Finding True Magic, the blog

One of my favorite quotes from myself (eye roll!) is,

“We think we live in the world, but we live in our minds.”

Another (double eye roll!) is,

“Once you realize your innocence, you can accomplish anything.”

I am surprised when people don’t have a clue about what I am saying with these statements. (jaw drops)

Regarding the first quote about living in our minds, try entertaining the awareness that the outer world is really a creation inside your mind. We think our mind is in our head and our chattering certainly seems to be located there. But our mind is more than our chattering. Spend some time thinking of your mind containing all your sensory fields.

Don’t mistake this to mean I want you to pretend the outer world is in your head. No, just simply consider that your mind is outside of your head. Consider your mind to be that which contains your body and its chattering thoughts, and everything in the outer world. Relax and sense your mind’s pervasiveness and spaciousness.

That brings us to the second quote: “Once you realize your innocence, you can accomplish anything.” If you have the thought that the above exercise is too strange or difficult to even try…that is a sign of lack of awareness of your innocence. Don’t let yourself miss this opportunity to play with your mind because of some stodgy old judgments. (Stodgy old judgments = opposite of innocence.)

Click on this Podcast Link to hear me discuss my ideas with Greg Voison of Inside Personal Growth.

Greg recently interviewed me about, Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP.

Greg kindly says,  “Jack’s mind blowing, thought provoking ideas you really need to listen to, and take action on. This interview could truly transform your relationship with yourself, and more importantly everyone you love.”

In our talk, greg and I get at the root of most of  our struggles. When you listen you will better understand how hypnosis for pain,  for weight loss, for depression, for phobias and trauma, for anxiety, and virtually any other issue is a tremendous life-enhancing tool.

May we all prosper together.

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.

Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

Inception, the new film about the mysteries, dramas, and possibilities existing in our inner life, relies on many hypnotic principles to develop its story.

Inception explores the intricacies of implanting an idea in another person so that they think it is their own original idea.

It is actually much simpler than they make it out to be. In hypnosis jargon its called a suggestion. All that is required is to successfully bypass a person’s critical faculty (the ability to evaluate and say “No!”) and deliver the suggestion while the  critical faculty is suspended.

Hollywood must make it mysterious and dramatic, of course. But the goal of inception is quite easy and we are the constant subjects for inception through the ever expanding technology of mass and social media propaganda and advertising. The recently deceased Dr. Herbert Spiegel, psychiatrist and master hypnotist, demonstrated time and again how easily people can be made to adopt a suggested reality.

Even though hypnosis has been around for over 300 years, few people understand hypnotic principles. This makes it a big box office draw stimulating interesting analysis as if these are new and rare phenomena.

Besides the critical faculty bypass, all you need is repetition of a suggestion that is vivid and emotionally engaging. The more vivid and emotionally engaging the suggestion is, the less repetition is required.

Sorry to say, we must make a great effort to guard our minds and sanity in this age of expert spin doctors spreading their suggestions with ever more powerful technological and media advances. All too often they are serving money, power, and greed rather than the uplifting of humanity.

Here is a CD that will help you guard your mind and stay connected to your best impulses:  Opening to Higher Self Purification.

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessionsin Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

This can get you into real trouble!

There are many ways to define hypnosis.  Here’s the central definition of hypnosis that I teach my students at the Institute for Therapeutic Learning: We’re always selectively paying attention to only a small portion of the data that comes to us through our senses and our thoughts. When a hypnotist invites  a person to move that selective attention to whatever the hypnotist suggests — and the person does so — that person is said to be hypnotized.

What we pay attention to determines what we experience and what we feel. It sounds simple. But when you’re having a strong emotion or a craving, do you just stop, relax, take a deep breath and tell yourself, “This emotion or craving is just an arbitrary temporary experience based on what I’m selectively paying attention to”? Or do you relate to that anger, annoyance or sudden craving as if it is the truth of the moment, as if you absolutely must act on it? I don’t know about you, but I tend to do more of the latter, and less of the former!

If we relate to what’s happening as if it is the truth — something that must be attended to — then we are engaged in a hypnotic state . . .  even though, if you asked someone else about it, they’d probably agree that you’re in a perfectly “normal” conscious state experiencing “Reality” as it is!

Watch this video and then consider what is real about your experience:

Consider this the next time you drive and talk or text or eat. More than 50% of viewers miss this video challenge.

