October 18, 2009 by Susan Gold
See Science Daily’s 10/13/09 article, “Children Can Greatly Reduce Abdominal Pain by Using Their Imagination,” for an exciting new study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University Medical Center.
Here is the opening paragraph:
Children with functional abdominal pain who used audio recordings of guided imagery at home in addition to standard medical treatment were almost three times as likely to improve their pain problem, compared to children who received standard treatment alone.
Read the rest of the article here.
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October 10, 2009 by Susan Gold
If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, I would love for you to join me at my upcoming workshop, Tools for Coping with Stress. For more information, please visit the Hypnosis Workshops page of my website.
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October 7, 2009 by Susan Gold
My husband and I have a birdbath in our living room that we have filled with sand and enjoy as an ever-evolving art project. Here is its latest incarnation—my homage to Hypnos, Greek God of Sleep, and Morpheus, Greek God of Dreams. You can read more about Hypnos and Morpheus in this previous entry.
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September 25, 2009 by Susan Gold
Below is an excerpt from Belleruth Naparstek’s 9/19/09 Huffington Post article, “Finally Figuring Out What Helps Troops with Posttraumatic Stress.”
For this nasty condition, we need tools that re-regulate the body and allow the owner of these symptoms to put his or her stress management on “manual” – tools that go straight to instinct, not thinking. No wonder immersive, right brain methods make such dramatic inroads on symptoms – guided imagery and hypnosis; certain kinds of body work, such as massage therapy, Reiki, Healing Touch; and new protocols combining imagery with acupoint tapping or pressing, with odd alphabet names, such as EMDR, EFT, SE, TIR, IRT, TAT and the exuberantly named WHEE.
Wonderful results have emerged from 3 different guided imagery studies with traumatized troops at Duke Medical Center/Durham V.A. hospital, showing that after 6-8 weeks of listening five times a week to a half hour’s worth of calming guided imagery downloads, symptoms drop dramatically. This is true for male or female warriors, middle aged or young adult, Vietnam or Iraq vets. It works for military sexual trauma or combat trauma or both; and with or without active substance abuse. Improvements appear to hold over time, too. The imagery is a simple, portable, user-friendly and non-threatening group of audio downloads – an intervention that stays the same each time it’s used and can even go back to Iraq with the user on his or her MP3 player. And it’s not only inexpensive – it’s bootleggable, for heaven’s sake.
Read the whole article here.
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September 5, 2009 by Susan Gold
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August 23, 2009 by Susan Gold
Kevin Atherton, In Two Minds – Past Version (still), 1978-2006; two-channel video installation with sound, 25 min.; Courtesy the artist; © 2009 Kevin Atherton
My husband and I spent a lovely afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and especially enjoyed the video installation, In Two Minds—Past Version. We entered the large dark room that held a video screen at each end and watched as the young man on the screen to our left and the older man on the screen to our right had a lively, contentious debate about art. We were intrigued but a bit confused having walked into the middle of their conversation. Then I noticed the placard that explained:
In 1978 Atherton made a work consisting of a dialogue between two recordings of himself for an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The openness of the work’s Q&A format allowed him to “reenter” the conversation almost thirty years later and respond to questions posed by his twenty-seven year old self…
We continued to watch, and then it dawned on me that it was much like witnessing a hypnotherapy session. A few techniques came to mind. Sometimes I will have a client imagine that he or she is mediating a conversation with the various aspects of him or herself that are in conflict. Another approach I might take is to have a client imagine that he or she is in conversation with an older, wiser future self—one who has surmounted the obstacles faced. Sometimes I alternatively will have a client imagine that he or she is speaking with a younger wounded past self, which gives the client—the wise adult—the opportunity to reframe the child’s experience and give assurance that things are going to be okay.
Atherton’s video installation is marvelous, especially thinking about it in this context. It demonstrates the way an artist evolves but also encourages each viewer to think about his or her own growth process and evolving perspectives.
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August 20, 2009 by Susan Gold
I was happy to see “Hypnosis: Beyond Mumbo-Jumbo” by Bob Pargament in the Huffington Post (8/18/09). Here is the opening paragraph:
Arianna Huffington, while speaking on Bill Maher’s show last week, made a wonderful point about the over-medication of kids today and I couldn’t agree more. In this pharma-crazed culture we are overlooking some of the most effective means of natural calming and focusing and the best of all may be hypnosis. That’s what I do as my life’s work and it’s great for kids. Many people unfortunately are completely confused by this amazing modality.
Read the rest of the article here. It’s a good read!
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August 15, 2009 by Susan Gold
Last weekend I attended the National Guild of Hypnotists annual convention in Marlborough, Massachusetts. What an energizing and inspiring experience! I attended seventeen different seminars and workshops on a range of topics—smoking cessation, weight loss, bruxism, test anxiety, guided imagery, stress, parts therapy, and more. I was so impressed by the professionalism and expertise of my colleagues and am excited to implement new tools into my practice.
I was also impressed by the organization of the convention. There were free teleseminars during the month leading up to the convention, a special online forum, and a daily blog radio hosted by NGH members. When I arrived at the hotel, I was given an NGH tote bag with the convention program and a CD with 500 pages of materials provided by each of the presenters. Each of the 300 workshops was professionally recorded or video taped so that participants could order workshops that they wanted to take home with them or were not able to get to.
The exhibition room was a lot of fun. Imagine a huge banquet room filled with hypnosis books! There were also trinkets and souvenirs. I got the poster below, which is a reproduction of the January 7, 1906 article on hypnosis in the San Francisco Chronicle. (Contact William Smith of the Action Resources Center if you’d like to purchase one. The photo doesn’t do it justice. The colors are much richer, and it looks great framed in my office.)
The hotel lobby had an exhibit of hypnosis memorabilia, including this November 3, 1958 article in Life Magazine:
The title of the article is “Hypnosis: Old ‘Black Art’ Is Now Accepted Medical Tool.”
I can’t wait to go back to the convention next year!
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August 7, 2009 by Susan Gold
I’m taking a quick break from my first day at the annual National Guild of Hypnotists convention in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The three workshops I’ve attended so far, from Don Mottin, Calvin Banyan, and Addie Kania, have all been fabulous! I’m so excited to be here and am blown away by how many offerings there are. Each hour there are 14 different workshops to choose from.
Okay, break over! Heading to “Habitual Smoking—Slaying the Three-Headed Dragon with Richard Kania.
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August 1, 2009 by Susan Gold
Statues of Hypnos
The word hypnosis comes from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. After looking over a dizzying amount of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts, I found his likeness yesterday afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. You can read more about Hypnos in this previous post. In this statue, he is pouring a sleeping potion out of a bottle in his right hand and holding his signature poppies in his left. Unfortunately there was a large window behind his glass case, making it hard to take a decent photo.
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