Session #67: Peter Blum on Neuroplastic Healing

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 67, Peter Blum on Neuroplastic Healing. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Welcome back. It’s Jason Lynette here with a very, very fascinating session, and I would very briefly reference, there’s a principle in business that of running the applications of how you reach out to your audience, your potential clients, as being that of a dog whistle.

And what I mean by that is imagine for a moment to apply a little bit of our good friend hypnotic metaphor. You’re at a dog park and you have a trustee dog whistle that apparently only dogs can hear yet. I can hear them and they’re kind of annoying though. It’s this moment where you blow that whistle and maybe there’s two or three dozen dogs there at the dog park, but maybe only four or five of them come running over to you.

So I’d reference that in advance because when you listen to this conversation I’m about to have with Peter Blum, there’s some themes that we’re gonna start off on that it may be too easy for some of you to go, That’s not for me though. What I want you to hear in terms of these concepts of shamonic healing, these concepts of healing through sounds, everything is grounded through science.

Everything is grounded from a real world approach to how we actually interact with our clients. And I love though the aspect of not necessarily using those modalities with every single client. So back to that dog whistle principle, this is how. As a business strategy, my hypnosis business is called Virginia Hypnosis because I’m in Virginia and I do hypnosis and to look at that website, I’m positioned as generalist.

I see smoking cessation, I see weight loss, I see fears. I work with people with medical issues, which definitely listen through this podcast session cuz Peter and I get very heavily deep into working with clients with medical issues. So it’s that statement that not every marketing piece that I would put out would be a match for everybody, and that’s intentional.

Yet it’s allowing those people that hear the message that they need to hear to rise to the surf is raise their hand and express that they are interested. And then reach out, make the contact, and then get the help that they absolutely need. So this brings us full circle to this concept of neuroplastic healing.

And I reached out to Peter as I saw that he and former Work Smart Hypnosis podcast guest, Michael Elner, session number three are doing a pre-convention offering up at the NGH Convention this year, August, 2016. And all the details are that are over in the show [email protected]. So Michael, who I’ve known for years, Peter, who I’ve been getting to know in more recent years and reading over the content and really just for my own.

Fascination and enjoyment, wanting to have a conversation about this as well. And I’ll tell you, you’re about to hear us jump into themes of Sharks and pacman and singing bowls and just covering a whole wide range of strategies, which just simply, I’ll tell you now, just simply listening to this conversation, it will inspire you to help your clients in even better ways.

So let’s jump right in. This is session number 67, Peter Blum on Neuroplastic Healing.

We usually kick off by playing Origin Story, so just kind of kick us off, tell us a little bit of your entry into hypnosis, how you first got introduced to it. Okay. Well, I mean, uh, Go back in time to the years 1985. I’m in my late thirties and working at whatever I can do to, uh, support a small family.

Used to tell people I don’t know what I want, wanna do when I grow up. And I was a journalist at the time. I had been involved in a lot of metaphysics, yoga, meditation, various forms of spiritual pursuit. But I was writing a series of articles for a local paper on alternative forms of healing. A lot of things that are now mainstream and accepted and are even in some cases, insurance reimbursable.

Were just starting to get more popular. So I interviewed a chiropractor and an acupuncturist and someone doing shsu. And I, I, part of the research was that I, I got sessions in all these modalities. So then I got a call from an old friend person I had known from like 10 years before named Richard zk. And Richard had gone out to California about four or five years before and had just returned back to my hometown here in, uh, the Hudson Valley of New York State.

And Richard said, I am practicing Aon hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming. I saw the series of articles you’re writing. I think what I’m doing would fit in well. And I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t know what Aon hypnosis or neuro linguistic programming were. But I went over and interviewed him and it was fascinating.

And even with a lot of experience with meditation and, uh, different forms of, uh, you know, playing with consciousness, I had never. Really had any direct experience with hypnosis and had very, very limited frame of reference. And so Richard talked a lot through a bunch of books and articles at me. But the best thing about it was since I was doing, uh, experiential research, He, uh, took me into his office and he put me in a chair.

Uh, he had this chair that was made by Panasonic. It was called the Getaway Chair. Mm-hmm. . And it was a luxury, a recliner with built in, you know, rollers that go up and down the acupuncture points on either side of your spine. And, uh, footrests that vibrated and wings with speakers in them that you could put a cassette tape.

That’s what we were using at the time. Cassette tapes in and here. And he put a cassette tape in and something called a double induction. Two people telling two different stories at the same time, one in either ear. And then he put headphones and goggle on me that were hooked up to an early version of what’s we now call, you know, Alpha Theta brainwave machines.

And he plugged those in and, uh, and he, and he left the. Basically , he sounded like the chair was already doing a lot of the work for him too, on top of, Well, the, between the, the chair and the cassette tape and the goggles and the headphones, I was gone. I, I later found out this is a technique that we might call overload.

Mm-hmm. , you know, I had certainly more than seven plus and minus two bits of information coming in at the same time from all of my fences. And the two voices were telling a story that was, you know, to induce a state of relaxation and, and to excite the imagination. And it was a fantastic experience. So that was great.

And, um, but I said, you know, I’m not, I, I’m, I’m still curious. I said, Richard, that was like, I need to come back and talk to you some more. And I came back following. For the second part of my interview. And I said, Well, you know, that was, that was wonderful. I recognized that state. It’s not a, it’s, it’s not an alien state.

I had thought it necessarily would be something totally different. I said, It’s not all that different from states that I’ve experienced on my own in, in meditation or deep concentration or kind of you said exactly and said, and you didn’t, you didn’t do anything. And he said, Yes, exactly. So he was really introducing me to the idea that a lot, you know, self hypnosis, it all, hypnosis has a self hypno, not a component.

The hypnotist and the model that I use is the facilitator of the guide. But really they’re engaging your imagination so that you can make changes and see things differently. So I said, Well that was great, but what would I use it for? And he said, Anything you like? And I thought, well, you know, at that point I was a lot more arrogant.

