Hypnotism as Soul Medicine

Accessing the Spiritual Core of Hypnotism; Hypnotism as Soul Medicine

Keynote for the Heartland Hypnosis Conference, April 29, 2023

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles, DNGH

Introduction

Good morning colleagues. For those of you who do not know me, I am not only a Consulting Hypnotist, but also a clergy person. I am a Unitarian Universalist minister in Full and Final Ministerial Fellowship, and a Board Certified Chaplain - a specialized training program for clergy who work in healthcare.

I am also a member of the Advisory Board of the National Guild of Hypnotists and the chairperson of its Ethics Committee. In the ranking structure of the Guild I am a Board Certified Diplomate. I have been in full-time hypnotic practice in the Chicagoland area for more than thirty-five years with a strong emphasis on hypnotic health coaching, mostly around issues related to cancer or fertility.

I have been interested in hypnotism from the time I was ten years old when I saw the great hypnotist Ormund McGill perform his Concert of Hypnotism on the Art Linkletter Show. I sent away for my first book on hypnotism which was advertised in the back of Superman Comics - using a graphic of a hypnotist in a tuxedo mesmerizing a voluptuous woman reclining on a couch wearing a dress she had put on using a brush and roller. There were lightening bolts coming out of the hypnotist’s fingers. I would later learn that this graphic was actually done by Ormund McGill who owned a graphic design company at the time.

The book wasn’t bad for something I saved up for by collecting quarters from my allowance to buy. The theory the book articulated we now know was false, but the basic techniques were the same as those taught in basic training today.

The book gave me everything I needed to get myself into trouble. I really did hypnotize my schoolmates to sing the Star Spangled Banner whenever the teacher turned her back to the class in order to erase the blackboard.

Yeah. That actually happened. I got in a ton of trouble and my parents forbade me from having anything to do with hypnotism going forward. You can see how well that worked.

I would grow up. I got formal training from some of the best. Became a hypnotist for real, but also a minister. My interest in spirituality is as deep as my interest in hypnotism. Therefore, I was pleased to receive the invitation to talk about the spiritual aspects of hypnotic practice here today.

The Spiritual Side

Reflecting on experiences I have had as a hypnotist, and those that colleagues have reported to me, when we do our hypnotic work with our clients, something else seems to happen. It is something that cannot be explained as resulting from hypnotic patter.

In this keynote I suggest that there are two things going on. First, the client may hear something the hypnotist did not say, and which spontaneously arises from the deeper mind of the client. That is a profound thing which guides the client towards individuation and wholeness. That certainly seems spiritual to me.

The second phenomenon is that the hypnotist, in deep rapport with the client, may spontaneously say just the right thing, often unplanned, that turns out to be the key to the client’s unlocking. That is unquestionably a spiritual thing.

If you are in this profession long enough you will have the experience of something “more” manifesting in your hypnotic work that you may find hard to explain. This, I believe, shows that the hypnotic encounter actually has a spiritual aspect as well as a mental, physical and emotional aspect. There is a spiritual core to hypnotism. Hypnotism is Soul Medicine.

As hypnotic technicians, we know something about the way the human deeper mind works. For the purposes of this talk I will refer to that deeper part of the mind using the Ericksonian term, “unconsciousness.” Others, who may embrace a different school of hypnotic thought may prefer to use the term “subconsciousness.” That’s fine. For the purposes of this address, I consider the unconscious and subconscious mind to be synonyms.

While there are some practitioners who simply ask a client what their goals are and confine the hypnotic work to a narrow focus on those specific goals, many practitioners (and I am one) will add a more general effort to help the client not just with specific goals, but also to achieve a higher level of functioning as a person.

Simply, while we work with the goals list in mind, we also want our clients to become better versions of themselves.

Some wag has said the secret to success in business is to underpromise and overdeliver. That is, to do more than is expected. I think that is true. Helping a client become a better version of themselves in an ethical way, as well as achieving the stated goals, is an example of being successful by doing more than is expected. Getting a reputation for doing that will give your practice long-term security because your clients get more than they came for in a good way.

