Bring the Sunshine Back To Your Life – 'Manifest with the Sun' Workshop and ‘The Happiness Trip’ Hypnotherapy Sessions

It has been a long, cold winter here in the UK, but now that the weather is beginning to warm up it is time to think about how you can start bringing the sunshine back into your life. If the grey skies and freezing temperatures have left you feeling a little blue, what can you do to make yourself feel happier, more vibrant and more energetic?

Is the sun rising or setting in your life at the moment?

One of the most important things is to realise that you do have control over how you feel.  It is surprising how many of us believe that we are at the mercy of our emotions and that if we are feeling miserable and unhappy then there is nothing that can be done about it.  One of the first things that you can do is to start monitoring how you are thinking and talking to yourself.  Is most of what you say to yourself negative, or are you more of a positive, glass half-full type of person?  Always try and use positive language and if you catch yourself thinking a negative thought press the delete key in your mind and immediately replace it with a happier, more constructive one.

What do we mean by positive language?  Let’s start by looking at a statement containing a negative. A good example would be someone who is trying to lose weight saying an affirmation like ‘I don’t want to eat chocolate anymore.’  A much more useful affirmation would be ‘I only choose to eat healthy food that I know is good for me’ as with the first statement you are basically telling yourself to eat chocolate, as your mind will just ignore the ‘don’t’.  Do you say horrible things to yourself if you think you have made a mistake or haven’t done something that you intended to do?  If so, next time that you call yourself a ‘stupid idiot’ or something a lot stronger, stop and think for a second.  Would you say that kind of thing to a loved one, friend or work colleague? 

So why are you being so critical of yourself?  Every time you say something negative about yourself, you are compounding it in your unconscious mind.  If you hold onto negative beliefs about yourself in your unconscious mind, you will find that you attract people and situations into your life that just reflect those beliefs back to you. So rewire your unconscious mind with positive beliefs about yourself, by being as kind, gentle and caring to yourself as you would be to anyone else in your life that you love. Then you will find that the people in your life will start offering you more consideration, love and attention and the events in your life will run much more smoothly and offer you greater opportunities.  You have to cherish yourself before you can be truly loved or give love to someone else.

Do you complain a lot?  Do you expect situations in your life to go badly?  Do you think that you are unlucky and that you have been born under a cursed star?  Every time you complain about something or someone, you are just locking yourself further into your misery and despair. Just look at how we Brits complain about the weather.  As soon as the sun comes out we are ‘too hot’, if it rains our day is ruined and if it snows the world has come to an end.  How much happier would we all be if we just accepted the weather we were experiencing on any given day?  Much better would be to bless the weather and give thanks for the awesome miracle that is the sun rising each morning and for the start of another day where we can choose to be as happy and content as we want to be.

Let springtime bring the sunshine back!

Do you choose activities, friends and surroundings that bring a smile to your face and help you feel great?  Should is a very pervasive and potentially damaging word and if you habitually feel that you don’t want to crawl out of bed in the morning to face another day, then maybe you need to examine all the ‘shoulds’ in your life.  So where do you feel obligated?  Are there friends that you see through habit and because you feel obligated?  Do you have friends who always seem to pull you down, draining your energy and always leaving you feeling flat? Would you be happier if you broke away from them and spent time with people or doing activities that make you happier and more energised?  Are you doing a job that you hate or find boring because you feel you ‘should’?  Maybe it’s because you are trying to live up to family expectation, or you feel that you have to do a certain type of work to earn enough money or that you have invested too much time and effort just to walk away now.  While these are all considerations, are they worth being miserable and unfulfilled for the rest of your life?  If you are doing anything that doesn’t bring you joy, have a look at how you could do it differently or choose something that does make your heart sing.  If you are dragging yourself to the gym every day because you feel you ‘should’ exercise, why not look at all the other different types of exercise you could do that would put the bounce back in your step like yoga, football, cycling, ice skating or even mountain climbing?

