this. But, you know, in terms of fear of flying or fear of uh taking a math test, that's something you have to learn. And then that's something you have to practice to the point where it may start reaching out to other aspects of life. And that's something, again, it's not to blame the person or say it's their fault or or blame the victim, but you're the one who created that, and that becomes empowering. Because if you're the one creating those instructions, maybe, yeah, maybe through trauma and through abuse, maybe over years and unconsciously, maybe by a child. But if you're the one doing that, it becomes empowering because if you're the one who did that, that means you're the one who can undo it. And you can change it to something else. And so we're, as human beings, we're growing and changing and learning all the time, up until the very last breath. That's why they tell us as we get older, learn, learn new games, learn to play chess, learn to play mahjong, learn to dance, learn a foreign language, always learn something, keep the brain active and growing and learning the new neural pathways. All right, you know, let's create new neural pathways around a situation that may have been harmful to you. And it's not to like create amnesia or to create forgetfulness. You know, certainly there's wisdom in remembering that a hot pot on a stove will burn your hand, but you don't have to keep the hurt and pain of that anymore.

The Placebo Effect And Self Healing

Craig 5:55

And so with the subconscious mind and this work of hypnotherapy, what we're using is the placebo effect. And probably many people listening, you've heard of the placebo effect. And that is mind-healing body. It's not trickery, it's not fakery. Well, I guess it's you're kind of being tricked into it, but in terms of like the research people, you know, large pharmaceutical companies will do, they know they're going to accidentally influence people to heal themselves. So they have to have the sugar pill because they need to account for that. They have to understand how they're uh influencing people and how many people they're influencing. So let's say they're doing a high blood pressure medication. Well, half the group's going to get the sugar pill because they know the brochure about the new medication and the research and the research studies they're going to be doing. The website somebody signs up on and gets more information. The research office, the way it looks, the way it smells, the white lab coats, the waiver people sign. All this is influencing people to heal themselves. Needing to account for that, they'll have the sugar pill. So half the people get the sugar pill. Let's say 30% of the people with the sugar pill get better. Let's say 40% of the people get better on the real medication. Well, they actually have to subtract 30% because maybe they influence those people to heal themselves too. And really, only 10% got better. And they'll put it on the market at $80 a pill. But really, and at least in this example, more people got better through mind, through healing themselves. But there's no real big payout at the end of the year for the stockholders in terms of the some billion dollar windfall in teaching people how to heal themselves. And you can't copyright somebody's subconscious mind, you can't patent somebody's subconscious mind. And so you as a human being are pretty spectacular. I mean, you get a cut on the finger, you don't have to think about it. Your body and mind and brain know what the problem is and they start working together to fix it. And it knows that the cut's on the index finger of the left hand, so it doesn't send the emergency first aid to the peaky finger of the right hand. Somebody is out in Alaska skiing and breaks their leg, yeah, you're gonna go to the doctor and get an X-ray and get a cast, but the cast is not healing the leg. The bone is fusing back together through this process created by mind and brain and body. And if somebody breaks their leg, they don't send the emergency first aid to the wrist of the right hand. You know, if you somebody ever had that experience where somebody points their arm and say, hey, how'd you get that big scrape on your arm? And you're like, wow, I have no idea. I don't know where that came from. And the mind knew there was a problem and started fixing it, creating a scab and then new skin underneath that scab, but started all that healing process before the conscious mind was even aware there was a problem, digesting your food, beating your heart, breathing, taking a day-old baby to that of an adult. These are all things we don't have to think about. The subconscious mind is that extraordinarily powerful. And so, yes, it's running all those systems of the body, the immune system. It's holding on to habits like walking and riding a bicycle, zipping up your jacket, tying