The client may have come for weight control, smoking cessation, stress management or any of a number of other reasons. And I will address all of those concerns that the client may bring. But I also seek to get to know my clients as persons, and I always ask about how their life is going, and what they want for themselves in the longer term. And then I slip material intended to facilitate that into the work.

In my own practice, which has now spanned more than three decades, I have found this has paid huge benefits. And it is amplified by the two phenomena I mentioned and about which I have more to say.

Sneaky and Deceptive

I often remark that the reason there are so few hypnotists in practice isn’t that there is a shortage of people who want to do it. No. Hypnotism instructors train a lot of people. Many instructors make most of their living teaching classes rather than working with individual clients. There should be a ton of hypnotists out there. But there are not.

I believe the reason there are so few hypnotists is that really good hypnotists are born, not made. That is, to really prosper in this profession you need to have a specific sort of personality. Those that have it do well, those that don’t often move on to some other area of work or professional practice. We lack a calculus that can tell use which students will prosper and which will not, but in my experience that becomes obvious once a new hypnotist hangs out the shingle and gets to work.

I said this to a group of physicians when I was presenting to Grand Rounds at LaGrange Memorial Hospital some years ago (I had a program to help cancer patients with hypnotism based at that hospital for thirty years). One of the nurses raised her hand and asked, “So, Dr. Giles. What sort of personality does a hypnotist need to have?”

It may be a stain on my soul but I have a very dry sense of humor and so I replied “Well, you have to be a sneaky and deceptive person, willing to manipulate others with no compunction whatsoever.” I got a round of laughter. But I was only half-kidding. There is something subversive about hypnotism, because you are subverting the client’s resistance and any ill-formed defenses in order to help the client.

I mean the client already knows what they need to do. If you want to stop smoking, do not put a cigarette in your mouth and set it on fire. The client knows what to do. The problem is they can’t bring themselves to do it. Our power is that we enlist their unconscious mind to impel them to do what they do not want to do, in order to achieve what they truly want to achieve.

Every successful hypnotist knows this. However, some of us go further. It’s not just helping a client achieve a limited goal. We also help a client conduct a deeper appraisal of themselves and discover what they need to do to become more fulfilled as a person generally. In addition to helping with the specific goal, we also help them do a piece of interior work and become more fulfilled.

The Blueprint Hypothesis

Much of the work I do in my own hypnotic health coaching focuses on hypnotically enhanced fertility and on oncology (cancer care). At the core of the work I do are insights I learned from Dr. Bernie Siegel, with whom I have studied.

Born in 1932, Dr. Siegel was the Assistant Clinical Professor of General and Pediatric Surgery at Yale/New Haven Medical Center in Connecticut before he retired from medicine in 1989 to write books (he once told me his goal was to ultimately die of writer’s cramp). He would come to found ECaP, or the Exceptional Cancer Patients Organization and I have taken their training program.

Dr. Siegel’s first and best-known book is titled Love, Medicine and Miracles and was published in 1986. The book had a huge impact on me and was the reason I went to study with him. At its essence, Dr. Siegel’s theory is that every human being has a spiritual core in their unconscious mind. That is, the deeper mind contains an image of who that person should be.

Depending on your theology you might think this image, which I will call the “inner blueprint,” might be a gift from a spiritual power. But some of the colleagues who trained with me thought that previous lives and reincarnation may play a role. Others believed it is something that arises from a Collective Unconsciousness that we all share together. What one believes doesn’t matter.

The empirical finding is that everyone appears to have an inner blueprint for who they were created to be. To the degree that a person figures out their inner blueprint and creates a life for themselves that captures some of that inner plan, is the degree to which that person will be happy and fulfilled. And, as Dr. Siegel found, that is the degree to which they become physically and emotionally resilient to life-changing medical problems like cancer or other aliments.

To the degree that a person has not actualized their inner blueprint in their day-to-day lives is the degree to which their physical and emotional resilience is flawed. They appear to become susceptible to a whole range of medical and emotional problems. Dr. Siegel found that if you can help a person discover what their inner blueprint is, then they would not only do better medically, but also in every other arena of their life. That is a holistic focus. That is Soul Medicine.

