Finding True Magic, the blog

Not a new idea, of course. But it works. Everyone has something to share. And if you start sharing what you have, it gets you in touch with your natural happiness.

Take a look for a moment: What is your mind producing right now? Thoughts that bring you joy and happiness, thoughts that uplift your self-confidence? Or a familiar stream of negativity — worries, fears? It’s a great exercise to generate thoughts of gratitude for whatever you have,  think of someone who needs your help, and then share some of your good fortune. Especially when you feel like kicking something (computer? car? phone?).

Our problems are relatively small compared to those of so many people. In the face of so much loss and anguish in Haiti, one musician who once gave people hope and a voice, is himself struggling to find the will to make music again. It’s always beneficial to our attitude to sit back and take note of our relative good fortune, but it’s even more effective at producing happiness if we share.

Share What You Have — It’s easier than you think!

Here’s an easy way to get started: The people of Haiti need our help (Partners in Health).

DONATE here as well: We Are the World for Haiti

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.

“The thought manifests as the word. Word manifests as the deed. Deed develops into habit. And habit hardens into character.”   — Buddha

Mahatma Ghandi said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

What is it that the rare, great ones — the geniuses of wisdom and kindness — all have in common? When we consider someone like Ghandiji, it’s easy to see that he didn’t just think nonviolence was a good idea, and stop there. Ghandi didn’t just preach nonviolence and stop there, either. What caused people to called Mohandas K. Ghandi “mahatma” — great soul — was that his whole being was headed in a single direction, based on a single, great purpose of attaining freedom through peaceful means. His commitment to this goal was wholly present in him, which is why it made sense for him to respond (when asked for a “message” for his followers), “My life is my message.”

Biographers, reporters, friends and even opponents of Ghandi all remarked on his rare good humor. Despite the many obstacles he faced during the decades that he struggled for his country’s freedom, Ghandi generated happiness in his thoughts, words, and actions. His happiness didn’t just satisfy Ghandi himself; it inspired an entire generation.

We revere Ghandi not for one part of his life’s work, but for the message made by the whole of his life: his beliefs and convictions about nonviolence (his thoughts), his guidance on nonviolence to others in public speeches (his words) and most of all his courage in responding peacefully when confronted with the violence of others (his actions). So many years after his death, Ghandi’s life and message are still generating happiness: when things look bleak and obstacles seem insurmountable, peacemakers and other activists still look to him as a compass, to find their own true North.

Happiness comes in many forms, but we are happy when our words and actions are full of integrity and authenticity. When we know our own mind, speak our own mind, living and making daily choices in agreement with our deepest convictions (”I am 100% committed to living nonviolently”) we are happy.

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.

Have you ever gotten to around 5:00 PM feeling like you were having a pretty good day, then you turn on the news and everything seems terrible? When we forget that we live in the world of the mind and start thinking we live in what we see outside of us, just by watching world events on the news we can easily get swept up in hope and fear.

To be happy, we need to recognize we live in our minds, not in an external world.  Of course the world around us is there, but our thoughts create its meaning for us. We are affected by our thoughts about the world, not by the world itself. If we focus mainly on a backlog of disappointments about the past and stressful concerns for the future, it doesn’t make for a happy present!

We can regain our ability to let the aliveness of the world touch us, moment by moment. To do this, we have to override our mind’s tendency to label and pigeonhole everything and everyone as “just  this again.”  We don’t feel this tiredness with the world because the world itself is tired. The world is ever-fresh, new in every moment. We knew this once. To be happy…

#4 Listen to this moment .

Take a look:

Like this son, in order to listen to this moment, sometimes we have to be humble enough, and courageous enough, to recognize how much we have let ourself harden, and then soften into love.

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.

Most of the time, the reasons for our unhappiness are not outside us, even though it often seems that way. But if this were true, what accounts for all the well-fed fashion mavens, depressed and obsessed with the details of their haute couture? And how can we explain, on the other hand, the many hungry people surviving in tiny huts who still somehow find ways to cheer up their neighbors? They must know the secret of how to . . .

#3  Ask a Better Question

Instead of asking yourself, “Why am I so unhappy? Why doesn’t anything ever work out for me?” try a new approach.