When driving I usually consider my alertness and attention to be largely unaffected by talking to a passenger or eating a candy bar. And I also know, thanks to a recent auto accident, that I am wrong in thinking I’m alert to the greater environment if I’m doing several things at once.

That might be all right in the office or living room, but not in the car!

May we all drive safely and be free from ignorance.

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessionsin Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

I never seem to stop needing reminders to broaden my perspective and lighten up. I can get disturbed about something transitory and basically unimportant on a daily basis!

I easily forget I’ve never missed a meal in my life; I’ve always had hot tap water at my fingertips, a heated home, and indoor plumbing. I still remember when I was 5 (1952) and we were showing my grandfather around our newly built home. He immigrated from the Middle East in the early 1900’s and was a simple street peddler.  When we showed him, with some pride, how our home had a second bathroom (a mere 1/2 bath), he said wryly, “Oh, now you can sh** lots!”

We laughed hysterically, but that was the first time in my life that I considered living conditions outside of the American Dream. We are so profoundly enmeshed in our extraordinary material wealth that it becomes a chore to maintain a genuine gratitude for the miracles we have in our lives. It was considered a great contribution to society when Oprah suggested keeping a gratitude journal! Here — where so many of us have gadgets, high fashion gear and gourmet food available 24/7 — we have to make a project out of being grateful.

But don’t try to be grateful so you can be a “good” person or to avoid guilt. Be grateful for the “selfish” reason that lack of gratitude weakens your mind and your character, because it does.

Watch this Louis CK clip to get an insight into how we forget our good fortune:

The question is, “How happy can we be with ourselves regardless of what is happening with our stuff?”  And what can we call this phenomenon — this way in which our sense of well-being  is all tied up with what’s happening to our stuff? In my line of work, I consider it to be a hypnotic trance. We give ourselves a hypnotic suggestion  (and we do this more or less constantly) that our happiness and well-being depend on our stuff. Plus, if we’re not happy with our stuff we can even begin to think life is pointless. And we can usually find other people to agree with us!

It is not easy for us, when we are so used to relying on our stuff, to enjoy it with detachment. A sign of character strength and self confidence is the ability to maintain mental composure and enthusiasm regardless of the condition of our stuff.

This challenge of ours with our material goods has been going on for quite a long time, hasn’t it? In  George Carlin’s classic comic stand-up commentary from 1986, he talks about the absurdity of this relationship with our”Stuff”:

May we all cultivate inner strength so that we benefit ourselves and everyone with our grace and generosity.

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessionsin Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

Recently  a hypnotist friend had a severe health challenge and asked for help from colleagues. Several people recommended various health modalities — acupuncture, chiropractic, Cranial Sacral Release.

I reminded him to try talking to the part of him that was creating the problem. Another hypnotherapist agreed and shared a story illustrating how extraordinary this process can be:

“Long ago I had a stabbing pain between my shoulders. It persisted for over two weeks, 24/7 and was very painful. It caused all kinds of other pains.
Just for fun, I did a parts therapy session on it. Asked it what it wanted. It told me that someone I knew (a business relationship) was stabbing me in the back. It told me what to do, I agreed and it was like RIGHT THEN the knife came out. The pain was gone in about 30 minutes. The pain never came back. And that clever little part was right.  Consciously, I had NO clue.”

In response, I shared this story:

“A single Mom brought her 3-year-old daughter to me because she was having severe asthma attacks in the middle of the night. She had been rushing her little girl to the emergency room in an ambulance every night until the hospital decided to put their equipment in her home so she wouldn’t have to do that anymore. That was all they had to offer! Her daughter’s attacks continued.

When the woman brought her daughter in to see me, I immediately started playing with the little girl, saying silly things and just generally being goofy, which has always come naturally to me. After some silly talk and game-playing the little girl was up on my lap, and I shifted to a focused deeper, though still friendly and playful voice, and I showed her a scar on my thumb.

I talked to her about how my “inside mind” made this scar — not me. I didn’t knew how to make a scar. Then I asked her if she’d ever noticed a cut heal. She had, so I said, “See, your inside mind knows how to do stuff, too!”
Then I explained that our inside mind takes directions from us. If we’re afraid to say how we feel and if we tell our inside mind to stop those feelings, it’ll do that for us. But, I went on to explain, it often does this by pushing the feeling into our body somewhere — like the lungs, which causes us to wheeze and cough and have trouble breathing.