If you want to be happy you can start today.  You just have to start making different choices and making your own feelings of joy, peace and contentment a priority.  This may seem like selfishness at first, but can you really make other people happy if you are miserable and negative all the time?  Like attracts like, so allowing more light, fun, joy and laughter into your world is going to open up inspiring new avenues for you and bring exciting new people into your life. Choosing to be happy will help you know that you can reach the goals that you set, that you can take the exercise and eat the healthy food your body has been craving and that you can have peaceful, loving relationships.  Because you know that happiness is a choice, you will also lighten up when things do go wrong or wander off track a bit.  It is only the meaning we give to events that makes us unhappy, not the events themselves.  So if the train is late in the morning it is entirely your choice as to whether you get all riled up and angry or whether you just chill out and treat yourself to another coffee.

If you would like some help bringing the sunshine back into your life and consciously start choosing to feel happy, I have some great resources for you.

On Monday 22^nd April at 7.30pm, I am running the ‘Manifest with the Sun Workshop & Meditation – Taurus and the Second House’ at the The Peace Hospice, Peace Drive, Watford, WD17 3PH.  Entrance fee £15.

The sun moves into a new sign of the zodiac around the 20^th of each month, allowing us to tap into the energies of that sign to make powerful, positive changes in our lives. This month the sun is moving into the fixed earth sign of Taurus.  Taurus represents the material foundation of our world, so when the sun is transiting that sign it is a good time to reflect on what we have built, what we have, what we value and how solid we think our foundations are.  How have we nurtured our talents and do we have the ability to feed, clothe and sustain ourselves?  It is about our earnings and how we use them.

Taurus is also a sensual, physical sign, so are you taking enough care of your body?  Do you choose to eat a healthy diet and take enough exercise?  Are you open to giving and receiving physical affection?  Do you give yourself enough time to relax and enjoy life?

In this workshop we will be doing a series of practical exercises and meditations designed to help us find out what it is that we truly want to manifest in these areas and release any blockages to our success.  By shining the warming, healing light of the sun into these areas of our lives, we will be able to identify and clearly see the steps that we need to start taking to achieve our goals and manifest our desires.

If you prefer working on a one-to-one basis, I have put together a special set of three hypnotherapy sessions called ‘The HappinessTrip’ which have been created especially to help you bring more sunshine and joy into your life.  During these special hypnosis sessions I will be helping you to identify why you are feeling unhappy, where these negative emotions are coming from and what areas of your life need some adjustment or unhelpful beliefs changing. I will give you some great practical tools to help you relax, cope with anxiety and improve your confidence.  The ‘Happiness Trip’ costs £170 and is a great investment because you will find that being happy and content will improve your health, your relationships and you will find that you start making much better choices in your life as you will be deciding from a place of joy not fear.

So if you want to book onto the ‘Manifest with the Sun Workshop & Meditation – Taurus and the Second House’ of book ‘The Happiness Trip’ set of three hypnotherapy sessions call me on 0777 051 5377 or email: cmarsh@cmhypnotherapy.co.uk

Choose to bring the sunshine back to your life today!

Learn to Relax Naturally - Kingsfield Kalm's First Event!

One of the exciting new developments for cmhypnotherapy is that I have joined with three colleagues to form KingsfieldKalm.  We are a group of four friendly, experienced complementary therapists dedicated to teaching you techniques that will help you to relax naturally, so as well as hypnotherapy you can enjoy aromatherapy massage, reflexology, yoga and meditation.

We will be holding our very first event on 21st July 2012 between 11am and 2pm at the Kingsfield Centre for Physiotherapy in Bushey.  Admission to the talk is free and you will be able to sign up for 20 minute taster sessions for £15 each.

As space is limited and places are filling up fast, please email kingsfieldkalm@gmail.com or call 0777 051 5377 to secure your place.

Or sign up for the event on our KingsfieldKalm Facebook page

We look forward to seeing you on 21st July and helping you to leave stress and anxiety behind forever.

Hypnotherapy - Christmas Offers at cmhypnotherapy...

In the run up to Christmas are you worrying about how you are going to get into that amazing (and ruinously expensive) slinky black dress that you bought last year? Or do you want to improve your health and save some money, AND not have to stand shivering in the pouring rain outside the pub/club/hotel?