Practice asking, “Who do I have to believe I am, or, what do I have to believe is true about me to have this problem?” Then challenge the “truth” of the answer you come up with.

This question is a great way to expose the negative self-talk that we would otherwise be unaware of. As author and meditation teacher Sally Kempton once said, “It’s hard to do battle with an enemy who has outposts in your head.” When you ask this question, what’s the answer that comes back? “I’m no good”? “I never have lucky breaks”? or … maybe your mind is unconsciously repeating this old favorite: “I don’t deserve good things.”

Whatever the negative message, challenge it. If this seems hard, remember that a lot of famous people have surprised the critics.  Take a look:

When you uncover your negative self-talk, it’s cause for celebration. You’re looking at the cause of your unhappiness, rather than getting caught in the trap of the egoic mind.  Once you’ve seen these negative messages and the damage they’re doing to your peace of mind and your self-esteem, you can begin to turn them around. See that there’s no truth in them, and try on a happier scenario. You may not see an immediate change in your outer circumstances, but it will definitely change the way you see the events of your life. And if you insist on thinking well of yourself and having a good time doing it, it may become more difficult than ever to keep happiness at bay.

At that point you may just have to give up and laugh! Who knows, you might even start cheering up your neighbors.

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.

Sometimes being happy isn’t as complicated as you think. In fact, the way we think is almost always more complicated than it is making the choice to be happy!

The reason we end up needing hypnotherapy techniques to get free of limiting thoughts and beliefs is because we’re so deeply habituated to thinking them, that it seems as though we’re powerless to change them. But it really is possible to . . .

#2  Let Go of Limitations

Release the images, thought patterns and stories about yourself. You know the ones — those inner voices that tend to convince you that you’re small, hopeless, helpless, weak, unlovable and unimportant.

Try thinking well of yourself for a while. Every time you think of something kind or intelligent or reasonable that you’ve done, write it down. Begin collecting thoughts about yourself. (There’s more on creating workable affirmations and self-suggestions in my book.)

In the Finding True Magic course (both live trainings and the Distance Learning hypnotherapy certification course)we spend a good chunk of time discussing the idea/trance of personality that causes us — and everyone else — to suffer from such painful thinking. It’s tragic to let it continue, because the pain only lasts as long as these limiting voices are allowed to run loose.

If you need help dissolving the limitations in your thinking (what the 12 Steppers call “stinking thinking”) consider a session in transpersonal hypnotherapy, which goes to the root of the problem, rather than just dealing with it on the surface.

Those thoughts of unworthiness aren’t as big and bad as they seem. As soon as we get a good look at them, as soon as we see our limitations for what they are — just mean old lies — they melt like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz!

Remember what happened after that? Everybody danced. So they must have been pretty happy.

May all beings be happy and free! May our compassion for ourselves and for each other 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.

Any way you look at it, you can’t get away from your emotions. Emotional pain, or confusion arising from conflicting feelings, accounts for most of the suffering I see in my clients, not to mention my friends and family – and myself! There are a wealth of suggestions out there on how to be happy and many of them are good ones. But I have my own favorites which go deeper into working with your mind for lasting results. This post will kick off my Top 10 favorite techniques for overcoming depression, fear, and shame, so that you overcome your suffering and experience more joy.

Extremes of happiness and of sadness may come up at any time, and with good cause. In my case, I have mixed emotions every December. Wonderful memories of great holiday celebrations filled with great food, gifts, and cousins to play with are tempered by the memory of losing my mother just after Christmas in my 20th year after her 6 month struggle with cancer.

Whether or not you have troublesome memories you wish you could forget, sometimes you may have mixed emotions – feeling sad when you think you should feel happy, and vice versa. Mixed emotions are a great opportunity to challenge any tendencies that your mind may have for taking you into small, dark corners, and to choose happiness instead. There are many  ways to do this, but I have my Top 10 Favorites. In the coming days we’ll look at each of them, one by one. Here we go:

Top 10 Ways to Choose Happiness

#1.
Release any notion that it is “selfish” or “bad” to invite abundance, happiness and joy into your life. The only thing that could make it “bad” would be if you were asking to receive good things at the expense of others. Again and again, invite abundance, joy, compassion, and wisdom for yourself and for everyone.