I got the little girl to agree to express her feeling to her Mom on the outside, by drawing, singing, crying, dancing etc. And I got her Mom to promise to be supportive and participate with her when she did this.

Mother and daughter left my office. I never saw them again. Figured it didn’t work. Then one day I got a call from a new client. I asked how she had heard about me. She said from a co-worker, and the name sounded familiar. I asked why she had referred her to me. She said that the co-worker told her she had brought her 3-year-old to me for severe asthma attacks and after one session she never had them again. This phone call was 5 years later!”

Although there are many alternative treatments for asthma, I don’t know of any that erase all symptoms of asthma permanently after one 1-1/2 hour session!

Hypnosis is gaining more and more credibility as such results become more widespread. Respected doctors and hospitals are using it in a variety of ways.

On my website you can learn more about this healing power we all have available to us, right within our own mind. You’ll find useful information throughout the site, but many visitors especially appreciate the Health, Relationships, and Sexuality pages. Here you’ll learn more about how hypnotherapy can help you in any area of life.

More about asthma:

May all beings be happy and free! May our compassion for all beings, ourselves included, continue to increase!

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

Someone asked recently about the difference between hypnosis and guided imagery. Many counselors say they use “guided imagery” which they may or may not consider related to hypnosis or hypnotherapy. And if that weren’t confusing enough, sometimes people aren’t sure of the difference between meditation and guided imagery.

So what is hypnosis, what is guided imagery, and what is meditation?

There are many kinds of meditation — the common denominator being focused attention.

A famous definition of hypnosis is simply, “focused attention to suggestions given.”

So you could argue that many times meditation and hypnosis are the same or overlap.

In the end, however, these words are just labels.

So here’s my suggestion: Be interested in your experience of being — what it feels like simply to be — without relying on labels. Then, whether you’re experiencing something called “guided imagery,” something called “hypnosis” or “hypnotherapy,” or something called “meditation,” you’ll be awake to your experience.

That’s the best meditation and the best hypnotic state, IMHO.

And if you’re interested in a no-labels dose of meditation, hypnosis, and guided imagery all rolled into one, check this out:

Finding True Magic audio CD: Cultivating Fearlessness & Compassion
Finding True Magic audio seminar: Mindfulness & Awareness

Recently meditation teacher Josh Korda of Dharma Punx NYC talked about the intersection of Buddhist meditation and punk culture. A good example of getting back to basics, focusing the mind, experiencing your own being.

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

As a practicing Buddhist for over 40 years, my orientation towards my hypnotherapy practice has always been within the context of the extraordinary insights about how the mind works — insights that are readily available in the Buddhist teachings.

One essential point is that to see clearly you must gain the ability to stop the mind’s constant thinking. This is done through meditation. Many Westerners misconstrue this point to mean stop the mind forever — as in have no more thoughts — and so they quickly despair of ever being able to meditate. “I can’t meditate, because I can’t stop my mind.” But this is to miss the point.

The point is to stop the mind just for an instant and develop your ability to be alert in that instant. My first Buddhist teacher, Shunryo Suzuki, Roshi always told us “Whatever you say, that is (Buddhism), and whatever you say, that is not (Buddhism).” That one stops your mind! When you hear that your mind’s constant choosing between this and that is futile — either way you’re right, and either way you’re wrong — you stop in a moment of astonishment and openness. And that’s the point.

Hypnotists recognize and use this gap in the mind’s constant thinking to deliver hypnotic suggestions. At the point when the mind “gaps” we are very suggestible. Buddhist teachers do the same thing. They create gaps where they can deliver the healing and enlightening teachings, past the shield of constant thinking, straight into the student’s heart.

How do you tell the difference between a wise spiritual teacher and a not-so-wise one?  It’s in the sauce: the quality of the suggestion/teaching delivered. A teacher can deliver suggestions that reinforce views and activities that lead to suffering, or  suggestions/teachings that uplift and mature a person’s character. You can use the same test to tell the difference between an effective hypnotherapist and an unskillful one.

The cultural baggage that comes with teachings from the lands of the East can obscure the important points  (i.e., “Will I have better meditation on a black Zen zafu, or on a red-and-yellow Shambhala-type zafu?” or “Oh no, I don’t even know what a zafu is!”) To cut through this confusion, Shunryo Suzuki, Roshi always told us to “find out what is the most important thing.”

