Portable Home

Now that summer is upon us, many people look forward to having time to return home. For many Japanese, this means traveling to the countryside during the Obon holiday. For many foreigners, it means flying overseas.

It's wonderful to have a place where you can feel 100% at home. Unfortunately, many Tokyo residents feel like we have to travel someplace else to feel that way. Why should it be that home is someplace other than where we live?

When we are at peace with who we are, we feel at home no matter where we are. We are able to adapt to different cultural expectations and demands without losing our sense of self. By remaining true to yourself, the feeling of being at home becomes transportable. You can achieve this by developing your self-confidence and self-awareness.

Think Positive

There are many benefits to positive thinking, but negative thinking has it benefits too. For example, when you design a product or launch a company, you need to believe it will succeed, but you also need to think of everything that could possibly go wrong so you can prepare for and prevent it. That's a good balance of positive and negative thinking.

Unfortunately, for many of us, the balance of positive and negative thinking can fall out of balance. Some people might be overly optimistic when some negative thinking would be useful. However, optimistic people bounce back from problems easily because they know the next time will be better. On the other hand, pessimistic people who encounter problems find it harder to bounce back because they expect the next time will be the same or worse.

Negative thinking can lead to excessive self-doubt and self-criticism. Self-doubt can be useful. If you think your public speaking skills aren't up to par, you might be motivated to work on improving them. Self-criticism can help you refine your techniques. But excessive self-doubt and self-criticism can lead to an erosion of self-esteem and self-confidence. Negative thinking that continually undermines your ability to value and believe in yourself is not productive and can lead to depression. You can halt and repair the damage by replacing negative statements with positive statements.

This may sound too easy to you. It may sound like it would never work. The fact is you may have already spent many years telling yourself negative messages or hearing them from someone else. Repetition bypasses our critical thinking and gets ideas into the subconscious. This is why commercials and nursery rhymes are repeated over and over. The good news is that repeating positive messages to yourself can override and rebuild the confidence that has been eroded. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy can speed up the process considerably.

Weight Loss Roadblocks

How many of us would like to lose a little weight so we can look and feel better?

Maintaining a healthy weight requires motivation and dedication. While most people have plenty of both when they embark on a weight loss plan, many give up before reaching their goals or stop paying attention to their health as soon as they do reach their goals. After taking a little break and gaining as much or more weight back, they try again with another program, diet, or workout plan... until they give up again. Does this describe you?

One reason that people give up is that they focus on weight loss. If you keep telling yourself you need to lose weight over and over like a mantra, your subconscious mind takes this literally. Subconsciously, you start to think, 'Oh, I lost something; I had better go find it!' This can lead to weight gain. It's better to focus on returning to the best weight for you. This is an idea your subconscious can support without undermining your conscious efforts.

Another reason that people give up is that they may use food to comfort themselves or their weight may serve as a protective barrier. Sometimes this is conscious, but often it is not. If your subconscious mind wants to eat large amounts of comfort foods or maintain that protective barrier, your conscious efforts to eat right are going to be overruled. To lose weight, these subconscious beliefs must be released. Once those are gone, it's easier to stay on track and achieve your goals.

Weight loss is one of the top concerns of most people-- and one of the top three uses of hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can release the subconscious beliefs that are sabotaging your weight loss efforts and bring your conscious and subconscious mind into alignment so that you can achieve your goals.

Be Happy!

No matter what initially causes a person to embark on a journey of self-improvement, the underlying goal is always the same: to be happy. People seek to make a change when they have reached a limit on their pain and suffering, when they are bored with the current state of affairs, or when they feel a yearning to get more out of life. They are seeking fulfillment, contentment, and satisfaction-- synonyms of happiness.

One woman dedicated a year of her life to following all of the advice from various self-help books and turned it into a blog called The Happiness Project. You can find all kinds of useful ideas about how to become happy at her site.

After you read through and implement some of the advice, you might find you get stuck in places or you just can't seem to progress as far as you'd like. If you have made a conscious effort to be happy and you have not reached your goal, this is when hypnotherapy can be the most effective. 

Hypnotherapy removes the roadblocks to happiness by enabling access to the subconscious part of our minds. All of our negative beliefs about ourselves are stored in the subconscious. Using hypnosis, we can find those negative beliefs and release them. When the subconscious and conscious parts of our minds are in agreement about what we want, this is when lasting change can take place. True happiness is attainable; it's as close as we believe it to be.

Expectations

Long before I became a hypnotherapist, I visited a hypnotist as a client. I wanted to stop biting my fingernails. I didn't have a lot of faith that it would work, but I thought it was worth a shot. Before we began, I asked the hypnotist if this could be fixed in one visit. She said that if it was just a habit, it could be. I settled in and prepared to be cured. Unfortunately, I started biting my nails again within five minutes of leaving her office. When I contacted her later, she said I would stop when I was ready. I was thoroughly disappointed with her answer and gave up on hypnosis. I didn't understand at that time how our expectations influence the results we get. I hadn't expected hypnosis to work, and-- surprise!-- it didn't. 

When I was suffering from chronic pain a few years later, I looked for a non-medical way to manage the pain. After quite a lot of research, I developed high expectations that hypnosis would be effective. I had read a number of articles from various mental health journals, medical websites, and newspapers like the New York Times, had watched a number of news programs about hypnosis, and had spoken to a doctor who had witnessed a surgery performed with hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia. By the time I saw a hypnotherapist for pain management, I was convinced that hypnosis would work, and --surprise!-- it did.