your shoes, all these habits that we have that we don't have to think about because we practice so many times. But its main job is to keep you safe and protected. And the way it helps you through these dangerous situations that it perceives in your world is by warning you. Now, in when somebody pulls a fire alarm in a building, the sirens go off, the lights, strobe lights go off, warning everybody that there's danger. Well, we also have a warning system, only it's feeling state. The feeling state of anxiety, the feeling state of anger and fear, worry, overwhelm. It's warning you that there is danger in the external environment. It's danger somewhere in your world due to the events and circumstances that you've experienced in the past. So the radar of your mind is pulling in all this information, what you see, here, taste, touch, and smell. So it's like has this filing cabinet of all the trauma and hurt and pain and anger and fear and embarrassment and humiliation you have been through in life. And it's pulling in all the information of your day, what you see, here, taste, touch, and smell through this filing cabinet. And if anything triggers one of those files, oh, whoa, this is very similar to that thing that happened a long time ago. You know, somebody was giving a book report or a show and tell in the fifth grade, and it didn't go well, and everybody laughs, and now there's an instruction in there. There's some pain, the humiliation of being laughed at. And now there's instruction that it's unsafe to be in front of people, a large group of people. Well, now maybe later in life in their 40s, they have public speaking phobia, and they can't get up and do the big presentation at the meeting or do the speech at the conference or get in front of the investors to promote their business. So the subconscious mind's main job is to keep you safe and protected, but it's just it may be using old information, old instructions. And this, the other kind of big issue, though, is that being a human being, the mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. And so, this as an example of this, you'll notice this when somebody's having a nightmare in the middle of the night. It doesn't matter how realistic it may be. Maybe somebody's having a uh, you know, a realistic dream about uh being back in war. They're a veteran and they're back in combat on the front lines, even though their war was 40 years ago. It could be something ridiculous and crazy, like a cheeseburger is chasing you down the street throwing coconut at your head. It's not real. Neither situation is it real. You're safe and cozy and sound and bent, but the mind thinks you are under attack and it has a shoot first ask questions later safety protocol and will turn on the stress response even in deep sleep. So the brain starts creating all that adrenaline and cortisol, dumping it into your bloodstream, the heart starts racing to get that cortisol and adrenaline to the big muscles of your arms and your legs to fight and to escape, turning down the power of your music and your digestive system to get that power and energy to the big muscles. Maybe so much cortisol in the brain gets dumped that it wants you awake. Your subconscious mind wants you consciously aware of your surroundings, looking for this cheeseburger chasing you down the street. So you can imagine what's happening in your waking world. If you can literally change your physiology in deep sleep, you wake up and maybe with a scream and you're sweating, trying to cool down your body, your heart tracing. All because a cheeseburger is attacking you in a dream. So again, you imagine what's happening in your waking world. And so subconscious mind is this very highly emotionalized part of mind who's that's trying to keep you safe. Now, the conscious part of mind, that's the logical mind, the analytical mind, the part of mind that creates your goals and it plans to achieve those goals. But when there's conflict between the logical mind and the emotional mind, the emotional mind wins every time because the conscious mind, according to neuroscience, only makes up 5% of mind. Subconscious mind makes up 95% of mind. This doesn't necessarily have to make sense what people may be going through. It's like, well, I happened a long time ago. I don't understand why I'm so get uptight when this happened. Doesn't have to make sense. When there's conflict between the logical analytical mind and the emotionalized mind is trying to keep you safe, the emotional mind wins every time. And so with these techniques of hypnosis, therapeutic hypnosis, is we use the power of your mind to create healing, create change. Again, you didn't start off with these issues. You changed to create these safety protocols, the safety code in your subconscious mind. So let's create more change. And that's kind of in a big nutshell.

