Massage and Hypnotherapy

Today I am going to become a guinea-pig in an experiment that I find fascinating. After a luxurious 1 hour massage by Marianne at Advanced Body Mind Therapies (phone 09 940 5303) I will undergo hypnotherapy for the first time in my life. I was going to try this technique when attempting to give up smoking, but just went cold-turky instead which has been totally successful (celebrating 1 year without a single smoke!) - it took a few attempts though.

Why am I trying hypnotherapy? Well I want to know if it can be used as a practical tool to enhance training - in this case I want to see if it will improve things like relaxation, breathing and memory.

The Session…

The first part of the session was visualisation exercises and discussing the reasons I thought were holding me back and clarifying specifically what it was that I wanted – I have never done this either, so it was really interesting and quite surprising.

This was followed by the hypnotherapy which is essentially being placed in a very relaxed state and suggestions being made about your specific need, in my case about how I was going to relax during training. You also decide on an 'anchor' (such as making making a fist and holding it for 5 seconds) during the session which you use later to 'hot-link' back to your sub-conscious as required.

During the hypotherapy you are completely aware of what is going on around you – just extremely relaxed - so no need to worry about odd suggestions being made (although I find myself walking round like a chicken oddly enough - just joking).

 The Next Day…

Well, I am really happy.  I have to say that training went very well. Whilst I didn't suddenly acquire Bruce Lee-like abilities I certainly felt far more relaxed and less anxious during training which had the desired outcome of better performance, better, more controlled breathing and a sense of satisfaction.

I don't think for a second that you can replace good physical training with a couple of hypnotherapy sessions, but I do think that if last night's results are anything to go by then I do feel that hypnotherapy may be a very useful tool. I look forward to what happens over the next few months.

The Next Training Session…

There might be something to this whole hypnotherapy lark as I noticed that this training session went very well - I was more relaxed than usual, seemed to be breathing more naturally, and my technique was more fluid.

 Until next time…