MINDWORK:   HYPNOSIS, VISUALIZATION AND OTHER WAYS TO TAP YOUR POTENTIALITIES

Theodore X. Barber, the great maverick psychologist who most influenced my understandings of both hypnosis and human potentialities, pointed out that there is something called “ideomotor response.”  If you imagine something happening – either actively, in the sense of make-believe, or if your brain perceives something happening (whether a hallucination or some kind of neurological malfunction) – your entire system tends to respond as if it had actually occurred.  Similarly, there is “ideosensory response,” where you feel what you imagine (or your brain tells you) is happening, and tend to respond to that just as if you were experiencing the real thing.   In other words, your system cannot tell the difference.

The bottom line, then, is that if can let yourself think and feel and/or imagine as if something were happening, if you really get into it, you can trigger both the experience of that happening and also trigger the bodily responses that go along with that.  That’s how our wetware works.   

Mindwork can trigger both voluntary and involuntary responses, affect both your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system (look up the terms if you’d like), thus even affecting bodily systems you cannot normally get at through voluntary, conscious effort.  Many people have used “hypnosis” to reduce or eliminate acute pain during surgery and childbirth, or to help manage chronic pain.  That kind of “medical hypnosis” is a classic example of applying mindwork.

Mindwork, as we will be using the concept, extends beyond using your mind to influence bodily processes.  It refers more generally to using your mind to do things, using your thinking, feeling and imagining to make things happen in yourself, in your life, your relationships.

Mindwork is a form of play. I’d term it “mindplay” but who would take me seriously then?  Seriously, however, it is like daydreaming, like what we all have done as children (and virtually all continue to do as grown-ups).  Now, sometimes grown-ups tell me “I can’t imagine.”  Well, I can’t imagine that – we all once had that skill (or else we wouldn't’t have made it to where we are now).  We all dream.  Just some of us have learned to stifle that capability, to one’s terrible detriment.  Doing so, you lose a big part of what makes us human, and, more, what allows us to grow and adapt and learn and change as we move through our lives.  If you’re one of those people, hopefully this book will help you get back your native ability to daydream.

Mindwork is a kind of guided daydreaming.  As little children, we all daydreamed “out loud” – we call that imaginary play.  Now, everyone’s seen puppies and kittens trying out and practicing “grown up” skills by playing “ferocious hunter” and the like.  Humans do the same thing.  But we have an additional universe to master – our inside world.  We do that through imagination.  Little kids live partly in the grown-ups’ “real world” and partly in their own imaginary worlds.  They literally build their selves through   playing at taking various social roles, playing with real and imaginary friends, fantasizing and making believe.  Perhaps the most thorough and exciting research on this has been conducted by Yale psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer.  My point is that mindwork uses the very same capability you used as a child, and probably continue to use as an adult.  Now, as we grow older we learn not to be “caught daydreaming.”  Bad adult!  And we may even become somewhat embarrassed at our inner life of fantasy and imagination, dreaming and envisioning the possibilities.  But that is how we learn to take on new roles in the play of life, to practice enacting those roles in a safe place (the inside of our own minds).  Basically, mindwork is license to play, only we’ll do it in a strategic, goal directed fashion.

Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in how Mindwork relates to marketing and marketing research, for personalized mindwork training or if you’d like an autographed copy of Creative Self-Hypnosis ($20, postage and handling included).   Email me using this link: Dr.Rogerstraus@yahoo.com

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