Honest Hypnosis

Master Your Mind... for a Change

90 Day Challenge

Gardening Theory: A Self Hypnosis Philosophy

by

Today is Day # 66 of 90 Day Transformation Challenge #5! How are YOU doing? Drop me a line sometime ok?

Gardening Theory: A Self Hypnosis “Philosophy” For Creatives, Visionaries, Entrepreneurs and Anxiety Sufferers

For 40 years I struggled with anxiety and frustration around “getting my music out.” My temperament and natural inclination as an introvert made me excruciatingly creative but often unable to “sell” my “stuff” once I created it.

That “forced” me to work on myself. After clearing huge chunks of negative, self limiting beliefs with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), Hypnosis and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), I came to be at peace with exactly who I am and reframed the whole experience so that it stopped the pain, and instead “installed” a powerful new way of looking at my music in the same way perhaps that Elon Musk looked at Tesla when he started. He KNEW it wouldn’t happen overnight. He had a long term multi-year (more like multi-decade) plan that he has steadily progressed with.

We artists, musicians, healers, visionaries etc, need to keep that in mind when we set out to share our work with the world. We can’t know the time frame. We have no idea what’s “reasonable” as far as making an impact with our work.

When we think our music or art or whatever “should catch on immediately” we are causing ourselves to suffer. But when you look at any project like a vegetable garden or an apple orchard or a grove of Walnut or Redwood trees, you have very different timelines and they are all acceptable. When you plant lettuce you get a return much faster than planting an asparagus bed which will take 3 to 5 years. And asparagus is a short term investment when compared to growing a forest.

The poet Rumi is the best selling poet in the English language… HUNDREDS of years after he sang his poems in Persian.

So please be patient with your dreams AND take steady and consistent action towards living them.

Here’s a video where I go into more detail about this.

The point of all this is that when you set out on a journey you want to have short, medium and long term goals or visions or plans so that you can stay motivated and positive even when you aren’t getting a ton of “success” or “positive feedback” or “applause” at any particular point of the path with heart.

Thank you so much my dear Transformation Nation!

– Peace and groovyness!

– Mark

p.s. Here’s a song for your day.

p.p.s. My new Course, “Beyond Beliefs” is almost ready for release!!!! More soon. In the meantime you might want to check out my tried and true, best selling online hypnosis course, CRUSH anxiety NOW!

Your Body Language is Hypnosis

by

It’s Day 27 of 90 Day Transformation Challenge #5.

This week in the “Beyond Beliefs Course” that I’m building in this 90 Day Challenge, I taught the mastermind class the NLP technique of Anchoring. As part of the course I gave them the assignment to watch this video by Harvard researcher, Amy Cuddy. Ms. Cuddy very clearly demonstrates (and backs it up with solid data) the power of our physiological movements to communicate not only to other people non verbally, but to communicate to ourselves as well.

And if you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time you will not be surprised when I say, Hey! That’s HYPNOSIS!.

Hypnosis is not some weird mumbo jumbo magic show baloney. Hypnosis is how we communicate to ourselves and others. More importantly, hypnosis is communicating with your unconscious mind and with other people’s unconscious minds as well.

Take advertising for example, EVERY advertiser is attempting to motivate you to take some kind of action. Rule #1 of advertising is to focus on your audience’s SELF INTEREST.

They don’t say.  “Hey person watching this, buy Tide so we can make our quarterly earning goals.”

YOU don’t care about THEIR earnings goals. YOU care about YOU. That’s self interest. It’s not a bad thing. Every organism on this planet is programmed from the “factory” to but their own needs first. There are no altruistic squirrels, amoebas or humans.

So when the advertiser is selling you Tide, they HAVE to communicate why it is better for YOU to buy their laundry detergent. “It gets your clothes whiter! It makes your colors brighter! Your family will LOVE you for using Tide“.

Get it? You and I are constantly being bombarded with messages designed to sneak past your conscious mind and fit like a key into the lock of your unconscious fears, desires, motivations, longings etc.

And BTW, fear is way easier to trigger than the other motivating emotions.