Than I am now. And then he said, Well, I really don’t have any problems, you know, , so, but I am an avid tennis player. Could I use it to improve my tennis game? And he said, Absolutely. So we needed a second session that had no chair, no goggles, no headphones, where I, I stood and he did something that I later learned was more related to a, an NLP anchoring of excellence technique.

And created, helped me create a, an association with that particular word and posture of entering into a state of excellence that was associated with playing tennis. And then I, I went out that week and I, I played tennis and I, I beat people that I had never beat before. And it just all seemed very bean like the ball was, you know, twice as size as usual.

And I was moving, everything was in slow motion at all the time. I, I needed. And, you know, I went, marched back into his office a week later and I said, Okay, I’m a believer. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it works. Within six months. I, I wrote the article within six months, as state would have it, I had reached that point that there’s a metaphor that’s sometimes used in corporate coaching about putting a frog, you know, about the frog and boiling water.

Yeah. That’ll eventually, it’ll jump out if it’s hot or it’ll stay Right, Right, right. If you put a frog in a pan of water, so they say that’s cold and slowly heated, the frog will boil to death. If you throw a frog into a pan of water that’s already boiling, it will hop right out. So I, I was in a situation where I was slowly, slowly boiling to death, and I, I, I needed to leave and it was, you know, I couldn’t figure out where to jump.

So my friend Richard said, Look, why don’t you do what I. I’ll train you. I think you’d be good at it. You’re natural. I’ll train you and I’ll bring you into my practice. And, uh, my practice is so busy that I really, I need someone to download some, some of the excess clients too. And I also need someone, uh, business is booming.

I need someone to manage the office for me. So for the first year while you’re my intern in training, you can run the office and I’ll tell you to do that. And I, I said this, this sounds like the proverbial offer that I can’t refuse, , and that was in 86. So I’m, I’m actually celebrating 40 years in the profession, which seems extraordinary.

96, or maybe it’s 30, 30 years. That’s right. My math is a little off 30 years, but that’s still a really long time. 30 years to be doing something. I never did anything for longer than five or 60 10 years, so 30 years of doing this. And, uh, I love the field. I love the work. I, I hope that I can continue to do it for a while longer.

I worked with Richard for about three or four years and then we parted ways and I went off and I’ve had a private practice ever since, and I’ve been an instructor for the NG since 1993. So I have trained hundreds of hundreds of people and I also enjoy that part of it. And. I think that’s it. Yeah. I love that.

And I chair, one of the reasons I reached out to you is just the fascination that you’re somebody from many different modalities, many different approaches. I mean, even to browser website. It transitions along the side bar from NLP to hypnosis, to sweat lodges and shamonic healing and singing bowls. And I, I’d ask you, how much of this would you say is putting variations upon a similar theme and just attaching different terminologies, really, how much of a, how much of a barrier would you put between these different modalities, these different approaches that you have a passion and background in?

Uh, not a heck of a lot of a barrier. You know, I mean, one of the quotes that was that Erickson, who is my personal hero, even though I never met him, I’ve studied his work and, and his writings and. Watched films of him and about him. And in one of them there was a, a sociology anthropologist who was saying, uh, Dr.

Erickson always encouraged me to study the, the TRAs of the people in, in Brazil and in Bali as an anthropologist when people would be playing music and dancing and go and be possessed by spirits and go into a trance and stab themselves and not be hurt. And, you know, he said it was the same phenomenon, but from a different psychosocial context and different cultural context.

And that always, that always stuck with me that, that it’s, it’s my own curiosity that has led me my own passion. What, where, where it takes me and, and I, so I seek the inclusive. You know, in, in NLP they talk about meta programs and I seek the inclusive one. What is the, what is the connective thread between all the things that interest me?

I think everybody kind of does that, you know, And so my own particular stew or booo. You know, and we all cook it up. And I encourage people, if you’re coming from a dance background, then think about how dance, you know, works with hypnosis. If you’re studying hypnosis, if you’re coming from a linguistics and you speak several languages, think about the language component of, of hypnosis.

You know, there’s always, you know, movement, language, what, whatever sports, you know, what states of excellence in sports, whatever. So I, I’ve been a musician all my life and I’ve also been profoundly affected by teachers who, from coming from indigenous shamonic and, and medicine person settings, tribal people, and I, I put together something a few years ago called Where Three Rivers Meet, and it’s a.

A training that I’ve done a couple times, which is the braid, you know, the idea of a braid, which is with hair, you take three streams and you’re sort of crisscrossing them and, uh, making them into a one, one stream. And so the braid for me is these three rivers needing and those being hypnosis, uh, shamonic perspectives and sound human.

And I do employ all, all of them When people come to see me. My, I have a couple different business cards. The one that I’ve been handing out longest, uh, just says, you know, medical and clinical hypnosis. And the other one that I started giving out later has a picture of singing balls and it says, Sound healing shamonic interventions, uh, and lists among my credentials that I’m, uh, certified, you know, a, an an interfaith minister, so, Again, if somebody comes to me for hypnosis, I might not talk about those things, but I might, I wanna feel out who’s coming to see me, and if that’s something that they are amenable to, leaning towards, have knowledge of, have curiosity about, otherwise, I’m just, I may alienate them.

And that’s never the intention, right? You wanna make it comfortable for people. So if I get somebody who’s very medically, scientifically oriented, I’m probably not gonna take out my drum or my singing balls and my, you know, my, my how wing, but I, you know, you never know, right? They’re, they’re all sitting, they’re, they’re sitting there around my room.

If people come into my office and they see I have some gongs and drum, and what, whatever, if they ask questions, I follow where their attention goes. Tell me about a time where perhaps, you know, maybe from the initial phone conversation, you would’ve thought, Incorporating these sounds would not have been appropriate, but then maybe you followed that haun and it found to be the right choice.

Mm. Can’t think of anything specifically off the top of my head, but I, what I will say is that in the last, so half dozen years, I’ve been working more with, in, in the sound healing work, more with tuning forks and, uh, turning forks are, are nice because they’re, well, they’re turning forks. They’re not something from a strange, exotic culture.

