Many years ago, as a young boy, I sat in a crowded theatre and watched as a dark dressed figure had a dozen if not more fully grown adults under a magical spell. With a single word he turned the roughest council worker into a swan princess ballerina who effortlessly danced and span across the stage, arm in arm with an even rougher-looking motor biker.

They gracefully swung each other around and around like they were dancing their finest steps.

The audience was roaring with laughter, whilst I watched and wondered what was REALLY going on. Did this "magician" use magic I wasn't aware of? Did he pay the people beforehand to "pretend"?

All I did know is that I had to discover more. Hypnotherapy in Australia back in the day, wasnt something many people identified with.

In the course of my discoveries, Hypnosis had been explained to me that was something intangible that was both "evil" and "nonexistent". I wondered to myself, how can something be evil if it doesn't exist?

I was curious to know more...

Fast-forward to many years in the future, I had studied many thousands of hours and was able to make the toughest bloke blush. I had learnt it wasn't a mystical and magical power, Hypnosis was something very natural and very familiar to us all.

As you sit in your seat and are on your computer and are reading this web site and focusing on the white text on the darker background, I'm curious to know if you can think back to that time where you were watching television or listening to music or perhaps it was when you were thinking those many thoughts in your mind that you just didn't hear that person talking to you, didn't notice that person had even walked into the room, or that you had driven a whole journey without really noticing all the details whilst you drove along.

After all, your mind couldn't possibly focus on all the unimportant details while you were becoming more absorbed in what you were doing, so your subconscious mind took on the management of those things so you could better place your attention on your thoughts instead. (Don't tell anyone this is a natural trance - a hypnotic state you put yourself into).

That's right, whether you are tuning-out on music, really getting into that movie, standing in an elevator thinking about all sorts of things, or doing the million-thought drive in your car, you are in natural states of Hypnosis. Incidentally, the most common form of natural Hypnosis is that sleepy state where you are still awake, just before you drop off to sleep where thoughts are flying around your mind.

HOLD ON! - Yeah, I can hear some of you screaming in protest at that last paragraph. "If I'm in Hypnosis, how is it I don't crash my car, or, how come i'm not dancing around like a chicken?" - There is a part of the mind, that sits between the conscious and the subconscious mind called the Conscious Critical Factor (The CCF as some call it). The job of the critical factor is to facilitate the information that comes into a person that gets sorted into true/false allocations. After a bit of information is classed as true, it is further sorted into how it relates to existing belief structures, habits and understandings. If the information is classed as false, it may be distorted (molded to something the subconscious can understand), or most likely, deleted.

As the conscious mind can typically handle only 7-9 single bits of information, everything above that amount is automatically handled by the CCF. This is why when you talk to someone and they don't hear you, it is because their conscious mind is already at its limits - so the CCF deletes the extra information, or passes what is needed directly to the subconscious mind (and unfortunately, the conscious mind misses the conversation all together).

With Hypnosis, a person is led into this Altered State of awareness by overloading and bypassing the CCF and allowing the conscious mind to "let go". A person in Hypnosis will still hear what is said to them as it offers the conscious mind a manner in which to be of use to the overall system. Of course, by bypassing the CCF, Hypnotherapists can get to the cause of problems in life (such as depression, over-eating, anxiety etc) and have the person reprogram their internal computer to operate in a more productive manner.

If you think of a car with a problem in the engine area, Hypnosis is the ability to pop the bonnet and access the area that is causing the issue. Talking therapies such as Psychology, Counseling and the like rely on the conscious mind to divulge information relating to the problem in the hope the client and therapist can work on the area. Unfortunately (and this is where conventional talk therapies fail most often), the conscious mind has no idea where the problem exists, let alone how to repair it.

As it is the subconscious that handles and manages everything behind the scenes, one needs to access the subconscious mind to effect any great deal of change work. If the subconscious mind manages all your beliefs, all your habits, all your patterns and ways of operating, going to the conscious mind and arguing your case certainly wont let you change much, except the way the client feels about the therapist.

I personally have worked with clients that have spent over a decade on traditional talk therapies and feel they are no different. And why should they be? If you want to fix a problem with your cars engine, you don't start by taking your car to a carwash?