Yuli 13:23

But uh well, thank you for this yeah, comprehensive overview. I mean, I have many follow-up questions, but the first one is it sounds the way you explain it, it's pretty easy, but we know that it's pretty hard to find those and identify some of those blocks that are preventing us or pulling us back into this fight of flight mode. Where do you even start? And people come with like long lives and and trauma. Most of us accumulate some sort of trauma, some big, some small. Where do you even start? And how do you find those moments that are crucial for that experience?

Craig 14:00

Yeah. You start with the feeling state. Because the feeling state in the body is whether you define it as anxiety or overwhelm or trauma or tension or pressure, that's feeling state in the body is created by brain chemistry. Famous ones, adrenaline and cortisol. Maybe you're feeling joy and happiness that's created by oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. But that feeling state in the body is created by brain chemistry. And in this sense of somebody maybe getting into fear or anxiety or anger around a situation in their life at work or family, somewhere else, that's created by mind having a thought, conscious or unconscious. So there's a direct connection between the feeling state and the thought that's created in it. And so you're saying it's like, well, it's hard to figure out. Yeah, with the conscious mind, it's hard to figure it out. But we don't use the conscious mind. And in and of itself, it's not that difficult because you know what the problem is. You're only turning on this situation of anxiety or anger or fear in a certain situation. And even if you're not consciously aware of the situation of why all of a sudden you're anxious or you're just angry, it's not easy to turn on the stress response in that way. That's not an efficient or easy way to run the brain and the body. So you know why you're doing it. You're doing it on purpose, not again, consciously, but unconsciously, like it's running all those other systems. It's running this protective armoring of anger or anxiety or fear. And even if somebody would come to me and say, Oh, I'm anxious all the time. I'm chronically anxious. And that very maybe so you may be anxious a lot of the time. I'm gonna guess you're not anxious all the time of the whatever, 16 hours somebody is awake during the day. I'm gonna guess you're not anxious 16 hours a day. There are points in your day when you are not anxious. And maybe it's maybe it's late at night as you're watching your favorite TV show, or maybe it's in the morning when you're working out, or maybe it's when you're having lunch with a friend, or you get to walk outside to take a 10-minute break between projects at work. There's points in your day when you are not anxious. So your subconscious mind knows when to turn it on and to turn it off. So you know what the problem is. You know, there's like people fear of flying, just to be a kind of a general broad thing. It's like, well, they're not anxious going to the store or driving in a car or watching their favorite TV show. They're anxious going to the airport or getting to the airport or getting on the airplane. They know when to turn that anxiety off and when to turn it on. And so, in a sense, you do know what the problem is because you are creating it, not creating the problem, but creating a reaction to something. So you know what to react to within the subconscious mind. And that's where it gets a little bit of mind-twisty. It's like, but I don't know what the problem is. Yes, not with your conscious mind. But you are reacting to something and you're not reacting to everything. Now, that doesn't mean the information that is causing this reaction is true or or needed, maybe is a better way of saying it. It may have been true and needed when you were a child, but it may not be needed anymore. But it's computer code. And why would anything change and if you're not changing anything? And so, with this work, here's a great example. I was working