They’re not alien. They’re, it’s a tuning fork and people are familiar with them. And I, and I can explain it in terms of, you know, these, these tuning forks are tuned to particular number of beats per second, and they vibrate in that way. And there’s a scientific explanation for how I can use them to tune your brain.

And, uh, it’s based on the principle of entrainment. Now, that’s the same principle as Shamonic Journeying uses, although a lot of people who use the drum for Shamonic journey might not know. Because I was curious when I got involved with that, and that’s a, a form of, of exploration, of consciousness for healing and guidance.

That was popularized by an anthropologist named Michael Harner, who wrote a book called The Way of the Shaman. And, and it involves lying down and somebody playing a large frame drum with a very regular beat. And I started studying this in the late eighties, right around the same time as I was learning about hypnosis.

And it was interesting. I had a foot in each world and I’d go and I’d work in Richard’s office and he’d had these, these goggles and headphones that were, you know, people would put on. It’s very scientific, well it’s listed, it’s goggles and headphones. It’s electronically produced, pulse, light and sound.

You know, it’s, it’s technology. It’s a machine. . So that’s, it’s within the parameters of, of the Western scientific approach. And then I go, In, in the evenings over the, get together with my buddies and Todd bandanas on and lay on the ground, somebody would play this drum and we journey, that’s what they call Sha journey.
And we go and meet our spirit guides and the beat of the drum is very regular and it, it kind of goes like this.

It’s not a syncopated beat, it’s just a very regular beat. And I was so curious and, you know, the, the brain waves, just for our listeners who aren’t familiar, this is what biofeedback is based on. Yeah. And the whole science and neurofeedback and that our brain is always generating electrical energy and it, it’s in different frequencies and those frequencies correspond with our state of consciousness.

So if you’re, you know, normal waking state as most people are walking around, conversing and conducting business, and if you hook them up, you find they were in beta, they is the fastest stage, 12 to 25 cycles per second. And the next slowest one down is alpha alphas. Eight to 12 cycles per second. That’s, you know, spacing out, daydreaming.

If you yawn, if you close your eyes, you go into alpha for a few seconds. We all go in and outta alpha Many times during the day, lighter stages of of trans early phases of, of meditation people would be generating alpha in biofeedback. You learn to, to find feedback through to seeing a light go on or a sound go off from electrodes that are hooked up to your body.

To calibrate this, say, Oh, okay, so an alpha, so alpha’s good failure is even more interesting. The is four to seven cycles per second, and that’s the state that corresponds with deeper states of hypnosis and deeper, more experienced meditators with plateau and alpha, and then drop down into theta. So four to seventh, very, that’s the hypnogogic state.

That’s the state. In between waking and sleeping where we, we have insights and breakthroughs and, and new ways of time understanding aha moments. It’s a good one. And the delta is the deepest one. That’s 0.5 to 3.5 cycles per second. So the bright and sound machines generally start people out in beta and then with post light and sound.

And because of a principle column in treatment, which says it’s a general, overall overarching principle in physics, it says that two objects that are operating and close to the same frequency is brought into proximity. Brought close together, will tend to, will match sometimes called the frequency following effect.

Mm-hmm. . So the brain is producing these frequencies, and if you suggest to it through pulse, light, and sound, Oh, let’s, let’s, let’s slow down. Let’s start data. Let’s slow down the alpha. As the light and sound slows down, the brain will go along with it. And so it’s a way of just very naturally, organically moving a person into a deeper state, into a more contemporary state.

So I’m curious, just back in 1988 and I take the drum and I take out my, I take my wristwatch off and I’m watching the second hand go around and I’m, I’m playing the drum and, and I about 280 beats per minute. And I drive that by 60 and I’m like, Hmm, that’s between four and five beats per second. Hey, that’s the, how about that?

Could that be that these ancient medicine people in shaman intuitively, without having the Ed Gs or the telescopes and anything to hook up to the brain, they intuitively knew that certain rhythms were more conducive to people going into a, a contempt with, of hypnotic state. That’s where I go back to the word modality.

That we look at the word modality. We’d often look at hypnosis as a modality. Some would even separate NLP as being zone separate modality or anything else of this nature. And to look at it as that word involving just, let’s call it transportation, we’re often arriving at that same place in the mind.

There’s just a different way to get there. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, like, uh, I’m going to Kansas City and I might take a train. I might take a plane, but if I have to walk, I’m gonna get there just the same. Mm-hmm. . So, so this is great. And this is a, a, a revelation for me. And so using the drum for people who are open to that is fun.

But now again, I don’t wanna, you know, I wanna be in rapport. I wanna make it safe. I wanna make it comfortable up to a certain point. Some people where it’s good to push their boundaries, you want to introduce something a little exotic, a little magical, a little exciting. They like that. But for a lot of people, you don’t wanna freak them out.

So Turning Forks do the exact same thing, but they’re turning forks. They’re what’s used to tune a guitar or piano. They’re very safe. And so I have now a set of five tuning forks. They’re called the Brain Tumor Set, and they’re tuned so that there’s a, a fundamental, and then there’s four different forks.

And that what happens when you, you strike two of them and you hold one up to each ear, is that the brain perceives the, the dnce tone, which are boral, what do they call it? Phenomena. Mm-hmm. Boral phenomena. Boral means two years. We have two years. And so we hear things through two years. And if I hold a fork that’s vibrating at 256, Which is a middle C 256 beats per second by one ear, and then one that’s vibrating at 270 by the other 270 beats.

The brain will perceive the difference. 14 beats per second, which is in the beta state. And then if I hold one, the 2 56 and one that’s 2 2 65. Well that’s 11 and you know, so I can ramp it down so that it’s perceiving a slower and slower frequency. And as it does, so it matches step just as it would with the drum or any, or the, the Alpha Theta brain wave machine.

So it’s two forks and I find that it’s very easy, very easy to transport. I just stick them in my pocket and pull ’em out. I say, Here’s some treating folks. This is pleasant. And I give the people a five minute explanation, just like I did now about, about entrainment in the brain way frequencies. And I said, But you know, you don’t really even need to know about this.