Dr. Siegel developed a program using a support groups, guided imagery and self-hypnotism as well as dream and drawing interpretation to help people look for and understand their inner blueprint.

People often have no idea of what the inner blueprint in their unconscious mind for themselves might be. Usually they start out their lives with some clues - childhood fantasies, heroes in movies or literature, their own remembered dreams. But far too often people move away from that inner guidance because it seems impractical.

So the person who was supposed to be a poet becomes an accountant, because that is easier. The person who really wanted to be a chef becomes an insurance salesperson instead, because they discovered that culinary work doesn’t pay well. But the inner urge is still there, and if no way can be found to move toward it, at least to some degree, frustration builds and resilience plummets.

For thirty years at LaGrange Memorial Hospital in LaGrange, Illinois I ran a program called I Can Act Now (abbreviated ICAN). It was the first medically approved, hospital based program in the United States for hypnotic interventions into cancer.

Because we were based at a single institution for three decades we were able to follow our participants. If you are curious you will find an analysis of our findings in the download directory of my website. But briefly, we showed that adding hypnotism to conventional medical care produced, reliably and over time, improved outcomes when our participants’s results were compared to the national cancer outcomes database.

Yet, other programs of doing hypnotism with people who were living with cancer, such as the original programs by Dr. O. Carl Simonton, did not produce this sort of result. I suspect the reason is that the other programs confined their focus to specific problems - nausea, loss of appetite, discomfort, etc. We covered those bases too, but we also included the search for the inner blueprint in all of the hypnotic work we did. That is what, I believe, did the trick. We didn’t just work with symptoms. We looked for the spiritual core and helped our participants find it.

I’m encouraged in this belief by noticing that many of the other approaches, including the more recent work of those following Dr. Simonton, have been evolving in exactly this direction - perhaps proving that all worthwhile helping techniques tend to converge over time.

So how does one help a client find their inner blueprint? I suggest there are two tools we use which plumb the deepest level of the client’s mind, and also that of the hypnotist. These are spiritual tools.

Spirituality and the Unconscious Mind

I believe that spirituality, the sense of connection between oneself and something greater, arises in the unconscious process.

This is an insight that comes from depth psychology. The great analyst Dr. Carl Jung based his whole therapeutic system on helping his patients discover who they were supposed to be, as opposed to who events had made them become. He identified that process as the core of his therapy. Further, he believed that the unconscious mind of one person was connected at a deep level to a Collective Unconsciousness which contains a wisdom and a structure that we all have access to.

I have come to agree. My evidence for this comes from a phenomena I have observed as a minister and as a hypnotist. I call it “Hearing A Word No Mouth Has Spoken.”

As a minister I have delivered many sermons. It is not uncommon to have someone come up after and say something like, “That was fantastic. It changed my life! You have to give me a copy of what you said.”

So you give them a copy. Then, later you ask if they received it. And they say, “Yeah, but it wasn’t the right one.” But it was the right one. They heard something in the sermon that was not actually there. They were ready to have an insight or awareness, and their unconscious mind used the occasion of my sermon to let that awareness manifest in their mind. They thought it was something I said. But it was not. It was something they said, to themselves. I just provided the occasion for their unconscious mind to guide them.

This phenomena has been known for a very long time. In the spiritual classic, the Tao Te Ching the ancient sage Lao Tzu wrote “when the student is ready the teacher will appear.”

He didn’t mean that there was a celestial backlog of insightful teachers, and somehow one would be supplied to a seeker on a schedule by an Amazon delivery driver.

He meant that when the mind is ready to have an insight, it will find a way to let that insight manifest. My parishioner was ready to understand something about themselves. In the words of my sermon the parishioner found a way to manifest that insight. They did the work. My sermon just provided the opportunity, because I did not actually say what they heard. They heard a word no mouth had spoken.

Well, hypnotic work with a client can do exactly the same thing. Many of us will have the experience of a client reporting how wonderfully our hypnotic work helped them, how insightful they found our words, and how as a result of the session whole new areas of their lives were pulling together or taking a new direction.

When this first happened to me I said to myself, “Wow! I must be really good at this.” The trouble was when I listened to the recording I’d made of the session I realized that I had never said anything intended to cause changes like that in my client’s life. But the session did cause that change. Not because of anything I did, but because the client had heard something I did not need to say. What the client heard came from the client’s deeper mind, or their soul, if you prefer. It did not come from me.

The student was ready. The teacher appeared. The teacher wasn’t the hypnotist. the teacher was the unconscious mind of the client who heard in the hypnotist’s words something the client needed to hear. The hypnotist was just the vehicle.

The hypnotist allows the client to discover something the client knows at the unconscious level, and that allows the possibility that the client will make it real.

This is a profound thing, and many would call that level of profundity a spiritual thing. I do. Yet essentially I am describing a psychological phenomena - the client gives birth to an awareness from their own unconscious mind. Certainly it has a spiritual aspect in that it can be deeply moving, but the action is occurring within the psychology of the client him or herself.

Spirituality implies something more than a purely psychological phenomenon. While the client realizing something profound about themselves may in fact arise from a power deeper than their own mind, there is something more.

Transpersonal Spirituality

There is more going on at a spiritual level in the hypnotic consultation then just what I have said so far and builds upon it.

Every hypnotist knows that what makes hypnotism effective is not just the hypnotic induction itself. What adds the power is that the hypnotic induction occurs in the context of a relationship between hypnotist and client. If the hypnotist does their work well, they will have excellent rapport building skills and forge a powerful connection with the client. This is what Ericksonian hypnotist Dr. Stephen Gilligan calls “the Cooperation Principle.” The hypnotist and client enter into a mutually transformative relationship, cooperating together on the common goal of helping the client.

Yes, I did say the relationship is “mutually transformative.” You will find that as a person you change when you start to practice as a hypnotist. In order to achieve the sort of deep rapport good hypnotic work requires you will find yourself changing. In order to work with someone who is quite different from yourself you will need to call into question and rethink things you had believed or not understood fully. The hypnotist helps the client change. The client helps the hypnotist change.

In 1991 Grove Press published a book titled Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell. If you don’t know the book I do recommend it, as the story is told from the perspective of a working hypnotist who moved to London to set up a practice and escape a troubled past. At one point he is hypnotizing his client and he actually nods off into self-hypnotic trance himself in the middle of his hypnotic patter.

That is something that has happened to more than a few of us, I know.

In the story the hypnotist was startled to hear himself insert into his patter something he had not planned to say, but it turned out to be exactly what his client needed to hear to trigger a healing insight.

In this case it wasn’t exactly the client “hearing a word no mouth had spoken,” because the hypnotist did speak it. But there was no reason for him to have done so. The words came drifting up out of his unconscious mind because of a connection that existed between himself and his client.

Brought to the fore by the hypnotic rapport, the unconscious minds of the hypnotist and client were, I propose, linked through a collective awareness and a shared wisdom came to be. The words the hypnotist said in the patter actually didn’t amount to much, but somehow in a shared state of consciousness, something emerged that cannot be explained as mere psychological connection.

Hypnotism and Spiritual Consciousness

Most hypnotic inductions involve some sort of synchronization to the client’s breathing rhythm. Different systems do it differently but often one will count the client down in time to the client’s breath, or one will parse suggestions so they are recited in time to the client’s respiration. This is a standard technique, used since the time of Mesmer.

Yet, the next time you do it pay attention to your own breathing as you work with your client. I find, as have most of those I have taught, that you will regulate your own breathing in time with the client. During the hypnotic induction, very often the subject and operator are in sync. They breathe in unison, words flow in time to the beat of the breath.

As a clergy person and chaplain, as someone trained in spiritual techniques from around the world, I can point you to systems of spiritual development all over the globe where exactly this technique is used.

The shaman chants in rhythm to the supplicant’s breath. The Russian Orthodox Starets (one of whom, by the way, was Rasputin) recites prayers in rhythm to his or her breathing in the monastery or convent, and when in a group, the whole group breathes as one. The Dessert Mothers and Fathers of Christianity taught the importance (in 1Thessalonians 5:17) of “pray without ceasing,” which meant to pray while breathing. The Buddhist and Sufi Meditation Masters teach much the same thing, as does the yoga adept.