Regression Story From Procrastination To Worth

Craig 17:06

with somebody and I was doing, I do most of my work over Zoom now, as a lot of us do. And uh, ever since the COVID era, we kind of shut down our offices and moved to Zoom because nobody wanted to come into the offices, and people just found it convenient and and really easy to work from home. In fact, what research has shown is that Zoom sessions work as well as in person. And uh that's because people feel relaxed and comfortable, they feel safe in their homes. They don't have to drive. If you live in a big city, you don't have to drive across town on a Friday afternoon to get you, you know, rush hour traffic to get your appointment on time. And when you're done, you're at home. And so I do most of my work over Zoom. And I was doing some classes uh for the cancer support community in in my town. They had an office. Of course, during COVID, they had to close the office because they have really compromised immune systems, people struggling with cancer. And so all this went to Zoom, all these classes. And so I do classes on pain control and healing acceleration and immune system boosting, like a series of classes. I think there are like 12, 15 people in a class. And this one older woman was in the class, about 70 years old, and we had done two classes, and she shows up for the next week's class, the Zoom call, and we're just chit-chatting. She was early. I'm I'm, of course, the early at the class, setting up, and we're just chit-chatting as one does about the weather and uh weekend plans and all that. And then she asks, Oh, you know, I wanted to ask you if uh hypnotherapy can work with procrastination. I said, Well, yeah, that's a mindset issue because you're putting the brakes on moving forward, getting the project done, getting the report turned in on time, whatever it is. You're even if it's beneficial to you, there's something in your subconscious mind that feels unsafe about it. So it's putting on the brakes so you procrastinate and not do it. Or maybe there's some other issue around that. But you know why you're doing it because you're only, again, generally procrastinating in certain areas in life. So you know which areas of life to procrastinate in, you know what the problem is. So we can do some techniques to help uncover and create some healing around that. So we set up a time for actually for the very next day. I had the afternoon appointment open at the very same time. So 24 hours later, she shows up for the Zoom call and she says, I know I told you I wanted to work on procrastination, but what I really want to work on is why I don't matter in life. And this is a 70-year-old woman who thinks she has no worth, she thinks she offers no value, thinks she's unworthy. And so there's a feeling state to that when you feel unworthy, when you feel you have no value. So that's what we work with. And so we started that process. And what's interesting about this work is you know, you may want to come for procrastination or some other issue, but oftentimes the subconscious mind will say, Well, we can work on a problem, but now why not work on the problem? And that's what she wanted to do. She's in her 70s now. She wants to work on the problem. She's not aware of what it is or where it came from. She just wants it gone. She wants it resolved. And the subconscious mind is ready for that healing. That's why she showed up for the appointment. And so we start doing this work. We're gonna do a regression work. Regress to cause is uh is the fancy term. But we're gonna go back to the first time she ever felt this feeling of not being worthy. There's somewhere instructions in her subconscious mind. And so we're gonna trace it back and link it back, this feeling state, back to the thought, conscious or unconscious, that is causing it. So I do my countdown, even the famous countdown, five, four, three, two, one, and be there now. Where are you that is causing this uh feeling of not being worthy for the first time? And she says, I'm standing up in my crib, and my father is screaming at me because I won't stop crying. Now, I don't know, standing up in your crib is maybe 12 months old, 14 months old. And if she's 70, 75 years old, you know, I'm guessing that's the 1950s. This was some years ago. And so I'm guessing it's the 19, you know, 50s, and and maybe men back there weren't exactly taught how to deal with children and babies, and maybe dad's having a bad day or a bad week, a bad life. Maybe he's just not a very nice person. Mom's out of the house, the baby won't stop crying, he doesn't know what to do, and now frustration of just not knowing to do, he just screams louder than the baby. And the child needing to justify why this is happening, why this person is supposed to protect her and love her and nurture her, is screaming at her at the top of his lungs. So, well, I guess I I don't matter. I guess this means I don't matter. And she held on to that instruction on how to move through life for some 70 years until one day she decided it was time to change it. There were some probably several steps, but several steps moving up to I need to release and let this go. And she did in that session. So we had some like three classroom settings, like of generalized processes and techniques and tools they were learning about pain control and healing soldiers. She had one solo session specifically on the issue of not feeling worthy, released and let go of this. Hurt and pain she'd been carrying for some 70 years. I never saw her again. That was it. You know? And so even if you don't know what the problem is, consciously, you can do great healing work because your subconscious mind may have been dealing with this for some 70 years and is tired of carrying this heaviness. And it's time to let it go. And generally, by you showing up for the appointment, you're ready to do the work because you showed up for the appointment. Otherwise, you would have made an excuse on why not to do it. You would have canceled or rescheduled or not just shown up or not even made the call in the first place. But generally, by the time you're arriving at a hypnotherapy appointment, whether it's in person or doing a Zoom call, you're ready for the work because you've done everything else. We're at the bottom of the list. We're the witch doctors, hypnotherapy. You know, nobody starts off with hypnotherapy at the top of the list. They go through all the other kind of traditional talk therapy, which is very helpful, very useful. But this is different. We're not using the conscious mind to analyze and try to logically find your way out of a situation that'd be highly emotionalized in the subconscious mind. We're going to use the subconscious mind to do it. And so a lot of this work isn't so much hypnotizing people as de-hypnotizing people. Because if you're reacting to something in your world that you don't even know what it is to create this change of physiology to create the fight or flight anxiety stress response or create anger or create fear, you're already hypnotized. So all we're going to do is reverse engineer it and create healing around it.

Yuli 23:30

Well, that's an incredible story. Thank you for sharing. But I have to put on a skeptic hath for a moment and because it sounds too good to be true. It sounds almost too simple, right? And in this case, she had the awareness of the problem, which helps a lot. And then one session and it's gone. And walk us through what actually happens in that process and why does it take just one session?

Craig 23:55

Well, no, no, no, I don't mean just say it takes one session. And even in that situation, she had three sessions plus practicing with recordings and things. So there's three weeks of leading up. But in terms of the actual work, I believe healing can happen in an instant. Because oftentimes that trauma is installed in an instant. You know? And so why wouldn't you be able to release and let it go? And he said, I think we got the Freudian idea that it's going to take years to figure this stuff out.