Now for some people it’s a good overload technique. You start talking about this stuff, right, Jason? Follow me, you know, start talking about, you know, brain waves and treatment. It serves as a confusion for some B oral and they’re like, Whatever. Damn for, you know, like, , let me listen to the sound. Either just ask for eye closure at that point, or just yell the word sleep.

It’s either gonna . Yeah, yeah. You know, and, and I say, and you don’t have to listen to me, blah, blah, blah. You don’t have to understand if the inquiry might wanna know, if you like to know about this tough time. But otherwise, here’s the good thing about this. You don’t have to understand it for it to work.

And I’ll tell you what I’m loving. I’ll tell you what I’m loving about this, is that it’s a category that far too often people would be a little critical of. They’d start to cast judgements and assessments on it before they even know about it. Though, for the listener, you know, participating in this, hear that everything is coming from a place of research and science, which is kind of how I want to transition us over to working.

You know, with our clients about the, the mindset of creating new neural networks. This whole concept of neuroplasticity, which is one of the biggest buzzwords of, you know, just to bring it into the process of working with a client, how, how would you kind of characterize if there is like an overriding goal?

If there’s overriding themes that carry into a session, as someone’s there sitting with Peter Bloom, the hypnotist, you are far more powerful than anybody has ever told you, or you’ve ever let yourself believe. Now, is that about me or is that for your client? Cause I’ll take the compliment. Exactly.

We’ll leave it, we’ll leave it, Uh, interviews over. You’re on the homepage of the work Smart Hope . We’ll leave it, uh, Sorry. Go ahead. You know, what, what do they call it? You know, delightfully vague or something like that. You know, deliberately ambiguous, heartfully vague, but you know that every person, it can benefit from having somebody in their corner who absolutely believes in them and is telling them, You can, you can do whatever you put your mind to.

You, you can’t even begin to imagine what is possible for you. Don’t let the limitations of of others limiting belief systems keep you from, from attempting. You know, Tony Robb, who a lot of people have mixed feelings about, I, you know, guys took, he took NLP and he ran with it. Yeah. He made it its own. He built an empire and he helped.

I’d always, people, I’d always point out, it’s kind of like that moment where, this was before I was born, though, quite familiar with the history of the movie of Monty Pythons life of Brian, where people were protesting it and they hadn’t even seen the movie. I think, I think most of the critics of Tony Robbins haven’t actually interacted with material, experienced them.

Right, Right. Tony Robbins says, What would you attempt if you knew you could not fit? If I gave you a written guarantee that you could not fail, what is it that you’ve never even allowed yourself to consider? So, you know, this is opening up horizons of possibility. We don’t know. I mean, you know, Michael Elner and I are, are together.

We’re, we’re, we’ve worked, we’ve known each other, uh, for, you know, 20 years and, and or at least, and we’ve co-taught together and we both are great believers in the empowerment of others. You know, that through, through learning hypnosis, through experiencing hypnosis, self hypnosis, a open, opens up a panoramic view of what is possible.

Maybe been looking through, you know, tunnel vision three years. Robert Anton Wilson, who’s a great writer and thinker, uh, he was, I don’t know if he coined the term, but he talked about, you know, your reality tunnel. And it’s, it’s like you’re looking through down this tunnel. That’s your reality. And, and there’s, there’s so many other ways of looking at things in, in, in Transformations, which is a wonderful book that I recommend to all my Yes students, which is, uh, transcripts of Grinder and Baler early seminars on hypnosis in, in nt And I will definitely link to that over in the show notes, cuz the, to find the original to find it’s now out of print and classically Yeah.

I’ve had students be able to grab copies for like 25 bucks though. Yeah. The show’s a lot of that. They can, they can contact me and I will send them the PDFs. All right. Real seriously. Yeah. But you know, in, in that book they said, you know, if you could just for one second the inside someone else’s mind and consciousness and perceptual reality, it would be more powerful than the most powerful psychedelic drug.

You could put your hands on it would, it would, you would be on such an altered a reality trip because we are all thinking, Oh, this is how things are and everybody’s wandering around with their own, you know, we have no clue what somebody else’s worldview or reality or, or reality tunnel is. So this, this idea, you know, we’re coming historically out of the age of decar and the, the mind body split and, and the body as machine and the, in the seventies and eighties there was tremendous groundbreaking research.

And I was very fortunate because my first instructor, my mentor Richard. So I, I’ve mentioned before, Za was really into this and, and he, I had up in front of me an article that he wrote in the spring of 1989, and I just wanna quote a little bit from it because it, it bear bears directly on what we’re talking about, neuroplasticity.

He says, Recent scientific mind theories is the metaphor that the mind is a kind of biocomputer taking and processing mental image pictures called holograms. These images have been found to change the emotional and physical structure at the body and even objects outside of it. For example, Penn State psychologist Howard Hall, took blood samples from a group of subjects and establish their white blood cell count.

White blood cells are our first line of defense against invasion of foreign bodies. Then Hall taught his subject self hypnosis. Also called variously autogenic training. Progressive relaxation guided or creative visualization asked them to imagine their white blood cells as hungry, powerful sharks devouring the cancer cells.

Children were asked to imagine Pac Man. Remember Pac Man? Well, some people do. Pac Man traveling through the body through the bloodstream eating bad cells. An hour later, Dr. Halt took their white blood cell count. It had risen on the average from 15,508 to 15,000 hundred 92. A week later, it was 18,950.

Hall commented that for some inexplicable reason, the mind can influence the body by changing the biochemistry of the blood. I mean, that’s, that’s what, 25 years ago, more. You know, to be honest, the images of a hungry shark eating a bad cell are attack man ing around a bloodstream are ridiculously simple, perhaps even silly.

And those silly pictures held before the mind’s eye, when the body has relaxed its muscles affect us almost instantaneously, right down to this cellular level. You then goes on to say, imagine then what the impact is of our own self image, The mental image picture of who we think we are, not only in the health of our bodies, but also in the quality of our lives.

