Hypnotherapy for pure relaxation

I’m never quite sure why people don’t tend to consult hypnotherapists for pure relaxation sessions? I mean it’s not uncommon for people to see osteopaths for a G.O.T. (general osteopathic treatment). Preventative medicine is much discussed but not much practised.

The beauty of hypnotic “trance” is that it places you right in the present moment, a place we seldom inhabit. Much is made of mindfulness and being in the present moment but how much of that do we really understand? Perhaps we can best understand it by looking at how much time we spend in the future or the past.

Starting with the future, let’s give some specific examples, firstly short-term ones then longer-term ones. Short term, it’s easy to think that everything will be okay when this job is done or that job is done, or when I can relax after work. “I just need to finish this and then I’ll feel a lot better…” But what about the task itself being what keeps us really alive?  Perhaps something as simple as washing the dishes could be the most special moment of our lives? It is, of course, the most precious moment because it’s the only real one. At that point in time, there are only dishes to be washed and there is, in reality, no future and no past. A full contemplation of washing the dishes might bring surprising results. The quality of water may be noticed in a deeper way than ever before, the temperature of the water may be adjusted so that the sensation it produces on the skin is pleasurable. One might wonder about the process of creating the crockery and cutlery. How many people might work in that factory? Which country were the dishes made in? One could marvel at how interconnected/interdependent we have become in such a small space of time… Perhaps one is listening to music whilst doing the dishes… even more pleasure available!

Examples of longer-term, future-based thinking might be, “Everything will be okay when my mortgage is paid off/when the children have safely navigated childhood and gone off to college/when my divorce comes through/when I change this horrible job I’ve got/when I’ve got over this cold… All of these thoughts can easily prevent us from “living in the now.” My favourite John Lennon quote is, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I wonder if he was urging us to act otherwise: make sure that we are living our lives whilst they are actually unfolding, moment by moment.

Anxiety is most easily triggered by spending a lot of our mental energy being immersed in the future - and depression, of a kind, is more easily brought about by being immersed in thinking about the past.

I love to offer pure relaxation sessions to my clients because it’s a chance to pass on a technique that they can use on their own. It’s really a chance to learn meditation. So go ahead, book a pure relaxation session with your chosen hypnotherapist. It’s likely to be the first thing they were trained to do and it’s also likely to be the one thing they’ve never been asked for!

The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Hypnotherapy Directory are reviewed by our editorial team.

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