Hypnosis History And Brainwave States

Craig 24:27

You know, Freud was a hypnotherapist. And, you know, this more modern day era of hypnotherapy kind of came about in the early 1800s. Now, of course, probably back in Greece and Egypt, and they're probably using trance and all sorts of kind of altered states of consciousness to create healing. But this more modern day era of hypnotherapy kind of started around the early 1800s. And Dr. James Esdale was a surgeon and he was practicing in India. Now, back in the early 1800s, not just in India, but around the world, you know, there's not fancy hospitals or fancy anesthesia. You're having your leg amputated, you're biting down on a stick, or you're, you know, blow to the head to knock you unconscious. And so Dr. James Esdale, being in India, he actually learned this about this trance state. And he learned to put people into a deep, deep, deep trance state. Took them like an hour. And he put them so far under into trance it looked like they're in a coma. Then he could do amputations. He could cut people open with a knife and take out tumors and or deal with war injuries or wounds or whatever. So he takes this technique back to England with him when he returns to England. And he starts talking about it and demonstrating. And another doctor, Dr. James Bard, starts working with this trance state, this coma-like state, wanting a word to describe it to his colleagues and to write about it. He decides to name it after the Greek god of sleep. The Greek God of sleep is Hypnos because this coma-like state looked like sleep. So he called it hypnosis after the Greek god of sleep. And since then, this altered state of consciousness, of deep trance state, has grown to encompass all sorts of different kinds of states, where there's the more daydreamy alpha brainwave state of when your mind drifts away during the middle of the day and you're at work and your mind drifts off, you're in a boring meeting at work, or maybe you remember school and your mind drifts off in math class. It's just brainwave state. It's literally how fast your brain is processing information. And so if anybody's ever seen the kind of the footage of a brain and the lightning storms happening when somebody's doing something, walking down the street, or waving their hands around when they're talking or they're, or they're talking, or they're thinking a thought or feeling emotion. The brain cells are shooting little electrical pulses to each other to communicate. And that looks like a cool lightning storm, electrical storm in the brain. How fast that electrical storm happens determines what brain wave state you are in. And the famous ones we learned about back at school were beta, alpha, theta, and delta. And so right now, you and I were having a conversation, we're listening, we're having a discussion. And so we're probably in this present moment focused on the task at hand. We're firing about 18, 20 cycles per second. We're in the beta brainwave state. But let's say I'm back in high school math class and I start drifting off because I'm bored and I don't, you know, I'm trying to pay attention because it's going to be on the test, but I start staring out the window thinking about the weekend. Well, I've just slowed down how fast my brain is processing information. Teacher's still talking, the kids are still acting up and asking questions, but I'm drifted off. I don't even listening, I'm not paying attention. I don't know what's going on. I'm thinking about the weekend. I'm thinking about the vacation my family took last year. I've slowed down how fast my brain is processing information. I've moved into that daydreamy state. My thoughts have floated away. I'm in the alpha brainwave state, firing about 12 cycles per second. Then my eyes get a little heavy and I sort of fall asleep. It's like, now I'm not really asleep, but I'm not really awake either. Now I'm in that hazy, dreamy state. Well, now I'm in the theta brainwave state. I'm firing about six cycles per second. And in a minute, I'm probably going to be asleep. You know, and with my eyes darting around into uh REM sleep, firing about one or half cycle per second. But the teacher sees me and says, Hey, Craig, why don't you come up here and do the problem on the board? And so I kind of startle myself back into awareness. And I'm looking around, everybody's staring at me, and I'm embarrassed. And I'm looking at the board. I don't know how to do a problem. I don't recognize that. I wasn't paying attention. And now I have to figure out how am I going to get myself out of this. I'm stressed. I'm firing about 30 cycles per second because I'm in the stress response, high beta. So just in that, you know, eight, 10 minutes in math class, I've altered my state of consciousness three or four times, just being bored in high school math class. And so that's a lot of the moving somebody to hypnosis. That's that whole trope, that uh kind of cliche of waving the pocket watch back and forth, you're getting sleepy from the 1940s movies. That's what that is. It's like Ferris Builder's Day Off and the teacher boring all the kids in a class. He put them all in the hypnagogic trance state, it's a fancy term, of the alpha and theta