RESOURCES & STUDIES
“Imagine floating in an ocean of serenity, in an ocean of possibilities...”
“The first step to absolute happiness is to take full, total and complete responsibility as the creator of every single aspect of your life.
This includes the good and the bad.”
M.D. Rowland
RESOURCES
OCEAN MEDITATION
Beautiful ocean video by Australian Ryan Pernofski
"3 mn of peace in the ocean at sunrise // music by Jordan Critz"
MINI-MEDITATION - 17 seconds to change your state of mind
In order to very effectively change the way you feel and the way you perceive your life, take the following steps:
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Think of a place that you particularly like, a place where you feel good, really very good.
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Visualise it, but also hear all the sounds you can hear (for example, the sound of the waves, the breeze in the leaves of the trees, the birds…), touch what you can touch nearby (the sand, a pebble, the bark of a tree…), smell the smells (sea spray, flowers…); and maybe there is a taste too (the salt on your lips, something you ate when you were in that place, a fruit maybe…)?
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But above all, the most important thing is to feel. Relive your feelings of intense well-being, unspeakable happiness, incredible joie de vivre. Feel them all over your body, and realise how good you felt in that place, and how good you feel just in the moment, just thinking about it and using all of your senses.
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Then… What you're going to do next is hold that state of well-being for 17 seconds. Why 17 seconds? Because thanks to neuroscience, we now know that maintaining the same frequency, if only for a minimum of 17 seconds, makes it possible to “vitalise”, to energise a thought. Now, the more a thought is “vitalised” and energised, the more it attracts other thoughts of the same quality, and the grain of sand then becomes a superb pearl.
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17 seconds is really nothing. It can therefore be done very easily several times per hour… 17 seconds, 34 seconds, 68 seconds, or longer, of course. And thanks to this extremely effective technique, you don't have to meditate for hours to change your state of mind… or your life! Indeed, when you feel better everything aligns around you so that your life changes. And quite fast too.
RELAXATION: 5 minutes of cardiac coherence
Visit the Gaia Meditation site for this very relaxing heart coherence meditation, with the ocean in the background:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ZSlBTuerk
As Franklin Servan-Schreiber mentions in the preface to the book "I feel good with cardiac coherence" by Thierry Thomas, “Practising cardiac coherence helps to ride the waves of our destiny rather than having them crash in your face.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY (non-exhaustive list!)
Heaven's Proof - Dr. Eben Alexander
0.001% - Mark Auburn
Jonathan Livingston the Gull - Richard Bach
Finding Bridey Murphy - Morey Bernstein
Codes of Wisdom - Gregg Braden
We are not what science says we are - Gregg Braden
The Secret - Rhonda Byrne
The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth - Dolores Cannon
The scientific evidence of an afterlife - Dr Jean-Jacques Charbonier
Quantum Healing - Dr. Deepak Chopra
The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
You are the placebo - Dr. Joe Dispenza
Becoming supernatural - Dr. Joe Dispenza
The b rain that changes itself - Norman Doidge
The amazing transformative powers of the brain - Norman Doidge
You have to believe it to see it - Dr. Wayne Dyer
Healing through hypnosis - Dr Milton Erickson
Initiation - Elisabeth Haich
Creative Visualisation Techniques - Shakti Gawain
Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
The wheel of life - Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Dying to be me - Anita Moorjani
Anatomy of the Mind - Caroline Myss
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind - Dr. Joseph Murphy
Life Between Lives - Dr. Michael Newton
The Power of Positive Thinking - Norman Vincent Peale
Unlimited Power - Anthony Robbins
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Healing - Dr. David Servan-Schreiber
Sybil - Flora Rheta Schreiber
The Silva method - José Silva
Think and Heal - Pr Kurt Tepperwein
I feel good with the cardiac coherence - Thierry Thomas
Adventures of the Soul - James Van Praagh
Conversations with God - Neale Walsch
Many Lives, Many Masters - Dr. Brian Weiss
Breaking the Patterns of Depression - Michael Yapko
INTERVIEWS (Youtube)
Lilou Macé's TV (some interviews in English)
Gaia Meditation (some interviews in French with English subtitles)
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
A survey of scientific literature was conducted by Alfred Barrios to compare recovery rates for various modalities. It is estimated that:
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Psychoanalysis can be expected to have a 38% recovery rate after approximately 600 sessions
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Cognitive behavioural therapy can be expected to have a 72% after an average of 22 sessions
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Hypnotherapy can be expected to have a 93% recovery rate after an average of 6 sessions -or even less!
Conclusion: Barrios therefore noticed that in order to modify thoughts, behaviours and habits, hypnotherapy was the most effective therapy and the one that required the least amount of time.
Source: Barrios, Alfred A. "Hypnotherapy: A Reappraisal," Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice (1970)
RESEARCH
More and more, hypnotherapy is being recognised as an extremely efficient therapy in all sorts of fields, and studies are there to prove it. Here are some examples of research studies covering a variety of cases: childbirth, enuresis (bedwetting), Irritable Bowel Syndrome, recovery (surgery), skin diseases (iachtyosis; dermatitis), sports performance.