Well if you are serious about losing weight or giving up smoking, have you thought about hypnotherapy?

cmhypnotherapy... is offering a special deal on weight loss hypnotherapy and stopping smoking hypnotherapy.

So if you want to give yourself a treat before Christmas and change your life forever, or if you want to give a loved one a special Christmas gift call 0777 051 5377, email cmarsh@cmhypnotherapy.co.uk or go to the website www.cmhypnotherapy.co.uk

How To Find A Good Hypnotherapist

One of the more unusual news items in the last few weeks is the story of the presenter who registered his pet cat George as a Hypnotherapist with three of the main industry bodies, to prove how easy it is to get accredited as a Hypnotherapist in the UK. Apparently all three of the industry bodies accepted George's certificate from the non-existent Society of Advanced Mind Therapists without question.

So how do you go about finding a reputable Hypnotherapist?

1) Speak to your friends and colleagues and find out if they have seen a Hypnotherapist that they could recommend. Nothing beats a personal recommendation from someone you know and trust.

2) Approach one of the professional bodies, such as the General Hypnotherapy Register and ask them about Hypnotherapists in your area. They may well have a facility to search for practitioners in your area on there website.

3) Search online for Hypnotherapists in your area and call a few of them. A good therapist will be more than happy to spend a couple of minutes talking to you and answering your questions.

4) Don't be shy about asking your potential Hypnotherapist about their qualifications and experience. Ask to see their certificates and check out if the qualifications really exist.

5) Remember even after you have started your Hypnotherapy sessions, you are free to stop them at any time. Also, if you feel that the Hypnotherapist has behaved inappropriately or unethically in any way, you can approach the industry body that they are registered with.

And finally, always trust your gut feeling - if someone doesn't feel right for you they probably aren't. You need to feel comfortable with your Hypnotherapist and feel that you will be able to trust them.

Hypnotherapy Directory

Recognising the need for help is often one of the biggest steps on the road to recovery. But once the initial decision has been made there are numerous issues to consider - practical and otherwise. What about, for example, location, money, professionalism?

This is where The Hypnotherapy Directory comes in. It was set up to provide a simple, easy, and most importantly un-daunting way of connecting people that need help with the people that provide it. A comprehensive searching tool, the site allows postcode, town and country searches of the whole of the UK, and produces a list of hypnotherapists registered in this area. Each hypnotherapist has a profile, listing a bit about themselves, their approaches, what areas they deal with, and all their training, qualification and experience and fees.

The site shows which hypnotherapists are registered/accredited with a professional body, and full profiles are only displayed after insurance and qualification documents are checked or membership with a professional body has been verified.

Hypnotherapy Directory has also become a huge information bank - there are articles written by hypnotherapists, as well as comprehensive information on all kinds of distress - from depression to eating disorders to phobias, to help people identify their problems and become informed, not scared.


www.hypnotherapy-directory.org.uk

Free Workshop - 'The Secrets of Successful Sleeping'

You have been invited to a free workshop:

'The Secrets of Successful Sleeping' on Wednesday 15th July 2009.

You will be shown what you need to do to set up your bedroom for optimum snoozing, the benefits of organic and natural bedlinen and how hypnotherapy can help you catch those sometimes elusive zzzzs.

The Workshop will start at 7pm and take around one and a half hours. Refreshments will be provided.

Please call 0777 051 5377 or email cmarsh@cmhypnotherapy.co.uk to reserve your place!

The Free Workshop is being held at: The Kingsfield Centre for Physiotherapy, 54 Chalk Hill, Bushey, WD19 4BX

or visit: http://www.cmhypnotherapy.co.uk/hypnotherapyevents.html

Now You Can Have A Gastric Band with Hypnotherapy

An article in the Daily Mail on 21st May 2009 outlines how a 35 year old British mother of three underwent hypnotherapy to be given the suggestions that she has had a gastric band fitted.

She was taken through every step of the medical procedure under hypnosis in the clinic in Spain, and now feels that she has a gastric band in place and that her stomach can only take small amounts of food.