It is said that on average, you will take a billion breaths in your lifetime. Your breathing does more than just oxygenate your blood. While your heartbeat is controlled by a pacemaker (natural or artificial) located within the organ of the heart itself, your breathing is controlled by your brain.

The ancient Greek physician Galen noted that gladiators whose necks were broken at the angle to damage their brain stem could no longer breathe. We now call the part of the brain stem that controls this the preBötzinger Complex. The brain-breath connection works in both directions. If you damage the brain, breathing can be stopped. But if you control the breathing, you also change the brain. Every advance-level martial artist learns breathing rhythms that overcome fatigue, quiet fear, improve clarity of mind and boost an awareness of what the opponent might do next.

Modern science teaches us the value of mindfulness meditation, a sort of present-moment focus that is created by centering attention on the breath.

While the technique has been known for centuries, the medical value of the practice has been documented in our time. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote about the technique in his book Full Catastrophe Living after teaching it at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and Mindfullness Based Stress Management is now taught in hospitals around the nation.

I believe all of these spiritual techniques amount to Hypnotism Lite. What we do with our clients in our consultation rooms is a more powerful and structured version of what spiritual directors and teachers the world over have been doing since time immemorial.

Those same spiritual directors and teachers talk about how, in the deep inner place that breath work brings them to, they sense a connection to something larger than themselves. Some call this something “God.” Some call it “Buddha Consciousness.” Hermetic practitioners call it “Cosmic Consciousness.” The Sufi call it “Nearness to Allah.” Psychologist William James called it “Something More.” Dr. Carl Jung called it the “Collective Unconsciousness.”

Call it what you will. That many people describing what is obviously the same thing, are unlikely to be wrong. There is a deeper something that is contacted during the immense rapport of the inner state of mind that hypnotism can harness and during which “Something More” becomes manifest. And the hypnotist finds themselves saying exactly what needs to be said to meet the hunger in the client for meaning. And the hypnotist often does not know why.

Ah…but the result is there. The key to the client’s opening is found. The client discovers what their deepest desires are, and resolves to somehow manifest a part of the inner blueprint.

Like “Hearing A Word No Mouth Has Spoken,” this is a profound thing. But it is also a thing that transcends the individual psychology of the client. Something more has manifested in the deep rapport of subject and hypnotic operator.

If that is not a spiritual connection, I do not know what is.

The Complete Hypnotist

Sadly, not every hypnotic practitioner gets good at this. But many do. The best do.

As a hypnotist of many decades standing I believe one can sort of tell, and one can get a sense of what the hallmarks are of those who are good at this. Here is what I have noticed.

The best hypnotists, the colleagues who practice Soul Medicine, work with clients.

That may seem odd, but you’d be surprised how many colleagues out there have abandoned client work and while teaching classes about hypnotism, have ceased to practice it themselves. Perhaps they have gone as deep as they can go in their own self-transformation. Perhaps they no longer care. Perhaps money has become more important to them than helping. But you can tell. After a time what they have to teach feels shop-worn and dusty. They have lost passion. The best hypnotists work with clients, at least some of the time.

The best hypnotists, the Soul Doctors (if you will) regularly practice self-hypnotism in one of its many forms.

Simply, they do their own inner work. They attempt to deal with there own stuff - their traumas, resentments, hurts and pain. They learn by regular practice how to self-sooth and as a result become deeper and wiser people themselves. In hypnotism, more than in any other helping profession, what you do has to be who you are. Your methodology needs to flow from your personality and temperament. If you don’t have yourself together, your clients can tell and they will not trust you to accompany them to the deeper realms. You can’t take your client to a place you have never been.

In Conclusion

We are all works in progress. I look back with chagrin at some of my early hypnotic work and realize that I’m so much better now. That’s okay. I hope I keep learning and becoming better as a hypnotist until the moment I leave this world. We never know it all and there is always something new to learn.

But I want to make my hypnotic practice Soul Medicine. I want to stay in touch with the spiritual core of the hypnotic arts and sciences. I hope you agree. For there are rewards - to both you and your clients - for so doing.

And that is what I have to share with you in this keynote today. I hope you have a fantastic conference experience.