Childbirth
* A. Madrid, R. Giovanni, M.Wolfe (2011) “Treating persistent nausea of pregnancy with hypnosis” - American journal of clinical hypnosis.
**Harmon, T.M., Hynan, M., & Tyre, T.E. (1990) - Improved obstetric outcomes using hypnotic analgesia and skill mastery combined with childbirth education - Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
Prior to any other work, hypnotherapy must deal with negative beliefs about the birthing experience: by releasing fears, anxiety and preconceived ideas, imagined detrimental outcomes are avoided, thus allowing both the mother and the father to be to relax and enjoy the process.
Research shows that hypnotherapy can significantly reduce nausea and vomiting during pregnancy* with some positive suggestions being given, for instance, to reduce sensitivity to odours.
Five reports quoted 60-79% of women using hypnosis required no medication. In another study, subjects given hypnosis reported reduced pain, shorter stage 1 labours, less medication, more frequent spontaneous deliveries than other groups. In two other reports, 58% of women using hypnotic analgesia required no medication**. Also, some had lower depression scores after birth than the other groups.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Whorwell P.J; Prior A; Faragher E.B. (1988 & 1987). Whorwell, P.J., Prior, A. & Faragher, E. B. (1984). “Controlled Trial of Hypnotherapy in the Treatment of Severe Refractory Irritable-Bowel Syndrome.” Lancet, pp. 1232-1234. Whorwell, P.J., Prior, A. & Colgan, S. M. (1987). “Hypnotherapy in Severe Irritable Bowel Syndrome: Further Experience.”
Hypnotherapy is one of the most successful treatment methods, giving 80+% success rate for abdominal pain and distension.
It often results in assisting with other problems such as migraine and tension headaches.
With patients who have severe chronic IBS, it was hypnotherapy patients that showed dramatic improvement in all measures, and they maintained that improvement at a two year follow-up.
Recovery
Rapkin, D.A., Straubing, M., Singh, A. & Holroyd, J. C. (1988).
“Guided Imagery and Hypnosis: Effect on Acute Recovery from Head and Neck Cancer Surgery” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Asheville, N.C. Spiegel, D, (1998).
Report in the Harvard Mental Health Letter.
Patients trained with hypnosis before surgery had significantly shorter stays in hospital.
Research also shows that hypnosis methods have been used successfully for anxiety associated with medical procedures.
Skin diseases. Ichthyosis
From the British Medical Journal, 1952
“The article relates the almost fantastic episode of a British lad who had been born with ichthyosis. This is one of the most hideous diseases imaginable, a congenital affliction, often dubbed fish-scale disease in which the skin forms a thick black casing over practically the entire body. The skin furthermore is covered with close-set black bumps between which is a scale as hard as a fingernail. When this scale is bent, it cracks and oozes a bloodstained serum. For this loathsome disease, neither cause nor cure is known.
But this particular victim, even though his condition was so repulsive that his teacher and fellow students at school resented his presence, was more fortunate than others. An English hypnotherapist heard about the case and offered to try hypnosis. Understandably, other doctors were sceptical of what seemed to be a ridiculous gesture. Already the boy had undergone, to no avail, treatment in the best British hospitals. And even a trial operation for grafting new skin to the hands had only aggravated the matter. The grafted skin blackened, shrank and brought more pain. No wonder then that many scoffed the young hypnotist who dared think he could talk out of existence a serious congenital disease. Nevertheless he started his cure, after taking only 10 mn to induce a trance, with 5 words: “The left arm is cleared”. He repeated the suggestion several times. Sure enough, to the amazement of everyone, within 5 days, the coarse external layer turned soft and crumbly and fell off. Soon the skin underneath became pink and soft. The hypnotist shifted his suggestion to other parts of the body with similar results. Twelve doctors witnessed the hypnosis and the outcome.”
Sports Performances
The Soviet Olympic Team of 1956, Melbourne - Australia
The Soviet Union team had arrived with an extra 11 coaches -quite different from your usual sports coaches. They were hypnotists, with the mission to hypnotise the Russian athletes into super-athletes. And they did! By the end of the 1956 Olympic games, the Soviet Union had won more medals than any other nation: 98 medals (24 more than the USA), and 37 gold medals.
Jimmy Connors
Popular US Tennis player Jimmy Connors was a keen advocate of hypnosis using a variety of techniques to visualise winning strokes on his way to winning the US Open championship 5 times.
The Chicago Bulls “ Coach Phil Jackson” and Michael Jordan
NBA Basketball head coach Phil Jackson used self-hypnosis daily with the famous Chicago Bulls team of the 1990s when he coached Michael Jordan and the Bulls to their incredible 6 NBA Championships.
Take your life in your own hands and what happens?
A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong