Last week the YouTube Gods, in their Infinite Wisdom, deemed it fit to recommend some hypnosis videos to me. They had incredibly enticing titles:
Sleep hypnosis to let go of negative attachments;
Hypnosis for meeting an unexpected healing guide.
Curious and a little fearful, I tucked into bed and turned one on, flipping my phone upside down to hide the glow of the screen.
Fearful, because I'd never been hypnotized before and had actually gone out of my way not to be. Once in college a friend offered to hypnotize me and as I felt myself slipping deeper and deeper I bailed out:
no, I don't like this at all!So YouTube hypnosis? Who's going to be there to snap me out of it? Will I get stuck?
I detail my experiences over at my
diary but in short:
• I became hypnotized; I fell into a trance state that I'd only experienced with certain entheogens
• I received delightful healing. That surprise of getting exactly what you need even though you didn't know you needed it
• At my next meditation sit, I immediately fell into a trance state and had powerful insights (for those interested in A&P events, I welcome you to check out my
diary entry and chime in)
Safe to say that hypnosis is playing very nicely with my meditation practice at the moment. Which I'm a little surprised by, as I'd never heard the two mentioned together.
So I'm curious:
1. What are your experiences with hypnosis?
2. What do you think happens when we are hypnotized?
3. How can meditation and hypnosis play together?
I'll share my initial thoughts on 2 & 3, as someone with no knowledge of hypnosis and very early in meditation practice.
I believe in the unconscious mind and I see hypnosis as a way to invite it forward. During sleep the conscious mind shuts off. During hypnosis, the conscious mind steps aside, and maintains some helpful role once assured that the situation is safe.
I like Thich Nhat Hanh's
understanding:
Store consciousness, also called root consciousness, is the base of our consciousness. In Western psychology it’s called “the unconscious mind.” It’s where all our past experiences are stored. Store consciousness has the capacity to learn and to process information.
[...]
Consciousness is like a house in which the basement is our store consciousness and the living room is our mind consciousness. Mental formations like anger, sorrow, or joy, rest in the store consciousness in the form of seeds (bija). We have a seed of anger, despair, discrimination, fear, a seed of mindfulness, compassion, a seed of understanding, and so on. Store consciousness is made of the totality of the seeds, and it is also the soil that preserves and maintains all the seeds. The seeds stay there until we hear, see, read, or think of something that touches a seed and makes us feel the anger, joy, or sorrow. This is a seed coming up and manifesting on the level of mind consciousness, in our living room. Now we no longer call it a seed, but a mental formation.
When someone touches the seed of anger by saying something or doing something that upsets us, that seed of anger will come up and manifest in mind consciousness as the mental formation (cittasamskara) of anger [...] In store consciousness, anger is called a seed. In mind consciousness, it’s called a mental formation.
Whenever a seed, say the seed of anger, comes up into our living room and manifests as a mental formation, the first thing we can do is to touch the seed of mindfulness and invite it to come up too. Now we have two mental formations in the living room. This is mindfulness of anger. Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. When we breathe mindfully, that is mindfulness of breathing. When we walk mindfully, that is mindfulness of walking. When we eat mindfully, that’s mindfulness of eating. So in this case, mindfulness is mindfulness of anger. Mindfulness recognizes and embraces anger.
[...]
Our blocks of pain, sorrow, anger, and despair always want to come up into our mind consciousness, into our living room, because they’ve grown big and need our attention. They want to emerge, but we don’t want these uninvited guests to come up because they’re painful to look at. So we try to block their way. We want them to stay asleep down in the basement. We don’t want to face them, so our habit is to fill the living room with other guests. Whenever we have ten or fifteen minutes of free time, we do anything we can to keep our living room occupied. We call a friend. We pick up a book. We turn on the television. We go for a drive. We hope that if the living room is occupied, these unpleasant mental formations will not come up.
[...]
If we can learn not to fear our knots of suffering, we slowly begin to let them circulate up into our living room. We begin to learn how to embrace them and transform them with the energy of mindfulness. When we dismantle the barrier between the basement and the living room, blocks of pain will come up and we will have to suffer a bit. Our inner child may have a lot of fear and anger stored up from being down in the basement for so long. There is no way to avoid it.
That is why the practice of mindfulness is so important. If mindfulness is not there, it is very unpleasant to have these seeds come up. But if we know how to generate the energy of mindfulness, it’s very healing to invite them up every day and embrace them. Mindfulness is a strong source of energy that can recognize, embrace, and take care of these negative energies.
For some beginners to meditation, I think hypnosis may actually be more effective for engaging in the mindfulness Thich Nhat Hanh describes here. Truly inviting these seeds into our living room requires a level of receptivity that can be difficult to cultivate. Hypnosis induces receptivity (or suggestibility), at the cost of conscious participation. "Mind consciousness" is at least partly disabled during hypnosis, which might negatively impact concentration, clarity, or other conditions for "circulation."
My guess is that experienced practitioners of meditation have everything they need to host a party in their living room without the need of hypnosis. Or, to put a finer point on it, they might actually self-hypnotize lightly and fluidly without consciously thinking of it that way.
Looking forward to hearing others' thoughts!