“OMG! What if my family doesn’t love me because their clothes aren’t clean?”

So paying attention to what THEY (the advertisers and manipulators in power) are attempting to communicate to us makes a ton of sense to me. Not to follow their suggestions. But to evaluate them and block them if you so choose.

One excellent technique for STOPPING the influence of the mass media is to STOP WATCHING IT!

Another excellent technique for stopping the influence of the mass media and other people is to TAKE CHARGE of your own hypnosis. In other words, TAKE CHARGE OF HOW YOU COMMUNICATE TO YOURSELF. Take charge of what you do allow past your conscious vigilance. For me that means I stop listening to music with dysfunctional and victim mind set lyrics… in other words MOST popular music. LOL.

It’s about visual, auditory and kinesthetic hygiene. Essentially Amy Cuddy is teaching us Physical or kinesthetic hygiene.

One key way to do this is to become aware of your body language and what it communicates to yourself and others.

You mind mastery assignment today (should you choose to accept it) is to watch Amy Cuddy’s TED talk video.

Put a few of her empowering body language ideas into practice. Keep track in your journal of how you feel as you experiment. See if you can notice and document a positive difference in your own life. Then, let me know how it’s going for you…

(BTW what Ms. Cuddy DOESN’T seem to know is that she unconsciously uses a body position as she speaks that we in NLP call “Placater” which is forearms out and hands up. It is NOT a power position… It’s subconsciously communicates, “Please accept me and my ideas…”

DO NOT use “placater!”Turn your hands so that palms are DOWN. and all of a sudden you have a more powerful message being “broadcast”… but she gets the rest of it spot on.)

Extra Credit:

I call Amy Cuddy’s “power position” with your arms up over your head in a “V” position, “The Victory Position” (maybe she calls it that too, I’ll have to re-watch it) and that suggests to me that the “Victory Song” might be a sweet support vehicle to lock in this concept… And please know that this song is designed to be helpfully hypnotic. In fact it was one of the first songs I wrote that fully incorporated NLP and Conversational Hypnosis language patterns… so technically it is “Sound Healing Hypnosis” The key difference is that I’m “selling” you on your own power and magnificence.
here it is,

Here’s the audio only version in case that works better for you…

Peace out.

– Mark

p.s. Have questions? Thoughts? Comments? Inappropriate Jokes? Contact me!

Want to check out the “Beyond Beliefs” Course I’m building during this current challenge? The class is full but you can “Audit” the class and get the modules on video as I create them each week for only 3 payments of $19 bucks… It won’t help your clothes look whiter but it might help YOU feel better about yourself and your life than you’ve ever felt before… And if you feel better, that makes ME feel better. So BOTH of our self interests can be honored. PLUS your financial support helps me to keep doing THIS. Which also benefits both of us. :o)

Beyond Beliefs: How To Stop Your Limiting Beliefs From Limiting Your Life

[stripe name=”90 Day Transformation” description=”Join Now!” success_redirect_url=”http://honesthypnosis.com/index.php?/register/Xbekq3″] [stripe_subscription max_occurrences=”3″] [stripe_plan id=”90Basic” label=”90 Day Audit”] [/stripe_subscription] [/stripe]

Check out my other courses as well

Overcoming The Victim Mind Cage Part 2

by

It’s Day 26 of 90 Day Transformation Challenge #5, How are YOU doing?

I’ve gotten a flurry of strong, positive responses to yesterday’s controversial conversational hypnosis post, “Overcoming the Victim Mind Cage.”

Here’s what Linda wrote,

Hello Mark,
I had a real good ASS kicking from you last evening when I listened to your podcast. That was for me. I listened to it 3 times and realized how much and how long I have been wallowing in this shit. The points that hit me:

  • I have success, get tested and I resist, resort to crying, handringing, and why me when things get a bit hard. The sustaining of success has been an issue. I have thought it was supposed to be easy, but it is not!!
  • Grow up, step into your shit, it’s mine, I can clean it up, I am not a victim, but creating my own pain, feeling so sorry for myself. Why do I have to learn the hard frickin way?
  • most of my thoughts have been failing thoughts about failing and never getting over GAD because I believe the physical sensations which can be overpowering. You called it wallowing in self indulging pain.

