14 - Induction - Phenomena
Up to this point, everything we’ve done could be easily classified as guided meditation. Now, we’re finally going to elicit some hypnotic phenomena. We’re going to do this by building heaviness in their feet, then binding the feeling of immobility to relaxing further.
You may notice that feeling of relaxation in your feet on the ground… heavy, comfortable… relaxed… and you can become aware of how your thighs, your calves, your feet and your legs feel heavier than before… and you might notice that heaviness growing… or moving,… or you’re just becoming more aware of it…
(Pause.)
And as you notice that feeling, you can just sink in to it and enjoy how good it feels…
Again, I’ve deviated a tad from the original, but it has the same direction. We direct their interoceptive focus to the heaviness in their legs and feet, suggest heaviness, then suggest it can build. By building this feeling, we’re creating plausibility that it’d be just so heavy that they won’t be able to move their legs.
Here’s another useful tool:
[Suggest any feeling.]
Is [that feeling] growing… or moving… or are you just becoming more aware of it?
It’s a bit sly - but we imply we expect something to become more intense, and add a fallback in case it doesn’t. (And, while I don’t subscribe to all of MMHA’s ideas, I have to give them credit for that one liner.)
And if you’d like… you could even imagine what it would be like for those feet to be so heavy that they just wouldn’t move… continuing to savor that feeling of relaxation… taking a moment to imagine that… knowing how you’d feel… if your legs were just so heavy and so relaxed that they’d barely budge…
(Pause for a moment)
And I’d like to invite you to build that feeling even further… When you know that your legs are just too relaxed to move… and when your feet are just too heavy to lift… You can test that… and find that each time you try, it just relaxes you even further… making those legs and feet heavier and heavier, relaxing you more and more each time…
On the surface - what we’re asking our subject to do is obvious. There’s a bit of nuance to how we’re doing this that could be easily missed.
Firstly, we just ask our subject to create this feeling themselves. Then, when they are ready, and they’ve convinced themselves that they’re just too heavy to lift, they can test it out. This encourages them to actively participate in creating that feeling, rather than just betting that they’re already done. It’s both permissive in the sense that they can do it if they want to, as well as effective in that it’s self-reinforcing, where they can try a few times to build that shift in experience..
Give them a few moments to try it out, see what happens.
And when you’re ready… you can just stop trying to lift those feet and let go… letting that feeling of comfort and calm spread to the rest of your body, seeping in to your mind…
That’s right…
Ah, a little treat for them at the end for putting up with your rambling. How nice! At this point, they’ve experienced some hypnotic phenomena, seen how they can create it themselves, and are probably relaxed and buttered up.
This is what I’d call the end of the induction. If we wanted to throw hypnotic terms out the window, we’ve guided them through an experience where they’re much more likely to try things out with us than if we had just started cold with something like “Hey uh, your legs heavy? Want to notice how heavy they are?”