And the, we love, we carry around that picture of how we see ourselves, not for 24 hours of Dr. Hall’s experiments, but 24 hours a day, day in, day out. So I would tell a personal anecdote here, I’ve worked with people with, with cancer, with tumors, and uh, visualizing them, and you have to use the imagery. I found this is my.

In, in, Im o in my humble opinion, , everyone who says that is obviously not humble, but , I have found that my belief is you need to use imagery that’s comfortable for people. And so for some, some people, the idea of, of how this, you know, like those are two aggressive, those images of sharks or if things eating it.
So, so maybe just, you know, like, uh, uh, weeding the garden or whatever it is, whatever image is comfortable for them. But I’ve helped people using selfness and imagery to shrink tumors. I’ve helped people change their, their blood sugar level change their blood pressure, you know, Um, I worked in a doctor’s office in the nineties.

I had, uh, a fellow, the doctors would refer people to me and when they hired me, They said, we know what we do and we are holistic in our approach. And we believe that every chronic condition has a stress component. And uh, so we would like to have, and we have, we believe in a mind body approach, and we need somebody in our office.

We had somebody they left. We need somebody to handle the mind part of it. We’d like to hire you. Can you do what you do without using the H word? ? ? I said, sure. This was in 19 96, 97. I worked there for two years and the sign on my door said, Peter Blum, Director stress management department. So they would send people to me and they, the people would come and they’d say, I, I’m not even sure what you do.

Dr. Ken or Dr. Steve told me I should come see you. And I said, Well, I’m gonna teach you some, um, body relaxation, you know, some body scans, some progressive relaxation, some some breathing techniques. Use your mind to visualize things, maybe work with examining your language change how you, you, you express yourself change.

Basically, I was teaching themselves hypnosis without ever using the word hypnosis . So I had a fellow came to me by referral from the doctors with high blood pressure, wasn’t able to downregulate his blood pressure. And the guy was an engineer, so it was obviously a scientific mind. I said, Okay, what I’d like to do is call the nursing and have you have her take your blood pressure before, before the session.

Nurse, fine nurse came and took his blood pressure. It was high, it was high. And I said, Fine. And, and, and I said, So now I just wanna talk to you for a while and close your eyes. Listen, you know, I, I don’t remember how I started. Probably something about, you know, focusing on you breathing and relaxing muscles, you know, fairly standard stuff.

And then I started talking to him about nature and about beavers. I said, You know, beavers are the engineers at the animal kingdom. And I said that because the guy’s an engineer, I figured he will relate to that. And beavers had the ability to build, you know, dams. And it’s amazing what they can do to regulate the, the, the, uh, pressure on how much, uh, liquid is, is damned up and stored.

But then there’s also ways that they need to sometimes open up those passage rates and allow the, the water, allow the liquid to flow through and create a better flow of, you know, blah, blah, blah. Metaphors for, you know, changing the pressure. Changing the pressure blood is a liquid that’s flowing through, you know, in enclosed, uh, type, which is called, you know, vein or, um, artery, et cetera, et cetera.

I never talked to him about his blood pressure. I talked to him about beavers and, uh, he came out of, he said, I feel pretty good. And I said, Let’s call the nursing. And of course, his blood pressure was much lower, so he said, Well, how did that happen? I said, Well, I didn’t do anything. Obviously you must have done something.

Mm-hmm. . So this, this was, you know, he was a convert and he came back and he came back for more sessions and eventually he came to me and said, I, I want, this is fascinating. I wanna do this to help other people. And I ended up training in the hypnosis. And, and so as the Beal song says, and so I left the police department, you know, and, and I said, So you can have a wonderful career as the scientific engineer of the hypno world, you know, and, and you can use all that scientific information and knowledge that you have and that kind of, you know, left brain approach and help people with, with their problems.

So, so anyway, I obviously believe in all this stuff. What’s beautiful about that metaphor that just jump in for a second, is that we can look at it in terms. The whatever illness or disease may have also been going on. Being a direct metaphor though, at the same time, there’s also just all of the residing stress, all the residual stress around having that issue, and if there is indeed a stress component that may have been causing it, it’s that power of the hypnotic metaphor to really go in and address it from all of these various angles that, you know briefly, here’s a client that I was with this morning that she came in.

She’s someone who I’ve seen a number of times now for weight loss. She’s down a significant amount of weight, still has quite a bit of ways to go. Yet it’s this place we’re going into like an extended control room process was the, was the clear fit for it today, which we had done something like that a couple of weeks back.

And it’s this beautiful experience of we were going in and reframing occasional moments of what I can label as appropriate hunger where, yeah, it’s four o’clock you could eat, but now you have that ability to wait till it when it’s the better time and make better choices. Being the, the literal translation there though, it’s that beauty of the metaphor often may have unintended results where I did not go into anything in terms of food choices in that meeting that day.

Right. And that was her biggest takeaway. The way that we can, we can hear a song and we hear a message. That’s what we need to hear yet perhaps isn’t what the person who wrote the song was intending. Yes. Yes. And you know, just to enlarge the, the scope of this that there would be in a different situation with a different client, I might be addressing like, what are the causes of stress in your life?

You know, what, you know, high blood pressure is, is a response to a situation. I mean, there are diet dietary aspects of it, exercise aspects of it, but a lot of it, you know, white coat syndrome person goes, their blood pressure’s fine. They go into the doctor’s office to have it measured and they get nervous and all of a sudden shoots up.

So it is, it is, you know, supposedly part of our autonomous systems, but it’s, it is directly affected by circumstance and by our thoughts and emotions. So if a person is, is not really good at responding to stressful situations in their life, and we all have them, They may need to learn some stress management techniques.

So in that sense, the sign on my door was very accurate. It was about stress management. But sometimes I, I think that why this story came to mind with several reasons, but one is we don’t always need to, you know, examine the history. You know, there are a lot of people who I are, you know, you need to find out where this first happened.

When did the, I don’t believe that. I think sometimes you can just go right to the unconscious and, and, and how help the person discover that we can, we can regulate a lot of these things that we had been told that we, we couldn’t buy by images and by unconscious responses that we can then sort of, uh, delegate to, to, you know, you know how to do this now, now you know how to do this, so just take care of it.