Thank you Mark for kicking my ass and I don’t feel judged at all-just know you are right. I need to kick anxiety’s ass, but fearful it would turn on me and it would get worse.  Thank you!!     – Linda

=======

Paula wrote:

Thank YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just what I needed to hear, and so beautifully expressed!
And I was also so pleasantly surprised by the song [Can You Imagine] — I hadn’t heard this before!  What a fantastic surpise!
I feel like I’ve opened wonderfully-packaged priceless gifts from you today!    Thank you!!!
=========

Here’s my response:

Hey Linda and Paula and everybody else!

Thank you so much for receiving that message in the spirit it was intended. Not as judgment or criticism because the intention is to help all of us move through the same “field.”  I’m not placing myself above any of this because I experience the same thing.

I just see it over and over and over again in my own life as well as in the clients I’ve worked with over the last 15 years. They all seem to want me to fix them. They seem to want me to wave my magic hypnosis wand or NLP wand and “Heal” them. Preferably in a single 10 minute session.

And who can blame them? It makes sense. When we take our car to the mechanic, we want it fixed. Logical.

But in personal transformation work, the problem is not a “car” but our process of interacting with reality.

And that’s always an inside job. AND it’s the farthest thing from LOGICAL. The problem is almost always in the conflict between what our conscious mind thinks things should be like… and what the unconscious mind is responding to… None of which is “fact,” but PERCEPTION. And again, NOT LOGICAL…

Working with clients, I can often get them a shift and I can see them making progress but many of them seem to just abandon themselves when the least little thing shows up to test their new “program” and they run scared back to the old familiar place. In some cases they would BLAME ME! (for not FIXING THEM PERMANENTLY…)

Because at least it’s familiar. It may be painful, shitty, horrible even. But it’s the elephant in the room they KNOW.

But the only way out is THROUGH. And the only way THROUGH is to ACCEPT what I call, “Response-Ability.” We can’t always change external events but we certainly can change how we respond, how we interpret, how we think about events…

For example, I climbed a mountain with my friends Mike and Brett… I was in my 50’s THEY were in their 20’s.

About halfway up this fucking mountain in the middle of winter (the 2nd tallest in NY State’s Adirondack Part), I just wanted to go home. But I couldn’t. And once I got up to the summit, I couldn’t care less about the fucking view. It was 15 degrees below zero with gusting winds up to 40 mph. I just wanted to get back down off that fucker without breaking a leg or dying of hypothermia…

It was one of those ALL day ordeals… and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. And I was pissed. and whiny (inside). I tried not to bitch too much out loud but I was wanting to quit big time…But the only way to get out was the same way we went in. Walking. On my own two feet. There were no “stops” to get off.

I had to just tough it out and finish what I’d started…  Mike and Brett couldn’t carry me. I had to move one foot in front of the other… thousands and thousands of footsteps… I started counting them and chanting,

“1, why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine…

2, Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine…

3, Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine…”

Every time I got to a 1,000 steps I started over again…” Eventually Mike and Brett were waaaay ahead of me and I was alone in the falling dark… taking it one step at a time… almost delirious with fatigue and cold.and you know what?

EVENTUALLY I got back to the car…. and it was already warmed up. And I didn’t break my neck or freeze to death. And it felt really, good to simply be alive and safe.

In retrospect, I’m really glad I did it. LOL… It felt even better a couple of days later looking back on it.

NOW?

Two years after the “ordeal” It seems FABULOUS! HEROIC! LEGENDARY! LOL. And I’ve now used that story to illustrate a point… Cowabungah! Got me some VALUE out of that EXPERIENCE… That excruciatingly UNCOMFORTABLE experience.

But the whole point of yesterdays video, “Overcoming The Victim Mind Cage” is that we often don’t even get half way up the mountain in our own healing work.

