Reprinted from the "Desk of Gale Glassner Twersky"

     People who experience the benefits of hypnosis quite often describe the process as "magical" – and in a way, it is.  How else can one explain something that can transform the negative behaviors of a lifetime in a matter of days, hours, or minutes?

     But where there is magic, there's mystery, and it has been found that many people who are attracted and made hopeful by the promises of hypnosis will hesitate to embrace it because they aren't sure they want something mysterious to go on with their minds.

     In fact, what happens during hypnosis is no more mysterious that what happens to one's body when he or she runs on a treadmill for 10 minutes.  It is a fairly straightforward neurophysiologic process whose effects can be scientifically observed, measured, and understood.  The idea that hypnosis works by opening up the subconscious mind and suppressing the conscious mind has been borne out by research that utilizes EEGs to measure brain activity.

     Many people have been called "right-brained" and "left-brained".  These monikers accurately reflect the fact that the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex controls things like reason, logic, and deduction, while the right hemisphere is the seat of creativity and imagination.  EEG-based evidence suggests that while a person is in the hyper-attentive hypnotic state, activity in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex is reduced, and activity in the right hemisphere is increased.  In other words, the conscious mind, though not shut down, recedes into the background, and the subconscious comes to the fore, open and accessible in a way it normally is not.

     When the subconscious mind is open and dominant, suggestions are accepted by the brain as reality.  If one were told, for example, that he or she had just bitten down on a lemon, that person would pucker up, salivate, or maybe even spit and sputter, just exactly as one would if there were a real lemon in one's mouth.  The conscious mind would recognize the distinction between a real lemon and an imaginary one.  But the subconscious doesn't.

     Essentially, hypnosis takes this kind of simple suggestion to a more complex level: re-writing the old programming that governs whole swaths of dysfunctional thinking and behavior in such a way so that when one re-enters the ordinary conscious state, new suggestions are still active.

     The readiness with which the subconscious accepts suggestion as reality explains why challenges that people have spent years working to overcome in a conscious forum with a variety of professional modalities can so often be conquered through just a few hypnotic sessions.  It may take longer for an individual's brain to accept a new reality regarding something as pervasive as his or her financial habits than it does in accepting that he or she have just tasted a lemon, but it doesn't take much longer.

     The true magic of hypnosis lies in the fact that it isn't necessary to understand – or even completely believe in -- the scientific, neurological, and physiological processes at work to experience its amazing effectiveness.  One just has to be willing to give it a chance, and really, deep down, want what is being asked for.

     Millions of people have proven what scientists, researchers, and innovative thinkers have been saying for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years – that human beings have the power within their own mind to change their lives at the most fundamental level through the incredibly simple process of hypnosis.  It is hoped readers will take this opportunity to discover its "magic".