There is an emerging voice in Buddhism that is pointing the way out of the cultural baggage problem. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, a brilliant young Tibetan lama, is stepping out of the cultural and religious trappings of his own heritage to emphasize to Westerners the most important point — find out who you are beyond allegiance to a culture or a religion. Hints to his students might come as hip poetry written in an urban cafe or a funny photo collage in a tweet (follow @ponlop), a post on Facebook, or a quote from Jimi Hendrix.

You can read his latest article in the Washington Post, “The Buddha Wasn’t a Buddhist” Nice timing, together with The Buddha on PBS here last night.

May you find delight and healing as you notice  what is present when you experience a gap in your mind.

May all beings be happy and free! May our compassion for all beings, ourselves included, continue to increase!

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View The Buddha (PBS) videos in chronological order here.
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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

Anxious thinking can become such a familiar part of our inner dialogue, that we can end up believing it’s natural. “What’s going to happen to me?” “What if . . . ?” on and on. We’re good at keeping our anxiety going, but we don’t always know how to get control of anxiety.

Sometimes a simple positive suggestion can give you quick relief from anxiety.

Suggestion is the essence of hypnosis (my gig). Our inner dialogue is full of hypnotic suggestions. We are hypnotizing ourselves thought by thought! When we suffer, it’s because we’re giving importance to negative thoughts. We think they’re more valid than positive thoughts.

Surprisingly, we can be stubborn about changing this tendency to trust negative thoughts and be suspicious of positive thoughts. I meet people all the time who — in spite of their abilities, accomplishments and good fortune — can’t relax. They’re on pins and needles because they’re thinking, “One wrong move and I’m f—ed.” Basically, this is the message that all of our anxious thinking is giving us.

When I have this problem, I get relief when I remember, “You know, it’s fine for me to think about all these things. I just don’t have to be anxious about them.”

To be honest, I didn’t really like the idea at first.  It offended me that perhaps my problem wasn’t “important.”  But I kept making the effort to shift from worrying to wondering. Soon I found that it really felt a lot better and was actually a better problem-solving strategy.

I started sharing these insights with my hypnotherapy clients.  I’d say, “Instead of worrying anxiously about things, you could just wonder about them. You could develop solutions much more creatively and effectively if you wonder about how you’ll meet a challenge instead of worrying about how you’ll meet it.”

So simple, and effective! One person started cheering up right away. Another was more like me. He needed some time to decide to let it be that simple. After a few minutes of wondering instead of worrying,  a good idea came to him and he started cheering up, too.

You can use this self-hypnosis script to change your negative self-talk to positive suggestions. Doing this, you’ll change your mind from an enemy to an encouraging friend.

For more help doing this, try these Finding True Magic audios:
Stress Relief, Rejuvenation & Empowerment
Become Fearless & Compassionate

And you’ll find more tips in this article about squashing anxiety and grabbing happiness.

May all beings be happy and free! May our compassion for all beings, ourselves included, continue to increase!

Subscribe to this blog
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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.  Book Jack Elias to speak to your group or organization.

My wife recently showed me a quote by Seth Godin,

“Anxiety is nothing but repeatedly re-experiencing failure in advance. What a waste.”

Well said, Seth.  It can be very helpful to recognize more precisely how anxiety is accomplished.

When speaking about anxiety, I often take my clients and students on a journey through time. I ask them to think of a painful memory from their past. Then I ask  them to try to be anxious about that past event. If they follow the instruction and keep the event in the Past, they can’t be anxious about it. Try it. If you think you’re succeeding, you’ve jumped out of the past.

Next I say, “Consider that you don’t know the actual Future. Since you don’t know the actual future, you can’t be anxious about the actual Future — because you can’t be afraid of what you don’t know.” Likewise,  “fear of the unknown” is a misnomer. The “unknown” is the absence of a stimulus,  so fear can’t come up about what is “unknown.”  (We’ll get to what fear of the unknown  really is in just a sec.)

Then I ask them to notice they can’t be anxious about the Present because you can’t find or hold the Present. It is constantly becoming the Past.

