WEIRD

One of the things that has contributed to keeping hypnotherapy on the fringes of the acceptable, is that it deals in all kinds of stuff that is generally considered questionable - some on religious grounds and some on scientific grounds. Well, you cant really do much about religion, but i personally always believed that science was about exploring the unknown - about learning to understand the things we don't understand rather than about dismissing them out of hand.

As therapists - [call us healers or helpers or therapists, it's really the same thing at the end of the day], our first duty is, obviously to the client, and it really is not for us to judge in any way what is right or wrong - what is ethical or unethical, or indeed what is or is not appropriate from a religious perspective.

Our job is to help the client to achieve their goals, insofar as they do not conflict with the law of the land, our personal morals [Although i personally try very hard never to turn away anyone who asks for help, we do have the right to choose who we will or will not work with - this is a personal choice and a complex issue] or the safety / wellbeing of the client or others.

We, as Therapists, do deal with some quite weird stuff, by most people's standards, such as the following topics:

Past Life regression

Did you know that there are literally hundreds of documented cases of people undergoing past life regression, where the individual has been able to give names, dates and details that were later verified, including some information that was completely unknown beforehand? A common argument against past life work is that the person could have heard about such and such a place or this or that person almost anywhere, and be making it up, either at a conscious or unconscious level.

Fair enough, that sounds possible, but when they tell you that two hundred years ago, there was a tunnel at such and such a place, and if you go to the left hand rear corner of xyz church, face north, walk a hundred yards and dig, you will find this tunnel, going from there to a local pub, and you go there and find that what is now a shop was then a pub and you dig as described and find the tunnel, then when you check it does not appear on a single record, or in a single book anywhere, you have to start giving a little credibility.

One such record deals with a church in Europe - a woman who had never been out of the Uk, kept having dreams of being chased and hiding and later dying in a strange church. In regression, she recalled the time, place, her name, the name of the church and whereabouts in the catacombs it happened.

IT turns out that she was one of a group of Jews in the middle ages who was persecuted and hunted down. They went to the church, but there was no sign of the catacombs mentioned and no record could be found of the event she referred to, until a year or two later, when the church was undergoing renovation, and a bricked up doorway was uncovered, right where she had said it should be. In the crypt beneath, they found the bodies of the people who had hidden there all those years ago and had been trapped when the doorway was deliberately bricked up with them still inside.

She had the place right, the time right, and even the number and sex of the victims.

Another case that comes to mind dealt with an American lady who had never bee out of the us, but kept dreaming g of a place she was sure was Ireland, and of her family and children there.

eventually she had past life regression, following which, she went to Ireland with an address, the names of her "children", detailed drawings of the house and its location etc.

They found the house had been left to collapse but parts of it were still standing and matched the description. then they found her children, several of whom were still alive [ in their 80's] and she told them about their childhood - which one wet the bed on which day, who did what etc. These people were Catholics, who do not believe in such things, but by the time she had finished, they were convinced that their mother had returned to them.

Occasionally in therapy, you find a problem that just will not respond. frequently when this happens, past life regression will uncover something - for example someone with a problem with neck, or throat or their breathing will recall being hanged, and once that recollection occurs, the problem either goes away, or becomes workable within the parameters of the past life experience.

Many people - including many therapists, believe that past life regression is a real; and genuine phenomena, but even among those who don't, the same remains true. occasionally symptoms that have proved completely intractable will respond this way. I doubt that we shall ever have more than this kind of evidence which, although surprising, can always be explained away however great the stretch required.

Astral Projection / Distance viewing

Generally speaking, most people have little time for things of this nature; it's just too esoteric and not easy wither to prove or to accept. However, it is interesting to note hat during the cold war, the American intelligence services had a whole section devoted to the topic, which was purportedly instrumental in keeping an eye on the Russians among others and (depending on who you listen to) had a very high success rate ( there are quite a few books around on this subject). While the CIA told congress a while ago that this until had been shut down, others claim it is still in operation and was used to keep an eye on so Saddam during the gulf war.

Certainly there are many people who practice these things and they are very adamant that both distance viewing and astral projection are real. In fact a quite convincing televised demonstration did take place a while ago.

At a fundamental level, it really depends on your world view - on what you believe a human being really IS and on your religious beliefs, but the basic principle is simple enough - that te physical body is really only a vehicle for something bigger, and that with practice, that something - call it a soul, an astral body (not the same thing) or whatever you want, can consciously and intentionally leave the body and travel where it wants.

The had part is that in order to do this, you have to be able to disengage from the body.

The best way to describe it is through analogy: In a car, you have an engine and a gear box. The engine provides the motive power and the gear box transfers that power to the wheels. If you want to stop an get out with out the engine being turned off, you have to disengage the gear box, because as long as all those cogs and things are connected, the wheels keep going round. you have to use the clutch to physically disconnect the engine from the gears; you cant simply change into neutral because the cogs in the gear box are firmly connected and cant let go.

The way they look at it is that as long as you are thinking, your Self - your consciousness - the thing we call "I" ( the car's motor) is interacting with your physical brain ( the gear box), In order to separate, you have to stop thinking, but when you are actively trying to do something, this is not easy.

That is where hypnosis comes in. A lot of people, when learning to do this, find the process extremely difficult. Hypnosis allows you do achieve that state of inner peace a lot more easily than meditation and with a lot less practice ( do you really want to spend 25 years sitting on a mountain meditating?

A hypnotherapist can teach you self hypnosis, they can facilitate your entering that altered state a lot more easily, and for this reason people do come to us in order to make learning these things easier.

Seeing Auras

This, no matter what the scientists say, i can vouch for as being real; in fact, the University of Kiev spent about fifteen years researching auras, and came up with some very interesting information. many others have done the same, and much of that data is on the net. It is actually quite an easy process, and again, we can assist in this.