Nothing and no one seems to be able to push or pull us in just the right way to keep us on the path of healing. It’s so much easier to just turn tail and scurry back down the mountain at the first steep or scary place.Milton Erickson, considered by many to be the “father of conversational hypnosis” used to assign people “ordeals” that they had to do before he would consent to work with them. The ancient Toltecs would “trick” their apprentices into expanding their perception by maneuvering them into “sink or swim” kinds of dilemmas that they quite literally had to solve or die.

As a coach or healer it’s tricky because I know personally I do not respond well to “tough love” “drill Sargent” kinds of coaches. I want someone to be gentle and compassionate with me but at the same time I want and NEED to be challenged in the right way for me. I don’t want my coach to just accept my own loudly voiced limitations… but I don’t want my face shoved so deeply in my own “shit” that I can’t breathe either… LOL

You might say, I’m a labrador retriever, not a pit bull.

I like my lessons to be firm but gentle… and sometimes life is just NOT GENTLE. Sometimes we don’t get to CHOOSE an EASY lesson over a TOUGH lesson… and sometimes as the Course in Miracles states, we “do not know what is in our best interests.”

It’s not always easy to figure out how a client responds best or what tactic I need to use to put exactly the right kind of pressure on them so that they keep climbing towards a new perception of their reality… without taking the easy way out and quitting just as they are getting close to the summit…

And then, once we’ve reached the summit and gotten the thrill of the view… guess what? We have to schlepp our ass down off the damn mountain. There’s no elevators up there! There’s no helicopter waiting to whisk us back down to base camp and a warm dinner…

We are all climbing mountains of various steepness at any given point in all of our lives. There is no escaping that this being alive thing is often INCREDIBLY challenging and painful. Particularly for highly sensitive people. And guess what?

The only way out is through. If it was easy it would be boring. The thing to REMEMBER is, YOU are not alone in this. We are all on this same path. We CAN help each other. But we’ve got to do our part by putting one foot in front of the other even when we don’t feel like we can keep going.

Guess what? You are more powerful than you’ve ever imagined… Just take one more little step… now take another one… now take another one… eventually they add up.

So thank you for your honest and heartfelt responses!
May you thrive on challenges and be patient and self loving of all of your attempts, failures and successes at mastering your mind for a change…

– Peace and groovyness!
Mark
p.s. here’s a song that seems to fit today’s message:
 Got questions? Contact me!

Want to go deeper? Check out my Online Hypnosis Courses

Want to just chill out with some of my Live Sound Healing Hypnosis Sessions? 

Conversational Hypnosis: Overcoming The Victim Mind Cage

by

Today, I want to share with you some real stuff.

This gets pretty intense but I think it needs to be said. Please “get” that everything in this video applies to ME as well as to my clients, my students as well as YOU.

We are all in this together.

And by “this” I mean this healing journey. Fortunately or unfortunately OUR agenda for healing and transforming our lives doesn’t always co-incide with what the reality of healing and transformation often brings us… In other words, sometimes it ain’t pretty or easy.

Please watch the whole thing because the stuff in the beginning is the setup for the stuff at the end. Take from it whatever you can and leave the rest. If you’re not in the mood to work deep today, at least give a listen to the Transformation Tune below the video…

Please remember that this is an actual conversational hypnosis session that was inspired by some of the stuff folks are experiencing in my “Beyond Beliefs” course. Everything I say is purposeful. How I say it is as well. What I can’t control is how YOU interpret it. Please interpret it in the best possible way for your own healing.

Your song of the Day: Song #349, “Can You Imagine?”

Have comments or questions? Please feel free to contact me!

The May Day De-Stress Technique

by

It’s Day 23 of 90 Day transformation Challenge #5. How’s your stress level?

The term “May Day” has long been used as a distress signal out at sea or up in the air…

Since there is no way I can possibly imagine the kind of stress you might be experiencing in your life, I just want you to know that I’m thinking about you and sending you love and support in response to whatever “radio waves” of stress, struggle, yearning, longing, or hurt that you might be sending out consciously or unconsciously.