delta brainwave states. So it's a natural state of mind. There's nothing unnatural about this. And it's just that this term hypnosis, that is literally used because of the Greek god of sleep, has grown to kind of encompass all sorts of different hazy states of our mind drifting out. You're driving down the street. You know, you're going home, you're going to work, you're going to the store, and your mind drifts off. You don't remember the last minute or two, and you find yourself at the store, you find yourself at work, you find yourself in your driveway or something. It's like, well, your subconscious mind knows how to drive home. You've driven home hundreds of times, thousands of times if you've lived there for many years. You know how to drive to the store. So your mind drifts off. You start thinking about work, you start thinking about the people coming over this weekend, you start thinking about all the stuff that's happening next week. You've altered your state of consciousness. You put yourself into hypnosis. All we do is do it on purpose. Yeah. And so in the late 1800s, there's two schools of hypnotherapy in Vienna. Sigmund Freud was at one of them. But Sigmund Freud had a speech impediment. And as you can tell, hypnotherapists talk a lot, especially when you're doing a session because you're guiding them into this more relaxed state of mind and body, maybe telling a more inspired story of walking along a beautiful beach and all of a sudden, you know, that kind of thing. So you talk a lot. And that's difficult for somebody with a speech impediment. And he was also kind of annoyed that people would go into a hypnotherapist's office with a problem and walk out without the problem. He wanted to delve in. He wanted to understand the shadow self. He wanted to understand the darkness that may be within people and analyze it and understand it and tell people what their problem really was. And so he started developing this analytical kind of therapy, this he literally called it talk therapy. And the person would talk and he would write down and analyze it and tell them what their problem was. And one of the things he said about it was not a poor man's therapy, because it was going to take hundreds of hours to figure it out. And what's very fascinating is it wasn't working that well. So he'd prescribe cocaine for people. Use a big cocaine at it, you know? And so the system that was working kind of got put on the back burner because, well, we could do even more sessions if we just talk and talk and talk and talk. And again, that can be very helpful and very useful and very healing. Obviously, there's great healing that has happened since over the last, you know, 100, 125 years with talk therapy. But it's also you're using that 5% conscious mind when moving into the deeper subconscious level of mind was actually creating deep healing. Now it's not always a one and done, but generally what I tell people, like when they ask for more information, I'll send them an email, and one of the uh bullet points in the email is we're, you know, we're looking at like three or four sessions, probably what we're gonna do. Now that's an average. So yeah, maybe one or two sessions. It may be seven or eight sessions, but it's not gonna be 80, 90 sessions over two years. We're just gonna do a handful of sessions. Now, yeah, sometimes it's one, but generally there's an armoring around people that have maybe been holding on to something for some time. And there are steps to get to that healing. And so there, you maybe do a session or two plus some homework of training the nervous system to be in a more relaxed state. But while maybe it's not one session, maybe three or four or five, but still that's pretty extraordinary. You know? And and the the thing is there's so much information out there that if people aren't aware, there's a subsection of Google, Google search, and it's called Google Scholar. So if you just go to regular Google and you type in the little search bar, type in Google Scholar, what comes up is scholar.google.com. And you go to that section of Google, and all his searches is research papers, papers that have been published in medical journals and scientific journals, uh, university journals over the decades. Type in hypnotherapy, or type in hypnotherapy and anxiety, or hypnotherapy and quit smoking, or hypnosis and anxiety relief, whatever it is you're interested in, irritable bowel syndrome, uh, overactive bladder syndrome. There's tons of research that has been going on over the last, you know, 50 years, really, but especially the last 20, showing the power of the subconscious mind to create healing. We already know that. We already have to account for it in research by having the placebo effect. And so it's pretty extraordinary what we can do there as human beings. It's just a matter of finding the right way and to help people tap into their own healing power. Because I don't fix anybody as a hypnotherapist. I don't fix anybody. And hypnotherapy in and of itself doesn't fix you. You fix yourself. Because who better to know you than you? And who better to know what to do about it than you? It's just you may be using out-of-date instructions on how to keep yourself safe.