And, and so anyway, so I obviously believe. Wholeheartedly in this. I, I’m a proponent of it. I teach to other people. Now, flash forward to, you know, eight, eight years ago, seven, eight years ago, I work a lot with a, a wonderful psychiatrist, my friend Dr. Lewis, Mel Madrona, who’s the author of a number of books, Coyote Medicine, being the best known one, but he’s a, his, his most recent.

We work a lot with Story and he’s of Lakota and Cherokee descent, but he is a psychiatrist and he’s board certified in three different areas. And, uh, so we do a lot of, uh, workshops on, on storytelling, but he, he also teaches something called Cherokee Body Work. And, uh, so seven years ago he was giving a workshop locally on Cherokee body work.

And now I’m a, I’m mention tennis. I’m a, I, you know, this is consistent theme tennis player and. Right around that time, I started feeling a, something I never felt my body, I started limping and I started feeling pain in my right knee. Couple months before this workshop, Cherokee body work, I had gone to see my doctor and I had an x-ray and he referred me to an, you know, an osteo orthopedic osteopath.

And, and he took an MRI and he said, Oh, Mr. Bla, you have a torn media meniscus. And I said, Well, what does that mean? He showed me this, you know, the film. And there it was, it was torn right in half. And I said, What can we do? And he said, Well, you know, you’re gonna have surgery. And I said, Well, I, I’m not so crazy about that.

Look, let’s wait a while and see, you know, see what happens. But I, I was limping around and I was concerned about, you know, the future of my tennis career and, and, and we’re, we’re in this Cherokee body work weekend and, uh, we paired off. And we’re working with another person, and this is very wise body worker.

A woman named Julie was working on me and she said, What’s going on with your body? And I said, Well, I have the torn meniscus. I can’t, you know, I sat crosslegged in, in and half lotus pose and meditation for decades. I can’t get my knee down far enough to do that. It hurts. I’m lumping around tennis court goes, Well, let’s, let’s heal that.

And I said, No, no, no. But you don’t understand. I, it’s, it’s torn. I’ve seen , the mri, I was there in the doctor’s office. We can’t, and I, I, you know, I was like, I sounded just like my, my patients who are in that like stuck state, you know, the stuck state. Yeah. That usually starts out with, I can’t, the danger of the word because she looked at me.

And she said, Have you, you’re a healer, right? You, you work with people with hypnosis? I said, Yeah. She said, Have you seen people shrink tumors and heal from cancer? I said, Yes. She said, So what? You’re different

And she had me. And in that moment I realized I was somehow holding my own situation as being un. I, I, I thought, Yeah, I, but you know, this is science and it’s me and it’s a torn thing and it’s shredded. And she said, you know, those Navajo blankets that get stitched together, it just visualizes just joining and being stitched together.

And she worked on me and I went into trance on the, on the body work table. And lo and behold, you know, within a couple weeks it had stopped hurt. And I wasn’t limping and I was back on the tennis court and, and a month later, two months later, I realized I was able to sit in a, in a crosslegged position, I could get my knee down again.

And that was eight years ago. And it hasn’t bothered me since. Well, I mean, of all things that’s, it’s that experience of, I had two clients in the office last week, oddly enough, came in with the same story. And for one, that story of, because I’m now retired, this is gonna be the easiest time in my life to get into better health.

And the other one coming in. And because I’m so now retired, this is gonna be one of the most difficult times to get into health. Right, Right, right. So what is the, this is where, where why I’m so concerned with story. What are the stories that we tell ourselves and actually convince ourselves a true, They’re just stories.

And if, you know, I say, you know, there are no bad people. I’m very optimistic. There are just bad stories. . Mm-hmm. . So helping somebody change, question their story. I mean, that, that’s what this woman, woman did. And, and I have a quote on my, on my wall. I have a number of quotes that I keep up there to, you know, sort of little ticklers that I look at ’em and I remember, Oh, that’s right.

One of ’em is from, from Ericson. He says, It isn’t the amount of time, it isn’t the theory of psychotherapy, it’s how you reach the personality by saying the right thing at the right time. And she nailed me. She got me right at the right moment by, by sort of making fun of me. What you think you’re different.

And I was like, No. Go Jesus. If I believe that other people can do this. And in that moment, something shifted. I went from, I can’t change this science. It’s torn to who knows what’s possible. Beautiful. You know, I, I work with shamans and medicine people and, and you go into this liminal world with them, and you’re talking about, you know, calling in the spirits and, and, and having them move and, and change, you know, reset bones and, and move muscles and, and who knows what’s possible.

Not everybody can go to that place. It’s not, everybody’s comfortable with that. If I said it’s somebody, it’s a metaphor. And if the metaphor works, fine, if not, let’s go try to diff try a different metaphor. Let’s try the metaphor of science. That’s, that’s a good metaphor. . Nice. Nice. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve got, uh, and, and, and bringing this all full circle, there’s a fascinating opportunity coming up that you’re actually doing with Michael Elner prior to the GH Convention.

Yes. Yeah, we are. Do, yeah. Yeah. We’ve got a one day pre convention, uh, workshop on, on neuroplasticity. And, uh, you know, I was just saying to you before, before we went on air that Michael and I have taught together many times, and, and this particular one, he put in the, you know, the description. He put this together and I said, Fine.

I, yeah, let’s do that. And, and we put a few different ones in, and that was the one that NGH accepted. And so, so we’re, we’re doing that one on, uh, I think on Thursday before it starts. And, uh, neuroplastic approaches to creating health and wellbeing. And after it got accepted, I said, All right, well, Michael, What, what does this mean?

What is new? ? , You know that thing that we’ve been talking about for the last 45 minutes? Oh, that name? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s the word that I said. Oh, so the brain, the mind can influence the body and, and, and so this is, you know what I came up with here? It’s the brain’s ability to be flexible and to rewire in response to experience.

You know, that that’s it. The brain’s constantly changing not only in function but in physical structure. So it changes itself in, in two different ways. One is by adapting to what’s happening in the environment. So this is what we would call experience dependent neuroplastic. And we think of this as sort of an automatic, unconscious process of conditioning.