The hypnotherapy has been so successful that she has reduced her weight by four stone and her dress size has dropped from a size 22 to a 14.

She was taken through every stage of the procedure over five sessions of hypnosis, including introducing the smells of a hospital into the therapy room, at the Elite Clinic in Fuengirola, gaining the ability to lose up to 3lbs a week due to the belief that she had had the band fitted

Is Hypnosis Safe and Will It Work For Me?

Everyone quite naturally enters a hypnotic trance several times during a day - on waking and falling asleep, if you become engrossed in a book or a TV programme, or if you arrive home and find you cannot remember the drive! Being in a trance is very relaxing, you will be aware of everything around you and will be able to end the session at any time if you choose to.

One of the more frequent questions that is asked is whether the person will get ‘stuck’ in the trance and not be able to be roused. The answer is no. As the hypnotherapy session comes to an end, the hypnotherapist will 'emerge' you from the trance and bring you back to your normal level of consciousness. The worst thing that could happen is that you relax so well that you fall asleep and then wake up quite naturally.

It is important to remember that the hypnotic subject is in charge of their experience at all times. They can come out of the trance and terminate their appointment at any time, and if there was an emergency, such as an alarm going off, they would rapidly emerge from the trance and be able to respond as appropriate.

Another frequent fear that is voiced is that the subject will find themselves ‘clucking and flapping like a hen’ when they are walking down the High Street or find themselves performing some other embarrassing feat in public. This is highly unlikely to happen, as even if the hypnotherapist had given you suggestions to do this, your subconscious would reject anything that it did not mesh with your moral compass and usual behaviour. It is also important to bear in mind that a professional, well qualified hypnotherapist would have no reason or desire to give these kinds of suggestions – it would soon be the end of their practice!

There is also a belief that being in a trance is a bit like being unconscious, and that nothing from a session will be remembered. There may be parts of the session you do not remember, or you may experience some time distortion where either time seems to speed up or slow down, but you will mostly be aware and remember what you experienced during the session.

People are also often sceptical that they can be hypnotised; that they will be unable to go into a trance. In fact, most people can be successfully put into a hypnotic trance and thereby gain the benefits of the positive and beneficial suggestions given by the hypnotherapist, and intelligent, well educated people often find it the easiest as they have the ability to concentrate.

So Where Do We Start Our Weight Loss Quest?

Look at How You Are Thinking and Talking To Yourself - for us humans everything starts in the mind. You will find it much easier to lose weight if you are happy and thinking positively. Avoid using the words ‘weight loss’ as our subconscious minds tend to have very negative associations with the word ‘loss’. Always try to think of everything you will gain by being slimmer. Always think in the positive and concentrate your mind and thoughts on how you want to be; visualise the slimmer you enjoying your life and all the things that you want to do. Be kind and gentle when you are talking to yourself; and again always use a positive voice. Often we are much harder on ourselves than we would ever be on others – would you call one of your friends a ‘fat pig’ for instance? When talking with others, do not dwell on being overweight – talk about how slim you are now, all the things you can do now that you could not do before, and how much you are enjoying your new eating habits and exercise regime.

Affirmations are very useful; repeated out loud or silently to yourself and always positive (if you include the word not, as in ‘I will not eat lots of chocolate’ your subconscious will knock off the word not for you, and you will find yourself wanting eat even more of it!)

I achieve my goals regarding my weight effortlessly and joyfully
I choose the weight that I want to be
I choose to eat healthy and nutritious food
I am happy that I am the weight that I choose to be
I enjoy exercising and am pleased at the benefits it brings me

Set Your Goal – how much do you want to lose? Be realistic about how much you would like to lose and how long it’s going to take you. Work out your BMI and see where you really are on the charts. Very few women are naturally a size 8, and none are healthy at Size 0. The average size for a woman in this country is a 14-16. Remember, being underweight poses as many, if not more health problems as being overweight. In addition, you want to build a healthy eating plan that you will be able to keep up and, very importantly, enjoy for the rest of your life.