Yuli 34:00

Incredible. Well, thank you for this very comprehensive overview. And yes, I love listening to you. I feel like I'm hypnotized. Right? No, this is a wonderful skill. But as we're running out of time, I'm sure I could have this conversation for another hour. Is there any last advice to people?

Skeptics, Stage Shows, And Consent

Yuli 34:19

And again, especially maybe skeptics or people thinking this is not for me, or I can never do that, or I'm not open to this kind of thing, or it will never work for me. Any kind of last words of wisdom.

Craig 34:31

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Again, this isn't mind control. It's not brainwashing, as I said before. You know it works because you've hypnotized yourself many times in the past. And it may be around that anxiety or that anger or that fear. And so we hypnotize ourselves all the time, but you can't make somebody do anything you don't want to do. This is most noticeable. Let's just say, and I don't want to get into politics or anything, but I think people understand this scenario that left-leaning political people will not be influenced by right-wing-leaning news. Right wing-leaning political people will not be influenced by left-leaning news. Yet if you're left-leaning, you will be influenced. If you're right-leaning, you will be influenced. You can't make somebody do something they don't want to do. If it goes against their ideals, then it's not going to influence it. But it's also that's why commercials work. That's why, you know, politicians get into office. You know, that's why the news works to certain individuals with their biases. It doesn't work for everybody, but works for a certain sect of people to influence that certain sect of people. So this work is you already can hypnotize yourself and you're already being hypnotized. If somebody may be listening, you said, Well, I tried hypnosis and it didn't work, I'm one of those people who can't be hypnotized. That's not a thing. It's the alpha brainwave state, the theta brainwave state. It's a natural process of the brain. And so more than likely, you didn't want to be hypnotized in that situation, maybe unconsciously. You didn't feel comfortable with the person, you didn't feel comfortable in the office or at the Zoom call. Or, you know, the academics love their research about how people can't be hypnotized. They say, well, only certainly 20% of the people can't be hypnotized. It's like, no, they couldn't be hypnotized with you. Because you're hypnotized all the time. You're hypnotized watching TV. Hip TV, watching TV puts in the alpha brainwave state. That's the hypnagogic trance state. Alpha, theta, delta is the hypnagogic trance state is a fancy term. You can be hypnotized because you've hypnotized yourself for so many things of loving this kind of food, of not loving that kind of food because you got food poisoning, of, you know, liking this person, not liking that person after they did something. This is all forms of hypnosis, and it's not trickery or magic or mysticism. It's just you are influencing yourself to, you know, move in a certain direction or not move in a certain direction. All we're doing in an appointment in a session is doing it on purpose for the sake of healing or resolving an issue or building confidence or something else. Can't make somebody do anything you want. And even those shows, like the Las Vegas shows or comedy clubs, and people are up on stage doing silly things and they're dancing like Michael Jackson and singing like Elvis Presley and they're, you know, barking like dogs and quacking like ducks. Understand that everybody up on that stage volunteered to be up there. You can't make somebody do anything they don't want to do. Every single person got up there as an extrovert or an exhibitionist, wanted to be up there to have fun and have a good time and get a funny video to put on Instagram and look at them at the end of the show. They all have a great, you know, a big smile on their face. They all had a great time. And who's the hypnotist gonna come out? Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. We're gonna have a great time. Are they picking the introvert at the back of the room, sitting in the shadows, hiding, trying to sink down in their chair, not to be seen? Or are they gonna pick the extrovert who got there early, sitting on the front row and saying, pick me, pick me? One of them is gonna do a better show. And even if you've ever been to one of those shows or you've seen it on YouTube or something, you notice that they always pick like 12, 14 people to get it up there. That's because two or three of them are gonna be excused because they can't do it. Even if they wanted to do it, they were excited to do it. They get up on stage, now there's a hundred people with their phones out, you know, filming them and bright lights, and now they're rethinking it and they have some stage fright and they're saying, okay, this was a bad idea. Now the stress response is building, the fear is building. They are no longer a good candidate for that show, no matter how excited they were in the darkened theater, waving their hand up and down. So they're gonna be excused from the stage. Now, hypnotists is a professional, if they had some time, probably get them to relax and that, but they don't have time. They got a show to do. So they're gonna be excused from the stage. And they're they're looking for body language. They'll do a big process with the at the very beginning. And they're looking to see if the facial muscles will droop, the jaw will kind of relax, if the eyes maybe are dotting around, the eyes are closed, maybe raise their hand up to see if their arm will uh drop down or will hang in the air because the people are tense. They're looking for body language, they're looking for the slight little cues because they're professionals, they've done it, you know, a thousand times in these shows. They'll excuse them off the stage. Why? Because he can't make anybody do anything they don't want to do. You know, I can't make people quit smoking if they don't want to quit smoking. It's not a hundred percent guarantee. And so with this work, if you want to do it, guess what? You can do it. You've already done it because you got the problem that you want to get rid of. You know you can do it. All we're gonna do is reverse engineer it. You know? And so that and that's the power. The power of you is that you can create healing.

Yuli 39:48

That's an an incredible message to end with, and I certainly can uh it resonates with me. That's what we're here for, to empower people to believe in their own abilities and also f seek for guides like yourself who can guide them in that process. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and being with us.

Craig 40:10

Thank you so much.