But then this also, it, it changes by shifting and directing our attention, which is self directed neuroplasticity. And on one side, helping the client to produce the change on the other side. Giving them the capabilities and skills to continue on their own. Yes. And the belief, you know, that it is possible.

A lot of people have been, you know, hypnotized by, you know, like that song they blinded me with science. Mm-hmm. . And a lot of people are hypnotized by their doctors, unfortunately, in negative ways. Like, oh, there’s nothing that can be done about this. You know, there’s, there’s, this is just, you’re just gonna have to learn to live with it.

This is, it’s, it’s bad hypnosis, so we don’t know what’s possible. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and I was inspired by a lot of it. And one of my favorite short stories, this was long time ago, was about the government called it top scientists together, a theoretical and practical physicist. And they, they, and they said this scientist was working on an anti-gravity device and he had, he was in its early stages, but he had gotten it to work and he had made some, some films of his early experiments.

Now remember this, this was before CGI or anything. This was a story that was written in the fifties, in maybe early sixties. This was long before computer enhanced graphics and so forth and, and special effects. So they said they, they had a 16 or eight millimeter, 16 millimeter film, and they said, but unfortunately there was a fire.

The scientists died. All of his notes burned up. Everything burned. All we have is a fragment of this film. And, and this, they, the scientists all said that they, they said, Anti gravity’s impossible. Everybody knows that. There’s no, no way. They said, Yes, but look at this film. And they showed this portion of this film to these guys and they scratched their heads and they went to work.

And after a year, they said, Well, we, we think actually, now that we have figured it out, and we, we don’t know how he did it because we don’t have his notes, but we have figured out a way to duplicate what we saw in the film. We have figured it out. And they demonstrated they had made their own anti-gravity device and the government said that’s great because that was all made up.

That guy never existed, his notes never existed. And we constructed this film very carefully, usually using, you know, like optical illusions to make it look like something was, was powered by anti-gravity. They had to believe that it was possible. They had to believe that it had been done and that they were able to do it as long as they thought, no, it’s not possible.

Violates laws of physics that was just stumbling block. They would never be able to do it. And we have examples of this over and over again. The very common one that’s used is the, the four minute mile. Yeah, I was about to jump in with that exact example that, oh, you can’t do that. And as soon as someone did then high school kids were doing it.

Yeah, everybody’s doing. Yeah. So, So, you know, Michael has done a lot of amazing work with long term survivors of aids. He challenged the existing paradigm in the eighties, in, in, in, and, you know, when there was sweeping like a, like the red death through, through certain communities. Uh, and, and the mantra that was going on in the background was AIDS fatal, age fatal.

And Michael challenged that. They said, I wanna meet. There are long term survivors. I wanna meet them. I wanna talk to them. I wanna bring them to people’s attention. That’s, you know, we need to focus on people who have lived for 20 years. I have a friend, a close personal friend who was diagnosed in 1999 with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.

A few years later, he had a spot, a malignant nodule removed from his lung. He has melanoma. He has three or four different kinds of cancer. He’s still walking around. He’s very stubborn, , you know, that’s, there’s some value in just saying, you know, giving the finger to the, the established truth and saying, I’m, I’m gonna make my own reality here.

You know, I mean, you know, we, we, we can, we can take that extremes and sometimes my reality co collides with somebody else’s reality. Something’s got a give. Yeah. It could be the, you know, the NLP softener of the Bold statement followed by or not, or I always tend to filter back to the, uh, as a person who watched way too many infomercials as a kid growing up, there’s gotta, there’s gotta be a better way

And that’s not all right, . But wait, there’s another, Well wait, there’s more. That’s another great catch phrase. You know, So this is the world we live in. We live in the world that where we’ve all been influenced by the commercials on tv, the movies, the pop culture, the songs that we, uh, to the jokes we’ve told, uh, the, the, the action movies, the superheroes.

You know what I sometimes say, you know, like, maybe you don’t believe in, in, in, uh, in animal spirits or guardian. Maybe you do, Maybe you do believe in guardian angels. That is an amazing communi. And people out there who, who believe that they’ve been contacted by an aliens. You know, there’s a, there are people who work regularly with the ascended masters.

That’s their reality, I’m saying. So let’s invite Jesus in, let’s invite the archangel, uh, Metron and, and Gabriel and, and have him come down and, and Archangel Michael and, and thee energy of the goddess and the purple ray. And let’s get with that energy because it’s all, these are words that we’re putting around energies that we don’t know how else to call.

So, so if that works for certain people, that works for certain people. But the, the trick is to get the client engaged in believing, in, in, in being curious about what, what they can change, what’s about navigating outta that stuck state. So I’m sure the techniques that you and Michael are teaching in terms of, you know, the bullet points here of the course about taking the suffering out of pain and proving immune function and better techniques for managing stress.

It, it’s reminding me of, I’m in the middle of doing a session with a client and. I’m always one to highlight the statement that regression is not a method, just only about finding the cause. We were doing a process all about, you know, like an NLP model, pulling out resources and building anchors to revitalize those empowered states.

And this wasn’t the goal of the, of the session that day, but she brought me to what she perceived to be past life. And it’s the end of the session. And her only question was, Did you bring me there or did I bring you there? And I just responded, Well, here’s the scope of how I do it. And the, the concept of those who teach regression, the lightness never lead the witness only using appropriate direction throughout the process.

And again, we’re going to an empowered moment. And her line on the way out was with a smile. Well, that changes a few things. And I love that as a thought of just, you know, the people who would walk in and to have the goal that every reason why this used to be a challenge. What if instead that now becomes every reason.

This is the right time for this shift to occur. Yeah. Yeah. What better time than now, You know? Exactly. I mean, that’s, that’s all we have is this, this moment. I know it’s a cliche, but it It’s so true. It’s all we have is this moment. And is it, you know, is it filled with, with, you know, I have a picture I, I’ll, uh, maybe posted on my Facebook page or my website, but it’s from a I workshop that Michael and I did probably 15 years ago.

