Intuitive Hypnosis: Insight and Hypnosis in Practice

by Maurice Kouguell, Ph.D., BCETS.

Intuitive Hypnosis recognizes and acknowledges that all of us have at times experienced a feeling of knowing, a hunch and questioned if indeed we have psychic abilities. This does not dismiss rational thinking or learning or specialization; it frees the individual from the submission to methods, procedures and teachers who create students in their own image.

Knowing what, how, when and where to render a service is necessary but limiting. When the procedure within a therapeutic session becomes the session, then linear thinking inhibits creativity. Intuitive therapy moves away from standard procedures and its essence is to create a modus operandi for each individual and so is the method of choice.

When intuitive hypnotherapy becomes an established therapeutic style, wouldn't it then become standardized and a model to be followed?

Yes, there is always that possibility that some students and practitioners will apply a specifically destined or chosen approach meant for a specific person to all his/her clients. Hypnosis scripts are available and have been known to be formatted as 'one fits all.' Scripts for intuitive hypnotherapy will be available as one fits none. That approach needs to remain individualistic and respectful of the differences and personal characteristics of each client. A highly individualistic approach can only be done by one who recognizes the importance of respecting each client's uniqueness. In the training, or better in the teaching-learning process of developing intuitive hypnotherapy, teachers need to guide their students. Their role will be to unleash the inner resources of their students by first understanding themselves, recognizing that they themselves are open to that approach.

Will anyone be able to respond to this approach? Only if one wants to and is willing to devote time to learn and explore, acknowledge and feel. The student needs to see through his/her eyes, feel through his/her heart, understand through his/her knowledge. When the student needs to consult with the teacher for procedures, the focus on the client has been lost. The teacher's role must then be to help the student/hypnotist to find within himself the answers.

Intuitive insight occurs usually in an altered state. What an ideal congruent merging of intuition and hypnosis.

We live side by side with paradox and illusion. Of these things it is difficult to speak...'to tie a rock to the cloud', is this possible? As it is, does the cloud descend to meet the rock or does the rock rise to meet the cloud? (Tying Rocks to Clouds by William Elliot)

I went to the beach, looked to the horizon and beyond. My eyes wandered for an instant and I saw a child flying a kite. I felt I was the kite... soaring, descending, ascending, fighting to get higher, crashing, fighting for my freedom but always attached to a string attached to the child. I became the string, a conduit...I was controlling and being controlled at the same time. I became the child. I became angry at the power that child had and how he abused it. I believed I could free the kite through my mental powers so that it could go anywhere... free. A chill ran through my spine... should the kite be free, the child would be so upset. I realized that it was not time yet for the kite to be free, for the child to let go and the string to loose its purpose. Suddenly I became the kite, the string and the rope. It felt right...this is where I am now in my journey.

I picked up a rock from the beach. It was off white smooth and innocent. It was safe in my hand. Someone looked at me from a parked car. Do we always have to throw the stone and destroy? I took it home, washed it and cleansed it. Innocence.

I found a small pine cone. It was imperfect and I liked it. It had many facets and it told me to understand its wisdom.

Intuitive hypnosis acknowledges the limitations and constrictions that have been imposed on us by a series of rigid patterns of behavior. Beginning with our parents' teaching, continuing on a larger scope with the teaching of institutions and becoming highly specialized in procedures, we no longer allow our childlike imagination, fantasy and creativity to surface and guide us into a different dimension, a different reality.

Science fiction writers frequently create non fiction scientific or historical documents. Jules Verne took us to the moon, to the submarine, to a voyage around the world way before it actually happened.

Our thinking and emotional processes are dwarfed and their progression can be sketched in the following way. Our parents think they know best and rationalize our expressions and wishes to suit their needs. Our teachers teach us to learn and think the way they have learned how to teach and think. Having learned from their own elders, they now apply to children methods that no longer have any current significance. Little responsibility is taken by parents and teachers to look at their own contributions to a child's' maladjustment. Teachers blame parents who in term blame one another or their respective in laws for the genetic endowment of the child.

The hardest and most sacred responsibilities are in raising children and teaching. This article will confine itself to teaching, for although it has and requires emotional involvement in the interpersonal relation between student and teacher, it focuses on intellectual learning. Both teachers and students suffer from linear limitations for that traditionally has been the teaching modality par excellence.

Hypnotists come to practice hypnosis from basically two backgrounds: some have a clinical background in medicine, psychology, social work, etc., others are not required to have any established clinical academic training; yet both populations learn hypnosis basically in similar ways. Put in a simplistic way, living in an age of cyberspace, it is in the realm of the possible that the human element of learning hypnosis is taught as a procedure: the procedure is highlighted by a constrictive approach which emphasizes the mechanics of the delivery of the induction and the script. In time, the most gifted and creative therapists transcend that approach while many still remain bound by technique and procedures. (Note: As I reread this article, I see how much this applies to EFT)

More and more we recognize that everyone is endowed with intuition. Some describe it as a hunch or a gut feeling. Others explain and describe their intuition as luck or a good guess. Carl Jung pointed out that the trouble with the unconscious is that it is unconscious. More and more we are accepting the power of the unconscious. Most health practitioners acknowledge the existence of the subconscious. Work done with health issues, disease, as well as spiritual awakening invariably recognizes and taps into the subconscious.

In our work in hypnotherapy, and more broadly in any therapy involving interpersonal verbal communication, we respond to partial information usually transmitted to us in a linear cause and effect way by our client. Most of us are trained to think along rational lines and justify procedures and results. Many are trained in procedures and seem to believe that if the results are not the expected norms, then the client is resistant, or not co-operating and thus the "responsibility" of failure becomes the burden of the client who continues to be a victim. What stands in the way of meeting the client's search for experiencing wellness and how do we go about finding it?

All of us have had some unexplainable experiences and I am no exception. On one occasion, I suddenly felt an incredible feeling of heat in my back, followed by an uncontrollable urge to run. I excused myself to the family in my office at the High School, a couple and their young adult son and ran through the commons, entered the shop class, only to be stopped at the door by a substitute teacher who had never seen me before. I continued on into the room nevertheless and opened a closet where I found a student who had slashed her wrist. I called the nurse and went back to my office.

On another occasion, for no apparent reason, I found myself going to a storage area in the building where I discovered behind a filing cabinet an adolescent runaway who had been hiding there for a couple of days.

I was seeing a client in my office and found myself compelled to pursue my quest to find out where the client came from; apologizing for that line of inquiry, it was determined that not only did she come from the same town in England as my first cousin whom I had not seen since I was eight, but they were also best friends. At one of the conventions, Jane Doughety, a well known psychic and a fellow hypnotist, was graciously offering a demonstration on dowsing in someone's room. The dowsing rod picked up my energy with three walls separating me from Jane .

During a past life regression, I knew that my client was in the presence of Christ before she mentioned it. The office was filled with a blue-grayish mist.

At times, I feel a pressing need to call former clients. And when I do so, invariably they have been thinking of contacting me because of some new crisis. Some of those clients may not have been seen for over five years.

All the above illustrations are but a few occurrences that I am sure may have happened to many people.

In my research I have come to feel that for hypnosis to have a strong lasting impact, two procedures must happen. One, the individual should be de-hypnotized. Two, the hypnotist needs to allow himself to enter an altered state and while retaining all his conscious rational knowledge, he needs to go below the level of his consciousness and unleash his intuitiveness.

There are fences and stumbling blocks to overcome.

The following is a partial transcript of a session which illustrates intuitive hypnosis. In view of what has been discussed above, it is hoped that this will not become part of a collection of scripts to be used with clients reporting similar symptoms.