This is not to say that the results were instantaneous, but I knew that if hypnosis could work for other people, then it could also work for me. I was also much more motivated to stop feeling pain than I had been to stop biting my nails. I realized I couldn't take a passive role and expect to be cured. I had to be proactive. I had to participate in my treatment by using self-hypnosis and doing the exercises assigned to me by the hypnotherapist I saw. When hypnosis worked for the chronic pain, I realized that I had given up too easily and too early on nail-biting. I hadn't really believed hypnosis would work for that, and I hadn't really wanted to stop. However, I knew that hypnosis would work for chronic pain, and I really wanted the pain to stop. Different expectations--and different levels of motivation--produced different results.

Since becoming a hypnotherapist, I have worked on a number of personal issues. Using hypnosis, I have overcome allergies, asthma, and chronic pain and have set and achieved many other personal goals. Ironically, nail-biting was the most difficult behavior to stop. The main problem was motivation: there didn't seem to be any penalty to continuing a behavior I had been doing for over 30 years. If you don't have a clear reason for changing your behavior, then chances are good that you won't. Finally I thought, "I'm a hypnotherapist, what message does this send to my clients if I bite my nails?" Shortly afterwards, I stopped!

Mind Control vs. Thought Control

Many people associate hypnosis with some kind of mind control. Hypnosis is often depicted as mind control in cartoons, movies, and television shows. The hypnotist swings a watch or spins a psychedelic disk in front of a subject's eyes and then suddenly has total control over him or her, like a kind of puppet master. If you have seen a live hypnosis stage show, you may have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. However, like watching a magic show, what you think you saw and what you actually saw were not the same. 

Hypnosis is about controlling the mind. However, we all control our own minds. Even when you are in hypnosis, you have control over what information you will tell a hypnotist and what suggestions you will accept from the hypnotist. The participants in a hypnosis stage show are carefully selected. Anyone who resists the hypnotist's suggestions will be asked to leave the stage, and those that remain on stage are choosing to accept the silly suggestions and perform for the audience. It's like someone pretending to be drunk so that they can get away with behavior they might otherwise be too inhibited to do. However, it is not like being drunk-- you are always in control when you are in hypnosis. If you hear a suggestion you don't accept, you will either ignore it or come out of hypnosis.

Many of us feel like we can't control our minds. We can't control our thoughts. However, controlling our minds and controlling our thoughts are not the same thing. We all have thoughts throughout the day. Thoughts arise just as surely as blood flows. Meditation and spiritual practices can teach us not to attach to those thoughts-- let the thoughts come, notice them, and let them go. If you can resist attachment to your thoughts, then you are controlling your mind. Unfortunately, it can take years to learn how to do this.

Hypnosis replaces negative thoughts with positive thoughts. This is much easier to do than learning not to attach to thoughts. Most of the thoughts we have throughout the day are repetitive and many of those are negative. What we say to ourselves about ourselves is what we tend to believe about ourselves. Therefore, if these thoughts are negative, we feel terrible about ourselves, and if these thoughts are positive, we feel great about ourselves. This is mind control: controlling the kind of thoughts we have rather than allowing the thoughts to control us.

About Tokyo Hypnotherapy

Tokyo Hypnotherapy is a private hypnotherapy practice owned and operated by Karen Mattison, a clinical hypnotherapist, life coach, and Reiki Master. Tokyo Hypnotherapy offers:

• hypnotherapy for medical support and pain management
• hypnotherapy for personal and professional development
• stress management training in self-hypnosis, meditation, or Reiki
• life coaching 

Karen is certified as a clinical hypnotherapist by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners (#108-054). Karen has completed advanced hypnotherapy training in accelerated healing, pain management, painfree childbirth, and cancer support. Karen is also a life coach and teaches self-hypnosis, meditation, and Reiki.

Karen became interested in alternative medicine after developing chronic pain in the wrists and weakness in the hands, which required extended periods of rest and increasing amounts of pain medication. She first learned Reiki to promote healing in the wrists and hands. While this also provided temporary pain relief, the pain in the wrists kept returning from overuse. 

Karen looked for other alternative therapies for managing pain and discovered that hypnosis can be used to eliminate pain in childbirth, surgery, and chronic pain. Now when Karen has pain, she can use hypnosis instead of medication to manage or eliminate it. Since chronic pain can greatly impair one's life and lead to depression, Karen is particularly interested in helping clients with pain management.

Although Reiki and hypnotherapy are often called alternative medicine, Karen prefers the term complementary medicine. Reiki and hypnotherapy are best used to complement traditional (allopathic) medicine not as an alternative to it.

In addition to her training in complementary medicine, Karen has a BA from the University of California at San Diego and an MA from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She has lived in Japan for more than ten years.

2009 Events

Upcoming events are now posted at the Tokyo Hypnotherapy website. This list contains past events.

January:
Received training in Vipassana meditation

February:
Reopened Tokyo Hypnotherapy at new location

Presented at the Women Educators and Language Learners conference; Topic: Learn How Hypnosis Can Help You and Your Students

March:
Joined Human Dynamic as workshop trainer and EAP therapist

April:
Presented at the International Mental Health Professionals of Japan conference; Topic: Learned Optimism through Meditation

Elected to serve as Outreach Coordinator on the IMHPJ board

May:
Joined Tokyo English Life Line as workshop trainer

Dec and Jan Events

Tokyo Hypnotherapy will be closed for December and January while I pursue additional training and relocate the office.

Happy Holidays to all!

November Events

November 29
Prep for the JLPT! A Self-hypnosis Workshop

• Overcome test-taking anxiety
• Improve concentration
• Improve memory and recall
• Learn self-hypnosis and NLP skills to remain calm and focused