This “happiness technique” has the effect of not only bringing your mind into an uplifted state, but also expanding your sense of your own generosity and loving connection to humanity at large. It feels good to be part of a big family!

Check out this fun video by our friend Marci Shimoff, author of Happy For No Reason

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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.

People who suffer with chronic pain due to injury or illness can begin to feel at the mercy of their body’s nerve responses. This may sound strange, but with hypnosis and hypnotherapy you can actually “talk” to the part of you that is creating your pain. Once you have its attention, you can then discover the purpose of the pain and get it to dramatically reduce, and often stop, sending “hurt signals” to your brain. Hypnotherapy does this by helping this pain-producing part of you to fulfill its purpose in a truly beneficial way — even if you’re one of those sensitive redheads.

At one point my wife was having terrible back pain that prevented her from going to sleep at night. She was allergic to the drugs usually given for severe pain, so she couldn’t take those. Fortunately she’s a trooper and was able to work standing up at a special raised desk. This way she was able to ignore her pain during most of the day while taking Tylenol. But at night the pain would increase dramatically as soon as she lay down in bed. After a few nights of my hypnotizing her, she learned the visualization, remembered my suggestions, and was able to do self-hypnosis to get herself to sleep without  my help.

Of course, according to recent pain research, swearing helps. @#$%, that hurts! But that doesn’t usually solve the problem if it’s persistent.

Besides making for a better night’s sleep, using hypnosis and self-hypnosis to heal chronic pain — or even intense, brief pain such as that associated with dental work or childbirth — teaches a powerful hands-on lesson. I am not the victim of my body’s nerve endings!  It’s possible to train your mind to tune out any kind of unnecessary pain. So actually, it’s better to have a mind than a brain.

In every hypnotherapy session where I’m giving suggestions to reduce or eliminate pain, I always include this message to the mind: Keep the ability to feel any pain that you need. Because pain isn’t the enemy. It has a purpose — to alert us to the fact that there’s something wrong that needs our attention.

But when pain is too intense to bear, or becomes chronic — when we already understand the cause, but the pain continues — that sort of pain is unnecessary. Through direct hypnotic suggestion, and by connecting with the memory of our body in its normal, relaxed and easeful state, we can let the pain go.

Learn about my Finding True Magic audio: Quick & Simple Pain Relief

Learn about the Finding True Magic audio: End Insomnia

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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.

How can you tell if you have an addiction or just a bad habit?

Addictions are often referred to as diseases. That reflects the deeply destructive, often life-threatening, effect that an addiction has on a person. Addictions are the most extreme form of self-rejection and self-hatred. If you’re involved in an addiction, you focus almost all your energy on one thing (drinking alcohol, overeating food, smoking cigarettes, gambling). The only thing strong enough to motivate anyone to make such an extreme effort is a powerful unmet need.

The tragedy of addiction, however, is that what you do to try meeting your need never actually does it. Instead, you’re left with an underlying self-hatred and self-rejection that covers up your true need. What’s the result? You become locked onto a false (or “decoy”) need. Time passes, and you just keep trying to meet that need in a way that doesn’t work. A few days ago it was reported that almost 5% of Baby Boomers in the United States are abusing drugs. And even though you may know that overweight people die about 4 years too early compared to those of normal weight, food addiction can keep you eating in unhealthy ways.

An addiction takes away your free will, and leaves you in danger of losing what’s most important to you.

So what’s the difference between this addition scenario and a simple bad habit? With a bad habit, you may be creating huge inconveniences in your life, but you still have a certain capacity for self-control. You can see the bad habit; you recognize it’s a problem, and there’s a certain openness about it. With an addiction, there’s a powerful urge to hide the compulsive behavior, to deny it to yourself and others.

Hypnotherapy can help you take back your personal power, and free you from compulsive and addictive behaviors. My transpersonal approach to hypnosis and hypnotherapy is holistic; it helps you tap into your own internal wisdom — your natural ability to be whole and free. This approach doesn’t just work with addictions, though. It can help you with bad habits too!  I’ve helped thousands of people to get free of destructive behaviors. If you want to take back control of your life, you’re invited to schedule a private session. I offer sessions in person in Seattle, but we can work just as effectively over the phone to free you from the habit or addition that’s been getting in the way of your happiness.

