You will not achieve your happiness. Or rather you will not “achieve” your happiness. I’m not saying it’s impossible for you to be happy but that happiness is not an achievement. It is the wholeness and inner peacefulness that is already the natural state of being or Presence, within you. The only thing between you and knowing a deeper sense of joy and contentment with yourself is the thinking mind’s fixed ideas about who you are.
These ideas might be positive or negative: I am successful or I am a failure. Either of these beliefs is conditioned on your external circumstances. They rely on the conditions of your bank account or job title or mood state or relationship status or even the contents of the thoughts moving through your mind, in order for you to feel good about yourself. But what if there were something underneath all the judgments of success and failure, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant? What if you could relax into the abiding wholeness and peacefulness at the very heart of who or what you are?
In A Great Wagon, the great Sufi poet and mystic Rumi invites us to enter this space of deeper insight, connection, and wakefulness:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Most people come into see me because they have become entranced by the negative beliefs running through their heads. I’m not good enough. I am unworthy. I am unlovable. I don’t matter. I am broken. And often at the root of it all, like the three-year-old we once were, we somehow believe I am bad. Such fixed ideas are actually hypnotic trance states or what we most commonly call ordinary waking consciousness or “reality.”
Most of those negative beliefs have their origins in our earliest interpersonal experiences. This is partly why they have such sticking power. But the other reason is that between the ages of two and six our brains are operating in Theta-wave frequency. Theta is the brain wave length of hypnosis. So basically until we’re about seven years old, we are literally in a trance-like state, receiving a big download from our direct experience about how to survive in our families and in our culture. That download programs the software of our perceptions and lays down the tracks of our subconscious and often self-sabotaging mind.
Up to age seven or so, children have very little access to critical or rational thinking. They live mostly in the realm of the abstract and their imagination. This is why children are so good at “pretending” in their play. The divide between what is possible and what is real is nearly nonexistent. At this stage, children are much more likely to accept what you tell them: Good children do what they are told. Big boys don’t cry. Nice girls aren’t loud. Your sister is the smart one (or perhaps, the pretty one). And all of those messages are about as true as the tooth fairy left that quarter under your pillow last night.
From this perspective, the process of healing is about getting un-hypnotized from these old, inaccurate beliefs. What we call hypnotherapy is just another way to wake up out of the trance state of our early conditioning and get grounded in the reality of our wise and loving nature. Hypnosis supports us in broadening our state of consciousness so that we can engage in a transformative process of self-inquiry from the perspective of our higher self.
For more information on hypnosis, read Hypnosis FAQs .