Start a Food Diary – write down in a notebook everything you eat – even the half of fish finger you took off your child’s plate – you will probably be amazed at what you can get through in one day. Also note down how you felt before you started eating and what types of food you chose to eat based on those feelings

Eat Three Meals A Day – and one of them has to be breakfast! If you want to snack have fresh fruit, nuts, or seeds. Do not skip meals, as this will lead to fluctuations in your blood sugar levels.

You Can Eat Everything – there are no ‘bad’ foods. You can still enjoy chocolate, cakes, pasta and potatoes but not all the time and not as a substitute for proper meals. Three packets of crisps, a Mars Bar and two glasses of wine a healthy dinner doth not make!

Get Enough Sleep – there is a lot of current research that says that getting enough sleep is crucial if you want to lose weight. Lack of sleep causes the ‘hunger hormones’ to malfunction which leads to an increase in appetite and an inability to recognise when we have eaten enough. Lack of sleep can also lead to sugar cravings. One study showed that the increase in appetite caused by not sleeping enough can cause people to consume an extra 1,000 calories a day. Another has shown that those who regularly sleep between seven to eight hours a night have the lowest BMIs. (See http://www.horlicks.co.uk/ for Dr Stanley’s sleep report)

Up Your Exercise Levels – the equation is really quite simple; if you consume too many calories that are not burned off, you will convert these calories into fat which will be deposited somewhere in your body – usually where you would least like to see it go! Try to boost your activity levels; walk if you can, take the stairs rather than the lift, don’t use the remote but change the channels on the set, go swimming, join a gym. Again, it’s important that it’s something you enjoy; if you don’t enjoy it you will not keep doing it for long.

Drink Plenty of Liquid – quite often we misinterpret thirst for hunger. Before you reach for the biscuit barrel, have a large glass of water, as you may just be thirsty. Try to keep well hydrated all the time by drinking plenty of plain water – remember alcohol dehydrates you, and coffee and tea are diuretics which help you lose water from your body.

What is Hypnosis

There are many definitions of hypnosis and the definitions have changed and evolved over time as our understanding of the hypnotic state has grown, from Franz Mesmer’s beliefs in the 1700s that a ‘magnetic fluid’ surrounded the body, through James Braid’s development of and coining of the phrase ‘hypnosis’ and the growth of the psychoanalytic movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through to the work of Milton Erickson and Dave Elman

The online information source Wikipedia states that ‘hypnosis is often thought to be a wakeful state of focused attention and heightened suggestibility and diminished peripheral awareness’. Therefore it is a focussed state that can occur spontaneously, such as happens when driving or walking when a person ends up at a destination without any clear recollection of how they arrived there or when someone becomes very caught up in a television programme that they are watching, or can be induced by a hypnotist. In this state of focussed attention the hypnotist can give beneficial suggestions that will be taken on board more readily as the state of hypnosis allows for a greater suggestibility and there are no outside distractions filtering through.
Dave Elman stated ‘Hypnosis is a state of mind in which the critical faculty of the human is bypassed, and selective thinking established’ [Dave Elman, Hypnotherapy, 1964:26].

This mirrors the US Federal definition. This is probably one of the best definitions of hypnosis, as our critical factor come into play with our very earliest thoughts and our self-image is formed by the age of four. Our conscious minds cannot remember or retain every memory or piece of information that we are presented with on a daily basis, so the Reticular Activating System in our brains rejects things that the subconscious mind is not prepared to accept. These include all the things that do not fit in with our belief systems, so that if we hold a belief that we are overweight and destined to remain so, any comments on how slim we are looking or what a good figure we will be filtered out. It is very difficult to get someone to change their view of themselves purely through addressing the conscious mind. Hypnosis can be used to bypass this ‘critical faculty’ and to embed more positive suggestions in the subconscious that will better serve the hypnotic subject in life.