Finding True Magic Audio “Strengthening Your Will”

Finding True Magic Audio “Weight Loss — Health Gain”

Finding True Magic Audio “Quit Smoking — Be Free!”

Finding True Magic Audio “Stop Gambling Now”

When the first edition of Finding True Magic was released in 1996, readers were quite surprised. It wasn’t that I had brought together East and West in the context of hypnotherapy and NLP, but that the book looked through the lens of Eastern philosophies to show how the ego shapes our thoughts and experience. The result astonished people, many of whom previously believed that, if they (or their clients) came to therapy with a “problem,” that problem demanded a solution. My approach, however, rendered the problem itself  null and void, even absurd, simply by showing the keeper of the problem how the process of egoic minding” kept the problem alive and made it seem “important and urgent” (as in Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix).

In a section of the book called “Models of the Psyche, Concepts of Reality” I explained how the Vedic tradition of India gives the name “Shakti” to the energy that underlies and controls all phenomenal reality. Shakti is female because she gives birth to everything.  She is us, and we are her. On the other hand, the unmanifest reality (out of which the Shakti arises) is called Shiva, the immovable, indestructible witness of Shakti’s play. Shiva is Shakti’s  male consort, her lover. Locked in eternal embrace — the two are one and the same, yet different, always ecstatically merging and moving apart, only to merge once again.

The special aspect of Shakti called “Matrika Shakti” is the power of illusion. At the root of this power is Language. Words are the primordial hypnosis, the building blocks of the thinking mind.

In the Eastern philosophical approach to NLP, we look at the dream- creating power of our thinking minds. We have to access our “Shivahood” to do this — our awareness that underlies the play of thoughts. Otherwise, hypnotherapy becomes just the shifting of one trance for another, and we stay caught in the realm of the most powerful and subtle trance: egoic minding. In the book I call it “minding”, not mind, because it is not a thing — it’s a process. Until the process of egoic minding is dissolved completely, we  have to use awareness to stay alert to its tricks of illusion. This applies whether the egoic minding is in yourself or in an “other.”

Ego happens. It’s happening all the time, but you have to be on the lookout, or you’ll miss the whole Shiva-Shakti show.

This description bothered some people because it short-circuited the egoic underpinnings of people’s problems. I was saying it wasn’t necessary to sit and talk for years about our pains and problems. Instead of being laborious, I asserted, positive transformation could be quick, easy, and even delightful. The egoic minding doesn’t have a true sense of humor, so humor is a powerful tool in breaking its spell. Humor arises out of awareness. Awareness of what? Awareness of 1) not being the thinking; 2) not being an object being thought about; and 3) awareness of being the awareness without having to think about it.

That might sound intimidating, but it really isn’t. It’s just me playing around. And the more you play with this stuff, the closer you get to seeing what’s real and what’s not.

Want to try an experiment?

Consider the following (and at the same time, remain aware that you’re thinking):

1) people’s problems are always about themselves as the object of the problem

2) in order to be the object you have to be something

3) That something is always an idea (or set of ideas), in other words, a suggestion (hypnosis!) of who and what you are. But it’s never really what you are (and what are you, anyway?).

In other words, the problems we have are all about a false self, an idea of self. A problem is no more than a trance, an illusion. So in theory, you could just walk away from it. What makes it so hard to walk away, then? The subtlety and complexity of the shadowy dualistic play of egoic minding (our blind spots).

In the world of Western psychotherapy this was a controversial viewpoint at the time. But I was really just passing on what I’d learned from my teachers: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. The Buddhist and Vedic traditions had been pointing out this wisdom to their students for generations.

I’ve been using this method, Transpersonal  Hypnotherapy/NLP, for over 20 years now. Thousands who have experienced positive results can attest to its effectiveness. Read testimonials from clients,  students, and readers of Finding True Magic

If this blog post piqued your curiosity, you might enjoy Finding True Magic HypnoTips. It comes to you just once a month, rain or shine, and it’s free.