Oakville Zen Meditation
“Self-hypnosis”
Hypnosis:
Mental state associating relaxation focused attention, reduced peripheral sensorial awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to verbal suggestions or commands.
During hypnotherapy, the patient remains fully conscious, awake, cooperative, and cooperative.
Therefore, hypnosis is neither a mind control nor a brainwashing tool.
Around 20% of the population is resistant to hypnosis.
Used for centuries, it is a recognized and accepted therapy by the Canadian & American Medical Association as long as it is under the control of a certified health professional.
Hypnotherapy is frequently recommended for anxiety, phobias, addictions, sexual dysfunctions, guilt prolonged grieving, procrastination, depression and poor self-image.
Zen perspective:
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung ( student of Freud) knew Zen philosophy very well, was practicing meditation, and recommended it to his patients.
He realized very quickly the similitude between zazen that is Zen meditation and hypnosis. Indeed, mindfulness meditation is an induced mental state associating relaxation, focusing attention on breathing, and reduced peripheral sensorial awareness therefore very similar to hypnosis.
However, the only difference is the absence of external from a therapist.
We estimate that our brain/mind produces around 100,000 thoughts every day.
A very tiny proportion of them is decisional, meaning useful in our day-to-day life.
But the immense majority of them are just a constant background sound, sort of inner voice that I call self-talk.
We are spending a huge amount of time chatting to ourselves rather than talking to others.
This self-talk is, in fact, a form of self-hypnosis focusing on past events, future expectations, self-analysis, judgment, emotions, etc.
However and contrary to hypnotherapy, our self-talk that is self-hypnosis has no therapeutic value what so ever.
On the contrary, it is often detrimental, inducing more negative feelings more than positives ones.
Finally:
To awaken or enlightenment is to be free from this self-talk or self-hypnosis because its content, coming from our mind is, by definition, fictional and not necessarily true.
Thank you
