Anyone trained in this therapeutic tool will have guessed this immediately!

It is of course NLP – Neuro-linguistic progamming, followed very closely by hypnotherapy.

Major marketers use NLP; Google, for instance, uses NLP and hypnotist tricks in all that they do – a lot of social media is about hypnotically steering us in specific directions. The global lockdowns used classic hypnotism to make people compliant to a level that, for me, beggared belief.

Don’t believe me? Ask a marketing expert or stage hypnotist!

Does this make NLP and hypnotherapy sinister? Of course not. Like most things it’s about who is using them and for what purpose.

I trained in NLP and hypnotherapy in 2006 and while I don’t use them as stand alone methods they have been an absolutely invaluable part of my training. Especially hypnotherapy, Ericksonian hypnotherapy to be exact.

Hypnotherapy changed my voice and the way I was able to use it. Almost overnight I became very confident about leading meditation, guided journeys and relaxation sessions in groups.

Because of this training I now knew how to take people into the light “trance” of the Alpha state that suits Mindfulness or to the deeper trance of Theta needed for the change-work inherent in guided hypno-therapeutic journeys.

It doesn’t mean I’m “hypnotising” people in groups! It simply means that my voice is an essential part of what I am doing, more than the actual words some of the time.

As for NLP, I’ve never been drawn to using it as a stand alone device but parts of this mixed bag of therapeutic tools will often surface in a session.

The beauty of NLP for me is in it’s demonstration that inner change can happen instantly, through simple word tricks and using a persons own values, imagery and thought processes.

In other words it allows the inner resources that a person already has to work for them instead of against them.

As to the verbal “trickery” used in both these methods, this has been used to great therapeutic effect by many authors to help readers easily make positive changes. To give a couple of examples, Paul Mckenna is an expert at this and to a lesser extent Marissa Peer.

I have a few different kinds of meditations on my youtube channel, please subscribe for updates as I don’t blog about them all!

Here are a couple of different examples:

HeartMath Meditation – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npGUfp4Dozc

The practice of Loving Kindness to heal conflict – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrXg9SbsBCU