I don’t even remember what the title of it was, but written on the blackboard Behind me is the phrase opportunity is, and then the word, and then the letters. N O W H E R E. And depending on how those letters are spaced. Yeah. And either read, Opportunity is nowhere or Opportunity is now here. Beautiful.

It’s the exact same letters, but how close is that? W and the H Is it look like two words or one word? You know what, what, what? , Right? So what? What do you know? What do you wanna do with the rest of your life? Starting right this second. You know, you wanna walk around feeling like a victim. Welcome. You’re welcome to do that, but I find that’s normal lot of fun.

I, I’ve been there, you know, I’ve been resentful at circumstance or at my life, or at the, the curve balls that have been thrown my way is this, it’s of limited value to, you know, rage and rage against the dying of the light. Like Dylan Thomas said, Do not go gently into that midnight rage. Rage. He goes dying of the light.

Well, sometimes, like my friend being stubborn can keep you alive. You know, You, you need to find out what the strategies are that’s gonna help you get, get to where you wanna go. I don’t have an agenda. My clients come in and I say, What, what can I do for you? What do you want? And, uh, as long as it’s, you know, legal and doesn’t involve anybody else getting hurt.

No, I’m serious. Yeah. I love, I love that the, the sky is the limit, You know, and say, I, I’d like to become, you know, I’m a really good gambler. And I go out and I, I gamble professionally. I go out to, uh, to uh, you know, the World Series of pokers. I just came back from Las Vegas and I understand NLP teaches you how to read body language and can you teach me how to do that?

I already do it. Well, can you teach me how to read the imperceptible the tells that people, I’m like, Well, I’m not a gambler. I don’t play cards, but I can certainly share with you what I do know. You know, and you use it for whatever you wanna do with it, you know, But, but should you be going to gambler’s anonymous?

You know, is it a problem? If it’s not a problem, then it’s not gotta edit that one and say it’s a problem. If they’re losing, I don’t know if we’d labeled a problem. If it’s working. Yeah. If it’s not a problem, it’s not a problem. Right. You know, I mean, if you have millions of dollars and you’re losing tens of thousands of them gambling, so what.

You know, but anyway, are anything else that we, we haven’t covered that you, this, this is fantastic. Yeah. And I, and I’ll link to your website as well as this upcoming training. Uh, Michael was on this program back on session number three. So, uh, for those of you listening, we finally have a search function working once again on Work Smart hypnosis, just type in elner in the top left search.

That’s ELL n Eer though. We’ll, we’ll link to that in this, uh, session as well. Plus this upcoming training opportunity up in Massachusetts prior to the NG Convention. I love it because it continues that theme of. Now, I love that you brought up stubbornness as being a positive resource where, you know, we can say stubbornness in terms of not wanting to change, but there also can be that appropriate stubbornness of not accepting that sentence of, because you have this issue.

I mean, I, I briefly reference being I was 17 years old and was being told I had chronic fatigue syndrome. And maybe it was just the cynical 17 year old brain hearing that, well, we diagnosed this because you have all of these symptoms, but you don’t test positive for any of these conditions. And the cynical brain went, That’s BS and I felt better with the next week.

So again, there’s gotta be a better way and helping our clients find that better way as well. Well, every word, every concept has two poles. And uh, you know, ordinarily stubbornness is thought of as a negative thing, but we can say, but somebody’s very persistent. Hmm. And that’s not that it has a different spin on it, right?

Yeah. I am, you know, doggedly persistent in pursuing my goals. Well that, that, that seems like a positive thing, right? , I’ll take that. So, right. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, thank you so much for having me on the show Jason, and it’s fantastic. You know, people know, uh, the website is sounds for healing.com and uh, come join us at the Massachusetts, I guarantee Michael and I always, we are sworn to fun, so you will have a good time as well as learn a lot of useful stuff in our one day workshop.

All right. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com. Hey, it’s Jason here, and thanks again for listening to this program. Thanks again for leaving your feedback [email protected] slash iTunes. Head over to that page that’ll redirect you over to the iTunes listing.

Leave your positive feedback there. I’d, uh, typically reserve this part of the program for, uh, brief endorsement or plug of one of my products, whether it’s hypnotic workers.com or any of my life trainings like the ones I do here in Virginia, or even online offerings like learn virtual gastric band.com.

Though I’d actually pivot for a moment and encourage you. This is launching in July, 2016. And what I’d tell you is we are gearing up for an outstanding season of hypnosis conventions, and I refuse to look at any of it as this mindset of this event versus that event because so far every event I’ve been to, whether it’s the Hypnobirthing conclave, whether it’s MidAmerica Hypnosis Conference, or we used to have an event actually in Charlottesville, Virginia, which, uh, Keith and Andy, if you’re listening to this, do that again or let me know how I can help out.

As well as, of course, the GH convention in Massachusetts, as well as hypno thoughts live in Las Vegas. Outstanding opportunities to really jump in with both feet, get FaceTime with some of the big names in the profession, the most dominant and prominent voices out there. This really is a call to action to invest in yourself.

Now, of course, I will throw in the plug. If you are going to hypno thoughts live, check out hypnotic business mastery.com. That’s the two day pre-convention offering that I’m doing just prior to the Las Vegas Hypno Thoughts Live convention. It’s the six figure blueprint for your success in terms of building, launching, and sustaining a profitable hypnosis business.

Though, whether it’s my course, whether it’s anyone else whose names you recognize, these are outstanding opportunities to improve yourself. Again, to reference another former previous work Smart Hypnosis guest, it’s all becoming rather incestuous here. Uh, Ron Eslinger, who on here I believe quoted that he goes to these conventions to remind himself how much he does not yet.

Even back to the recording with Melissa Tier, She and I remarking how often we would have tables in the exhibit hall and our tables are empty because we’re attending workshops right along with you. So challenge yourself. Take outstanding classes. Uh, highly recommend the one with Michael and Peter that we just spent some time talking about.

Either way, stop by, say hello and it’d be great to meet you in person. I’ll see you soon.