So, if you can’t be anxious about the Past, the Future, or Present, what can you be anxious about? (Head scratching . . . frowns)

The answer is you can only be anxious about an imagined Future. You can only imagine the Future based on the Past. If you imagine that the negative Past experience will repeat itself in some variation in the future, only then can you feel anxious.  The key word is “imagine”! When you say you’re afraid of the unknown, what you’re actually doing is imagining a  future that you don’t want.

Anxiety is a mind game – it’s your mind game! You are totally in control of creating anxiety. It’s the game of imagining that unpleasant things are going to happen to you and convincing yourself that it’s true, that it’s not imagination.

(At this point students usually raise their hands:) “But bad things can happen in the future, and you need to prepare for them.”

Yes, you need to prepare for reasonable possibilities. But does preparation require thinking/imagining in a way that creates fear? Seems to me that fearful imagining (some call it “worry”) is an extra side activity. Worse, it’s a side activity that diverts your attention from constructive preparation: imagining solutions!

(More head scratching and frowns) It’s challenging to recognize that you don’t see things as they really are. It’s challenging to realize you are living in an imaginary hypnotic trance of your own creation, instead of living in the real world.

Imagining is not all bad. Here is a delightful example of misperception. Mingyur Rinpoche is a  Tibetan teacher who once suffered terrible panic attacks. He got over those, though — in fact, scientists studying the brains of monks during meditation concluded that Rinpoche is 700 times happier than the average person! Below, Rinpoche shares what happened when he found a life-like  Dalai Lama replica in a wax museum:

So here’s the 10th and final in my list of Top 10 Ways to Be Happy:

#10. See Things As They Are and Imagine Successfully Creating Happy Outcomes

(Frowns, still unsatisfied.) “But bad things can happen!“  Yes,  but does a stressed and tired state of mind, run ragged with anxiety, help you meet the challenge of a “bad” event? Wouldn’t it be better to meet it with a refreshed state of mind because you keep your mind happy with positive future imagining? It’s your call.

I say, Nip Anxiety in the Bud!

If you’d like help doing this, see the following Finding True Magic audios:
Stress Relief, Rejuvenation & Empowerment
Become Fearless & Compassionate

May all beings enjoy unchanging happiness and freedom from fear!

Subscribe to this blog.

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.

“There is nothing that will not reveal its secrets
if you love it enough.”

~George Washington Carver

When someone asks you, “How are you doing?” do you (out of habit or instant reflex) say, “Fine”? That could be all right if it’s the grocery cashier asking the question, but if it’s a friend, you might want to go a bit deeper.  New research shows a link between our personal happiness and the number of substantial conversations we engage in. So try this for a day, and see what happens:

#9. Have Deeper Conversations
There’s a reason it’s called “the art of conversation.”  Experiencing depth in our conversations isn’t always easy. But why is that the case? If we’re trying too hard, we may actually be cutting off the flow of natural communication between ourselves and others. To reach deeper, to have a heart-to-heart talk, doesn’t mean that the words we say are brilliant. It does mean that we’re engaged. And that means we’re listening with empathy and  responding with authenticity, as well as voicing our own ideas and feelings when it’s our turn to speak.

Of course, women sometimes have an easier time of this than men do. This appears to be due to some basic differences between men’s and women’s brains. For this reason men may find it hard to identify or speak about emotions, and respond to stress differently during conversation, while women generally tend to be more articulate about their feelings and needs, and find it easier to be in tune with the feelings and needs of others. Keeping our differences in mind, we can listen with empathy, and respond with authenticity.

“Be curious, not judgmental.”    ~Walt Whitman

When we give time and attention to deepening our interest in others, we get a bonus: our patience grows. As our curiosity about others increases, so does our compassion. Conversation is both a creative art and a spiritual practice. As we practice this art, deeper conversations naturally arise.

If you feel a little nervous reading this post, you may want to explore these Finding True Magic audios:
Shyness to Confidence
The Dating Survival Kit
The Relationship Survival Kit

May all beings enjoy unchanging happiness and freedom from fear!

Subscribe to this blog

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Jack Elias, CHT is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP, a book and course which blends NLP training modalities with philosophical traditions of both East and West. Jack offers private sessions in Lucid Heart Therapy and Life Coaching. He offers live trainings and distance learning trainings in Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP. Jack also presents keynotes and other programs to teach audiences how to use the techniques of  Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP to achieve success, confidence, and a consistent sense of well-being.