Ultimately, since there is no “time or space”, my intention to support and soothe you my dear Transformation Nation members, can reach you whenever you might need it the most… In fact, I sent out so many signals of LOVE during Friday evening’s Sound Healing Hypnosis “Song Bath” that you might still be receiving the signals days, months, even years from now…

All you have to do is TUNE IN. Activate your IMAGINATION (remember, your unconscious mind IS your imagination. Your conscious mind is your WILL).

So you can activate your IMAGINATION, AND your WILL together, to allow transformation and healing to take place right now in your life or whenever you’re ready to have transformation and healing take place… whether that’s this very instant or over the course of the day, or week or whenever you most need to activate the healing and soothing and self loving resources that I’ve been suggesting you activate and access all along…

But as the late great Milton Erickson would say, “Who am I to say, ‘change now?’ You WILL change whenever you are READY to change. And when you DO change you may notice it or it may kind of sneak up on you and catch you by delightful surprise as you look back and see the change manifesting perfectly in your life exactly when you least expected to notice it…”

…Now…

To support YOU, I have Friday night’s, Sound Healing Hypnosis Session aka “Song Bath” all ready and edited for your watching/listening pleasure….

You might want to  play it softly in the background all day just as an experiment to see if it turns this somewhat grey Monday into one of the best days of your life or whether it just soothes you  pleasantly and that may be enough.

So today’s (almost) Daily Mind Mastery Message AND Transformation Tune(s) are all combined in what I think is my best Sound Healing Hypnosis Song Bath YET! Cow-ah-bungah!

hear it is… (and yes the pun is intended)

  • Any questions or comments? Contact Me!
  • Want to go deeper and get some help for that anxiety, worry, fear or phobia that’s been dragging you down? Or maybe you’re struggling to get over a break up or you’re struggling in some other way with shyness, lack of confidence or changing habits around food and exercise… Check Out My Honest Hypnosis Online Courses
  • Just want to get deeper into my music and the Life In Song Project? Click this link: MarkShepardSongs.com

Thanks for showing up! Keep those emails coming!

all the best,

–  Mark

How To Get Over A Break Up In 3 Minutes

by

A song that I wrote waaaaaaay back in 1980 after a college romance ended, in retrospect was filled with some pretty powerful and sound advice…

Sometimes looking back on these songs I am amazed at how “schmart” I seemed… Somehow this “wise beyond my years” stuff kept pouring through my songs even back in 1980…

It just took me another 30 years to start to actually follow my own advice!

However, knowing all the NLP and hypnosis mind mastery stuff that I know now, this song probably saved my life even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it or always able to follow it’s advice… because it REFRAMED the hurt as a small experience to just add to the jar of all my life experiences. That put it into perspective which caused a lot of pain to stop.

Since I’ve heard lately from a number of people struggling with getting over break ups, I think I’m going to add this song to the “How To Get Over A Break Up” course as a free bonus…

But I figured I’d give it to YOU first. Just because… Well… I like you… and I think of you all the time… You know. As a friend… ;o)

Enjoy! It’s the first time I’ve played it in probably 20 years…

BTW It’s Day 18 of 90 Day Transformation Challenge #5.
==========
Quick Reminder: You can STILL audit my new “Beyond Beliefs Course” and get the modules as soon as I add them to the program. Click here to get it now: Beyond Beliefs: How To Stop Limiting Beliefs From Stopping YOU
==========

Your Modern Jedi Mind Mastery assignment today, should you choose to accept it, is to Laugh and Put Another Penny in The Jar of YOUR life. Let something go today that has been bugging you or bothering you or causing you pain. Don’t know how? Check out  “How To Get Over A Break Up”

– Mark

p.s. or pretty much any one of my NLP/Hypnosis courses. Because they are ALL about Mastering YOUR Mind For A Change so that you can stop the pain and get to the fun part of being alive. Faster. Easier. Better.

BOOOM!

p.p.s. I really DO think about YOU all the time… and right now you look like you could use a hug… sending out…. zooooooooom!