Another definition of hypnosis is that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. The subject has to allow them self to go into the trance state, and the hypnotist is the navigator. The subject is the one who chooses to stay in the trance and can emerge from it at any time if they want to. With this definition it is the subject who chooses to respond or not respond in the trance, and to have a positive outcome the subject must be motivated and willing to succeed. Therefore, if a subject comes for hypnosis to be able to lose weight and have control of their body weight, they must first have to have a strong desire to be the size that they desire and a positive belief that the hypnosis will be able to help them. In addition, no hypnotist could make a subject do or believe something that they do not want to, as they are ultimately in control in the trance at all times.

How To Cope With Anxiety

For us humans, anxiety develops from fears and concerns about the future. However, the future is unknown and none of us can accurately predict what will happen. What we do, though, is treat the future as a given, as if we do know what is going to occur and have a belief that we can control or change it. Just a quick scan across all the variables and possibilities of things that can or might happen during a day shows that this is just not true and that we have to deal with what comes our way – in one week in our house a pigeon flew down the chimney and the ceiling fell in! So there is no point in worrying about it, right?

So what does anxiety feel like?

Typically when people get anxious they start to hyperventilate, which is breathing faster and/or deeper than necessary, which brings on feelings of light headedness, dizziness, sweating, chills, nausea and trembling. Someone who is anxious can experience chest pain, feel like they have a constant lump in their throat, become very pale, develop skin rashes, indigestion, heartburn, diarrhoea or constipation.

So how do we go about combating anxiety?

One of the keys to combating anxiety is to relax. As we relax our bodies respond by slowing down the heart rate, slowing down the breathing rate, the muscles of the body become less tense, your blood distributes itself evenly throughout your body, your digestive tract returns to working normally and you find it easier to let go of your fearful thoughts.

So how do we relax?

When you start to feel anxious or frightened, the first thing you need to do is to bring your attention to your breathing.

Start to breathe slowly through your nose using your diaphragm and abdomen. Do not breathe through the mouth, and concentrate on exhaling slowly. Do not take excessively deep breaths, as this may exacerbate the symptoms.

Also, when you start to feel scared and anxious, the way you talk to yourself is very important. To help yourself to relax and become calm, again, it is very helpful to repeat some positive, coping statements to yourself. Some examples are:

‘I will relax and accept what is happening to me’
‘I can be anxious and still deal with the situation’
‘I will let my body relax into whatever is going on. This will pass’
‘This does not feel good, but I can handle it’.
‘I choose to be calm and confident in every situation’

If you feel that you are anxious or stressed a lot of the time, doing visualisations could be very helpful for you. These can be undertaken two or three times a day or, if your situation allows it, when you start to feel scared or anxious. Sit upright on a chair, with your feet on the ground and your hands resting loosely on your knees. Keep all legs, arms, fingers or toes uncrossed! Mentally relax your muscles and take some nice deep breaths before you begin.

Below you will find an example of a visualisation that you can use. You can find many more on pre-recorded CD’s, downloads, in books and on the internet. It is useful to record them somewhere that you play back and follow while you are visualising. You may also want to write your own and record them; using imagery and settings that appeal to you and that you know that you can relax in.

Breathing in Sunshine Guided Visualisation

Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Imagine, visualise or sense yourself sitting in a rolling green meadow, dotted with white daisies and golden buttercups.. The sky above is a beautiful blue and the sun is shining. As you are sitting there, sense that a strong ray of golden sunshine is penetrating through the top of your head. See or imagine the warm, golden light of the sun fill your head and then move slowly down your body, filling all of your body cavity with a wonderful, soothing, golden light. As the light of the sun fills your body, dirty black smoke is being gently forced out of the soles of your feet. This is all the anxiety and negativity being pushed out and cleansed away. When your body is totally full of the glorious sunshine, and all of the dirty smoke has been expelled, let the light leave your body knowing that all your anxiety and fears have also gone. Find yourself in a crystal clear waterfall or pool, and bathe in the pure, cleansing water to wash away any lingering remnants of anxiety or fear. Sense yourself sealing up the top of your head and the soles of your feet and surrounding yourself in a protective cocoon of glowing white light. When you are ready, open your eyes and notice how calm, relaxed and wonderful you feel.

If you would like to learn more about coping with anxiety and learning to relax, contact cmhypnotherapy in Bushey, Hertfordshire